A Somerset Lad

Ninety Year 5 students came to visit the school today, with all the cheer and enthusiasm for life that only ten year olds can have.

They talked about all sorts, telling me about their school and their summer holidays. One told me about not only his summer holiday, but also his winter holiday in Austria. His chatter brought a memory of being with a ten year old in Austria, just after my fiftieth birthday, and telling the ten year old about when I was ten

The ten year old friend was feeling fed up.  “I’ll tell you a story from when I was ten.”  I had said, “that’s forty years ago.”

“When I was ten years old, a girl called Sarah, whom I thought to be the most beautiful in the world, was having a birthday party. This was to be a day of great excitement, for it was to be the best party ever.  On the day on which the invitations were handed out, I was absent from school with asthma. ‘Never mind’, I thought, ‘my invitation will be waiting for me’.  As the day drew close, I grew more worried. Our two teacher school had forty pupils. There were twenty in the classroom in which I sat, and everyone else had been invited. It wasn’t talk of the party that worried me, it was the point when all the others went to the party that I was dreading. Sarah lived in a stone cottage directly opposite the gate of our village school. It would be impossible for the others not to notice that I was the only person not going.”

“At 3.45 on the appointed day, our teacher let us go from the class. I was very sad as I walked out through the door and across the playground to the school gate. Everyone else merrily crossed the road to Sarah’s house. Very sad and lonely, I turned right and walked home – I was the loneliest ten year old in the entire world.”

“Then do you know what happened?  Thirty years later, a new family moved into the house next door to my church in Dublin and they came to church.”

“Where are you from?’ I asked the man.

“From England,” he said.

“Where in England?”

“Somerset,” he said.

“Somerset is my home county,” I explained to my ten year old friend, so I asked him, “where in Somerset?”

“High Ham,” he said.

“Where did you live in the village?”

“Opposite the school.”

“You’re Sarah’s little brother,” I said.  “He looked at me in amazement.”

The gondola had arrived at the lift station, and we had stepped out.

“Is that story true?” laughed my friend.

“It is.  And in forty years time, when you are fifty and I am dead, I want you to tell another ten year old that story and make them laugh as you did.”

“You won’t be dead in forty years time.”

“I think I will.”

We had smiled and walked on.

There were two teachers at High Ham primary school, ladies who had devoted their lives trying to impart knowledge to unpromising children in a rural backwater.  Miss Rabbage lived across the fields; the roof of her green Austin A35, parked in the road outside of her solitary house was just visible above the hedge.  Miss Everitt lived five miles away in Somerton, which was such a distance for a small child in those years  that it might have been a foreign country.

What did they do in their own time? What did they do during the short summer holidays?  When the middle of July was finally reached, did they leap with delight that their days would be their own?

Perhaps Miss Everitt went off for a two week Clarksons package to the Costa de Sol, drinking sangria each evening and returning with a sombrero and a big toy donkey – it doesn’t seem likely though; Miss Everitt would not have spent the whole year teaching us common sense only to spend the meagre teacher’s salary on the frivolous.  Miss Rabbage was much easier to monitor; the A35 a sure testimony to her presence in the village.

Only once in all the years did I ever set foot in Miss Rabbage’s garden.  My mother was anxious that my sister and I spend the afternoon at the school swimming pool, the worst imaginable fate for a ten year old who could not swim and who hated getting into the water, and who hated even more sitting and watching while others moved up and down the lengths with swift strokes.

“Miss Rabbage said that if we couldn’t swim we couldn’t go to the pool”, I asserted defiantly.

My mother looked at me, “Did she?”

“Yes”, I said.

“Right”, she said, “we’ll find out”.

My sister and I were marched to Miss Rabbage’s house.  Standing in fear and trembling as my mother knocked at the door, we heard footsteps coming down the hall.

Miss Rabbage answered cheerily, “Mrs Poulton, you’ve come just in time.  Would you pull up the zip at the back of this dress; I find I can’t reach it”.

Miss Rabbage turned her back while my mother pulled the zip on her summer dress to the top.  Turning and smiling she said, “How can I help you?”

“Ian says that you told them that if children couldn’t swim, they couldn’t go to the pool”.

“Oh no”, she replied, “he has misunderstood.  What I said was that if they weren’t swimming, they weren’t to come to the pool.  People were coming and using the school field with no intention of going in the pool; if children are coming it must be to use the pool”.

I knew perfectly well the difference between ‘couldn’t’ and ‘weren’t’ and what had been the original intention of what was said; my first attempt at spinning words had ended in miserable failure.

The memory of standing in her garden that afternoon remains chiefly, not because of the unsuccessful attempt at avoiding the school pool, but because it was the moment when I first realized that teachers were also people.  To glimpse beyond the outer appearance to the person beyond, in an age when baiting teachers was fair sport in many schools, was an important lesson for a Somerset summer’s day