Hard times

Posted on 31st May 2020 by Ian

Military life was a necessity. In my family tree, there are numerous soldiers. They were men who had joined up not because there was a war, although in the vast expanse of the British Empire there was generally a war somewhere, but because joining the army was the only option available. Farms were too small to sustain younger brothers in a family.

My great grandfather joined 15th Hussars in 1899 and spent eleven years with the regiment. His brother joined the 18th Hussars and fought in the Boer War.

My great grandfather spent eleven years with the 15th Hussars, ten of them in India. When he married in 1910, my great grandmother wanted him to give up army life and stay at home. He left the 15th Hussars in the summer of 1911. There was no work to be found back in Somerset. He re-enlisted with the 19th Hussars and survived serving on the Western Front in the First World War. My grandmother used to tell of how his pension was reduced because there had been a break of service.

For generations, my family had been yeomen farmers working pocket handkerchief sized farms. Their families married into other local families, first cousins sometimes marrying first cousins, and the cycle of life continued from generation to generation. Baptized in one of the local medieval parish churches, they would be married there, and buried within the walls of the churchyard; there was a reassurance in the continuity of the family, but never money.

The small farms were sufficient to keep them in the locality, but not enough for them ever to become wealthy. “Enough to hold on and never enough to move on,” as one uncle commented.

The picture of rural life was never as pleasant as it seems. In difficult times they lived in poverty, there is record of one family going to the workhouse, and death lurked at the door.

My great great great grandfather, Thomas Luxton moved to Aller in Somerset where he married Hannah Sawtell in 1827. They had seven children. Jemima died at the age of one month in 1830. Daniel died at the age of four years in 1843, his baby brother William died at the same time at the age of four days, and they were buried on the same day. Four months after the death of her two youngest children Hannah herself died at the age of thirty-four.

In my great great grandfather’s generation there were fourteen children, six of whom were to die between the ages of four and twenty-one. In my great grandfather’s family, there were eleven children, two brother and two sisters died before reaching the age of twenty-one.

Mortality rates were much higher, early death was something common, but reading through the family tree with my mother, there lingers a sense of the hard times.

 

 

 

 

 

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Sneezing

Posted on 30th May 2020 by Ian

One evening captures the mood of many. Standing in the bathroom of the farmhouse, I took a flannel, soaked it with cold water and placed it, blindfold-like, over my eyes. There were a few moments of relief, a coolness in my cheeks and forehead. Taking the flannel from my face, my eyes were bloodshot and swollen. Feeling better, I rinsed out the flannel, hung it up and stepped back outside into the evening sunshine. Within minutes, the sneezing had resumed.

For someone with multiple allergies, a farmyard in warm weather was not a good place to be. Haymaking time brought on fits of irritation and sneezing and would often trigger bouts of asthma. There would be similar reactions to the cats that were kept to rid the farm of vermin; to the chaff generated by the machinery at threshing time; to the chickens that kept the family supplied with fresh eggs; to the dust that rose when sheds were cleaned, to random other things that might have only been encountered for the first time.

An uncle had suffered worst allergies. Eczema had afflicted him as well as asthma. In his early years, the irritation was so great that he would take off his clothes and lie in the bath of cold water outside the milking parlour in which the churns of milk were placed to keep them cool in summer time. The chill of the water would reduce the inflammation and the itching.

Even had farming been my vocation, it would not have been possible, everyday there would have been a reaction to some new irritant. Contact with animals, contact with fertilisers, contact with chemicals, contact with fumes, the list of things to avoid would have made an agricultural career an impossible choice.

Piriton was the breakthrough medication. Although there would never be a time when the experience of haymaking did not induce sneezing and wheezing or when feathers and cats did not produce an adverse reaction, but the availability of a single tablet made spring and summer at least tolerable.

The small, round, red and white plastic container containing the tablets became a symbol of security, together with the Spincap inhaler it meant that allergies and asthma would not become the chief determinants of how I lived my life.

Years later, when I reflected on two boys from the small school I attended dying of asthma in the summer of 1974, I realised how much those medications had meant.

 

 

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Mapped

Posted on 29th May 2020 by Ian

Google Maps may be excellent. The app may get me to places in optimum time, it may tell me where I am when I have no idea, but it is not tactile, and it has no sense of history. There is no sense of delight in sitting with Google Maps, no opportunity to appreciate the colour and the print and the design.

It is a delight to sit with a real map. It is a delight to spend time following each road, noting the features of each settlement, tracing the course of each river, examining the route of each railway, pondering how close were places that seemed distant and, sometimes, how distant were places that seemed familiar.

The fascination goes back to childhood days, perhaps it began with tales of pirates and maps of buried treasure, perhaps it was about the stories of armies advancing or navies sailing. Perhaps it was the maps of the journeys of Saint Paul at the back of the Bibles we used at High Ham Primary School.

Maps have become as fascinating as a novel, though they are perhaps more like a history or a biography. Maybe, a memoir would be the most accurate description of their capacity, the thoughts they evoke are part autobiographical, part impression, and part plain misremembering. Sheet 177 of the 1930 Revision of the Ordnance Survey with later corrections, first published in 1946 which covers south Somerset and west Dorset  has become the history and autobiography of home.

