A Somerset Lad

When the house was quiet, the ticking of the clock was clearly audible. There would have been many quiet moments.

Television broadcasting hours were limited and there were only three channels to watch during those hours. The idea of a television being a constant background noise would have seemed odd. Why would anyone switch on a television if they were not going to sit down to watch a specific programme? The television page of the newspaper would have been scrutinised to decide if the set should be switched on, electricity was not for wasting.

There was a radiogram in the living room, with four wavebands. On the Long Wave, there was BBC Radio 2 at 1500 metres and on Medium Wave there was Radio 1 at 247 metres. Radio 3 and Radio 4 were somewhere on the Medium Wave, if anyone had chosen to listen to them, not something that happened frequently. In teenage years, Radio Luxembourg would be found at 208 metres; its programmes rising and fading according to the climatic conditions. Pressing the Short Wave button allowed you to find strange stations, some were foreign language and meant nothing; others, like Radio Moscow, had programmes in English that were full of strange names and ideas. There was an FM frequency, it was interesting sometimes because you could eavesdrop the conversations of the local police force: it was a lesson in how boring was the life of a country policeman.

In the majority of hours, when neither television nor radiogram were turned on, the house would be silent and there would just be the ticking of the clock. There were three clocks in the house; one was part of the electric cooker in the kitchen; one was a metal alarm clock that rang very loudly if not switched off before the time for which it was set; one was the clock that did the ticking.

The ticking clock had brass numerals and brass hands mounted on a round wooden face. The clock was mounted on a wooden base and sat in the middle of the mantlepiece above the fireplace in the living room. It was the authoritative clock, the clock that provided the right time for leaving  the house, the clock that declared whether or not you were late home from wherever you had been and whatever you had been doing.

At a time when there are constant reminders of the time on every electronic device and when noise accompanies every moment, the gentle ticking represents a world of tranquility.

The smell of a steam locomotive is a distinctive smell, it is the smell of burned coal, the smell of heavy engineering, the smell of a lost past. It is a smell that can be an expensive experience, now; travelling on heritage railways is not cheap.

Being someone who has no understanding of machinery, for whom the number of wheels on an engine and the type of rolling stock it pulls are arcane matters, there is nevertheless a fascination in following the course of long closed lines and imagining the activity of stations that have disappeared without trace.

There are moments when one stands and ponders the industry demanded in building such lines, the ambitious investments, the technical skills, the hard labour, the countless people for whom the railways brought work – and hope. Maybe hope was the most significant factor: expectations of wealth for investors, aspirations to become successful among entrepreneurs, access to markets for factories and farmers, jobs for those who were prepared to travel. The prospect of travel itself changed communities; shopping, excursions, even holidays.

Perhaps the railway relics in the landscape will be regarded by future generations in the way monastic and ecclesiastical ruins are regarded today, as artefacts of a society whose ways and customs were very different. Perhaps the archaeologists in centuries to come will excavate sites where stations once stood and ponder the lives of those who travelled from these places, perhaps children will stand in museums and watch hologram trains making sedate progress along cuttings and embankments.

Perhaps there is a deeper fascination in days following the course of redundant railways, perhaps it is about connecting with deep childhood memories. Perhaps the smell of a steam locomotive is about evoking memories of standing with my mother on the platform of Langport West station when not yet four years of age, waiting for a train to Taunton. Perhaps it is about sitting in my father’s car on the way home from my grandmother’s house in Yeovil and watching the level crossing gates of the station at Martock being opened to allow the passage of a train, and to discover decades later that the line closed in 1964. Perhaps it is about being at Weymouth with my uncle and aunt while I was very young and seeing a train travel the line through the streets of the town on its way to the station at the harbour where people would disembark to join a ferry for France.

Train smells are powerful.

It is forty years ago today, the first Thursday in May, that I first voted. In solidly Tory Somerset, I went to High Ham village hall with bright red stickers from the Labour candidate stuck to my motor bike helmet.

Sitting outside the village hall at five to seven this morning, there was still a sense of excitement. Polling day has always to brought excitement. No matter that there was little prospect of backing a winning candidate, there was something about the actual process of voting that was fascinating.

Polling stations have a church-like formality and order.

In the years I lived in Northern Ireland, a big, bored policeman would stand at the door: surely, sometimes there must have been some of them who almost wished that something would happen to relieve the monotony of watching a stream of good citizens come and go.

There might be party tellers, asking one’s electoral number so as to check that all of their party’s vote was got out. Usually they stood at the door, but in at least one Co Down polling station, they were sat at a table inside – two old friends one an Ulster Unionist and one an SDLP member sat at a school desk recording the numbers; had one gone to the toilet, the other would have recorded the numbers for him. Of course, there would be little chance of losing votes to each other, their battle was with the other parties on each side of the divide.

A presiding officer sat sternly watching the proceedings, ensuring all was done properly. A school teacher who performed this task in the school in which he worked was fond of polling day; he was paid for the day as a teacher and as an electoral official.

The clerks sat in pairs with their thick books of tear-off ballot papers and a ruler and pencil with which to cross off each name. A friend arrived at the table on one occasion to discover someone had taken the trouble to vote for him already. At least he was alive, in some places votes were cast on behalf of dead people.

Every time I have engaged in this odd ritual on which democracy rests, the same questions have arisen. Why are the polling booths made of clapboard? Why are votes cast with pencils? (There’s no rubber to erase mistakes). Why are the pencils often blue? And why are polling station signs so often printed in black upper case bold Arial font on a white background?

There was a school book in the 1970s that talked about Manny Shinwell defeating Ramsay MacDonald in the 1935 General Election in Britain – it illustrated its point with a photograph of a polling station, the sign then as it is now.

The doors of the polling station opened and I went in and chatted with the officials. It did not seem like forty years since I had first stood in that clapboard booth.