A Somerset Lad

Walking through the riverside park in Langport, a boat lies on the bank beside the backwater. Only in recent years have boats been seen again on the River Parrett, and the boat at the catchwater is undoubtedly more for decoration than navigation. In the pale sun of a midwinter day, it brought memories of the long hot summer and of the busyness of the ancient town. Perhaps it also spoke of former times in the town, of stories told in my childhood of a great grandfather who would take a horse-drawn barge down to Bridgwater and come back up river with goods from the town.

Taking a picture, it seemed appropriate to switch it to monochrome, to try to evoke times when the occasional flat-bottomed boat would have travelled up and down the unremarkable waters that cross the Levels on their way to the sea. Of course, the image was too sharp and the boat too well kept for the picture to appear as anything other than recent, but there was a strangeness in seeing the image in black and white. There was an evocation of moments from childhood that are remembered in colour, but appear only as monochrome images among family snaps.

The first colour photograph among my parents’ family albums is from 28th August 1972. There is no date written on the back, but the date is not hard to verify. We had visited a country park in Gloucestershire and the news on the car radio had announced the death of Prince William of Gloucester in an air crash.  News of the death had seemed to cast a cloud over the afternoon, as if it seemed improper to enjoy ourselves when such a tragedy had occurred.

Perhaps it was a matter of cost, but not only are the photographs that date from the years before 1972 in black and white, but they are mostly only a couple of inches square. Perhaps the Kodak camera used to take the pictures only used film that produced prints of a certain size; perhaps it would have been much more expensive to have larger prints; perhaps the definition would have been fuzzy if there had been an attempt to enlarge them.

Accustomed to using a digital camera or a smartphone, it is hard now to imagine how sparingly a camera might have been used in childhood years, holidays and special occasions were the only times that merited expenditure on film and printing. Random pictures of a boat on a river bank would probably have been thought frivolous, and would not have merited the expense of being printed in colour, or in black and white.

Moments surface in the consciousness before sinking out of view. Going to Denner’s department store in Yeovil; eating Dundee cake at teatime on Christmas Day; dipping a hand into a vast tin of Quality Street, hoping not to get soft centres. Little by way of continuous narrative, except for the growing anticipation and excitement at High Ham primary school.

Christmas in school would never start until the last week of term, but it was observed in grand style. There was a Christmas dinner, prepared in our little school kitchen, and there would always be special guests from the village invited to attend to attend the occasion. The criteria for being a “special” guest seemed unclear, in retrospect, they seemed to be elderly people from the village who lived alone: our teacher knew about inclusivity before the word was invented.

The dinner was always followed by Christmas pudding served with custard and cream, an enduring image of Christmas decades later. There was a custom of putting a sixpenny coin into the mixture of each Christmas pudding; whoever got the sixpence was supposed to have good luck. It was a mystery how there came to be a sixpence in each dish. Forty sixpences, for there was one for every child in the school, would have made a pound, a pound that probably came out of the teacher’s pocket, though she would never have said.

The closing days of term would have been spent on the manufacture of decorations and Christmas cards. The decorations generally involved sticking crepe paper around toilet roll tubes and cutting out a piece of paper to make it look like a flame and sticking it in the top of the tube. Making the cards, robins and candles and snowmen were much easier to draw than anything religious; though stars in the sky weren’t too hard.

And then the holiday came and the excitement of Christmas and the desire to hold onto it wasn’t about anything religious; it certainly wasn’t about peace and goodwill. It was a desire to hold on to the sense of anticipation. The reality of Christmas never matched the expectation, but there was something in the build up, something in the looking forward, that made it a time different from any other.

There is a line in “God rest ye merry, gentlemen” that goes “This holy tide of Christmas all others doth efface” and, without ever going near a church for anything other than the school nativity play, I felt could understand what it was trying to say. Five decades later, I still haven’t found the right words to say what it was expressing.

It was the humanities teachers’ Christmas dinner and the conversation turned to television. “I remember Channel 5 starting,” said one of the younger members of the department.

“I remember Channel 4 starting,” commented a teacher who was a smidgen older than the first.

I lent back in my chair and admitted that I remembered BBC 2 going on air.

“You are an historical artefact, sir,” said one of the history teachers.

To be honest, there was a terminological inexactitude in the statement. I think I remember people talking about BBC 2 being launched. I would have been between three and four years old at the time, but a new television station would have been the cause of much excitement in an age when television possessed compelling powers.

Our television was a 405 line VHF set, so even if I had been older, we could not have watched BBC 2, which was only broadcast on UHF with a 625 line picture. Consciously highbrow, the  programme schedule would not have had much to excite children of any age. I do, however, remember BBC 2 becoming the first station in Europe to begin broadcasting regularly in colour.

We still had a VHF set in July 1967, but if we went to Langport it was possible to stand outside Mounter’s electrical shop and watch BBC 2 through the shop window. There was no sound, but the novelty of colour pictures was enough to prompt a boy to stand on the narrow pavement and stare in through the plate glass window. The colour television sets were huge and heavy and cost £400, which might be as much as a working man would have earned in five or six months. There must have been people with money in our community, for the electrical shop would hardly have stocked the colour sets for the amusement of children who pressed their noses against the glass.

The thought of having become an historical artefact, even if it is an inaccurate description of a person, had a faintly reassuring feeling about it. When I watched BBC 2 in Langport as a boy, someone recalling memories from fifty years previously would have been recounting tales of Edwardian England. Tales from before the First World War would definitely have been regarded as historical, though the word “artefact” would not have been part of schoolboy vocabulary.  Yet someone who had inhabited a world the other side of two world wars would have seemed far more genuinely historical than someone who has simply lived through the history of BBC 2. Historical artefacts are not as plentiful as they once were.