Going down a hole in the ground

Posted on 11th December 2020 by Ian

A “prepper” to me would have been someone who prepared people for surgical procedures, or perhaps someone at boarding school who completed what other schools would set as homework.

“Prep” is preparation and it seems a “prepper” is neither a member of a medical staff nor a school student. A prepper, according to the BBC, is someone who prepares for a “worst case scenario.”

The scenarios for which people “prep” are diverse: environmental and natural disasters, civil unrest, the collapse of law and order. Situations where mere survival is a challenge demand considerable preparation.

For two years, I was among people who were preppers. During two years at Sixth Form College, I was a volunteer with the Royal Observer Corps.

In the Second World War, the Royal Observer Corps were the people who kept watch for enemy aircraft. Members learned to identify the planes that passed overhead, reporting the types and the numbers to command posts.

By the 1970s, there was no possibility of ground-based observers spotting enemy aircraft. If there were to be an aerial attack, the planes would have been at a high altitude and would have been tracked on defence radar when far distant from British shores

Observers in the 1970s were prepping for a nuclear war, preparing for the measuring of the impact of Soviet missiles as they landed on targets in Britain.

The missile strikes would bring bursts of radioactivity that would be measured on photographic film mounted in boxes at ground level. The film would give information such as whether the atomic explosion had been “touching” or “clear.” “Touching” meant the burst had gathered up countless tons of earth that would be part of the extremely radioactive fallout. “Clear” meant there had been an air burst; not good, but not as bad as it might have been.

The people who were to periodically check the film were members of a crew of three who spent shifts in the fallout shelter.

At this point, the preparations lost some of their credibility.

The shelter to which we were to go was in the middle of a field on a hill above Langport. Perhaps it is still there. It was a dozen or fifteen feet underground, and was reached by a path from the end of a track. The hatch, beneath which there was a steel ladder, was surrounded by a small square of concrete, perhaps eighteen inches high. The shelter had some survival packs of supplies and some basic furnishings.

It was the communication with the command post that used to cause me to doubt. There was no radio set. Instead, there was a telephone. Wooden poles carried the line across the field to join the GPO lines. We were to respond to a nuclear war with an old black telephone.

Looking back, it did not seem much preparation. Looking at preppers now, you might wonder how effective their preparations would be.

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Wanting to fall asleep

Posted on 9th December 2020 by Ian

A memory surfaces from childhood days. It is dark, and it is late at night. Late could have meant anything after ten o’clock; we were always an “early to bed, early to rise” household. We are travelling home in my father’s car, from a day out, or an evening out. The roads are quiet and it is easy to fall asleep on the big leather bench seats in the back of the car.

There is a wish for nothing more than to have my head on my pillow. Dozing, I wake from time to time, noticing the progress on our journey. I want to be at home, under my blankets, but, at the same time, I do not want to arrive, because arrival will mean getting out of the warm car and going into the house that will be cold because there will have been no fire lit in the evening. The bathroom would be cold because the paraffin heater would not have been alight to take the edge off the chill of the night air. The bedroom would be cold. Warmth beneath the cotton sheets and woollen blankets would take a while to develop.

The memory is one of exhaustion, of wanting to do nothing more than to just fall into a deep sleep. It would be sleep that would be undisturbed by thoughts of needing to wake for school because we would never have gone out on a school night.

A sense of exhaustion has descended as the final week of the term approaches. Perhaps the tiredness owes much to the tension of the strange times, from the need to constantly behave in an abnormal way. Perhaps it arises from the effort required to insist that the sixteen different classes I teach wipe down tables and sanitise their hands at the end of every lesson. Perhaps I am exhausted from having to carry boxes of books from room to room before lessons can begin. Perhaps I am exhausted because as someone who is weak at behaviour management, I struggle to create a peaceful atmosphere in the classroom and feel a consequent unease.

Whatever the reason, I am as weary as that small boy riding through the Somerset lanes on a dark night. All I need to do is to get through to the end of the school day on Thursday, 17th December. Like the boy, I shall sleep soundly.

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We could do with a saint

Posted on 8th December 2020 by Ian

Not only do the young people in the class not go to church, they know little or nothing about Christianity. If I am hoping for an answer to questions to questions on the Christian faith, I frequently have to turn to the students from Eastern European backgrounds.

Perhaps the problem with the church in England is that there is a lack of local connections, the Church of England withdrew from village life and left behind it few traditions with which to maintain a sense of presence. It differs from the church in Ireland in lacking local expressions of spirituality.  In rural Ireland, there seemed hardly a town or a village that did not have an association with a local saint, many of which had “patterns,” rituals observed by local people on the feast day of the saints.

Irish saints were different from those of Bible times. Christianity arrived in Ireland without bloodshed; there was none of the “red” martyrdom that marked the early Christian centuries.  When the Irish monks sought ways to witness to their faith, there was the “green” martyrdom of those who went to live severely ascetic lives, subjecting themselves to harsh physical conditions and spending their time in prayer and reciting Scripture. For the course of European history, more important than the green martyrdom was the “white” martyrdom, the monks who left behind everything to head towards the white sky of the morning, to head from familiar fields into the unknown dangers of Europe in the Dark Ages. The white martyrdom of those monks perhaps had the most profound and long lasting impact.

Perhaps it is was the rootedness of the monks in the lives of small communities that gave them their enduring appeal, to be able to stand in the same spots as they stood and to hear their tales gives faith a local connection – even if that faith has as much by way of ancient paganism as it has of anything Christian. Read the tales of Brigid of Kildare and they have more in common with the English legends of King Arthur than with the pages of the New Testament.

