A memorable day out

Posted on 18th September 2020 by Ian

“Do you remember going to the Golden Valley in the Malvern Hills with the Cheltenham crowd?”

I did remember, but the memories were patchy, unclear. We had parked in a grassy field and had spent the afternoon in a nature reserve, but what had we done?

Perhaps there had been a walk, my own family together with my uncle and aunt and five cousins.

Perhaps there had been games, although that would have been unlikely. It was 1972 and the four girls among my five cousins always dressed in the height of fashion. The fashions in 1972 were flared trousers and platform shoes, not ideal for outdoor games, even if they had been inclined toward such activities, which they were not.

The photographs from that distant Worcestershire afternoon are in colour. It must have been a time of relative prosperity for my family, for in that single year my parents had bought their council house, had electric storage heaters installed, and bought a tent and taken us on a camping holiday to Westward Ho! in Devon. To buy colour film and have it developed and printed was a new luxury, earlier pictures are monochrome.

Having holidayed in North Devon, we must have gone to Cheltenham for the August bank holiday weekend, an additional indulgence and one that would have been less likely in earlier times when there was little to spare in the weekly budget.

To be able to recall that it was the bank holiday weekend and to know exactly the date on which we went to the nature reserve does not conflict with having very hazy memories of the day. When we returned to the car, my father switched on the radio and the BBC bulletin brought the news of the death of Prince William of Gloucester in an air crash in the Midlands.

To the ears of a boy who would start secondary school later that week, the news on Monday, 28th August 1972 seemed strange.

It is hard to explain how such a belief may have developed, but I somehow assumed that members of the Royal Family could all be kept in complete safety. I struggled to imagine how the Queen’s cousin had been in a small plane at a small airfield.

Rather than the day out being the context of the story of the death of Prince William, it is the death of Prince William that has provided the reference point for the day at the Golden Valley.

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Unsaid words

Posted on 15th September 2020 by Ian

Going through stuff written over the years, I discovered a poem I had written for my Dad. Of course, I never told him that I had written a poem for him and he would have been embarrassed at the thought of such words. Neither of us were ever demonstrative in our expression of our feelings and after a lifetime of things being unsaid, it would have been difficult for either of us to have found the capacity to express what we wanted to say.

Dad’s health was poor for many years. He was invalided out of the Royal Navy in 1962 and, as a civilian, had continued his work as radio and radar technician on naval aircraft at RNAS Yeovilton.

Dad’s health was always better when he was at the seaside and someone somewhere determined that it would be beneficial to him if he worked at RAF Manby in Lincolnshire.

The postings to Manby, a station close to the Lincolnshire coast, would last weeks at a time and his absences were times that I hated.

I remember the eve of one of his departures and the tears I shed at the thought he was going away. In the Noughties, looking back on the pain of that moment, I wrote a poem I called Manby bound. The lines are of little literary merit, but I wish now that I had shared them with him.

You would not remember that day, now.
Going away again, was too much
for a five year old, uncomprehending,
his father’s departure.

The tears on that spring evening
as abundant as the rain
on Somerset moorland,
permeating everything, damp, cold.

Perhaps embarrassed, you walked,
through the barton, with its cloak
of mud and manure.
‘Let’s go up to the field’.

A cow stood, ankle deep,
amongst tufts of green.
Her calf tethered; twine
defining its world.

The ground sucked down the boots
of a small boy who wished
his grip on his father’s hand
might be nearly so firm.

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Lung questions

Posted on 13th September 2020 by Ian

Do you remember the BCG test?

It was 1973, the second year at secondary school and we queued outside a classroom waiting our turn to receive the Sterneedle test. It was a spring-loaded instrument with six needles arranged in a circle that was inserted into the inside of each person’s forearm. We joked and laughed as we each emerged from the room with a neat set of six holes in our skin.

The following week, the test was assessed. Everyone else had a negative result, I tested positive.

Letters came to my home. There was concern that I had suffered tuberculosis. A letter came summoning me for an X-ray examination in Wells. In memory, the X-ray was undertaken in a big blue van. Perhaps that is a piece of misremembering, perhaps it is true. The National Health Service had a Mass Miniature Radiography programme using vans to go out to communities to screen people for TB.

I remember standing against the X-ray machine, worried that I would get the wrong result for a second time. No-one talked openly about what might happen if it was discovered that I had tuberculosis, there seemed to be a veiled suggestion of hospitals and long-term treatments.

The X-ray proved to be negative, the threat of being sent away receded. The conclusion reached was that I had a natural immunity to TB. The source of the immunity was never fully explained. A suggestion was made that drinking unpasteurised milk on the farm as a child had led to an exposure to bovine TB, but it was never confirmed. Perhaps it was possible to be simply immune to an illness.

