The internet means our town is a backwater no more

Posted on 12th March 2019 by Ian

“Oh, Langport, it’s a very nice place. It’s full of lovely shops.”

My colleague’s comment was perfectly accurate, my home town is a very nice place and it is full of lovely shops, but it was not always thus.

In the early-Twentieth Century, Langport was a bustling little market town. It had its own rural district council replete with its own council offices. It had two railway stations, its own newspaper, it own gas works, and a range of shops catering to every need. However, it went into a long-term decline. The newspaper closed before the Second World War; the railway stations disappeared with the Beeching cuts (in the case of Langport East, an entirely illogical decision that owed more to prejudice than reason). One by one, the shops disappeared. People had cars; people could drive to Yeovil or Taunton or Bridgwater; people took their custom elsewhere. In 1974, Langport Rural District Council, which served a population of 59,000 people, was abolished, its area being absorbed into a much bigger local authority based in Yeovil. In the 1970s, a new close of shops was built along with a new town car park, but there was nothing to suggest that this was not a town past its best. One writer commenting on Langport suggested it was a town that had succumbed to a “humdrum retirement”.

Today marks the thirtieth anniversary of the Internet as we know it, Google featuring a picture of a big, clunky PC monitor as its graphic for the day. If there was a single factor that has contributed to the transformation of my home town, it must surely be the possibilities created by going online. People can live in our deeply rural community and still be engaged with commerce in every corner of the world. People can have front offices in London, but still work from the tranquility of the Levels. Crafts people can produce fine work in local studios and market it globally. Shops can be in Bow Street or North Street, and have customers in streets very far away from the River Parrett. If there is a vicious circle as a community declines, closures contributing to further closures, then there is a virtuous circle as a place revives: money bringing more money, success creating more success, diverse and attractive shops attracting more diverse and attractive shops. If there is a common factor among the successful enterprises that now fill our town, it is their strong online presence – their websites and their use of social media.

Thirty years ago, it would have been unimaginable that our town would have revived in the way it has. It has been amazing what a mouse can do.

 

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Mr Gardiner

Posted on 9th March 2019 by Ian

The return of cold and wet days mean it that it would have been unlikely that he would have passed down the road. On those strange few days in February when the temperature touched twenty degrees, it would have almost have been possible to imagine that you had caught sight of him.

He will always remain associated with summer nights, walking down the road as darkness fell. This far south in England, the price of longer, lighter days in the winter is summer evenings when darkness falls much earlier than it does further north. It is fully dark by ten o’clock, even on the longest days, so his walks would never have been late. In memory, he is a silhouette against the dying light of the evening sky. Wearing his distinctive flat cap, the glow of a cigarette would have indicated his progress along our road to anyone who might have glanced out of their window.

A gentle, quiet, softly-spoken man, he and his family lived in one of the row of six council houses, of which ours was the last one before the open fields. Beyond our house, the road becomes much narrower as it goes towards the windmill. Soon after the windmill, there comes the very steep Stembridge hill. Like most of us, he would not have walked much further than the windmill before he would have decided to turn back. After working hard all day, walking down a hill with a 25% gradient, only to have to turn at the foot of the hill and walk back up it, would have seemed a foolish thing to do.

There was a contentment in watching he and his Jack Russell dog passing by, sometimes, it was as though time had stopped. It was as though that this single moment said that all was well with our little bit of the world. There was a feeling that if a man could go for a walk with his terrier in the shadows of a warm summer’s night, then, no matter what we saw on the television news, there was peace where we lived.

In his commitment to live in the present moment, to contentedly amble down our road each evening of summertime, there was a sense of tranquility. My Grandad, who would have sat on at the table after his evening meal, sipping his tea and staring out of the kitchen window into the middle distance, would have recognized such contentment. Perhaps it was a generational thing, perhaps after the times through which they had lived, quietness and peace were moments to be treasured. Perhaps it is something now lost.

 

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Frightening plimsolls

Posted on 7th March 2019 by Ian

After posting here about the teacher called Gorf  and the terror he struck in the hearts of pupils at his school, I was sent memories of how frightening had been the PE teachers at one local school.

The one thing certain to evoke those memories is a pair of black plimsoll shoes. There were people who had lace-up versions of such shoes, but for most of us the elasticated version was used for those activities which filled me with a sense of dread and foreboding. Black fabric and rubber soles, they provided little support for the feet of someone who always walked awkwardly.

Plimsolls were worn for physical activities, gymnastics, basketball, running; things that were approached with delight by some people, but not those of us who had no aptitude for anything that demanded speed or agility. The problem with plimsolls was that it was not even possible to drag out the time putting them on, to pull on each took no more than a couple of seconds, and then we were expected to gather around the teacher to listen with enthusiasm to the instructions that the teacher would give.

