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6. Wasn’t It Ironic? The Haxey Hood and the Great War
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CHAPTER 6 Wasn’t It Ironic? The Haxey Hood and the Great War CATRIONA M. PARRATT THE “APPROPRIATE INTERPRETATIVE MEANS” The Great War of 1914–1918 gave many British people from diverse walks of life occasion for a reappraisal of the most fundamental order. As more and more began to understand, to represent, and to experience the conflict as an enormous, scandalous tragedy, the greater the gulf that seemed to separate the prewar world from that which came after.1 The impact on people’s lives was devastating. The war struck the prosperous, comfortably middle-class Vera Brittain as an “explosion which . . . reverberate[d] through my personal life to the end of my days.” Brittain’s Testament of Youth was an attempt to “rescue something that might be of value, some element of truth and hope and usefulness, from the smashing up” of her “youth by the War.” It was an unflinching, bitter portrayal of the “stark agonies” that the Great War generation, when still only in its twenties, faced, an unapologetic “indictment of a civilisation.”2 Brittain was far from alone in the impulse to wrest some meaning from her trauma through writing about it, and her youthful cohort’s war-inspired prose and poetry stand as a masterful and moving body of literature. Much of this work, Paul Fussell observes, takes “a terrible irony” as the “appropriate interpretative means” for apprehending the war and its aftermath , and it is from it, to a considerable extent, that present-day memories 131 I am indebted to Norma and Eric Neill for their kindness and invaluable help with the research for this project. of these things derive. For some of the generation of English youth that came to adulthood in the 1960s and 1970s, myself included, the poetry of Wilfred Owen and T. S. Eliot offered a textual access to World War I and a judgment of it that in the Vietnam War era had a powerful resonance. When the United States was dispatching thousands of its young men to suffer and die and kill in Southeast Asia, the antiheroic, accusatory verse of a soldier-poet such as Owen told never-to-be-forgotten “truths.”3 Recently I have been reflecting on those truths in light of my work in sport history and bringing them together with research on the Twelfth Night custom of the “Haxey Hood.”4 At some point in this process the Great War started, as Chris Ward expresses it so evocatively, to “present itself” to my imagination, “to loom out of the fog of that half-explored landscape of [my] own culture. . . .” “That war’s susurration,” Ward continues, “for decades internalized and dismissed, yet heard almost everywhere in England, like the sound of distant traffic becomes distinct, louder, more insistent. You begin to notice the monuments on every side: in railway stations, in town centers and villages, by parish halls or in churches . . . in the old universities, even in department stores.”5 It may well be that in the course of my frequent recent journeys to the Isle of Axholme and wanderings around its villages, the ubiquitous memorials to local men who fought and fell began to register in a way they had not before.6 Or that previous research on the Victorian and Edwardian periods brought me sequentially to an event in history that has been seen as bringing those eras to a crashing close. Or that in sources on and local tellings of the history of the Haxey Hood the war is momentous because of the threat it was deemed to pose to the custom’s survival.7 Whatever the precise origins of my impetus, as I thought about and imagined how a history of the Hood and the Great War might be read, represented, and interpreted, it did indeed seem that irony was a most appropriate way to approach the task. At the deepest, affective levels I know why this should be so. For as long as I can remember I have lived in wretched anticipation of the “cruel twist of fate,” that bitter “wormwood” in “the wonder . . . of the whole.”8 This was a philosophy I learned early in life from my mother. Around the time I was born, quite possibly on the day I was born, a brother-in-law of whom she was very fond died. He was in the full vigor of his youth, a handsome, strapping farmworker, a gifted cricketer and football player. He was it seemed far too...