A Somerset Lad

It is odd that it was 2016, six years gone in a blink.We had come to Somerset on an early morning flight to mark my father’s eightieth birthday.

There was a meal at my sister’s house in Ilminster. The table was laden with food sufficient to feed twice the number for a week.

The evening passed and the clock struck nine. My father’s car was covered in ice, the temperature had dropped sharply in the clear night air. The passing years meant it is was I who would be driving. In a teetotal house there was no fear of being over a limit; the absence of alcohol was not even noticed, so different is the culture. (Perhaps in some future time the caffeine in the numerous mugs of tea we drank will be determined to have had some detrimental effect).

The road from Ilminster to High Ham was familiar, even in the darkness of a December night. The village of Westport seemed sleepily quiet. It was intriguing to discover in Bradshaw’s canal guide that a waterway had once carried laden barges from here down to the River Parrett, from where the produce went to Bridgwater and then the sea.

Hambridge has many family memories. The village hall was the venue for receptions and parties, caterers providing whatever fare might be required. Ireland seemed a strange place, having wedding receptions at hotels.

The main road was reached at Curry Rivel. The fleet of red and white school buses that emanated from the village would bring hundreds of children from the district to the secondary school at Huish Episcopi. The drivers were familiar faces to successive generations of pupils. Of course, they had surnames but to those boarding the buses each day, they were always “Mike,” or “Fred,” or whatever.

Langport was our home town. Its single medieval main street would have once provided shops selling everything one could desire. Langport once had its own bank and in Walter Bagehot, author of The English Constitution, it produced a writer who made a lasting contribution to political life.

At the top of the street, a ninety degree bend once passed a television shop. A clear memory from childhood is the first colour televisions appearing in the shop in the late 1960s; vast, bulky boxes the price of which far exceeded the pocket of a working man.

Passing the former premises of Kelway Nurseries always brings memories of two summers spent working in the fields there. Heading toward Somerton, we branched left to join the road that leads to High Ham and to home.

All was changed, and yet nothing had changed. Looking up into the night sky, there is Orion and The Plough – definitely unchanged.

Postman Pat was a favourite in our house in the early 90s.  We would sit and read stories and watch videos of life in Greendale and when driving through Cumbria would tell imagined stories of the Greendale community living their lives in the villages and lanes passed by the M6 motorway.

Postman Pat had the power to evoke memories of my childhood days in Somerset. Tthe characters were not so different from  those in any English village and the way of life and the daily concerns corresponded with those of countless communities across the country.  Perhaps the success of Postman Pat rested  on the fact that children could identify with the stories.

There was one story that always had a melancholic touch to it.

It was read to a boy a month short of his third birthday in France in September 1993 and told of Postman Pat helping with the harvest while the children played in the field.  It seemed odd that children in story books could play in mown wheat fields without their shins being scratched by the stubble.  Stubble in Somerset required shins to be washed in hot soapy water with a generous dash of Dettol thrown into it.

It wasn’t the stubble that was melancholic, though, it was Postman Pat’s loss of his cap.  Helping with the harvest, he inadvertently leaves his cap down, and it disappears.  Months later, when a bale of straw is cut open in deep midwinter, the cap reappears, it had gone through the baler.

Reading the story on a September day, when even France was turning towards autumn, there was a realization that the harvest was past and that the dark days approached.

There are times deep in December when Postman Pat’s summer days seem like a dreamtime, another age in a different world.

The finding of Postman Pat’s cap in the story was intended as a funny epilogue to amuse attentive young ears, something at which it was very successful.

Reading it those twenty-nine years ago, it seemed symbolic of the dying of the year, the passing of the happy times.  (Retrojection adds to the way in which memories are perceived: the months that followed were particularly unhappy and the thoughts evoked by the story became remembered as a prologue of the times that followed).

The cap should have served as a reminder that there are seasons other than winter, and that days in corn fields were as much part of life as snow and ice – but, being a melancholic, I overlooked the light and warmth.

It was on this day in 1944 that the aircraft carrying the American bandleader Glenn Miller. It would have been three days before my late father’s eighth birthday, yet decades later he would talk about the music of Glenn Miller.

Perhaps the music infused popular wartime culture to the extent that a primary schoolboy remembered it, perhaps there was also a subliminal factor at work.

My father often recalled a poem he had learned in childhood days. It had a sinister, threatening tone, and it had haunted him as a boy. For as long as I could remember, he  expressed the wish that it had not been taught to him.

The poem Antigonish was written by William Hughes Mearns, an American writer, in 1899 and subsequently re-published with various revisions:

As I was going up the stair
I met a man who wasn’t there!
He wasn’t there again today,
Oh how I wish he’d go away!”

When I came home last night at three,
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall,
I couldn’t see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don’t you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don’t slam the door…

Last night I saw upon the stair,
A little man who wasn’t there,
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away

The likelihood of a wartime London schoolboy encountering the work of a poem written for Harvard seemed slim, books were in short supply and American poetry books in London would have been a rarity.

I discovered that the explanation of his remembering the lines probably lay in it having been recorded by the Glenn Miller Orchestra in 1939, with Tex Beneke singing the lyrics.

In a world where death and destruction were daily realities, haunting songs might have made a deep impression upon a young boy.

Perhaps the fear felt at “The little man who wasn’t there” was an encapsulation of the fear of the dark and sinister world that existed beyond the front door of the boy’s home in Chiswick in west London. It was a house where his grandfather had died from injuries received when the local dairy had been bombed in February 1944. Perhaps it was an expression of the fear that must have filled the boy’s mind when his fireman father returned from firefighting duties and told the adult members of the family of the duties of the grim duties of the previous night. Rather than being a comfort to the boy, perhaps the music of the Glenn Miller Orchestra had added to the fears.