A Somerset Lad

It is not hard to believe the story of the man who knew only one sort of tree – it was called “tree.”  Having a list of trees that runs to oak, not-oak, silver birch and Christmas, it is not hard to imagine someone having as little knowledge as I have.

This is despite the best efforts of Miss Everitt, who took the primary school class for Nature every week, trying to teach not only the sorts of trees and flowers, but also their components – sepals and stamens and all that sort of stuff.  The list of recognizable flowers is longer than that of trees: daffodils, tulips, primroses, cowslips, things that might be bluebells, the red yokes in the corner, and lily things that give me hay fever on Easter morning.

It must have been hard to have got through an entire education in rural England without developing even a slight awareness of the countryside around.

An abiding memory of two summers working on a nursery, along with a friend, is being asked by the foreman to clear a bed close to the greenhouses in which he was working.  A grand job was done and an hour later there was not so much as the smallest of weeds left in the bed.  The foreman, on his return, turned a shade often described as puce and asked us in Anglo-Saxon English where his astilbes were.  We didn’t know what an astilbe looked like, so couldn’t answer his question.  A frantic search through the rubbish heap ensued, as he, along with us scrambled to find the unearthed plants before the manager came by on his morning rounds.

Not being any lazier than the next person when it came to studying at school, what happened that an entire component of education seemed to disappear? Historical stuff like the day of the death of Marie Antoinette and the youngest person in the Royal Navy to be awarded the Victoria Cross stuck in the brain (16th October 1793 and Jack Cornwell); English was not bad, except for the handwriting classes; arithmetic was manageable, even the long division; but ask what was the tree that grew in the hedge beside the school field, and there would be bewilderment.

Perhaps it was just dislike of the everyday familiar things – maybe stuff about trees and flowers had not much appeal in a rapidly changing England. Sometimes, an evening class on all the things one never learned would sound an attractive proposition.

As for the astilbes, they still look like weeds.

It was not so much a bicycle, more an amalgam of bicycles, a frame from one, wheels from another, parts gathered from various places. Its improvised nature meant it was not as valued as much one that had arrived shiny and new. Once it was stolen, its absence prompting a telephone call to a local police station, where a pleasant officer asked for its description and then revealed that it has been handed in to them a week before; the thief had thrown it over a hedge between High Ham and Somerton.

Shiny and new it might not have been, but robust it was. No-one in our small village had heard of mountain bikes, riding the sort of terrain more familiar to a trials motor cycle rider was something we did on whatever bike we had. In early teenage years, the bicycle had been a great machine for riding the rough terrain of our local beauty spot.

One summer’s evening, perhaps the rain had been heavy, for road racing was preferred to “scrambling” around the dips and rises of the picturesque hillside. The course was agreed: we would start at the village cemetery and ride a narrow lane that took us almost to our usual gathering place, but, where the lane met another that came from the centre of the village, we would turn sharp right and ride back and finish at the village green.

The amalgam bike might have been robust, but it lacked the gears of the other cycles and its capacity for acceleration was minimal. Someone called “start”and we moved off, speedier riders establishing an early lead. Even having reached full speed, the group remained a good twenty yards ahead. It was when the bend was reached that the moment of opportunity arrived, two bicycles touched and two other riders missed the turn as they swerved to avoid the tangle. Cutting down the inside, the four were passed and a long straight lay ahead. With the sharpness of the bend, momentum had been lost and only a zig-zag ride back to the village prevented the others from overtaking.

Howls of protest and accusations of cheating ensued; appeal was made to the case of a Formula 1 driver who had zig-zagged in order to stay at the front of a grand prix race. The evening ended in disagreement, being first to reach the village green did not mean being recognized as winner.

It seems hard to imagine that a group of thirteen year olds had raced the lanes of our vilage, without need of a fear that parents might be worrying, without concern that a vehicle might come around the corner, without a thought for all those things that now exercise the minds of those concerned with child protection.

We may not have had a fraction of the wealth of those today, but in terms of freedom, we were infinitely richer.

He was a small, dapper, white haired man. He would have been one of the guests at the primary school Christmas dinner, which he attended wearing dark shoes, flannel trousers, a V-necked pullover and a collar and tie. Half a century later, thinking about the occasion, the Christmas dinner guests seemed those who might otherwise have had no Christmas dinner. He was a solitary figure who came along by himself. He lived in a large, whitewashed stone farmhouse that I could see from my bedroom window. Being a very quiet and shy man, it is hard to  imagine what he might have thought about the cacophonous gathering of the forty children of our primary school, sat around the tables if our school dining room, enjoying our roast potatoes and turkey. Did he find a sixpence in his Christmas pudding as every pupil in the school would have done? Did he enjoy sitting with the two teachers and the other invited guests?

Among ourselves we would have called him by his forename, “Percy,” but to his face he would never have been anything other than “Mr Windsor.” Whatever age he might have been, to the pupils of the school he was a venerable institution of our village.

Passing his house on a bright October morning, I wondered what he would have thought of times when farming has become incidental to the life of our community, when places that still bear the name “farm” are no more than fine dwelling houses for those from elsewhere who can afford to buy them. What would he have made of the conversion of outbuildings to houses and the spelling of his name”Windsor” with a “z” and a “u”, instead of with an “s” and an “o”?

Undoubtedly, Percy would have spoken with the distinctive West Country burr with which we all spoke, (and which still lingers in these parts, Estuary English having stopped at the borders of Bristol, its halt being something to do with the West Country pronunciation of certain sounds).  Percy would have lived in a community where the letter “r” would have been long and the letter “s” may have sounded like a “z” to the ears of an outsider, but Percy was also of a generation where literacy and numeracy were greatly valued. To be able to write with legibility and correct punctuation, to be able to communicate on farm business with accuracy and clarity, to be able to keep the accounts with neatness and exactness, these were skills that were valued. Percy would not have thought that his name might have been differently spelt, particularly as it was one he shared with the royal family.