Topic: Making Wishes: Old Clee, (1942).

 

Wishing Stone, Church Lane, Old Clee, (c2017).

first encountered making wishes in 1940 as a six year old boy roaming Greetham’s Fields with a gang of older children from Cooper Rd and Ladysmith Rd.  The following ritual was enacted at the ‘Wishing Stone, then, as now, sited beside the back gate of what we called the Curvy Cottage on the corner of Church Lane, Old Clee.  

The wish-maker first recited the following rhyme: 

To make a wish;

First spit and turn. 

Then catch a kiss.

Next, you stood on the stone, spat on it, turned around three times, spreading your saliva over the surface; girls clockwise, boys anticlockwise.  After making the wish, someone might blow you a kiss, when a couple were said to be ‘sweethearting’.  Needless to say, a common wish in the 1940s was for the war to end.

This is not to say that the wishing stone did not once play a deeper role in the social life of adults in and around the village.  The stone belongs to a group of volcanic rocks known locally as bluestones.  They are thought to have been transported to Lincolnshire by glaciers  from the Whin Sill outcrop in Northumberland.  In days before maps they were frequently used on Lincolshire’s flat featureless claylands as boundary markers. Several marker bluestones are described in Bates’ book entitled “A Gossip about old Grimsby”.  There is a bluestone at Immingham situated in the carpark of the Bluestone Inn, Bluestone Lane.  Louth has a bluestone, now at the entrance to the museum.  Others gave the name Bluestone Heath to a remote part of the Wolds, traversed by an ancient ridgeway between Candlesby and Caistor.  This widespread distribution raises questions regarding the uses of other kinds of rocks moved by glaciation and deposited as Boulder Clay, (now called Till) when the ice melted. For example, a large block of distinctive granite from the Lake District was found during the excavation of Grimsby’s docks indicating that ice from the Lake District had crossed the Pennines and merged with North British ice.  Larvikite, a rare rock type from the Oslo Fjord area of southern Norway, is frequently found in the till beneath the submerged forests on the Lincolnshire coast. Some of these stones, called erratics, may have been gathered to build Old Clee’s Saxon tower, which is a compendium of many kinds scraped from the bedrock over which the ice travelled. 

Because of its rarity and size Old Clee’s bluestone will always trigger a sense of wonderment.  In the pre-scientific past it would have been a mystery; a doorway for the imagination and therefore a tool for learning the symbolic language of mental processes deep in the mind.  These are referred to as the unconscious. The unconscious deals with feelings and is a much larger realm than most of us realize. It has a complete life of its own, an enormous field of energy, which constantly streams through our imaginations as a powerful organ of communication to make sense of the environment.   It does not make anything up but gives preexisting symbols a cultural meaning. Wishes exist because they are fleeting thoughts released by some kind of symbol. They are sudden daydreams that are appealing because you think they would make your life better. You see the surface of someone else’s life, and wish you could have that too.

Eighty years ago, in Church Lane, the knowhow for making wishes was staged in a primitive courtship ritual which was passed from child to child at the edge of their understanding. We were  children of newly urbanised parents living in densely packed Edwardian terraces built on Old Clee’s former pastures. In the early 1940s our imaginations were occupied with the Wizard of Oz, Pinochio, Snow White and Bambi movies that all focussed on the power of making wishes.   From this point of view, it would only take the imagination of one child to invent a wishing stone myth that would be eagerly adopted by others. In this context, I remember many of us actors in the wishing ritual had invented imaginary companions for effective coping with the blitz.  These invisible friends were a positive source of entertainment, friendship, and social support when making a wish. 

Today we can view volcanic bluestones and other glacial erratics as symbols of cultural ecology. We can use them to meditate on Grimsby’s efforts to be great again and face up to the catastrophic polar ice melt of global warming. The bluestones provide an educational focus to see the town in a glacial landscape.  In fact they offer local history a cosmic timescale for people to think about their short term actions in relation to securing the future of great grandchildren yet to come.

However, for me, above and beyond all this, Old Clee’s wishing stone marks a route to articulate the common wish of humanity for a better life.  This wish for economic prosperity brought my heroic great grandparents to Grimsby.  It was then perceived as a Victorian boom town which attracted hundreds of economic migrants from the countryside aiming for what they imagined would be a life of plenty. This vision of Grimsby is now curated as history with the objective to stimulate the unconscious as an image/value forming faculty. These days the past is expressed in digital landmarking, adding heritage values to objects, places and neighbourhoods.  By viewing and collecting digital landmarks we encounter material and immaterial traces of the past in our daily lives. We are thus participants in the continuous social process of selection and giving meaning to the past, whereby people in the present value where they live and identify with it through pride in place.  This process of self education is particularly important to Grimsby and other post industrial communities who are struggling to rethink prosperity in a world of increasing inequalities.  Prosperity is now seen as something to be wished for among several alternatives to economic prosperity. The big wish is for a more equitable society that operates within ecological limits.  

Using social media, like this Facebook page, for digital landmarking builds an open educational resource for the application of arts reasoning to explain sustainability.  Here the task of educators is to master the imaginative power of heritage and demonstrate to young people, fed up with a curriculum they see as irrelevant to their future, that history is not boring. The library’s digital initiative clearly energises people to generate blogs, posts and pages demonstrating that heritage values represent a public interest in places, regardless of ownership. Therefore, the use of law, public policy and public investment is justified to protect that public interest and incorporate it into plans for living sustainably.  In this context, a wish to save Grimsby’s dockside ice factory inevitably nudges us closer towards a culture of sustainability and equity.

DB 2020