A Somerset Lad

My sisters have a network of roads they use altogether different from those that I follow. Were we making the journey from Taunton to our home village of High Ham, there seem points where our routes might intersect, but few lengths of road which we all three would travel. So it was that returning from Musgrove Park Hospital in Taunton, where we had taken my mother for an outpatients consultant appointment, my sister, who was driving the car, unexpectedly turned off the main road and began a straight-line journey across the Levels towards Aller.

Anyone familiar with Sedgemoor will know that the droves across the Levels are roads for those who know them well. Sometimes there will be deep ditches either side of the single track roads; often passing places are infrequent. My sister drives with the sangfroid of a taxi driver, unlike me, has no need to silently concentrate on the road ahead, and absorbs every detail of the landscape.

Aller is one of the villages we would call home. The cluster of parishes, Langport, Huish Episcopi, High Ham and Aller, was home to generations of our forebears. There were many stories my sister might have recalled, but never before had I heard the one that was discussed.

“Mum, isn’t this the lane that Grandad cycled to fetch the nurse the day that you were born”

It was the lane. Our grandparents were living in a council house in Aller. But why? How did they come to be there? Why weren’t they on the home farm at Pibsbury?

In my version of family history, my great grandparents were living in the farmhouse, and Uncle Stan, their oldest and unmarried son was living with them. Next door, in the farm cottage, lived my grandparents, with my eldest aunt and then my mother (there would be seven children, eventually). By the time of the 1939 register, drawn up at the beginning of the Second World War, they are all resident at the farm, what had brought my grandparents to live a good three miles distant?

Of course, I could have asked. Instead, in my mind’s eye, I saw a young man of twenty-three pedalling a battered black bicycle out from Aller. Flat-capped, with collarless shirt and corduroy trousers, he wore an old jacket and heavy workman’s boots. These were the days before the National Health Service. Would he have had to calculate how many shillings it would cost for a nurse to attend a birth?

Whatever the cost, he would have enjoyed the day. It was 1st May 1937, war was still a remote thought. The moor would have been alive with springtime and a baby daughter would be born.

It must have been on a Sunday afternoon that The Men from the Ministry was broadcast on the BBC Light Programme. It is hard to imagine my grandparents would have sat in their front room listening to the wireless at any other time. In memory, programmes like The Clitheroe Kid and The Navy Lark shared a similar Sunday afternoon airing, but that might be simply a conflation of childhood impression.

The Men from the Ministry abides because, on a small Somerset farm, “the ministry” meant only one thing, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food.

The Ministry was regarded with fear and resentment, its inspectors were seen as inquisitive and critical. The years of the Second World War had seen the emergence of an organisation that dominated farming, that directed policy and micromanaged its implementation. The men from the ministry might arrive in the farmyard at any moment, checking on all that was happening, asking to see livestock, production records, paperwork.

In wartime, the interference was accepted. After the war, my grandfather felt that the government should have stood back and left farming to the farmers. He believed much of the government’s intervention had been counterproductive, that its attempts to direct production were inefficient, that subsidies were a mistaken policy.

Men from the ministry seemed still to be arriving at the farm for various reasons when I was a child in the 1960s, although I suspect “the ministry” was a term used to cover anyone who worked for any government body.

Perhaps it was a feeling toward the men from the ministry that nurtured a suspicion of all authority.

Authorities seemed to do little to assist the small man. If you were a big farmer or a big businessman, you always had the influence that was necessary to ensure that policies were interpreted by officials in a way that was advantageous to you. If you were a small farmer or a small businessman, then policies and the regulations they brought, were rarely to your advantage. Even record-keeping and paperwork were much easier on a farm where the farmer had workmen to continue his tasks, while he dealt with the forms, than they were on a farm where the farmer had to do everything himself.

Perhaps laughing at The Men from the Ministry on a Sunday afternoon, laughing at pomposity and incompetence and bureaucracy, was a small act of rebellion against the sort of official who might step into the yard on a Monday morning.

Sitting in the garden, eating pasta and salad for lunch, I glanced up at an upstairs window.

The window had been the vantage point for a boy who spent much of his time hiding in his room. The room was small, but became a point from which to survey the world.

The levels to the north of the village would be covered in mists in the winter time and it would be possible to imagine the land as it once was, covered by water that stretched to the Bristol Channel. Tradition said that Joseph of Arimathea had once sailed through those waters, bringing with him a young Jesus of Nazareth. Tradition in the village said that Joseph and Jesus had landed at Turn Hill, the sheer hillside to the west of the village, and had walked the land that the boy walked.

Joseph of Arimathea was more famous, but not nearly as exciting for a boy as the tales of King Arthur. Glastonbury Tor, visible across the moorland, was not just a place visited by Jesus of Nazareth, it was the isle of Avalon. Arthur and his knights had ridden through this landscape; battles against enemies, both mortal and magical, had been fought. Best of all, Merlin the wizard had exercised his powers here. There were stories of men who said they had met with Merlin, though the tales may have owed more to cider than to any encounter with the supernatural. There was sadness in reading the account of the death of Arthur, but reassurance in the thought that he and his knights only slumbered and would one day again ride forth through these lowlands.

Standing at that upstairs window and staring across at Glastonbury Tor, a whole world of imagination was possible. Rising sharp from the moorland, its place as a source for legends and stories was easy to understand.

Conversations about those who frequented Glastonbury in the 1960s were as captivating as traditions about those who had been there in ancient times. The hippies offered colour and excitement; their vivid clothes and abundant hair contrasted sharply with the conventionality of rural England. Local adults frowned upon their activities, whispering about the things that were said to go on, but the adult disapproval only made these exotic newcomers more fascinating. It would have been impossible to imagine that fifty years later, they would still be in Glastonbury.

Fifty years later, and I wondered, if I stood at the window and stared across the levels, I would see the things that the boy had seen. The trees are taller, but the Tor is still visible. Are there still children who imagine Joseph and Arthur? Does anyone still look at the mists and imagine the sea? Do people still meet Merlin?