Escaping being sent away when it was found that I did not have tuberculosis, I did get sent away the following year when my asthma deteriorated and my absences from school became lengthy. The school to which I was sent on Dartmoor was austere, but probably a place of warmth and comfort compared with the descriptions I have heard of TB hospitals.

Five decades on from the close encounter with TB, I wonder now if the test result on that school day still has any relevance. Would it be possible that an immunity to tuberculosis, whether inherited or acquired through exposure to it, might have created a defence, if not a full immunity to the SARS-CoV-2 virus? Internet searches have given no hint of an answer. It would be intriguing to think that those six needles could retain importance so many years later

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The way we see policemen

Posted on 12th September 2020 by Ian

The students in the class talked about their experience of the police. “If you wear a track suit, sir, they will always stop you. If you are a middle class person, in a shirt and jeans, no-one will bother you, but if you are one of us, you will always be picked on. And if you are black, you haven’t a chance.”

The police have a thankless task and I doubted they were nearly as oppressive as the students suggested, but their tales of being picked on recalled a memory from my childhood.

I loved going out with my uncle as he did the farm rounds: checking livestock; drawing water from wells; moving electric fences; delivering bales of hay; tying gates firmly.

One summer’s evening, he had parked at the roadside and gone from the van to check cattle, telling me to stay in the van. It was a fine summer evening and I sat looking out at the hedgerows and watching the occasional car that passed. The quietness was broken by the sound of a motor cycle pulling up. It seemed a strange thing: who would be stopping behind the van on this stretch of country road?

A fist came down on the roof of the van and a man’s face appeared, glaring in through the open driver’s window: the helmet and goggles and dark uniform of a member of the Bath and Somerset Constabulary. Policemen terrified me, and here there was one only a few feet away.

“What are you doing here?” he barked.

“Waiting for my uncle,” I said, trembling in fear at the aggressive apparition.

“What’s he doing parked here?”

“Looking at cows,” I answered.

“You tell your uncle, I want to see him.” He slammed his hand down on the roof and stamped his way back to his motor bike. The machine started with a roar and sped down the road. As soon as it was out of sight, I opened the van door, slipped through the nearest gate, and headed across the field back towards the farm: I wanted no more encounters with constables.

My uncle had returned by this point and called out to me, “Where are you going?”

“Back,” I shouted, “there was a policeman.”

In retrospect, it seemed a strange interlude. What did the policeman expect when he stepped off the motorbike? Had he wished to speak to my uncle, why had he not simply called at the farm? When he saw no-one in the driving seat of the van, why did he not simply get back onto the bike and ride off?

In retrospect, it seemed not much more than an attempt to intimidate a child; an attempt that certainly succeeded. For years it left me with a suspicion of police officers, I was convinced that they regarded bullying as part of their duties and developed an irrational sense of fear and guilt whenever in their presence.

How many more children were intimidated by oafish behaviour? How many grew into adulthood with a deep suspicion of those in whom we were meant to trust?

Is the experience of the students now so far removed from the experience of a small boy in rural Somerset in the 1960s?

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Riddles

Posted on 10th September 2020 by Ian

“When is a door not a door?”

“When it’s ajar?”

“What’s big and red and eats rocks?”

“A big red rock eater.”

“How do you make time fly?”

“Throw the clock out of the window.”

The silly riddles from childhood days are still easily memorable. Perhaps they had been around for years when I first heard them in the 1960s. The pun on words, the creature that sounds like something from Dr Seuss, the flying time that sounds like something from the pages of The Beano: none were particularly funny or clever, but they made us smile.

It is years since I last heard a riddle. Perhaps children no longer ask and answer riddles.

I talked to a Year 7 class this morning about their engagement with social media. They talked about using TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram. Some followed particular influencers, they followed, although no-one could explain why they followed an influencer, other than to say that it was because other people did. Two of the boys talked about the YouTube channel that they watched and how they enjoyed the videos.

The class of eleven year olds seemed infinitely more sophisticated than those of us who grew up asking and answering riddles. Presumably, if you are the sort of person who is among the eight-four million followers of one of the influencers, you would not be impressed by simple plays on words.

Perhaps they are more sophisticated, perhaps they are also less resourceful.

One of the students talked about the addictive qualities of social media, how many people felt a need to be engaged with the online communities from the moment they woke in the morning to the moment that they went to sleep at night. Such addictions can only be detrimental to the intellectual and imaginative powers of those whose world is bounded by a smartphone screen.

Riddles were among the activities of children who were forced to depend upon their own resources for amusement. It would be the 1980s before electronic games found a wide market and came to command a significant portion of children’s time. Prior to the advent of electronic technology, there was a requirement for a much greater exercise of mental capacity. Even board games demanded much greater thought than simply pressing buttons on a console or a phone keypad.

Perhaps there are still students who ask riddles. Perhaps the riddles have changed and are now as sophisticated as the technology the students take for granted.

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