A Somerset Lad

With the passage of time, life becomes ever more prosaic. A bedtime drink now is a mug of hot milk, anything with caffeine would mean getting up in the night. I can never understand how my grandparents could drink Camp coffee at bedtime, the thick black liquid looked potent enough to keep anyone awake for hours.

My Mum always drank Horlick’s, the distinctive jar with a blue label and lid was a familiar. Horlick’s seemed an appropriate sort of bedtime drink, it went with warm fires, soft pillows and woollen blankets. Horlick’s meant the family being together, with curtains closed against winter nights. Horlick’s meant a feeling of security, the doors locked and the silence of rural Somerset all around. Horlick’s meant our mother fussing over us and our father checking everything was ready for the morning.

When they were empty, the last teaspoon of powder taken out and the jar tipped up, lest any remain, Horlick’s jars would never be thrown away. My grandmother would use them for jam and marmalade, their distinctive shape becoming associated with bread sliced thickly from fresh loaves, spread with layers of butter that would show your teethmarks, and then with strawberry jam or coarse orange marmalade.

Horlick’s seemed a symbol of happiness, of feeling safe and well. Such symbols seem more important with the passing years. Sometimes it is the most unlikely things that can be reassuring, things like Milo.

As well as Horlick’s, there would sometimes be tins of Milo in the house. Milo was a chocolate drink, it is still marketed in many countries, and, to my delight, I saw it on sale in the Co-op this week.

Being in the Philippines at the end of 1990 and beginning of 1991, two days drive from Manila, I sat by myself in a deserted dining room of the small hotel in which we had stayed. Home was 8,000 miles away, a three minute telephone call cost £6, and the area we were visiting was beset by violence. Feeling despondent about the place in which we were staying and the projects we were visiting, I wanted to be far from this place where militiamen wandered around with grenades and automatic rifles, this place where the bodies of church workers would sometimes be found in the river. I remember turning around and seeing a tin of Milo on a shelf behind a counter. At once, I was back in the kitchen of my childhood, with my Dad making the bedtime drinks.

Was it the prime minister of Italy or of Spain who said that stepping out into the world after the Covid-19 virus had passed would be like stepping out into your country after a war had ended?

The death of a close cousin prompted Mum to recollect their childhood years and the happy times they had spent together in the years after the end of the Second World War. In the late-1940s, happiness was not something to be found in shopping!

Mum’s war memories on the farm were of times when there was always sufficient to survive. There were vegetables from the garden, milk from the cows, and eggs from the hens. Meat was not plentiful, but there was plenty of bread.

Perhaps there was a sense in the war that times had to be endured so as to reach a better future, perhaps the expectations of what would follow were too optimistic. The country was exhausted, economically drained. The war effort had demanded every resource and had left few reserves with which to rebuild. Cities lay in ruins, housing was in short supply, incomes were low. It did not help that the beginning of 1947 saw the worst winter in living memory; it was said that there were places where the snow lay on the ground until May.

Bread had not been rationed during the war, it was only in the difficult post-war days that it became something requiring ration coupons. Coupons seem to have been required for a wide range of items.

Mum recalled a journey to Taunton with my grandmother and the younger of my uncles. Such a trip would have been anticipated with great excitement. My uncle, a toddler at the time, had to be taken along because of the mischief in which he constantly found himself. On the shopping trip, he disappeared from view only to be found shrouded in red ribbons he had pulled from a haberdashery counter.

The object of the trip was to buy Mum a new pair of shoes, my grandmother complaining that Mum’s feet kept growing. They walked the length of Taunton, calling at every shoe shop, before my grandmother found a pair of shoes for which she would part with the ration coupons.

Those years in the second half of the 1940s seem a time of deep austerity, a time when the privations of the war continued without there being a sense of purpose to carry people as there had been in the war.

If the premier who believes the days after Covid-19 will be like a post-war situation, then the times to come do not seem very attractive.