A Somerset Lad

It was late-September 1977 and our English A-Level class were an unprepossessing group of Sixth Form College students. Standing at the front of the room, Paul Selby, our tutor, must have felt it was going to be a challenging two years.

Being contrarian by nature, I remember thinking that the subject was one to be endured and lacked the substance or relevance of my other two A-level subjects, history and economics. Inclined to the hard Left in politics, I regarded the study of English Literature as bourgeois self-indulgence.

Paul Selby taught with passion and no more so than when he was teaching Shakespeare. Hamlet was our text for that autumn term and the teaching sought to engage us with the characters of Shakespeare’s tragedy.

‘Who cares about what was going on in Hamlet’s mind?’ I thought. I couldn’t understand why Paul Selby attempted to explore the psyche of someone who had never existed, what was the point?

I wasn’t interested in the affairs of the court at Elsinore. Were there a character with whom I identified, it was Fortinbras, the violent and hostile Norwegian monarch who sweeps away the renaissance values of the Danish court. Fortinbras was a man of action, Fortinbras would have made a revolutionary.

Paul Selby must have been annoyed at times with the lines of questioning I would pursue. Hamlet, for me, was a dithering narcissist.

Of course, I missed the point. I was trapped in a two-dimensional world more akin to the comic strips of the boys’ own comics than to any perspective that might have recognized the profound understanding of human nature that is expressed by Shakespeare in the play.

Perhaps Hamlet was annoying because it challenged those sat around the room to think about themselves. Perhaps it was annoying because it caused me to think.

Long after much else has been forgotten, those lessons linger in the memory. The gentle patience of Paul Selby with an obstreperous seventeen year old and the probing of the mind prompted by the lines of the play.

In a few lines in Snow Country, Sebastian Faulks identifies both the source of the discomfort caused by Hamlet and the reason for its endurance in the memory decades later.

‘And Shakespeare?’

‘He’s a case part isn’t he? My father had a theory that by having characters explain their thoughts and desires he made people aware for the first time in history that they all had minds of their own. Before that, they appeared to one another as two-dimensional. That woman was often angry. That man was often sad. He kept sheep, she made shoes. They gave each other names to signify these things.’

‘Are you saying he invented human nature?’

‘It’s what my father thought.’

‘So every play-goer standing in the mud thought himself a Hamlet?’

‘Once you’re awake to the possibility, it’s hard to forget. It’s a thought you can’t un-think. Like the moment the first man or woman achieved self-awareness. There was no going back, no return to what our ancestors might have been.’

Paul Selby didn’t just teach us English Literature, he introduced us to thoughts that could never be un-thought.

Apparently, Uncle Pat had begun his working life with the local gasworks and had then gained a job as a fitter with the Gas Board, converting homes to natural gas. It was a project that seemed to take a long time, for he moved to live in Ashburton in south Devon for some years to work in the conversion of homes there.

Uncle Pat’s work seemed always to be a ‘good thing’, the word ‘conversion’ suggested that there was a mission being undertaken.

The home farm was lit by gas in the 1940s. My mother recalls a moment from the early years of the Second World War. A younger sister had climbed over the side of the cot in which she had been placed to sleep and had fallen. Mercifully, the fall was onto an adjacent bed and she was unhurt, but the fall had shaken the house so much that the light from the delicate gas mantles had been extinguished and my grandmother had thought that a bomb had fallen nearby.

Restoring the light to the house had been a simple matter of relighting the mantles, but the people who lived in our community were pleased when electric lights were fitted in every house. It was more than about convenience. There was always a sense of fear about gas, a sense that something that brought life could also bring danger – and even death

The danger of gas produced in our local town, at the gasworks in Langport where Uncle Pat had begun his careeer, was well-known to anyone who lived in our area. There had been a mother and son living in a house on the village green in Long Sutton who had died following a gas leak. The most troubling thing about the incident had been that the family did not even have a gas supply to their house. The leak had been from a pipe that had passed by in the street outside.

To a boy who found the stories of gas leaks worrying, it seemed that the best option of all was to be in a house which had no gas supply of any sort. It certainly seemed best to live in a house which was near no gas main. When we moved to High Ham in 1967, a village three miles from the nearest gas main, there was a sense of relief. Uncle Pat would not have to come to protect us.