Roadworks

Posted on 21st May 2020 by Ian

It has to be acknowledged, Somerset is not an easy place for road maintenance. Country roads are frequently narrow, bounded by high hedges or deep ditches. Roads crossing Sedgemoor are built on peat, they subside easily creating roller coaster routes, at bridges the tarmac becomes disconnected from concrete and steel. Towns and villages that have stood since medieval times are a challenge for those who have to facilitate access by Twenty-First Century vehicles. However, there do seem to be times when the engineers of the county roads department appear to be conspiring to confound unwitting drivers.

Trying to drive from the M5 motorway to get home, the main road towards Glastonbury was barricaded. Signs announced that it was closed for roadworks and diverted traffic toward Bridgwater. At Bridgwater, Google Maps said the diversion was to the left, which then brought another barricade, another diversion and a drive through a speed-bumped housing estate. Would it have demanded too much of the engineers to have asked each other when they were planning their work? Perhaps it is the lockdown, perhaps there is a backlog, perhaps it is possible that entire sections of the county will be enclosed by barricades.

Roadworks are not just an inconvenience, they arouse childhood fears. Passing the heavy machinery used to carry out the work, recalls childhood memories of the tarmac machine itself, the noise, the flames, the steam.

Perhaps to a pre-school boy the machine seemed like some mechanical dragon. It looms menacingly in a very specific memory.  A clear and dry day, probably in springtime, for tar melts in high summer, at my grandparents’ farmhouse between Langport and Long Sutton. The A372 that passed the farm was being resurfaced.  There must have been notification that this was about to happen, for I was filled with apprehension at the coming of the tarmac machine. When the time came for the tarmac machine to pass the front of the house, I hid behind the settee in my grandmother’s front room. It is probably fifty-five years ago, but I can still recall the fear of the moment and I can still feel the texture of the fabric against my hand.

Perhaps the health and safety concerns that lead to road closures bring an unexpected benefit. The barricades mean that there is no possibility of passing in close proximity of the road repair machinery. There is no possibility of an encounter with dragons.

Posted in Out and about | Leave a comment

Papa

Posted on 20th May 2020 by Ian

There’s a black and white photograph of my grandfather. He is standing on open ground. Perhaps it was taken on a trip to the seaside, or on a visit to somewhere in the countryside. He is wearing an old sports jacket, corduroy trousers that are worn with wear, heavy black boots, a V-necked pullover and an open-necked white shirt.

It is a photograph that might have been taken in the 1950s, or even in the years after the war. More likely, it is from the mid-1960s, after he and my grandmother had moved from Chiswick in West London to Yeovil in Somerset.

Calculation of his age is alarming. He was born in a workhouse in Isleworth in November 1906, which means that he would have reached his sixtieth birthday in the autumn of 1966. For years, I have looked at his photograph and thought him an old man, and now realize he was only the age that I will be this year.

Papa died in February 1972, when I was eleven. He seemed an old man, but was only sixty-five. My memories of him are of a silver-grey haired, moustached man sitting in an armchair beside the glass-fronted fire that made the room seem always warm. Papa’s passed his time stamp collecting, working in the garden, and, occasionally, going fishing.

Perhaps he was old before his time. His mother’s poverty and anonymous father means his upbringing cannot have been easy. His Jewish identity brought persecution from the Blackshirts in the 1930s. His years in the National Fire Service in London during the Second War brought horror and trauma. He spent time in psychiatric care in the late-1960s, suffering from what would now be described as post traumatic stress disorder. In the 1960s, he was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, it being suspected that he had been diabetic for years.

In memory, he was a man who never, ever raised his voice. Perhaps his health made anger something too demanding, perhaps he had seen too much of the brutal realities that life could present to become annoyed at trivial things. For years, I had assumed that he could not drive, only on the anniversary of VE Day did I discover that he could drive, but did not do so.

And yet, despite everything, there was a gentleness, a contentment about him. Boisterous grandchildren cannot have been easy for him, but he always smiled and spoke softly to us.

When he died, he was cremated and his ashes scattered. Were there a grave, I would go to it and ask the many questions for which I shall never find an answer.

Posted in Unreliable memories | Leave a comment

Dust to dust

Posted on 19th May 2020 by Ian

Availing of the government’s provision that I could drive in order to meet another person outdoors, and also that I could go for a walk. I drove to High Ham to have lunch in the garden with my sister and then to Huish Episcopi to visit family graves.

Huish Episcopi churchyard is where generations of my family have been laid to rest. It is a place with a meaning far more profound than anything that might be found in the traditions of the church. Records of family members run back four centuries, the family presence undoubtedly extends centuries further back.

