A Somerset Lad

If the EU did anything for Britain, the cheap food made possible through the Common Agricultural Policy meant things once luxuries became part of everyday consumption. Christmas was once a time when there were things to eat that might appear only once a year.

Christmas dinner itself was conventional in parts: potatoes and vegetables were a routine part of the diet, except, of course, the Brussels sprouts which seemed an indispensable part of the Christmas menu. There was no reason why turkey might not have been eaten at any time of the year; perhaps its size meant that it would only be contemplated on an annual basis.

Christmas pudding: even its name reflected the frequency with which it appeared. In the 1960s, there was still a custom of putting a sixpence into the pudding. No-one ever explained why this was done, though there would be the annual warning to be careful not to swallow it. Sometimes the pudding came with custard or cream; sometimes with brandy butter, something that would have been made at home rather than purchased in a supermarket.

It was in the bits and pieces that the seasonal tastes really appeared. There would have been tangerines, a fruit which came in net string bags and which was eaten slowly in order to savour each segment. There were wooden boxes of dates; the picture of the camel on the lid gave them an exotic quality. The box always contained a two pronged wooden fork with which to take out the fruit. There were bags of nuts, Brazils, and almonds, and hazelnuts and walnuts. No-one ever explained why Christmas was the time of year for eating nuts, but it was not Christmas unless a bag was bought. Nut crackers made their annual appearance in an attempt to break open shells determined not to give up their contents.

Chocolate was always a significant presence, the massive tins of Quality Street seemed to offer delights that would last forever, though by the New Year the only ones left would be the coffee-flavoured ones that no-one liked. There were Selection Boxes, and stockings filled with bars, but these always promised more than they delivered (did anyone ever play the games sometimes printed on the boxes?)

By teatime on Christmas day, the cakes would come out. Home made Christmas cake topped with marzipan and icing, Dundee cake topped with almonds, mince pies. It was as if for one day in the year we were going to eat as if money was no object.

Wasn’t it the money that made the tastes seasonal? Food used to constitute a major element of weekly household expenditure, now it accounts for less than one-sixth. We can afford to eat what we like when we like. Paradoxically, it has been having money to spare that has made Christmas less special.

He was not an uncle, but as my grandmother’s cousin had somehow acquired such a status. A fussy, effete man, he would advise my grandmother when he and his wife would be coming to visit her, and expect my grandmother to have prepared everything as he specified. It seemed not to occur to him that his stipulation of dates of arrival and departure and his list of required foodstuffs might not have been convenient for his host.

In Somerset, the food he requested would not have been easily available. For breakfast he always insisted upon Force flakes. The packet, with its Sonny Jim figure on the front seemed something from history. There was a fussiness about what he would and would not eat, he had theories about which foods were beneficial and which were detrimental to one’s health. In the home of my grandmother, a woman who grew in her own garden much of what was set on the table, his ideas seemed like London fads adopted to make him sound more sophisticated than those of us who lived in a simpler place.

In my younger years, his wife seemed the more interesting character. He insisted that she suffered what he called “schizophrenia.” I would sit and watch her, imagining that there might be a sudden moment when she became someone else. With the passing years, I realised that the only change that came was that she would become very quiet and withdrawn. He would complain that she might spend hours sat watching out of the window at the front of their London home. The description seemed more that of someone suffering depression than someone suffering the type of mental illness that he imagined.

In my undergraduate days and in the years of my ordination training, he would write to me, sending me clippings from the Daily Telegraph and other publications he read. The articles were invariably those critical of anything he regarded as liberal or progressive. When I did not respond to one outpouring of prejudice, he wrote to my grandmother and complained at my bad manners. His opinions on the Church of England seemed odd, given that he claimed to be a Quaker.

It was his Quaker beliefs that had allowed him to avoid military service in the Second World War, he registered as a conscientious objector.

Visiting my mother on the day that would have been my father’s birthday, she recalled family memories.

“You know Uncle Alec was a Nazi?”

“What?”

“Yes, after he died they found he had a collection of Nazi books in his house, along with stuff about his visits to Germany in the 1930s.”

“So much for him being a conscientious objector,” my sister commented. “He simply supported the enemy.”

It was hard to reconcile the fussy old man in his neat clothes and dietary obsessions with the vileness of the Nazi regime. Had I known forty years ago, the letters may have been very different.

