A Somerset Lad

It has been a day when, even at midday, it never seemed fully light. A thick, heavy blanket if greyness seemed to express the mood of the first ordinary day after the Christmas-New Year holidays.

By half past four, there was a deep gloom, there seemed no lingering light in the sky to the west. Driving out of Langport, there seemed to be something dark coming towards the town, its presence noticeable because it was silhouetted by the headlights of cars that drove slowly along behind it. The dark object was being driven by someone in a bright yellow high visibility jacket, someone who seemed content at the sedate speed at which they were travelling.

Drawing closer, the darkness was revealed to be a red Ferguson tractor of a vintage when lights were an optional extra. Were there still a police station in the town, one of the constables might have stopped the driver and remonstrated with him about there being no lights. In the present times, policemen are such a rare phenomenon that being apprehended for anything is unlikely.

Away from the town, there was still enough lightness in the clouds for it to have been possible to see ahead. Being seen by the driver of another vehicle would have been another matter, anyone moving at speed might have been unable to slow in time to avoid collision with the tractor.

Perhaps the driver of the red Ferguson is too young to remember times when officers of Bath and Somerset Constabulary kept a vigilant eye on all that took place in the district.

One bright summer’s day, perhaps it was at harvest time, one of the local policemen arrived at the farmyard about a grey Ferguson tractor that did much of the donkey work around the farm. It was parked at the back of the farm cottage and lacked things that PC Pearce or Sparkes, it is hard to remember which, considered essential. There were no lights and no number plates; if tax discs were a requirement, then the tractor probably lacked one of those, as well. The policeman’s visit had an immediate impact, a can of white paint was used to paint the tractor’s registration number on the offside rear mudguard.

Policing in the 1960s seemed different from what it is now. There were no fines issued, no prosecution arising from the shortcomings of the tractor: a visit and a warning were sufficient.

Had the driver of the red Ferguson encountered a policeman, it is hard to imagine that the treatment would have been as lenient.

It is easy to lose count of time. It is perhaps a month since my Dad was reluctantly taken into hospital, the gentle paramedic explaining that only in-patient treatment could provide what was needed. Had I been him, I would have shown a similar lack of enthusiasm to go in the ambulance car to Taunton. Hospitals, like public transport, fat free diets, and cycling to work, are alright for other people. The care he has received has been exemplary, those who complain about the National Health Service should try living in a country where everything comes with a bill. Restored to health, he hopes to be home for Christmas.

Setting off to visit him, the journey from the last house in the row of council houses where we moved in 1967 goes through single track lanes. Passing the village cemetery, a rider on a large white horse occupied the centre of the road.

Knowing less about horses than about the thorns and flora of the hedgerows, the one thing noticeable about the horse was its wide feet around which the hair grew long: was it a shire horse? I had no idea.

I slowed the car from the 20 mph at which I roll through the village, the speed to which I was used when I was a child, to the walking pace of the horse ahead of me. “Keep back from it,” I heard my Dad say, “wait until she finds somewhere to let you past.”

The horse moved very sedately until reaching a fork in the road. The left fork being a road to the rifle range, the rider moved the horse to the left and shortened the reins. “Wait until she has turned,” my Dad said, “you don’t want to frighten the horse.”

As I slowed almost to a stop, the rider turned and smiled and waved. I took the fork to the right, accelerating to the 20 mph appropriate for a road barely wide enough to carry the traffic that passes along it each day.

At the top of Turn Hill, there is a temptation stop the car and to get out and to absorb the view. The Levels have become a vast lakeland, roads becoming causeways between expanses of water. “If it’s like this in December, what will it be like when the winter really comes?” asked my Dad.

Descending Turn Hill, not only is the road narrow, it is also precipitously steep. Halfway down, a 180 degree bend has to be negotiated. Dad would ease an old Austin Cambridge down the hill, sounding its deep bass horn as a warning to anyone who might be coming up.  On a bright December morning, there didn’t seem a need for a car horn.

Returning from an evening visit to Musgrove Park Hospital, the landscape along the road from Othery to Aller was no more than dark shadow. Suddenly a flash of whiteness crossed the way ahead, an owl gliding over the Sedgemoor lowland in search of prey. “The call of the dead,” I would have been told when I was a child.

Such childhood memories can be frightening.  Growing up amid tales of superstitions is disturbing when those tales seem literally true and where there was neither discussion that might rationalize, nor faith that might expel, such fears.

Stories like that of white owls being the call of the dead induced a terror of something as ordinary as catching sight of a barn owl on autumn evenings.

Claims that there were ghosts, even in our council house built in 1926, prompted me to sleep with the blanket pulled up over my head, lest a ghost come into the room and find me.

Worst of all, wild rumours of UFOs prompted an avoidance of looking up into the night sky.

Chaim Potok’s “My Name is Asher Lev” captures in a paragraph the intensity of childhood feeling:

“He came to me that night out of the woods, my mythic ancestor, huge, mountainous, dressed in his dark caftan and fur-trimmed cap, pounding his way through the trees on his Russian master’s estate, the earth shaking, the mountains quiver­ing, thunder in his voice. I could not hear what he said. I woke in dread and lay very still, listening to the darkness. I needed to go to the bathroom but I was afraid to leave the bed. I moved down beneath the blanket and slept and then, as if my moment awake had been an intermission between acts of an authored. play, saw him again plowing toward me through giant cedars. I woke and went to the bathroom. I stood in the bathroom, shiver­ing. I did not want to go back to my bed. I stood listening to the night, then went through the hallway to the living room. It was dark and hushed and I could hear the sounds of night traffic through the window. I opened the slats of the Venetian blind and peered between them at the street below. It was a clear night. I could not see the moon, but a clear cold blue-white light lay like a ghostly sheen over the parkway and cast the shadows of buildings and trees across the sidewalks. I saw a man walking beneath the trees. He was a man of medium height with a dark beard, a dark coat, and an ordinary dark hat. I saw him walking in the shadows of the trees. Then I did not see him. Then I saw him again, walking slowly beneath the trees. Then he was gone again and I did not know if I was seeing him or not, if I had been asleep before and was awake now, or if I had been awake before and was dreaming now.   Then I saw him again, walking slowly, alone; then he entered, a shadow and was gone. I do not remember going back to bed. I only remember waking in the morning and staring up at the white ceiling of my room and feeling light and disembodied, as if I were floating on the shadows cast by dark trees beneath a moon.”

Asher Lev and the flight of an owl would be enough to send a boy into hiding under the bedclothes.