A Somerset Lad

Did you ever wish your school would burn down?

It would become a particular wish of mine around this time each year. As the short English summer holidays drew to a close, there would be a hope that there would be no return to school. There would be a hope that I would look from my bedroom window and see clouds of smoke rising into the sky and word would come that the village school had been burned down.

Of course, it never happened, and, even if it had, it would not have prevented a return to school, we would simply have been bussed to another of the local schools.

The real wish was not that the school would burn down, but that there would be a prolongation of the summer, that there would be a delay of the arrival of autumn.

Autumn on the Somerset Levels does not arrive in a dramatic way. Were it not for the return to school at the beginning of September, it would be difficult to point to a particular day and declare that it marked the start of autumn.  Autumn seeped into our lives, it crept in gradually, one day at a time.

August would bring the first signs. We had hardly begun our school holidays when there reminders that the end of summer was not far away. Nature moved on inexorably.

Swallows gathered on telephone wires, a dozen or fifteen or more would sit in the evening. There seemed something extraordinary in the tiny birds. No-one could explain to us how they could fly to Africa for our winter months and find their way back to the same spots in our village each month. As a child, I would wonder if they would stay with us all year round if we didn’t have autumn and winter. There was a moment of pure joy when standing in Rwanda on an evening of December 2015 I looked up and saw a telephone wire filled with swallows.

Colours began to change, berries began to appear. Conkers ripened on the horse chestnut trees on the village green. Grain fields were changed to white stubble. Apples were picked from orchard trees. The potatoes lingered the longest, it would be a Saturday in October before we gathered in one of my grandfather’s fields for a day of potato picking.

Autumn seemed a time when everything died, when the games we played in the field across the road became no longer possible, when darkness and wind and rain kept us inside our houses. No matter what happened to our school, the shortening days and cold temperatures were inevitable.

Walking beside the river at eight o’clock in the evening, the temperature has hardly fallen from its afternoon high. Twenty-four degrees is no longer considered a hot day, it would have taken another ten degrees to have brought the day to a level comparable with the warmer days this summer. However, twenty-four degrees under heavy grey clouds creates an oppressive humidity that aggravates my asthma.

Reaching into my pocket for my inhaler, I found my phone, and the cotton mask I wear for shopping, and no Ventolin. Pausing to catch my breath, there were memories younger years when medication was less developed.

Before the days of Ventolin, there were spincap inhalers hardly remembered by anyone younger than fifty. Capsules containing powder were placed into a cylindrical inhaler which had a device that punctured the capsule. The inhaler was then placed between your lips and a sharp intake of breath caused the interior of the the inhaler to spin and the powder to be inhaled. That was the theory, anyway. Often the process of the breathing in the powder would cause irritation and a paroxysm of coughing that saw the content of the capsules spluttered out in a cloud of white dust.

Yet the spincaps represented a huge advance on what went before. I grew up in times when doctors had no arsenal of drugs with which to treat small boys with asthma. There were pink soluble tablets and a foul tasting brown cough mixture, and, if all else failed, there were adrenaline injections.

My uncle who grew up suffering from asthma and eczema thought even the limited medication of the 1960s to be progress from his own experiences.

There were stories of asthma sufferers in times past inhaling with smoky vapours from substances burned in tins, or sitting with a towel over their head breathing in the steam from bowls of hot water in which liquids that were meant to assist breathing had been dissolved.

Asthma seemed much less common when I was young, perhaps it went undiagnosed in many cases. It also seemed a much more serious illness. In the summer holidays of 1974, two boys from the special school on Dartmoor that I attended died from asthma attacks. I am still trying to find the grave of a friend from those days who died in 2003, he was forty-two.

Needing to pause to catch my breath is no more than a slight inconvenience compared to the experience of those who suffered asthmatic evenings in the past.