Multi-coloured hairdos

Posted on 15th November 2020 by Ian

The lady walked along the pavement in a purposeful manner. In days of lockdown, when almost everything is closed, when there are few places to which to walk, it was encouraging to see someone moving with determination, to see someone enjoying the brief sunshine of the November afternoon.

Perhaps the most uplifting thing was her hairdo. Her hair was cut short and dyed in three coloured stripes – white, shocking pink, and lime green. The hairstyle seemed a statement. Perhaps it was a response to the closure of all the hairdressers on 5th November, perhaps it was a reflection of her own personality. Whatever the reason for tricolour style, it was a declaration of the indomitability of the human spirit.

The hairdo recalled memories of my childhood years.

My mother had worked a hairdresser in Langport, spending time doing both gents’ and ladies’ hair, before young children came to absorb all of her time. Once we were older, she returned to occasional hairdressing work, sometimes at home, sometimes in people’s houses.

Mostly, the people who came for hair styling were women in their retirement years. Often, they were widows whose husbands had died long before their time. One woman’s husband had survived a Japanese prisoner of war camp, only to die while still a young man.

I remember those who came to the house because, if I was home from boarding school on the long holidays we had, it was my task to make cups of tea while the clients were under the drier.

The styling the women wanted was always intriguing to a teenage boy.

The 1970s were a time of glam rock followed by punk rock. Younger people wore their hair long, or extravagantly styled.

The women who came to get their hair done had a distinctness of their own. Perms and shampoos and sets and rinses were the order of the day. The rinses involved plenty of colour. There would be gun metal greys, and blues, and purples.

Oddly, those who were happy to tint their hair in shades of blue or purple, thought it odd that young people might choose flamboyant colours for their own hair.

However conservative or outrageous hairstyles might have been, the fact that people took so much care always seemed an optimistic statement. The 1970s were a time with a grimness of their own, but there were still plenty of people who were not going to be depressed by the stories on the television news.

A white, pink and green hairdo says that there are reasons to be cheerful.

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Which stories do you keep?

Posted on 12th November 2020 by Ian

My mother is a treasury of oral history. With an unrivalled knowledge of our complex family tree, where cousins marrying cousins mean a tangle of connections, she can also talk her way along each of the roads of the village, recalling the families who lived at each of the farms and cottages.

Following the death of my father in March of this year, there is a keen awareness that story tellers do not remain forever. I need to record my mother’s local history, either digitally or on paper.

But where is the line drawn between oral history and personal reminiscence?

Do stories like those of the cider house kept by a great uncle count as oral history or are they just a piece of family tradition?

And what do you do with stories that are just personal recollections?

One of my favourite recollections is one that she tells of a cycle ride through icy fog from her work at Harvey’s hairdressers in Langport, to her home at Pibsbury, on the road to Long Sutton. It is on the Somerset Levels, Pibsbury is a place with a pumping station to deal with winter floods.

As my mother rode her bicycle around Pibsbury Corner, she saw a car had skidded on the icy road, and, out of control, had gone over the bank of the catchwater.

Rushing to try to help, she found the car balanced precariously, and stood on the bumper to try to add weight to the rear of the car. A couple were in the car and while my mother did her best to balance the car, first the woman, and then her husband, climbed over the seats into the back.

The local vet, returning from a call, stopped and saw what had happened. “I am heavier than you,” he said to my mother, “I’ll stay here – go to the garage and fetch Bob Atkins.”

My mother pedalled to the garage where Bob Atkins had a breakdown truck. “Go and find Dick Weller,” he said, “tell him to come and help.”

My mother went to find Dick Weller – and then went home. There was no further need for her.

The couple stayed with Dick Weller and asked that my mother call in the next day so that they might offer their thanks. My mother was working late, so there was no opportunity to do so, and there the story ended.

Do such stories merit recording?

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No more vicars

Posted on 9th November 2020 by Ian

Covid-19 seems likely to bring an end to the Church of England in many places. The long decline will have become terminal.

A generation ago, our village had a vicar, it seems unimaginable now. I recall a conversation in Maisey’s, our village pub, when news of one of the last among the village clergy had reached us.

“I see the old vicar is dead.”

“Which one?”

“The man who used to visit around the parish.”

“Alwyn. I’m sorry to hear that. He must have been a good age.”

“He would call and share a glass of whisky. He didn’t worry if you never came to church. He came to you. There aren’t vicars like that, now.”

Personal experience of Alwyn confirmed exactly the way he had been described. He was a man of kindness, generosity, good humour. He would drive  to Taunton to visit villagers, like my father, who would never venture near a church service. He expected nothing in return. There was never a hidden agenda, never a feeling that he was awaiting an appropriate opportunity to make a religious point.

Why was Alwyn beloved of those of no faith? The apparent answer is that he visited them, but there must be a deeper answer, why did they value his presence in their houses? His style of being a vicar has all but disappeared. Perhaps the church would say its disappearance is not a loss, people didn’t believe, nor did they come to church, even though he spent his days going around the village knocking on doors.

