A Somerset Lad

A family wedding in Gloucestershire brought conversations with cousins not seen in years. “Ian, do you remember the man in the black horse when we went to Saint Ives?”

“The highwayman?” I asked.

“Yes, he was riding on the beach.”

“No.”

I remember the holiday, it had been long anticipated. Friday evening had been spent in anxious waiting for my uncle, aunt and their family with whom we would holiday. Leaving Gloucestershire on a summer weekend evening in those pre-motorway days; darkness had long fallen before they arrived. No matter that the hour was late, we were going to travel to Cornwall through the night hours to avoid the traffic Saturday would bring.

Not wishing to miss a single moment, I had endeavoured to stay awake by opening a quarter-light in the window of one of the rear doors. Of course, I had failed; being twelve years old and staying awake all night were not compatible. Two images remain from that journey: stopping at an all night filling station where petrol was obtained by inserting fifty pence pieces into a slot in the pump and my uncle driving straight on through a mini-roundabout, something that was then a novelty, and the trailer he was pulling leaving the ground as it  crossed the raised surface at speed.

By six o’clock in the morning we were at a campsite at Perranporth, but its cost sent us westward until reaching a campground outside the now fashionable resort of Saint Ives, a place where, forty-five years ago, it was possible to find somewhere to park. Days were spent on the beach and evenings were a time for walks and visiting the town. Pubs were strict about admission in the 1970s, and while parents might have gone into the Sheaf of Wheat Inn, those of us of younger years had to sit outside with our lemonade and crisps (years later, I would tell people I had drunk in the pub when I was young – it wasn’t a complete lie).

The odd thing is that the highwayman is a moment that is remembered by other members of both families. Not only do I not remember it, I don’t remember anyone talking about it.  If 50 pence petrol pumps remain in the consciousness, it is odd that something so unusual should altogether disappear. Perhaps I had not been in their company, though that seems unlikely, at twelve years old, I would hardly have gone somewhere by myself.

There are moments from the past when there seems to be a heightened awareness of things, moments when the layer of time between things long past and the present reality seems very thin; there are moments when you almost expect to see people as they were in the scenes that replay in the mind. Then there are other moments which strangely disappear. Perhaps the subconscious, in its editing out of images that might disturb, simply excised the highwayman. A pity, I always liked highwaymen and smugglers and the shadowy characters that filled the storybooks of childhood days.

The latest post from For the Fainthearted is here:

https://forthefainthearted.com/2018/10/27/sunday-thoughts-for-28th-october-2018/

There was an evening during my years in Dublin when a group from the parish went out for a meal before going to the theatre to see Brian Friel’s play, Philadelphia, Here I Come! One member of the group, a businessman who had grown up on his family’s farm in the west of Co Wicklow stood looking reflective after the play. Finally, he spoke, “he got it right, Ian, that’s the way things were.” The Dublin audience, who had laughed at some of the lines, had missed the deep pathos in some of what had been said.

The central character is Gar O’Donnell. He works for his father, the village shopkeeper in a community in the rural Donegal of the early 1960s. Gar aspires to marry the affluent, middle class Kate Doogan, daughter of a member of the Irish Senate. Kate is anxious that Gar will have an income sufficient to support them.

“You’ll have to see about getting more money.”

“Of course I’ll see about getting more money! Haven’t I told you I’m going to ask for a rise?”

“But will he -?”

“I’ll get it; don’t you worry; I’ll get it. Besides I have a – a-a source of income that he knows nothing about – that nobody knows nothing about – ­knows anything about.”

“Investments? Like Daddy?”

“Well … sort of … You know when I go round the country every Tuesday and Thursday in the lorry?”

“Yes?”

“Well, I buy eggs direct from the farms and sell them privately to McLaughlin’s Hotel for a handsome profit but he knows nothing about it”.

“And how much do you make?”

“It varies – depending on the time of year”.

“Roughly”.

“Oh, anything from us 12/6 to £1”.

“Every Tuesday and Thursday?”

“Every month”.

People at the theatre had laughed, but many people growing up in rural communities on both sides of the Irish Sea would have been familiar with the extra bit of income brought in by keeping chickens. Here in somerset, my Nan kept free range hens that laid big brown eggs, these were collected each day and carefully wiped clean before being placed into cardboard trays. Each tray held dozens of eggs – the filling of them demanded hours of caring for hens and collecting and cleaning eggs. Every so often the egg man would come and collect the eggs, presumably to sell to somewhere else in the manner of Gar O’Donnell.

Having earned money doing jobs like selling vegetables, painting chicken houses, pumping petrol, cutting plants and hoeing fields at various times during student years, there were plenty of moments when an extra pound in the pocket at the end of the week would have been something very welcome, and a pound in the days of Gar O’Donnell was worth a lot more than a pound in the 1970s.

Plans for a dual carriageway-sized tunnel at Stonehenge were submitted on Friday. The object is to remove the road from the proximity of the world heritage site. The A303 seems a route that gained prominence almost by chance, a line from the M3 to the West Country that sometimes seems almost a motorway, and that other times is no more than a single carriageway road through rural areas. It is perhaps the only road in England about which the BBC has made a documentary and passing through Somerset it assumes many characters, including featuring long and slow moving tailbacks on summer weekends.

There is an abiding childhood memory of the A303, a memory of sitting in my Dad’s car in a lay-by.  Waiting there, cars approached at speed, at at what seemed like speed in those years, and they passed by with a “whoosh.” Sometimes, a lorry passed and it caused the car to shake.  The A303 is now so much changed that it is impossible to determine exactly where the location of the lay-by might have been. What is unmistakeable is that the lay-by was the A303, because beside the road there were green signs pointing to Honiton and Exeter in one direction and to Andover and London in the other. In the times before the motorways, the road offered a route to London from the West Country that was relatively direct, that avoided the major towns. Somewhere on that journey we would have passed Stonehenge on our journey eastwards.

Since the pause in that lay-by, the A303 has been the route for many prosaic journeys, but for that moment more than fifty years ago, it had a poetic glow.  We were bound for London Airport (we always called Heathrow “London” Airport). The airport was a mythical place in the mind of a six year old boy and we were driving there to meet my aunt and her family who were returning from Canada for a visit.  Canada was so far away, and the air fares were so astronomically high that it felt as though we were going to meet someone returning from outer space.  Roadside lay-bys in those times were no more than a widening of the road, with an old oil drum serving as a litter bin, but as part of a journey that was important for a small boy, it the lay-by a memorable place. Somewhere along the A303, there is an unforgotten moment.