The following is excerpted from “Honest Labour: The Charles H. Hayward Years” – a collection of essays from The Woodworker magazine while Charles H. Hayward was editor (1936-1966). Please excuse the choices of pronouns. We are all products of our time, and Charles Hayward (born in 1898) was no exception. Every time we re-read one of these essays, we’re struck by how so much of it still resonates today. May our shared interests in the craft continue to be the “best kind of aid to living.”
So often it would seem that the wrong kind of memories attach themselves to Christmas. For some people there is a convention of sadness. Things are not what they used to be. Sons and daughters have married and gone their way and left the home hearth desolate. Death has made gaps in the family circle, beloved friends are with us no more, and the tide of mournful reminiscence flows on. But so does the ever-recurring pattern of life. We cannot halt the process. Only the intensely selfish and possessive would even wish to do so.
But surely we can persuade ourselves to an acceptance of the passage of time. The sad things and the bitter things lose their keen edge with the years, but, like the sundial which tells only the sunny hours, we can cherish the happy memories and rejoice in them as being something truly precious of our own.
Once when I was on a train journey, a small boy and his mother came tumbling breathlessly into the compartment, waved off by a happy throng of youngsters. As the train drew out of the station the boy sat back silently, little smiles chasing one another across his face. His mother looked down. “Tired?”
He shook his head and heaved a sign of contentment. “No. I was just thinking. I’ve had such a perfect day.”
Often I thought of him while the war was on, for that time he would have been old enough to fight. Did the memory of his perfect day spent in an English garden amid the happy laughter of his friends come back to him then? I have always felt sure that it did.
And then there are the absurd things in our lives which unite us to “the inextinguishable laughter of the gods.” Once when I was walking behind a friend in a narrow country lane, my foot slipped and I went headlong into a deep ditch. The side was almost perpendicular and for the life of me I could not manoeuvre myself the right way up again. My friend, meanwhile, who had been talking to me over his shoulder, struck by the sudden silence, looked round and found to his amazement I had completely vanished. Looking up and down and round about he saw at last a pair of feet projecting from the ditch. The moment when his horrified face came peering over the top at me, then to all intents and purposes standing on my head, still remains one of the funniest moments of my life. Indeed, we were both so paralysed with laughter that rescue by means of his helping hand was a slow business.
It still remains a memory which can set me chuckling at any time—and, oh, life is so mercifully full of them, if we know how to enjoy them and make them truly our own.
Then there is the chronic idea of loneliness, which is becoming one of the great bugbears of our age. Unfortunately, it is real enough for a great many people. What always seems so unreal are the means taken to alleviate it. The Christmas parties, the communal get-togethers, television and the like, are panaceas which bring their moments of happiness, but they cannot provide any real cure for loneliness. As with so many other problems, only the person concerned can find the answer. A rejoicing spirit will rarely be a lonely spirit, for he or she will be able to enter with liveliness and interest into whatever part of the human scene their lot is thrown. Moreover, for anyone who has been able to develop some definite interest or practical skill, there is always too much to occupy him for the thought of loneliness to enter in. The important thing is to find an interest in life which accords with the needs of one’s own nature.
For the man who is essentially practical a handicraft is the answer, one in which he can turn any skill which he already possesses to better and finer use, right up to the point where his craftsmanship enters the realm of true art and becomes a source of increasing satisfaction.
And there is no reason to limit his interest to manual skill. There is a whole wide field of literature dealing with furniture making and its allied crafts and the social history behind them. In fact, there are all manner of related interests which can be pursued by anyone who is prepared to take sufficient time and trouble. To start with only a meagre equipment of knowledge is no handicap in these days of good libraries and easy accessibility of objects of superb craftsmanship in famous houses and museums. We can browse among them all and follow up any particular trails which most take our fancy.
Interests will open up as we go, leading to many a fascinating bypath which at the beginning could never have been foreseen. A man has to care sufficiently to make the initial start and to be sufficiently persistent till the thing grips him. After that he will insensibly acquire those inner resources of his own which, in the long run, are the best kind of aid to living.