A Somerset Lad

Younger people seem to use contactless cards or smartphone apps for even the smallest of purchases, so perhaps having a handful of change in my pocket is a sign of age.

There seemed something reassuring in the coins. Once £9 would have seemed a fortune, as it was the two £2 coins and five £1 coins were quickly spent, yet for a moment there was a childhood sense of being momentarily affluent.

Feeling well off did not require having many coins; a few would have been sufficient to fill the pocket of a boy who was small for his age. Each coin was easily identifiable by touch.

The farthings had disappeared by the time I might have had coins of my own to spend, but the ha’pennies were still in circulation. A ha’penny might buy a couple of black jacks, or four fruit salad chews in the village shop. I remember buying fruit chews at eight for a penny in the post office.

Thruppenny bits were coins of character. Eight-sided and heavy, it was not hard to know when there was thruppence in your hand. Thruppence did not buy what it once bought, but when Macey’s Mobile Shop came down our road at teatime on a Monday, it would buy a sherbet fountain. David Macey would joke with the cluster of children, holding up a sherbet fountains and declaring, “two for seven pence, thruppence for one.” We would laugh and say that we would queue up twice if we wanted two.

Sixpences, which adults called tanners for some reason no-one could ever explain (will children now ever comprehend a world before Google?), were less plentiful. A sixpence was seen as a sufficient treat to be baked in a Christmas pudding, the reason for doing so was as much a mystery as the nickname for the coin. At our primary school Christmas dinner, everyone would find a sixpence in their Christmas pudding, almost certainly provided by our headmistress.

Shillings were unassuming coins. There would be advertisements in newspapers for pre-1947 shillings, the coins before 1947 were made of silver and the value of the silver must have exceeded the face value of the shilling coins. A shilling opened up all sorts of possibilities in a sweet shop, big bars of chocolate invited a shilling being spent in one go

The smaller values were always welcome, but the coins that really weighed heavily in a pocket were the two shilling pieces and the half-crowns. The old two shilling coins carried the word “florin,” though none of us knew why. The half-crowns were a source of real joy, “half a dollar,” my Dad would call one, in those times when there were four American dollars to £1 Sterling. In memory, a half-crown offered far more options than the £9 in my pocket did.

Perhaps oral traditions were already dying during my childhood years. My mother, who was born in 1937, has a wealth of stories about people, places and traditions, no-one from my own generation can recall a fraction of what she still remembers.

Perhaps television was the problem. We did not spend evenings in conversation. We spent evenings watching whatever was shown on the two, and then three, channels we could receive on the wooden-cased black and white television set which commanded our living room. Television was too serious a thing to be interrupted by chatter. There being only one television in the house, and one living room in which to sit, there would always be someone who would say, “hush!” if someone talked over the programme.

A lack of conversation has meant there are often stories of which I can only remember fragments. There are tales of people doing certain things where I have no recall of the cause or the consequence of the events. There are memories of being in certain places without any recall if why I was there. And there are lots of rhymes, sometimes whole ones, sometimes just odd lines.

Bedtime ones seem to remain in the memory, perhaps because they were often repeated.

“To bed, to bed,” said Sleepy Head
“Tarry a while,” said Slow.
“Put on the pan,” said greedy Nan,
“We’ll sup before we go.”

I was never sure whose argument prevailed. Did Sleepy Head have to sit in the kitchen while supper was prepared? Did Nan have to go to bed hungry? Was the rhyme about going to bed or staying up?

Another rhyme about going upstairs seemed altogether more threatening to a child.

“I met a man upon the stair
And when I looked, he wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today.
I wish that man would go away.”

Growing up in a community which seemed to take ghost stories at face value, the idea of a figure that appeared and disappeared was quite credible. The idea of there being a haunting presence on the stairs was quite worrying.

In retrospect, it is odd how many of the playground rhymes were morbid in their content. “Oranges and lemons” would be sung while two children faced each other with their hands joined. They would raise their hands to make a bridge under which the other children would pass, until the hands would be raised and lowered, “Chip, chop. Chip, chop. The last man’s head.” The wallflower song included, “we’re all children, and we shall surely die.” Even the sailing of the big ship through the “Alley, alley, O” ended with its passengers at the bottom of the sea.

Perhaps the advent of television was not such a bad thing.