Opposing improvers

Tot the south, the parish boundary of High Ham extends to the lowland beyond Picts Hill, to the north it stretches across the moor towards Pedwell. The King’s Sedgemoor Drain begins, on the moor to the north, below Ham Hill, the steep ascent into our village, and runs north-west to meet the River Parrett at Dunball. The drain, into which runs a network of rhynes, was built in the final decade of the Eighteenth Century. Its construction brought drier land but it also brought an extinction of the commonage rights enjoyed by many of the poorer people of our community. Drainage was something resisted by those who lost their livelihoods.

Writing in Wetland: Life in the Somerset Levels in 1986 Adam Nicolson described the spirit of the local people:

The classic instance in the seventeenth century was King’s Sedgemoor, entirely owned, as its name implies, by the crown. The Stuart monarchy was desperate for money and the draining of the moor represented a handsome opportunity. Agents were appointed, plans drawn up and negotiations opened with the freeholders who had rights of common on the moor. The Agents reported that,

“the very ditches of the enclosures will so drayne it, sucke out the water and the land will soon become warm, solide and full of fruite.”

This may have been optimistic but it was not on technical grounds that the scheme failed. The prospect of the extinction of their common rights made the freeholders resist. Their obstinacy, their defence of independence and their simple obstructionism made any progress impossible. Eventually, in 1632, Charles I sold off 4,000 acres of the unimproved moor at £3 an acre. The main agent, John Battalion, was summoned before the Attorney General in 1635 to explain the failure. In words which exactly reflect the intransigent saltiness of the moors and the moor-men, he explained how the whole business had

“fylled and cloyed with many more perplexityes, questions and queres than I ever dreamt.”

That is the reality of the place, of its natural conservatism and refusal to be cowed by higher authority. When, in the eighteenth century, the more elaborate scheme for the moor was introduced, it met with the same sort of opposition, which this time failed. As one enthusiastic improver complained:

“there is no propriety in calling a publick meeting with a view of gaining signatures of consent. . . . At all publick meetings of this nature that I ever attended noise and clamour have relent.’ sound sense and argument. Once men have joined the opposition, their pride will not let them.”

It is thirty-five years since Patrick Sutherland and Adam Nicolson captured the spirit of the Levels. As the life they described has slowly disappeared, so has some of the spirit of the place. Looking at the photograph of a cousin with whom I once spent an evening making cider, a man who delivered vegetables to our house every Saturday, I wondered how much of the metropolitan cosmopolitanism that now besets the place he would have welcomed.

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The magic of MacNiece

Growing up in sight of Glastonbury Tor. I lived for three years in Newtownards, Co Down near where to Louis MacNiece’s mother was buried at Carrowdore. I took services in the church to which is attached the graveyard in which MacNiece lies beside his mother. I lived for three years in Larne, Co Antrim, a neighbouring town to Carrickfergus, where MacNiece grew up in the rectory. Reading his autobiography The Strings are False, there are many moments of recognition of familiar landmarks.

The description of his days at Sherborne, where he was sent to the preparatory school when he was ten years old evoke childhood imaginings:

Euston, Waterloo, then Dorset. County Down had been different from Co. Antrim, the drumlins of the former seeming to me highly exotic and it being also the county where I had eaten a turkey’s egg in a farm near my mother’s grave, but Dorset was most unlike either. Woods, yellow stone houses and fossils for picking. I was not used to buildings with style nor to such a variety of landscape, though I missed the Irish light for the lack of which my father condemned all English landscape as ‘stodgy’. I came to Sherborne with no preconceptions about it, but before my four years there were up I was reading into this country of the Dorset-Somerset border a wealth of legend, mainly drawn from Malory. From a point within walking distance we could see Glastonbury Tor which someone, possibly our headmaster Littleton Powys, told us was the site of Camelot. So I organised some of the boys into Knights of the Round Table, I myself being Sir Gawaine (we tactfully had no King Arthur), and we roamed the country with lances, once luckily finding a cave. This make-believe, which we might have been thought too old for, did, I think, enhance my feeling for the Arthurian legends. After all, nearly everyone who reads Hamlet is playing Hamlet in his head. But Hamlet is for adolescents (which we all to some extent remain) whereas Arthur’s knights have fewer problems too old for a prep school. And their battles and joustings have the fascination of cricket averages, while the country they move through is, like Spenser’s, so indeterminate or never-never that it can easily be superimposed even on the parklands and quarries and pinewoods of Dorset. This transposition was helped by the placards saying ‘Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted’.

Playing the knights of the Round Table would be thought absurd by most boys of such an age group now, it would be an activity considered immature by those who inhabit the virtual reality of the world online. Few of the eleven year old boys I meet have an awareness of the legends that filled the story books of the past, few have any knowledge of the backdrop of history against which such legends grew.

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Feathered therapy

Teaching remote lessons is like walking through treacle. Worse, at least treacle is sweet.  it’s like walking through tar. Unable to see the members of the class, unable to see their work, unable to have the conversations vital to gauging and developing learning, the teaching becomes an exercise in damage limitation. Hoping something will stick, we work through the lessons. Much of the time is spent asking of people have listened and have read the instructions as to what they should do. Every lesson needs PowerPoint slides to support what is said.  Some students have a poor Wifi connection and spoken words can end up “laggy” and “glitchy,” the standard feedback words when they cannot follow. I have had to learn the textspeak they use in ordinary conversations, idk has replaced the “I don’t know,” answer of the classroom. Sometimes the terms are beyond me, I just have to hope they are not being rude.

