A Somerset Lad

Eric Burdon and the Animals were a favourite of my father. “We’ve got to get out of this place,” released in 1965, was his theme tune for years. We were going to move to Cornwall when I was twelve. Of course, we never did. As the years passed, he might have sung, “I’m not going to move out of this place.” He became a skilled procrastinator, content to live his quiet life in a quiet place, determined not to move on, even if he never actually said so.

If a song about getting out of the place expressed the mood of the times, another song by The Animals was about as far from our lives as could be imagined. “When I think of all the good times that I wasted having good time,” expressed the sort of life enjoyed by the people who appeared in pop charts and glossy magazines. When I watched them on television or listened to them on the radio, I thought that it was unlikely that many of them would have had much idea of what it was like to live in a council house in a tiny village far from anywhere.

Thinking that life was something that happened to other people who lived in exciting places, I became an expert at wasting good time not having a good time, in fact, I was an expert at not really doing anything at all.

Looking back, I wondered why I wasted just so much time.

My mother has been reorganising the bookshelves, putting my late father’s books into order, and I realised that, compared with many people, we had many books when I was young – added to which we went to one of the local libraries, Langport, Street, or Bridgwater, at least twice a month. When there was so much reading that could have been done, why did I sit doing nothing?

Why did I spend every evening watching programmes on one of the three channels in which I wasn’t even interested? When there were small towns and villages that might easily have been explored by a teenage boy on a bicycle, why did I spend hours just standing and watching out of the bedroom window?

Sometimes, I used to think how much more profitably all those wasted hours might have been used, all the things I could have done, all the things I could have learned. If I had spent the time studying, all the things I might have achieved. It’s always to be wise in retrospect!

It was George Bernard Shaw, or maybe Oscar Wilde, who is supposed to have said, “Youth is the most beautiful thing in this world—and what a pity that it has to be wasted on children!”

Scotland is a long way from Somerset. Fifty years ago, it was even further away. The journey by road or rail could take many hours, and no-one ordinary flew anywhere. It would have been easier to travel to France, travelling down to Weymouth and taking the Sealink ferry to Cherbourg. France, however, was a different country; Scotland was part of our country.

Scotland seemed like somewhere foreign. Once, when my father had made the long journey north to work at Lossiemouth or Kinross, I went to the village post office (High Ham had a post office and a shop in those days). I wanted a stamp for a letter I had written to my Dad. I asked Miss Hunt, the postmistress, if I needed an airmail stamp. She had smiled at my question and said that she didn’t think it would be necessary.

Scotland was different, though. I remember watching the television serial Sutherland’s Law and learning that Scotland had things like procurators fiscal and sheriff courts. (I remember one episode in which Sutherland said he would be somewhere in half an hour and was met with the expression of concern, “but Mr Sutherland, it’s forty miles.”

To a child in Somerset there were immediately identifiable differences: Scotland had different laws, different banknotes, different football teams, different music, different traditions.

What was baffling was that every New Year’s Eve our television schedule would be taken over by people from a far away and different place.

On New Year’s Eve, our black and white television would be filled with pictures of men in kilts. There would be people carrying lumps of coal, were they too mean to take anything else? Men with names beginning with Mac would sing songs in tenor voices that declared  the virtues of laddies and lassies.

Perhaps it wasn’t as bad as it seems in the memory, perhaps there were songs other than Loch Lomond and Donald, where’s your trousers? Perhaps not everyone leapt around in sporrans, plaids and dirks. Perhaps their houses were warm enough without neighbours bringing them coal.

Whatever the reality, though, the abiding memory of New Year’s Eve is of fuzzy television images from some studio in Scotland, where everyone was jolly until midnight approached. When the moment came to mark the end of the old year and the beginning of the new, the mood would change. Music that would have accompanied a highland fling was replaced by a drone and people who had been previously happy would take on a sombre look and sing Auld Lang Syne, which must surely be the worst dirge in human history.

Forty years ago, on 31st December 1980, I went to London.