There would once have been such traditions of saints in England, there would have been green and white martyrs, but Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Protestantism and Eighteenth Century rationalism slowly erased such customs. Now, a church, with a declining national profile and  one which lacks affection in local culture, that is struggling to survive, could do with a few local saints.

 

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Crossman Family History

Posted on 5th December 2020 by Ian

Sorting through family history today, I found Barbara Tremlett’s history of my mother’s forebears:

The name Crossman is Anglo Saxon and toponymic, indicating the place at or near which our ancestors lived, so ours were in England long before the Norman invasion of 1066 and lived near a wayside cross or cross-roads, the Crossman name occurs in the Domesday Book and in the earliest records of Somerset.

In the 13th century there were three main branches of the family, led by Nicholas, Philip and Thomas Crossman. West Monkton was later mentioned as being the site of one of the main branches of the family.

In 1625 the parish register of Langport has two entries, recording the deaths of Elizabeth, wife of Thomas Crossman and of Thomas their son. A later entry records the marriage of Thomas to Joan Hart and in 1629 there is a record of the baptism of their son Richard, I have not been able to prove the connection between that Langport family and our William of c.1716 but as the names Thomas and Richard have continued to be used down through the generations I have little doubt that we are descendants of that family of 1629.

Our earliest proven ancestor was William Crossman c.1716-1788 who married Sarah c.1740 Of their seven children three are known to have married and we are descended from the fifth child, Thomas, borne in 1751.

In 1778 Thomas married Mary West in Langport Church, and as a young man was hired by a local farmer at a wage of £3 per annum. he stayed with this employer for about 5 years.

At the time of his marriage to Mary, Thomas was building himself a house at High Ham on what he described as waste land. He sought no permission to build there, and no objections seem to have been raised by the authorities. He used local stone which he carried to the site, so the only cost was in labour. Most labourers built their own homes in those days. The buildings were of simple square construction with flagstone floors under an unlined thatch. It took Thomas two years to complete his house and by that time he had enclosed land around it and had it under cultivation.

Thomas and Mary had three children, Richard 1779, Sarah 1781-1782 and Sarah 1785. Mary died at the end of March 1799, and towards the end of that year Thomas bought 4 acres of land in Huish Episcopi, sold under an enclosure act. He added to this by buying a further two acres from a Mr. Huckey for £70. Half of his land he farmed for himself and the other half he leased to Farmer Wheller at an annual rate of £5 .

In the title deeds the land was described as ‘part of Wagg Common’ but was always known as Wagg Drove. In her book of Huish, Isabel Wyatt says ” a map of 1820 shows Wagg Drove as uninhabited. The men who surveyed Huish for that map found one solitary “squatters ” house in Wagg Drove.

From this the Wagg Drove of our time (1933) is descended from “Girt-Girt Granfer” Crossman who enclosed and cultivated 6 acres of Wagg Common, leaving when he died half to his son and half to his daughter, they in their turn divided their inheritance between their children, who each built a house on their own piece of land, thus there grew up in ancient Saxon fashion a family colony. Others unrelated have built in the drove since then, but much of Wagg still remains in the hands of the descendants of its founder, Thomas bought the land because it was cheap, it was cheap because it was too muddy to cultivate, Oliver Cromwell had complained about the muddiness 150 years earlier because his troops became bogged down. Locals used to say that ducks couldn’t travel along the drove as it was too muddy for them to walk and not enough water for them to swim. Whatever the drawback Thomas succeeded in his plan and cultivated the land and grew withies in the stream that led to the river Parrett. The withies were in great demand for thatching.

In 1800 Thomas married for a second time, his new bride was Sarah Sweet and the couple moved into a house that Thomas had built in Wagg Drave where they lived for the rest of their married lives. Thomas died in 1832 at the age of 80 and Sarah died in 1837 aged 91. Thus Thomas founded the Crossman family of Wagg Drove.

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Inspired by the darkness

Posted on 4th December 2020 by Ian

In the darkness of the early winter evening, there was light at a window, a movement of a curtain as a child pulled back one corner. Just tall enough to set its chin on the window sill, the child stared out into the December gloom. What thoughts passed through the child’s mind? What was being sought as the child stood intently gazing out into the night?

Perhaps one of those numerous Christmas films had been screened on the television, and the child hoped for a glimpse of Santa, early though it might have been. Or perhaps it was one of those American stories where the return of a loved one is awaited by a child, despite the adults having given up hope of seeing the person again, and the child behind the glass of the window hoped someone might appear at the front door. Or perhaps there was just a childlike fascination with the early evening darkness.

Darkness had an odd attraction during childhood years. Daylight was preferable for outdoor activities, it allowed for games of football in the meadow across the road and racing bicycles up and down the road, but darkness allowed space for the imagination.

If mists lay across the surrounding moorland, it was easy to imagine the hill on which we lived as an island in a mysterious sea. The Mendip Hills, with the 1,000 foot high BBC transmitter, became a distant shore. The village became altogether different when imagined as somewhere truly insular.

As welcome as the daylight always was, it told the prosaic truth about life in a tiny rural community, there was no reality that might be avoided, no mystery in the stuff of daily existence.

When darkness fell, it was possible to stand at the bedroom window, with the electric light turned off to avoid any reflection, and to stare out into a landscape that became filled with possibilities. Long periods might be spent weaving stories and imagining scenes. The lights of vehicles travelling  the road that climbed the gentle hill towards the village became not the cars of neighbours, or tractors heading home to farms, but the conveyances of strange and fascinating people. Shapes visible in the landscape became not houses or barns or farmyard buildings, but places occupied by by spies, or fugitives from foreign powers, or important people gathered for covert meetings.

There was no possibility that the darkness could have excluded, anything might be when nothing says it cannot be. The child standing, chin resting upon the window sill, might have been composing an entire adventure.

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