A Somerset Lad

Was it car ownership that caused the demise of the travelling salesman? Did being able to regularly go to shops for ourselves mean there was no longer a need for the men (and it always seemed to be men) who came door to door with their cases of products?

Living in a small, isolated village, three miles from the nearest bus stop, perhaps we had the travelling salesmen for longer than those who lived in towns and cities.

There must have been some products that were more popular than others when it came to doorstep sales. The men from Betterware and Kleeneze continued to call with cleaning cloths, sponges and sprays long after other salesmen had disappeared. Perhaps it was their catalogue that secured the sales. Each month they would drop in a catalogue, calling back to take orders, and then bringing the goods. The catalogue offered a wide range of goods, pictured in an optimum way; selling wares from a suitcase may not have been as easy.

The catalogue system did mean the men were sure of their money, payments being sent in with the order, or made when the goods arrived. People did not need credit for small household items. Door to door selling must have been much more difficult when the salesman provided both the product and the finance which allowed people to purchase the products.

One travelling salesman sold clothes, for which people were allowed to pay on a weekly basis. There was no charge for the credit, all that had to be repaid was the price of the garments. Presumably, the cost of credit was incorporated in an initial price that had been set higher than if the clothes had been bought in a shop. The clothes seller was a softly spoken, gentle and kindly man, perhaps that was his selling pitch, but it would have been hard to have imagined him trying to recover debts from someone who had not paid. Perhaps he chose carefully those to whom he allowed credit; perhaps he was the only option if they wished to buy clothes for their families.

It is hard now to remember the individual characters of those who called at our house. It must have demanded a hugely resilient spirit to set out morning after morning in the hope of earning sufficient commission to make the day’s work worthwhile. To have smiled when every door was opened would have demanded extraordinary positivity. The online world will never be the same as those who knocked at the door.

One evening last summer, I decided to walk to Pitney to celebrate my uncle’s birthday. Oddly, despite knowing every yard of the road, I looked at Google Maps to check the distance. It suggested an alternative route – a path straight through the woods. It was signposted as a “restricted byway” and demanded as much clambering as walking, which was not the way I had remembered Pitney Woods.

On Good Friday 1968 it was a fine day. Joy, a cousin of my mother who was a student nurse with a day off, came the three miles from Langport, on foot or by bicycle, and took my sister and I for a walk. Perhaps my mother would have been pleased to have had an afternoon free from noisy children; there were only two of us at the time, my mother was late in pregnancy with my younger sister who would be born at the cottage hospital at Butleigh at the end of April.

We walked a long way for children of seven and three, along our road, past the windmill, and down over the very steep Stembridge Hill and on to Pitney Woods. It is woodland that is unchanged by the decades that have passed since. Perhaps my sister may had the assistance of a pushchair; the return journey with the sharp climb back to our house would still leave all but the fittest of people breathless.

We gathered flowers in the woods. In my memory they are bluebells, but it would probably have been too early in the year, unless the weather really was much better in those times. Perhaps we picked pale yellow primroses.

Joy must have been intent upon keeping us busy, for I made a frieze when we got home – a series of white pieces of paper on which I drew the Good Friday story that we had been told by Miss Everitt at High Ham Church of England Primary School. Would a seven year old in the infant class of a two teacher school have known the word “frieze”? Probably not. The only thing I remember from what I drew is my attempt at Pontius Pilate – a figure, drawn badly, of a man seated behind a bowl of water. For some strange reason, I coloured him bright yellow.

Yellow is the only colour I remember from those drawings. Maybe there has been filtering in the memory, yellow, white and gold being the colours of Easter celebration in more recent times. Why that single afternoon still remains so vivid in my memory, I am not sure. There must have been many other moments of more significance, many moments more exciting. Perhaps there is in it the security and contentment and spring-like hope of childhood.

Should I have been able to travel, I should liked to have gone to Pitney Woods this Friday, to see what flowers were growing.

Asthma meant going away to school at the age of fourteen.

The school was tucked into a valley deep among the granite tors and outcrops of Dartmoor. It was reached by a single tracked road from the village of Manaton, three miles away. Dry stonewalls topped the verges. Hillsides were covered with bracken, ferns, heather and gorse. Slight falls of snow would close the road, enclosing us in the austere greyness of the school buildings. To be cut off from the main road at Bovey Tracey was an unhappy circumstance, the school community was a stifling place when isolated.

Yet the true distancing came not in term time, but in the long holidays.

Being a seven day boarding school which allowed no autumn or spring half terms, and which compelled participation in games or cross country running on Saturday mornings, the school holidays were significantly longer than those enjoyed by the communities from which the eighty boys at our school had come. There were five weeks at Christmas, a month at Easter and nine weeks in the summer.

The holidays meant weeks at home when everyone around was still at school. In summertime, the extra days at home were welcome, there was much that could be done. In December and January, the three weeks outside of the holidays enjoyed by others were days that could be long.

In a village that had one shop, a post office and one pub, there was not much to interest a teenage boy. A mobile library called once a week, the three television channels offered little daytime excitement.
Days were passed reading books and playing games against myself. Games involving playing cards or dice were the simplest.

A pair of dice allowed the playing of a complete cricket match: rolls of one, two, three, four or six meant the corresponding scores were added to the score of a batsman. If a five was rolled, then, ‘howzat?’ would be called. A second dice was rolled to determine if the batsman was out: one meant he was bowled, two meant he was caught, three meant he was leg before wicket, four meant he was stumped, and six meant he was run out. Should a five be rolled, then the batsman was not out and the rolling of the first dice would resume.

Hours and days could be passed doing little or nothing. Had those days been at the present time, the opportunities presented by electronic technology would have made the holidays into something completely different.

The death of my Dad brought moments simply to stop and think, moments to drive through familiar lanes and to recall journeys with him.

We must have travelled through Upton hundreds of times. Upton was fascinating to a small boy because it had once had a railway station. The railway station at Upton would figure in family stories.

Upton was merely a halt at which a few local trains would stop, but because it was on the mainline between London Paddington and the West Country, and because express trains would go hurtling through it had a romantic air about it, adventures could start at this little place on our doorstep.

The station was properly called “Long Sutton and Pitney,” but since it was at neither, the name of the hamlet in which it was situated was used by local people.

From Upton, the twin tracks ran towards Taunton in one direction and towards Paddington in the other.

The station was closed more than 50 years ago, but it had been our family’s gateway to the world, so was a special place in my memory. Passing through Upton on a visit home a decade ago, I remember searching for signs of the station and imagining it had moved.

To the east of the railway bridge, there were signs of what had once been a crossing and to the north side of the tracks, rubble strewn ground.

To the west side, there was what might have been a platform on the south side of the track, but nothing else.  Yet this was the place where a small boy in his father’s car had thought about trains coming and going.

Returning home, I asked, “When you went to catch the train at Upton, which side was the station on?”

“The left.”

“But that side is very narrow”.

“The station was very narrow – just a platform, no ticket office.  You bought your ticket from the guard on the train”.

“So what was on the other side? What was there, where the rubble is?”

“That’s where they loaded milk onto trucks – it was always open space.”

What happens when there is no-one left to remember the stories? Or when we are so rootless that we never heard the stories?

Maybe every detail is kept in some great archive, but whole areas of countryside that were once alive in the imagination through all the things told about them.  Driving through the lowlands of Somerset barely a mile passes without there being something we were told as children; perhaps they were reminiscences, or family connections, or one of the plethora of legends that abound, but without them it would not be the place it is.

Perhaps there are still boys who ride through Upton and hear stories of trains.