It took us four hours from mid-Somerset to the tube station at Acton in west London. Four lifts were needed and it took longer than it might have done, partly because two girls in a Mini didn’t know the name of the place they were going and turned off the road at a bad spot for hitching. A driver in a big articulated lorry made up for some of the lost time, flying down the M4 to reach his destination before the business closed at the year’s end.

Once the tube was reached it was simple to reach Highgate or Finchley, or wherever it was in north London. The house belonged to the parents of a girl called Sarah, a tall 19 year old with a mop of dark curls. She had a boyfriend called Arthur; an Irishman who had once taken pigs to the market in Roscrea and was a Catholic, though, as he pointed out, that didn’t demand much guesswork. That is, him being a Catholic didn’t take much guesswork. His journey with the pigs was the only time he had visited the north Tipperary town; it would have demanded prescience comparable to that of Sherlock Holmes to be able to say, “You look like a man who once took pigs to Roscrea.” Visiting Roscrea many times in more recent years, I often thought of Arthur and his pigs.

North London was reached in daylight and the evening saw a progression south to the West End, where every bar and pub was thronged with people. It took an age to get a drink, a good thing because at West End prices it would have taken half a day to earn enough to pay for them.

As the hour approached it was time to venture out and stand in the square to await the moment. There was a great view from Trafalgar Square down Whitehall to the Houses of Parliament. The fountains had all been turned off and barred against revellers. The clock face showed the final minutes passing and as Big Ben struck the final stroke of twelve, there was a great cheer, “Happy New Year!” And then?

And then, nothing.

“Happy new year” greetings were exchanged with all and sundry and the the crowd dispersed, and we all went home.

It seemed the most pointless thing I had done in my life, and by the age of twenty I was skilled at doing pointless things. I had frantically searched around for fear that I was missing some vital ingredient, some word or action that would give the whole thing meaning, but there was nothing. Perhaps I had drunk very little anyway, but I remember trudging London streets coldly sober, thinking I could have been at home and comfortable.

Forty years later, there is no inclination to return to the capital on a chill winter day, which is a good thing as there would be no-one there to celebrate.

From a distance of more than forty years, it is a mystery how I came by the catalogue. I didn’t read any music magazines, so it would not have come as a free insert (if such things existed in the 1970s). Perhaps there had been an advertisement in the Daily Mail, the paper that was delivered from Monday to Saturday, or the News of the World, which was delivered by a different newsagent on a Sunday. Perhaps there was one of those ads where if you sent a first class stamp and a self-addressed envelope, they would send you something.

Whatever the source, I had a catalogue of seven inch vinyl singles. It must have been in late-1977 or early-1978, when I had a weekend job pumping petrol and had money to spend and nothing on which to spend it. The catalogue was A5 sized and was columns of song titles, artists and prices, printed in small print on plain pages. There were no photographs of the artists or the records and no details of the recordings.

I remember spending many hours poring over the records on offer, deciding which ones I would buy, working out the total payable for the discs and the cost of the postage and packing. Each time I picked up the catalogue there would be another record that caught the eye, and one that had been on the list I had made that did not seem worth the money that was being asked.

Eventually, I didn’t order any of them. Some were classics at the time, singles issued by major artists from the late-1960s, now they might be worth considerably more than the price I paid for them. I cannot recall why, having spent so much time considering what I would buy, I didn’t buy any of them. Perhaps something else came along and I spent my money. Even the catalogue itself would be an interesting artefact of that pre-digital age.

The students whom I teach at school struggle to imagine the life of a teenager in times before the Internet and mobile phones. If I told them of the catalogue, they would look blankly, “why didn’t you just look up the singers online, sir?” If I talked about how much I might have paid for a particular record, they would look mystified, “why would you have paid for them, sir, couldn’t you just stream them?”

Perhaps even more surprising to them would be amounts paid for records, in memory a typical single in 1977 was 75 pence or more. There aren’t many teenagers now who would pay £4.70 for a single song.