The Accidental Tapestry by Eileen Quilter Williams

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2021 nonfiction third place blog post image

The following essay won third place in our 2021 Nonfiction Writing Contest. Congratulations to Eileen Quilter Williams on her excellent work!

“The Accidental Tapestry” by Eileen Quilter Williams

How many wars, upheavals and strife are caused by the moving finger of fate that decides on race, religion, wealth, health, social status or criminality?  

I currently live in England, but my mother was Irish Catholic, my father was English Protestant, his grandfather was Jewish Russian. I have an extended family comprising not only Irish, English, and Welsh, but people from the Caribbean, from India, from Cyprus, from Estonia… from Mars for all I know.  

I doubt that any of us even know what blood runs in our veins. Hence, I guess the modern trend and fad for DNA testing—which must be earning the competing companies a pretty penny. Not saying that there are crooks in the game, but if I sent off for my ‘analysis’ and it came back as mixture of Inuit/Aborigine/Falkland Islander/Irish/Russian… would I/could I challenge that? I could pay another 100 dollars to ‘go again’ to check the first one, which might come back with Irish/Russian/Polish/Tahitian… what would I do then? What could I deduce from any of that? Simply that the world is very small. I could deduce that whatever the DNA test told me… the fact  would be the same. We are all an amalgam of genes. We end up as we end up by sheer chance. Our place in the world—geographic, social, physical, financial—is a complete lottery. 

Before anyone starts to argue that ‘financial’ is out of place in that list… and I have heard enough ‘entrepreneurs’ declare that they are entirely ‘self-made’. They dragged themselves into a vast fortune purely by their sheer hard work and ingenuity. ‘Anybody’ can do it, they declare. But people are too lazy, or ill-disciplined, or lack dedication, or drive. ‘Not like them!’ Let us explore that. 

Are they right? The argument is that we can all do it. We just need to work harder. 

It is true, that much can be achieved by working hard, studying hard, marrying well, or setting out to meet the right contacts. Nobody should be encouraged to live on hand-outs or charity indefinitely, as much because it is bad for a person’s mental health, soul and well-being, as it is obviously a pretty poor ambition to have. But sometimes ‘choice’ can be arbitrary. We are all to some extent governed by the fickle finger of fate!  

So is that it? You just have to work hard. Is it just a question of making up your mind and abracadabra within a few years you are living in one of your four homes, with the possibility to buy the services company – not just try and put away a few dollars a month towards your electricity bill! Sorry to be argumentative, but I just need to throw a small pebble in that crystal clear water. Just to stop some people from feeling superior, and others from feeling that they are being unfairly labelled as ‘lazy’, or as too many school reports say ‘could do better’. Those ‘options’ are only open to you under certain conditions.  

There are, I fear, some prerequisites: You can only acquire wealth if the country you live in has wealth. If nobody has money, then you cannot acquire real money – not even by theft! Even a life of crime must have meagre pickings when everybody around you is broke, and you live in a village in the African hinterland where even if you had the brains and technology for cybercrime, there would be precious little in the way of reliable internet access!  

You don’t have to be Einstein, but you do have to have some basic education to make your way in modern times. If you were female, in a village in many parts of the world, you would not be deemed worthy of education, because you could be sold – like cattle – for a dowry in order to benefit the rest of the family and because that would be one less mouth to feed.  

You can only work—hard—or indeed work at all—if your health—physical or mental—makes that possible. As well, it would help if you can find somebody to employ you who is not put off by your appearance, your lack of education, your lack of work experience, your demeanour—whether too arrogant or too shy, your colour, your sex, where you live—or the fact that you are homeless, your lack of visible enthusiasm or your too obvious gratitude. They might just not like your face, or the fact that your father was Arab, or Jewish, or Irish, or Scottish, or… Native American. Finding work can be a minefield of obstacles that you have no idea are there, and no mine-detector to give you early warning.  

So if you are not born amongst people with wealth, and you have little education, and you are not deemed to be employable because of a perceived deficit in your health, personality, background or level of gratitude, perhaps you could marry into wealth?  

Well, that too might depend. You could marry well if you have an exceptionally beautiful face or perfect body and/or a scintillating personality. For a man, that is even more difficult. Not many daughters—even far from beautiful daughters—of rich families need to settle for an ugly, fat, boring, husband when there will always be a handsome gold-digger more than willing to overlook the bride’s shortcomings. So if you are a man, or an ‘ordinary’ to look at, penniless, run of the mill human being like most of us are you are perhaps not going to be successful ‘marrying’ wealth.  

You could perhaps win the lottery? You could be the one in 14,000,000 or whatever is the current percentage and buck the odds. My advice would be, though, that perhaps it is just soul destroying to rely on that route. I would put money on the fact that perhaps you won’t win the lottery. No more than you’d have the luck (not to mention sufficient money) to win a bundle in Las Vegas or Monte 

Carlo. It has been done—but… mostly only in films or in dreams. Don’t think that many of the current billionaires won their first million in the casino!  