Roman buildings are common on maps of the area. Growing up in sight of the site of a Roman villa that yielded up a fourteen foot square mosaic floor which is a centrepiece in the county museum, the Romans were taken for granted when I was young. Only decades later is there appreciation of the rich and deep heritage that lay all around.

A thousand years after the Romans came the medieval parish churches. An imaginary tour of the parishes around Langport is a journey through the rites of passage, baptisms, weddings, funerals. The buildings will outlast the Church of England, which is in its final generation in most local communities. Perhaps there will be new ceremonies to replace the bland Twentieth Century language of the Anglican Prayer Book, perhaps, like the French, there will be a devising of a secular liturgy with which to mark solemn moments.

Much more recent are the villages, houses and buildings dating from the Eighteenth Century onwards. An imaginary tour of the roads and lanes around our village brings recall of people who lived in particular cottages and farms. Living in a 1920s council house, there was always a certain envy of those who lived in period properties.

The 1946 map represents much of the reality I remember, the world had not changed much between then and the mid-1960s when my memories begin. It is good to look up from the map and stare across the landscape to Pilsdon Pen on the far horizon, lying in West Dorset. At 900 feet above sea level, it is within sight of the sea, and is at the edge of the map. In the countryside between here and there lies a whole world of continuity..

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Borrowing family members

Posted on 28th May 2020 by Ian

On the  Ancestry website, my great grandfather appeared in a family tree. According to the family tree that the person had assembled, he had lived in New Zealand, which was a fact that did not fit in with what I had learned of him.

Was there something I did not know? Perhaps there were generations of family members about whom I knew nothing. I clicked to open the family tree to see how he fitted into their generations of members. The tree noted his army service, about which I knew, but according to the information, he had enlisted not when he was in Aller in Somerset, when, according to military records, he was eighteen years and eight months old, but instead, in New Zealand, when he was just seven years of age.

Someone seems to have taken his name to fill in a gap in their family tree. A brief moment’s thought should have told the person who decided to insert the name of my great grandfather that no-one joined the British army at the age of seven – even in Victorian times! A cross-check would have shown them that three years after they suggested he had joined the army, he was living with his family in a small West Country village, attending the village school, as the law required him to do until he reached the age of thirteen.

It is tempting sometimes to add members to a family tree on a speculative basis. My mother wanted to know the name of an aunt in Swanage, Dorset with whom my grandmother lived in the First World War. Known in memory as “Great Aunt Old,” there was never clarity about the lady’s connection with our family.

“What was her proper name, Mum?”

“I don’t know, we always knew her as Great Aunt Old.”

A search revealed a lady with the surname of Old who had been born in Swanage and was living in Dorchester in 1911. The towns are not far apart. Would it have been legitimate to have imagined that the lady moved back to her hometown when the war began?

During years of parish ministry, there were often occasions when people sought the stories of their ancestors with very little information.

Many Irish people who emigrated had limited literacy; many had their names misspelt by immigration officials; many came from families of limited means who would mark graves with a single piece of rough stone.

It was sometimes almost impossible to establish definitive connections between visitors and their forebears, yet there was always a desire to give people a sense of place, a sense of rootedness. People wanted to believe the stories they had received, who I was I to dispel their ideas? Sometimes I would say, “it could have been.”

Perhaps, further research revealed that “it could not have been,” but in the meantime they borrowed someone for their family tree.

 

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Train noises

Posted on 27th May 2020 by Ian

“Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.” Paul Theroux’s words from The Great Railway Bazaar must have captured the sentiments of countless young boys through the generations.

Living in a small village three smiles from the town of Langport meant being three miles from where the trains of the Great Western Railway had once sometimes paused at Langport East railway station. By the time I was born, the GWR was becoming a story from history, British Railways had been established in 1948, and the British Rail trains ceased to stop in Langport when I was two.

Perhaps it was the absence of a station that allowed the trains to move at a speed where the sound of their progress carried across the fields on a summer’s evening. A high speed train rushing through the cuttings at Long Sutton and Pitney and over the viaduct at Langport was as evocative for me as the sound of the Boston and Maine for Paul Theroux.

Sometimes, in imagination, Langport East station was reopened and I would think to myself where I might go.

Eastward, the destination seemed uninviting. Castle Cary was just another place in Somerset and I knew nothing about Westbury or Reading. London Paddington was the end of the line, but London was crowded and expensive and there were stories that your pockets would be picked or that you would be mugged. It was not a place to journey in imagination.

It was in a westward direction that there were stations that brought thoughts of summertime and the seaside. Heading west, bound for Penzance, there would be Taunton, where we had to travel for real train journeys, and then a sequence of stations that seemed like poetry when recited by a station announcer: Tiverton Parkway, Exeter Saint David’s, Newton Abbot, Totnes, Plymouth, Saltash, Saint Germans, Liskeard, Bodmin Road, Par, Saint Austell, Truro, Redruth, Hayle, Saint Erth and, finally, Penzance.

After Exeter, the train would rush down the estuary and travel along the seafront at Dawlish. Children on the beach would wave at the passing carriages, they realized how magical trains were.

It was not possible to stand in the garden at home on a summer evening and not be transported by the sounds of the rushing trains. Perhaps those who rode on the trains thought their journeys far more prosaic, perhaps standing as an onlooker allows space for poetry.

 

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