Steve Lamacq concludes the Friday edition of his BBC Radio Six drivetime programme with a “free for all.” Listeners are invited to request whatever song they choose.

The selections are sometimes very random, it is an hour when records that would never be otherwise heard on the station are given airtime. Generally, the music is “good,” if not the sort of material that the station’s listeners would generally play themselves, but there are moments when requests of a hint of the mischievous about them, as if they had been chosen because of their capacity to annoy or provoke.

Yesterday, it was the last programme of the year and the invitation to the audience was to send in requests for the last song of the night that had regularly been played at the clubs or discos they attended.

”Ah,” I thought, “this will settle the discussion I had with my friend Philip more than ten years ago.”

We had been at a pub in Bray, Co Wicklow when he had asked whether in Somerset we had Frank Sinatra’s New York, New York at the end of the night.

”No,” I had said, “we had Jeff Beck’s Hi Ho, silver lining.”

Steve Lamacq was about a quarter of the way through the hour, when Jeff Beck got an airing. Clearly there were nights other than Strode College discos when he had played. “I remembered correctly,” I thought, “Jeff Beck really did round off the evening.

A few tracks later, it was the turn of Frank Sinatra. There were obviously people in England who shared similar tastes with the people from the Irish Midland town of Roscommon among whom Philip had grown up.

Very different they may have been, but both songs were an upbeat way of ending the night. Sinatra inspired people to imagine living in a place very different from the one in which they lived. Perhaps a popular aspiration in the Roscommon of the 1970s.

In Somerset, people may have been less inclined to want to move away, but would have been equally regretful that their evening was coming to an end, so the liveliness of Jeff Beck’s song, and the raucous dancing that would accompany it, would always lift the spirits.

Among the other songs played was The Bucket of Water Song from Tiswas. A listener said it was always played at the end of youth club discos, and would lead to water fights that would bring a two week suspension from the club.

The most unlikely of the choices played seemed to be Will You? It is a plaintive cry from the heart from Hazel O’Connor’s 1980 film Breaking Glass. Forty years after I first heard it, it still has a raw power, the saxophone solo mining a deep vein of emotions. At a disco, it is a song with a rhythm more appropriate for the slow set, but with lyrics that seem far from the cheeriness of a disco night.

The programme prompted a feeling of reassurance. Out there, there were people who shared both my memories and my taste.

Smoke drifted across the motorway at Cheltenham. The dryness of the mid-December day had allowed a garden bonfire, its scent unmistakeable to those who journeyed by.

It was a brief moment. Few people were going to forego the opportunity of moving quickly on a road strangely devoid of its customary traffic. But the moment was sufficient to capture another moment, now more than fifty years ago.

Standing in the back garden of my paternal grandparents, at the most distant point from the house, my grandfather had built a bonfire of autumn leaves and fallen branches. There was a sweetness in the smell, perhaps it was the wood that was burned. It was a smell that matched the fertility, the fruitfulness, of their red-soiled East Coker garden.

The garden spoke more loudly than my grandfather ever did. A gentle, softly-spoken man, he died when I was eleven years old. The only words from him that I can definitely recall was his telling me that it was, “Caesar, not Julius Caesar.” He sat unspeaking through most conversations, his passions were his flowers and his stamp collection. When he died, my parents did not tell me, nor did they speak about their going to his funeral.

My grandmother died when I was twenty-six. The last time I saw her was a month before, when making a post-Christmas visit from Northern Ireland. I had been ordained the previous summer and she had a photograph of me at the ordination tea on top of her television. My last memory of her was of her standing with her arms around me while I sat at her table. She had cried and cried and I had not understood why. The breast cancer for which she had refused surgery was far advanced and I had no idea of how ill she was.

The smell of autumn bonfire, conjuring the memories of Papa and Nanny in their garden, is deeply melancholic. It is the smell of silence, the smell of a refusal to communicate that has endured so long that it has become an inability to communicate.

Only on the day my father died on 10th March this year did my mother mention that Papa had a blue kippah, a Jewish skull cap, that he kept in the cupboard beside his armchair. My grandfather’s mother died in a workhouse. His father is nowhere named. No-one talked about his family.

Questions could never be answered. Words that should have been said became an impossibility. All of us were intimidated by the silence, by the generations in which we said nothing.