So let’s just agree that it is really all in the lap of the gods. It is totally dependent upon which queue you were in, which bus you got on, when you started out in life. You could have been born on any of the five continents, with any of a thousand illnesses, you could be black, white, brown or yellow, you 

could be male or female, you could be beautiful or hideous, you could be articulate or dumb, you could be sensitive or boorish. You had no choice. Now though you do have a choice. You can agree that nobody is superior, that ‘there but for the grace of God, go I’ and that prejudice in any form is not only wrong, but flies in the face of logic. That should make it more difficult to feel superior. 

Enough of that. So where does that get us? If one is cynical (or just old and disillusioned!) you would say that it gets us precisely nowhere. We have learned absolutely nothing since Adam was a lad.  

Many moons ago when men lived in caves and hunted mammoths with spears whittled from wood, one would have to ‘presume’ that since nobody could travel very far and the gene pool was relatively small, that you would have a good idea of your own ‘make up’. No ‘foreign’ blood contaminating the picture. If we fought, it would be over parochial things: hunting spoils, the comfiest cave, the best made spear. OK, I’ll grant you perhaps even then over the most buxom woman—some things probably have never changed. But you see where I am going with this – it was mundane stuff. Matters of everyday life and death, or everyday comfort and convenience.  

Nowadays, wars are fought for a variety of reasons, but at some level too often those reasons come down to grabbing land, reclaiming land, retaining land. Arriving, because they have ‘won’ it is inevitable that the ‘invaders’ have seen the nationals as ‘inferior’. The survival of the fittest. The winner takes the spoils. It became the norm that the view would be held that the ‘loser’’ needed ‘civilising’, they needed ‘educating’, they needed ‘disciplining’. It is all to justify the age-old temptation to ‘acquire’ what one doesn’t have. To prove superiority, to prove bravery, to add to the coffers. The invaders invaded, the discoverers discovered, the land-grabbers grabbed, the slavers enslaved, the colonisers colonised.  

And so it began. People have over the millennia taken for granted that perhaps the grass is greener on the other side of the track… and much of the time probably that has been true. Well true for them. Diversity should be educating and illuminating. A sad state of affairs if nobody ever had the curiosity, bravery—even necessity—to venture away. To explore and to contribute. But perhaps not to usurp and subjugate. 

Down the ages with Alexxander the Great, Hannibal, Ghengis Khan, tbe Romans and Napoleon people have sought to acquire empires. Even in relatively modern times with Hitler. Hitler was hell bent on promulgating the ‘Arian Race’ (a ‘pure race’ of blond, blue eyed people—despite the fact that he himself was decidedly swarthy and dark and would definitely not be adequately classified as 

‘a good fit!) by trying to make the whole of Europe into a giant ‘Germany’. Indeed 99.9% of the world population, thank goodness, would be thrown in the ‘rejects’ bin if the ‘requirements’ for humanity were so proscribed. So you can see the dilemma over this obsession with ‘race’ and indeed even ‘nationality’. 

There had been previous and more successful ‘invaders’—unlike Hitler, invaders who had succeeded in ‘infiltrating’ almost every part of the world. Some had come with rifles and bayonets, some had come with bibles and trinkets. Not always were those ‘new invaders’ welcome. Not always were those ‘new colonisers’ a blessing. Most places they caused havoc early on, and subjugated the local population, playing the arrogant and demanding guest, belittling the natives and destroying anything good in their way of life. But, if time is a great healer, it also has a great propensity to kill emotion and outrage. Some tried to save and preserve their very essence, but great powers, with great wealth, and great arsenals will always outlast, out fight the patriot. In fact, ironically, it is only in a land like the United States that it was possible to repel and throw out the ‘master’ and successfully fight for independence. I would argue that the strength came from the very fact that it was a hotchpotch of different peoples, with a myriad range of skills, experiences, personalities and backgrounds. The very fact that it was a new nation peopled by an amalgam of ‘entrepreneurs’ made that victory possible. They overcame a traditionally military nation with a long history of colonising, commandeering and ruling. 

In most places, the ‘colonisers’ had won the day. Eventually they became ‘accepted’. Next, they became ‘the norm’. Sometimes the local people were even grateful because with them came improvements to infrastructure, modern plumbing, education, and that dubious word with so many connotations, civilisation. Over time, however, people get used to those benefits, and realise what they have given up in order to acquire them – or in order to have them provided for them – sometimes having them provided for people around them but not them! Then the young, the energetic, the disillusioned, those with vision, are inclined to rebel. This is made worse, because in many parts of the world, the differences in standards of living between the interloper and the native can be stark. When, for the local people, there is too little to go around, when people’s expectation are not reached, when too many are chasing too little and the ‘foreign’ element is living high on the hog, then ‘difference’ becomes visible again. Eventually all peoples must be tempted to exert their own right to do better in their own land than the ‘invader’. It was probably inevitable that almost worldwide the kettle would boil over. The so-called civilised world would hit the twin buffers of ‘plenty’ versus ‘destitution’. Of ‘worthy’ versus ‘worthless’. 

