A Somerset Lad

Our village was not hunting country. An old farmer who rode to hounds in his younger days once said our area was one where the country of two hunts met. One of the two hunts was to the east of the county, toward the Wiltshire border, the other was to the south, bounding on Dorset. It seemed to me, that neither of them hunted in our vicinity. Only once in childhood can I remember seeing black jacketed riders on the village roads.

A brief look at a map would offer one reason for the absence of horse and hound hunting. The hill on which our village stands is surrounded by low lying moorland, marshy, peat land drained by a vast network of ditches and rhynes, a landscape without the trees and hedgerows that might have formed coverts for foxes. The countryside around the village might have been suitable for hunting, had it not been barred by the farmers. The fields were the winter grazing for livestock brought up from the moors. To have allowed forty or fifty riders to have galloped across the grass would have turned it into tracts of mud; the hounds would have been troublesome to sheep in lamb and to cows in calf. Farming is a hard-headed business – allowing traditions to continue doesn’t pay the bills.

If not hunting country, the area was one for shooting and fishing, both of which continue.

Shotguns were used for shooting. The word always seemed too prosaic for the weapon – a shotgun was a piece of craftsmanship, the smooth chestnut wood of the stock and deep blackness of the barrels. There was a gunmaker’s shop in Langport, the shotguns displayed in the window commanded large prices. Even cartridges had an attractiveness of their own, the bright orange cardboard and the shiny brass caps. In retrospect, the colour was probably functional, empty cartridges that had been dropped to the floor could quickly be retrieved.

Fishing was the most aesthetic of the field sports. Before the advent of plastic and carbon fibre and all the other materials now used, there was a handicraft in the making of fishing tackle. Rods were light, made with split cane, cork handles and metal ferrules. Floats and lures were often hand-made: fishing publications would often have instructions on how to make your own. Reels were simple devices without the sophistication of their present-day successors. It wasn’t just that tackle that provided the aesthetic content, it was the location; there seemed few places more attractive or tranquil than a pitch on a river bank on a fine evening.

Not once in my life have I ever hit anything with a shotgun, nor do I recall ever catching a fish in a river. It was never the prey that mattered, it was the experience, aural, visual, tactile.

My aunt has been “shielded.” Being a sprightly eighty year old is not a sufficient weight to counter the fact that she suffered cancer last year and is now deemed to be vulnerable.

Her daily drive to collect her newspaper is no longer permissible. Her bus journeys to Taunton are definitely excluded. Living on a farm, among brothers, nephews and grand nephews, there is no cause for concern about her shopping, or anything else that might be needed, but what would my aunt do with her time? As someone who has always been methodical, meticulous, and, above all, industrious, how would my aunt pass all the hours that would now need to be filled?

At a loose end, (there are many such moments at the present), I took a Google Street View drive down the road past her house, then I turned around and went up the road past her house. There was something I had never noticed.

Narrow, with a bend above the farm, and a speed limit of sixty miles per hour, the road that passes the farm has fast moving traffic which appears without warning. No-one parks on the road, visits to the farm always mean driving into the farmyard and going in though the back door of the farmhouse. A stone wall encloses the front garden, making the garden invisible to anyone driving through the entrance between the farmhouse and the cottage next door. The road and the walls meant I had never noticed my aunt’s garden.

The garden is a picture of park-like perfection, neatly manicured lawns, tidily trimmed shrubs, borders filled with colourful flowers. In childhood, one of my favourite memories was of my aunt using and old kitchen knife to clear weeds from between the stone flags that formed the front path, that level of care has obviously continued through the past fifty years.

Locked down by the virus, watching the days come and go, there was a moment of encouragement, a sense of life being enhanced, a sense of determination being affirmed in knowing where my aunt will be spending these warm April afternoons. A grand nephew mows the lawns, but she will be busy with her hoe and clippers, weeding and tidying, as she has done since her own childhood.

When the restrictions are lifted and freedom returns, there will be a moment to call with my aunt and to ask to step outside the front door, to stand on the path and to smile.