Walking among the graves at the west end of the church, I came across the grave of the Revd Joseph Stubbs. British History Online says that Stubbs was vicar from 1892 until 1923. His name was familiar because he preached at the funeral of my great-great-great grandmother, Harriet Crossman. This was a report of the funeral:

HUISH EPISCOPI

A REMARKABLE FAMILY The interment of the late Mrs. Harriett Crossman, relict of Mr. Thomas Crossman, of Ham Down, Huish Episcopi, took place on Saturday afternoon last, at the Huish Churchyard. The Vicar, the Rev. J. Stubbs, officiated. A large number of relatives and friends of deceased were present. On Sunday morning the Rev. J. Stubbs preached to a large congregation, founding his discourse on Ecclesiastes xii, 7, “The dust shall return to the earth as it was, and the spirit- to God who gave it”. Special reference was made by the Vicar to the life and character of the deceased. With regard to the late Mrs. Crossman, he said that as far as he could accurately ascertain – and he had taken a good deal of trouble to do so – her family and descendants consisted of 12 children, 96 grandchildren, 38 great-grandchildren, 56 great-great-grandchildren, and seven great-great-great-grandchildren, making in all a total of 259. The Vicar said that this was a proof of the remarkable vitality of the family, which he thought was possibly without a parallel. During the whole of her life the deceased had set a noble example of piety and earnest religious conviction to her numerous descendants, and to all who knew her. Mrs. Crossman’s age was 97 years, and she had seen as many as eight generations. With the exception of failing eyesight, deceased retained all her faculties until the day of her death.

Died NOVEMBER 16th 1897 Aged 97 years
Interred in St Mary’s Churchyard,

Huish Episcopi, November 20th, 1897.

The seven great-great-great grandchildren mentioned would have included some of my grand aunts and uncles, though not my grandfather, who was born in 1913 and was some fourteen years younger than his next sibling.

Standing at Huish, there is a wonderful sense of continuity, mortality and place.

 

 

Posted in The stuff of daily life | 2 Comments

There’s a grey van coming down the road

Posted on 18th May 2020 by Ian

Perhaps it arose from a feeling of consolation that Monday had been safely negotiated. Nothing too bad had happened at school. The spellings to learn for Friday were not too complicated (learning the spelling of sixteen words was the only homework ever given, how did we eve learn enough to pass any exams?). If not actually sunny, it wasn’t raining. There was a sense that teatime on a Monday was a good time and there was still Star Trek to look forward to on BBC television at ten past eight (Why did the BBC have such odd timings for programmes? The news was the only thing that started on the hour).

Monday teatime would not have been complete without David Macey coming down the road in his mobile shop. The shop was the interior of a big grey van. It was a 1950s vehicle with a long nose and long wheel base. It was the sort of van that might have served as a horse transporter.

At the back of the van, there was a step up through the rear door, which allowed people to come into the shop.  Inside the van, along both sides, there were wooden shelves which were filled with groceries. David Macey himself would stand at the front end of the shelves, collecting the pennies and the shillings that would be spent.

Perhaps we were very frugal with whatever money we were given, perhaps there had been nowhere to spend money over the weekend, perhaps parents did not mind finding the few extra pennies required to buy sweets from David Macey’s van on a Monday. Barrett’s Sherbet Fountains were 3d each, armed with a sixpence, I could buy one for myself and one for my middle sister (our younger sister still being too young to cope with the intracacies of eating white sherbet powder with a stick of licorice).

It is hard to imagine David Macey made much profit from the gaggle of children along our road who would crowd into his van to buy sweets. Perhaps the older customers, stepping into the van to buy food offered bigger margins. Perhaps it was remarkable that the mobile shop had kept going in times when almost every household in the village had a car.

The memory that remains from those Monday evenings is of an overwhelming sense of wellbeing, of being utterly contented with a thruppenny sherbet fountain. Would that there were still such vans with such a capacity to bring happiness.

 

 

 

Posted in Unreliable memories | Leave a comment

Home learning

Posted on 17th May 2020 by Ian

It’s hard to imagine that there were encyclopaedia salesmen. There were regular salesmen who would come to our house, selling hardware, brushes and cleaning products, and occasional callers selling clothes from suitcases, but no-one ever called selling encyclopaedias.

If someone had called, they wouldn’t have found a buyer. We had two sets of encyclopaedias, one was bound in brown covers with gold print. It was old, probably from before the First World War, and was filled with words beyond the comprehension of even the most curious of schoolboys. The other set was Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia, it had blue covers embossed with silver print.

The compilers of the Arthur Mee series had firm ideas about what children should do with such an abundance of printed knowledge, they should learn it. At regular intervals, there would be exercises to be completed, questions about what might have been gleaned from the entries that had been read. I would take a piece of paper and a pencil and try to write answers.

I was suspicious about some of the entries, thinking that some of the knowledge seemed to be very out of date. I discovered from an online search that the first edition of the Children’s Encyclopaedia was published in 1908, which might have explained the dearth of information about the two World Wars, topics which greatly fascinated me. It would also explain the lack of entries about jet planes, Formula 1 cars, and space travel, the sort of thing that would have been more interesting to a boy than histories of long dead kings and queens and the geography of the British Empire.

What the encyclopaedias with their dry content and difficult questions did achieve was to foster a love of learning for its own sake. There would never be a school test or examination in the random stuff that I would read, but it would never have occurred to me that learning things was about getting grades. One of my most treasured possessions was a globe with the nations of the world marked in different colours and the capital city shown for each. I would never sit an exam that asked where Mali or Chad were, but that did not mean the hours spent looking at that globe were not time well spent.

Having prepared lessons to upload onto an online platform tomorrow, I wonder if sometimes I would do better to tell students just to go and find out some random things for themselves. It won’t get them grades, but it might show them learning things can be fun.

 

Posted in The stuff of daily life | Leave a comment