Reaching the final lesson on Friday is a relief. The class is small, sometimes in single figures, and the dynamic is different from the lessons when there are thirty names on the list. They are forthright in their opinions and look for affirmation. Sometimes the logic is not clear, sometimes they are contradictory in their arguments. Perhaps the atmosphere is different because the end of the week is in touching distance.

“Have a good weekend,” I said.

What did have a good weekend mean, though? There was nowhere to go, nothing to do. Some are open about missing school, missing the normality that would formerly have been criticised as boring.

Having closed the Teams meeting. I opened the BBC website. On the homepage, there were links to suggested pages. One was a Live Lessons page on BBC Teach, it was about birdwatching and began with an acknowledgment of there being nothing to do:

“The start of 2021 has been a challenging time for parents, teachers and children alike. Whilst travelling outside your local area might be difficult at present, the simple act of birdwatching could help children – both at home and in school – get outside for some fresh air.”

The page recalled days in childhood when I would stand looking out of an upstairs window at the back of our house, simply watching the birds in our back garden. There were no organised birdwatches of which I knew, no programmes to watch. I knew someone who had the Observer’s Book of Birds, but in our house I just guessed at what the birds might me.

I don’t remember anything other than the most common birds, but I do remember a sense of contentment at standing and watching.

It is unlikely many of those I teach would have much interest in the birds outside their houses, but it is therapeutic for their teacher.

 

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Reinvention

The Lloyd’s branch stood at where Bow Street, The Hill and North Street met. Once possessing two banks, Langport now has none. Not that I ever stood inside it, we banked at the National Westminster Bank, a building a couple doors down Bow Street.

The National Westminster branch was the Westminster Bank when I was young and my father used to remind me that the branch in Langport had previously been home of Stuckey’s Bank, which had been a major West Country bank at the end of the Nineteenth Century. The secretary of Stuckey’s Bank from the 1850s, was Walter Bagehot, a leading economist of his day and the writer of The English Constitution. Bagehot was said to have been buried in Langport churchyard, but I could never find his grave.

Lloyd’s Bank seemed to have customers very different from people like ourselves. It was the sort of place where you might have seen going in the door people like dark-suited solicitors, or vets in leather-elbowed tweed jackets and corduroy trousers with check shirts and deep-coloured ties, or gnarled-handed farmers in old sports jackets, moleskin trousers and heavy boots. Lloyd’s seemed the bank for those with more money.

Returning to live in England in 2017, I was surprised to find myself a customer of Lloyd’s. I would have returned to banking with NatWest, as do members of my family, but they wanted a UK utility bill. Lloyd’s seemed more willing to take me on my word.

There being no branch in Langport, I drove to Street. The branch there is a modern building without the soft cream sandstone character of the former premises in Langport. There was a sense of reassurance the first time I went there, there were no security screens. Behind the counter there was a pleasant smiling man wearing a check shirt and a dark-coloured tie; all he lacked was a tweed jacket to complete the image from my childhood.

Lloyd’s has had the genius required to reinvent itself. Banking has become a matter of taking out my mobile phone and using a fingerprint to open the Lloyd’s app. There seems no transaction that is not possible, from anywhere, 24 hours a day.

Best of all, though, there is an account called Club Lloyd’s. Without asking much of customers, it provides 0.6% interest on current accounts, which is a paltry rate, but a multiple of that offered by most institutions, and allows a free subscription to a magazine.

My first copy of the music magazine Mojo arrived this morning. It is hard to imagine that it would have been read by the customers of the Langport branch.

 

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Telling the truth

“To tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

It wasn’t just an oath in court, it was what was required of her pupils by Miss Rabbage, our schoolteacher. Stories must be told without exaggeration and without embellishment; any suspicion of distortion or invention would have met with a stern rebuke.

Our teacher lived in our small village, she knew our families, she knew our community, she knew our ways; to have told an untruth would have been been silliness. Veracity was not virtuous, it was a wisely practical choice. Perhaps it made honest people of us, perhaps it also made us dull.

One autobiography seemed the very antithesis of the life we led, a volume of the life story of Laurie Lee. Not Cider with Rosie, but  its sequel, As I walked out one midsummer morning. Lee’s description of going to pre-Civil War Spain with no luggage other than a knapsack and a violin, and with no more than a handful of coins to spend, seemed a life beyond imagination of someone growing up in our tiny West Country village.

Had I ever had the courage to go alone to a foreign land, had I ever had the courage to try to live on my wits alone, I would have fled home to England at the first sign of danger, Laurie Lee stayed in Spain and participated in the conflict.

Except his story was challenged, there were assertions that he had not been where he said he was. The suggestion, even if it was unfounded, that his record of events was not absolutely correct somehow cast a shadow over the story, which is odd, because even if the books had been historical novels and not autobiographical accounts, they would still have been hugely captivating. If they had been told by someone who recounted every story with a dull obsession with exact detail, the stories would have had no appeal.

Why was our teacher so concerned that there be no inexactitudes? Wasn’t it good for children to have active imaginations, even if those imaginings were responsible for occasional embroidery?

Perhaps it was her age. Born in 1912, she would have been a young teacher during the turbulent days of the 1930s. The newspapers would have been filled with tales of the rise of the dictators in Europe; closer to home, the British Union of Fascists propagated their own brand of anti-Semitism and prejudice. Telling the plain truth would have been the most effective antidote to the tales told by the demagogues.  Perhaps an overriding concern with exact detail was not a dullness, but was a radical response to extremist propaganda.

Even now, describing events in a humorous or exciting way remains generally elusive. Poetic license would invite the feeling of being fixed with a steely gaze by the schoolteacher. “Is that true, Ian?”

“No, Miss.”

“Well, don’t say it then.”

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