In the UK, one can certainly add between ‘Class’ and ‘inferiority’. Class is an odd one. If one lives in America, you can move across the ‘classes’ by building your bank balance. In the US, wealth is the arbiter of acceptance and worth. In the UK, on the other hand, you could be a billionaire, but if you were born ‘working class’ then you are still just working class, with money. Probably sneered at by ‘the upper class’ and despised through envy by the ‘lower classes’. The middle classes? Well they are unloved by both because they are traitors to one and interlopers to the other. There is nothing less acceptable to ‘the gentry’ in the UK than a social climber. You’ve all read Jane Austen and seen Upstairs Downstairs… plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose… and all that. (I can promise that much in life remains the same—the more things move on, the more some people become entrenched in what they fear to lose).  

There is a very funny—but uncomfortably truthful—sketch written for John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett which so aptly portrays the situation. People found it almost embarrassing to laugh at it because it described so accurately a situation that people had accepted for generations. 

“He looks up to me, because he is inferior to me.” 

“I look up to him because he is superior to me.” 

“I look up to them both!” 

It says it all.  

There are, of course, people who ‘have made good’. They will tell you that ‘everybody could if they chose’ and that ‘nobody gave them a dime’. That may well be true, but had they been born in a different place, with different opportunities, with a physical or mental impairment… would that still be as easy? People must play the hand that they are dealt—whatever that is.

Some people can cheat the system or cheat other players. Surely even that is a skill that one has or does not have, isn’t it? You would have to be born with ‘the chops’, the ‘chutzpah’, the ego to feel comfortable and certain that you have the right to ‘cheat’ or ‘deceive’. Certainly people have made millions from crime. That takes nerve and skill, and resourcefulness… and brains. You will need all of those if you are planning to be good enough at it to survive and stay out of jail long enough to acquire millions. Let alone long enough to spend it. Whatever the attributes that a master criminal requires to break the bank, decidedly such a way of acquiring wealth would be to the detriment of the rest of us! If we all embraced a life of crime to feather our own nests, surely the world might just as well embrace anarchy. All right in a movie perhaps, but the world surely has outgrown the mentality of the Wild West!  

So, with the whole world at some time ‘conquered’ by somebody else—sometimes numbers of times—far back into the ancient civilisations, then the whole idea of ‘nationality’ is a ludicrous one. There are so few lands now where colonisation, annexation, immigration, emigration, social and financial migration has not completely altered their complexion and make up. Who are the ‘Americans’? Who are the ‘British’? Both countries have been invaded and colonised in the past. Both have colonised and invaded other countries as well. Some countries have been divided up and re-distributed by ‘invaders’, moving citizens like chess pieces around the territory. The world is now a hotch-potch—a pot-pourri—of races, nationalities, faiths. Why is there so much racial and sectarian tension and violence when really none of us can really know our family tree back to Adam? If you are an Aborigine way out in the Bush in Australia, of a Mongol on the Steppes of Mongolia, or a tribesman deep in the Amazon Rainforest … then maybe? But since men have ‘discovered’ the Bush, outsiders have been to (and even settled) in Mongolia, and logging continues to decimate the rainforest – can even they be sure who they really are ….with any degree of certainty? Race is a myth. We may be proud of, or in denial of who we are. But in truth, we don’t really know. Not even with a DNA test. We pays our money and we takes our chance! 

The ‘Take the knee’ protest at soccer matches in the UK, just like the black power protest at the Olympics too many years ago, is a reminder to everybody that racial prejudice and discrimination is not acceptable and in any case is merely a show of ignorance. It also demonstrates an ostrich mentality. We are all members of a rainbow world. I am sure that people who think their ‘race’ is ‘superior’ – be that Black, White, Brown or Yellow – will find it hard to accept, but truly the world is well on its way to being a ‘great big melting pot’… whether people like it or not. Who will people have to rail against then? 

About the Author

Eileen Quilter Williams, aka Ellen Fran Williams, is Irish by background, English by residence. Her work across the years with people as diverse as children, immigrants, recidivist prisoners, addicts, the homeless, political prisoners, and performers has taught her a lot about people. Her sense of humor has kept her sane. Her sense of justice has kept her challenging! All of this forms the background to her writing—the backbone to her life.

Thanks to Eileen and everyone who participated in our inaugural Nonfiction Writing Contest! We can’t wait for next year’s awards!