The capacity of a pair of canvas shoes to cause a feeling of unease, forty-odd years after such footwear was last worn, suggests that physical education really did instill a feeling of fear into the hearts of many of us.  The worst part of PE was rarely the game itself. There was nothing inherently wrong with basketball in the school gym, or athletics on the field, or our attempts at gymnastic manouvres, the pain came with the attitude of the teachers. Those of us not good at the prescribed activities were subject to belittling and sometimes even insults.

The worst treatment ever (albeit we were wearing football boots that day) came from a teacher who decided to try to teach first form boys the rudiments of rugby, despite the fact that we did not attend a rugby-playing school. One boy displayed a lack of skill in his attempt at kicking a rugby ball, something he had probably never done before in his life, when the teacher ran up from behind the boy and kicked him in the buttocks with such force that the boy was sent stumbling forward.

When those charged with caring for the health of the nation complain about the high incidence of obesity among middle aged Englishmen, they might ask themselves why there is an aversion to physical activity. If a pair of plimsolls can bring painful memories from the early-1970s for me, then how many more people had similar experiences?

 

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Gorf and teaching

Posted on 5th March 2019 by Ian

A wiry built man, bald-headed and heavily jowled, he was probably in his early-sixties. Perhaps he had seen service in the Second World War, he was of an age of many teachers who had been war veterans. Perhaps there were people with whom he would have had conversations about his younger days, if he did, they did not include anyone in our class. He tended to lean forward as he walked and he tended to glare rather than look. Perhaps his experience of life had made him wary of all whom he met. The one thing we knew with certainty, he had a ferocious temper when someone riled him and he was a man who was easily riled. Walking on eggshells would have been a heavy-footed way of going into one of his lessons, no-one wished to incur his wrath. It is hard now to remember exactly what he taught: there were  art classes, but in the back of the mind there seem also thoughts of him having, perhaps, taught PE and geography. Most PE teachers would have taught another subject, but PE and art seem an unlikely combination.

The one certain memory of the man was that he was known as “Gorf” by all the pupils. Of course, he had a proper name, we must have addressed him as Mister Whatever, but whatever his name was, I’ve long since forgotten. “Gorf,” was a simple reversal of the word “frog,” which throws no light upon how he came by his nickname. He wasn’t the slightest bit froglike. Frogs are benign creatures unlikely to scare anyone, Gorf specialised in terrifying pupils he deemed to have crossed some invisible and arbitrary line. He could suddenly explode in rage across the classroom at some pupil who might be unaware of what misdemeanour they were thought guilty.

Gorf would probably be hard-pressed to find employment in a school today. Codes of conduct and expectations of teachers are such that mercurial behaviour is not acceptable (I do not remember Gorf actually hitting anyone, his tongue was sufficiently terrifying). Gorf would probably not wish to find employment in a school today. In memory, he was a man of very fixed views who would not have taken to the idea of having to adjust to developments in his subject. It is hard to imagine he would have had much regard for the edicts of the Department for Education.

Yet Gorf came to mind today because watching a good teacher having to endure obnoxious and anti-social behaviour brought thoughts of what would have happened to those responsible in his classroom in those distant days.

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On a road with a windmill

Posted on 3rd March 2019 by Ian

The wind now battering our house has a name, according to the news, it is called Storm Freya. Had all the other storms that have battered the house over the years been given names, there would be few names left on the list.

“Do you remember the time the garage took off?” my mother asked.

I did. The wind had got under the doors of the asbestos-walled garage and the whole structure was lifting off the ground. No garage we ever had stayed empty long enough to accommodate a car, it would have been filled with all sorts of things for which there was no room in the house.

My father was working in Scotland at the time, “on detachment,” it was called. He was at Lossiemouth or Kinloss. one of those air stations on the Moray Firth where the wind came down from the Arctic to freeze the bones of those from deep in southern England.

“You’ll need to go for Mr Croot,” my mother had said. I had pedalled the few hundred yards to the old farmhouse where Mr Croot lived. A man of massive stature and massive strength, he was a man who knew what to do in every circumstance. He arrived with ropes and long metal stakes and a sledge hammer and secured the garage so firmly that the ropes and stakes remained its mainstay for a long time.

Living on a road that led to a windmill, we came to expect to expect that the wind would blow strongly sometimes. Gales like Storm Freya would come along from time to time. But gales would not have been of much use to a mill, what it needed was a persistent wind, a wind of a consistent strength, and it is the persistent wind that remains in my  memory much more than the occasional battering from a storm

Electric wires go down the road past our house and one of the lingering sounds of childhood is the mournful whine created by the wind as blew through the wires. It would usually be on days filled with dark clouds, or when moon and stars were obscured from sight, that the wind would begin its howl. On winter days, the air would be cold and few people would venture outside unless there was a reason to do so. Perhaps, if the mill had been operational, the whine of the wind would have announced the coming of people and traffic, as it is, it has remained the sound of a wintry days you wish would be quickly gone.

 

 

 

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