Perhaps the affection in which Alwyn was held was rooted in something much deeper, in an ancient, non-rational worldview. Perhaps Alwyn functioned in our village in the way that “holy” men did in primitive societies, a subconscious safeguard against those things that we might not understand, those fears within us from childhood days that we would struggle to name.

The church will have been unaware of the impact of the work of Alwyn, being fondly remembered does not appear in diocesan statistics. In the days when the evangelicals are in the ascendancy and when vicars wear sweatshirts and chinos and are called things like “Dave” and “Baz” and lead performances of pseudo-rock music, there  is no place for such people as Alwyn.

In a generation, the church itself will be gone, its buildings remaining the only lasting testimony to the unreligious nature of the English. Covid has brought that end nearer.

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The absence of death

Posted on 6th November 2020 by Ian

Death and the after life were the topic for the Year 7 lesson. Perhaps it is a topic that can only be addressed at secondary school. In High Ham, in primary school days, it is hard to remember death being mentioned.

In the junior class, we would read of the travels of Saint Paul. His final journey includes a stop at the Three Taverns; a journey recorded on a map in the Bibles from which we would read with Miss Rabbage. “The Three Taverns” had a reassuring tone to the ears of a small boy at a tiny country primary school in the West of England. “The Three Taverns” conjured up pictures of flat-cap wearing, ruddy faced farmers in old tweed jackets and corduroy trousers in the town on market day. It had about it a sense of the safe and secure, not a sense of Paul’s impending fate.

Did Miss Rabbage not explain that Paul’s journey to Rome would lead to his death? I am sure she did; but there is no recall of it.

Perhaps it is part of the genius of childhood to see time as a series of discrete moments rather than as a continuous process. Memories come back as individual, self-contained entities; often without any narrative to link them together.

Think about memories of summer holidays in those youthful years: the pictures are often vivid. How many memories are there of the spring that preceded those summer experiences or of the autumn that followed?

Perhaps one of the reasons that children often have little or no sense of death is that time is the experience of the here and now, there is no sense of time as a process leading to an inexorable end. Tom Stoppard’s character Rosencrantz asks:

Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one, a moment, in childhood when it first occurred to you that you don’t go on for ever. It must have been shattering – stamped into one’s memory. And yet I can’t remember it. It never occurred to me at all. What does one make of that? We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the words for it, before we know that there are words, out we come, bloodied and squalling with the knowledge that for all the compasses in the world, there’s only one direction, and time is its only measure.

Is he right? Is there an intuitive knowledge of death? If so, why do The Three Taverns have an enduring happy place in my memories and the ensuing death of Paul have no place at all?

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Fading war memories

Posted on 3rd November 2020 by Ian

Drive the road from Bridgwater to Weston Zoyland and it’s easy to miss them. Surrounded by undergrowth, shrouded in ivy, the buildings become less and less visible as the years pass. Perhaps the ownership of the land is unclear, perhaps the deeds lie gathering dust in a distant office, perhaps no-one wants to claim responsibility for the pockets of rough land and the ruinous structures.

Once they were the property of the War Office, or the Royal Air Force, or whichever branch of government that was responsible for airfields and their associated installations. The purpose of the short, squat tower-like buildings never seemed entirely clear, when bombers flew took off from the runways built across flat Somerset moorland, the function of each building would have been more apparent.

In my younger days, the buildings brought an ambivalent feeling. There was something reassuring about their presence: they were a declaration that my family and my neighbourhood had been part of something for which the aircrews would take off into the darkness, uncertain of what dangers may await them.

The reassurance came with a dark shadow. The bomber crews sustained heavy losses; the aircraft returning fewer in number than those which had departed. The bombing missions might have been against military targets, or they might have been against cities whose streets were not so different from those of London, where my grandfather had been a fireman during the Blitz.

The airfields in our community had brought with them their own dangers, Luftwaffe attacks in the area might be against the airfields, or might be against much more vulnerable targets. In 1942 the Cow and Gate milk factory in Somerton had been bombed by a bomber flying at roof height in daylight; eleven of the forty people working in the factory had been killed.

Each brick in the airfield buildings tells a story of times now disappearing from memory.  The drone of aircraft engines and the sound of airfield vehicles and the bells and sirens of alarm and the thud, thud, thud of anti-aircraft guns and crump of explosions are sounds now only to be imagined. It is good such fearful noises are no longer to be heard, but their absence, and the gradual disappearance of the runways, and the year on year decay of the buildings, brings with it a forgetfulness.

The last veterans of the Second World War are dying, taking with them memories of the times. To have served in the forces between 1939 and 1945 and still to be alive means being at least ninety years of age. In the next decade or so, the bricks will be the last reminder, still in their original place, of events that seemed so fresh in the memory.

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