A Somerset Lad

Having tea with my uncle on a Thursday evening, we recalled how Thursday was my grandmother’s shopping day. Each day through the week she would add items to her shopping list and on Thursday mornings she would phone the small Co-op store in Long Sutton. It had never occurred to me how she had shopped for things not stocked at the Co-op. “Do you remember the Great Universal Stores catalogue?” asked my uncle, I did when he reminded me. It was a huge catalogue from which you could order almost anything.

Many people of a certain age will remember mail order catalogues. Enterprising individuals would keep the catalogues, take the orders and collect the money; their reward would have been a small commission. The fact that their dealings would normally have been with family, friends and neighbours presumably ensured that defaults on payments were not common, but there must have been serious strains on friendships when payments fell into arrears.

The catalogues rarely had anything that might not have been bought in stores in a good-sized town and their prices probably were probably higher than the prices that might have been paid in the high street, the difference was that they allowed payments over months, twenty weeks, or forty weeks, or more. In a high street store the only items that did not require an immediate payment were the sort of thing that you bought on hire purchase, televisions, washing machines and the like, and hire purchase came with interest payments.

Hire purchase came with the threat of repossession if you did not keep up the payment of the instalments so, naturally, you could not have bought clothes, or many of the other things in the catalogues, on HP. The catalogues were successors to the door-to-door salesmen with their suitcases of clothes and household goods for which the repayments were collected week by week.

If you analysed the customers of the travelling salesmen and compared them with those who bought large items and paid instalments on hire purchase, or those who chose things from the mail order catalogues, the common thread was that even when goods were advertised at 0% interest, purchasers often paid dearly through significantly higher prices. The choice of paying for things over many weeks or months came at a high premium.

Perhaps it was just a matter of convenience that my grandmother used the GUS catalogue over decades, it is hard to imagine how much it cost her all through those years.

Technology is a boon, when you remember your user ID and password. Not being able to get to the surgery in Langport during opening hours to ask for a repeat prescription, I log into a website called Patient Access to order the tablets required after years of eating too many cakes and not enough vegetables. The medication is in very low doses, but I feel that to forget to take it would be to betray the trust of the doctor. The website not only allows me to renew my prescription, it shows me details of any appointments I might have and carries brief medical records. It is hard now to imagine that the National Health Service could function without such technology to assist in its daily administration.

Yet, exist it did, and not only existed, but thrived. People like Dr Ingram seemed to have an extraordinary capacity for caring for large numbers of patients. Dr Ingram had been our family doctor for decades and when my asthma was especially severe he would arrive at our house with his wisdom and his old leather bag. Once he even appeared unexpectedly, peering in through the window to announce his arrival; he had just been passing. Dr Ingram would have time to talk about all sorts, even on horse racing on the television.

Going to the surgery meant a journey to Langport, which is three miles from our village. Once a week, though, a doctor would come to hold a surgery in our village. Lacking a suitable venue, the front parlour of the village pub was used as the consulting room for two hours each Wednesday afternoon.

How did people like Dr Ingram have so much time? Why were we so unhurried? Was the medical practice very small?  The National Health Service was but a quarter of a century old, perhaps the demands upon it were less severe. Perhaps people still remembered the days of the bills.

From a medical system filled with a certain rustic charm, we have reached a situation where it is impossible to imagine how a modern Dr Ingram would find a place in the health service. Perhaps we are less healthy than we were, perhaps medical care has become increasingly sophisticated, perhaps bureaucracy has expanded.

It is impossible to imagine what Dr Ingram would have made of the Internet. Perhaps he would have rightly judged that it was no substitute for personal care. Perhaps he would have taken out a cigarette to stand and take time to think about what has happened to the service he served so faithfully.

Bags of doughnuts would come from Alan’s baker’s van. Once a pale blue van from the Co-operative Retail Society, it had become a grey one when when he had begun to work for himself. Alan had a surname, but it was a word that had involved the letter “z” not being sounded as what I thought the letter “z” should sound like, so it was easier just to call him “Alan.” (Names not sounding as they should was always a confusing phenomenon, a school headmaster called Jack Dalziel had a name that sounded nothing like what was written on paper – in school he was simply called “Jack,” probably more because few people knew how to say what sounded like Dee-Ell, than as a nickname).

Anyway, Alan would call with fresh bread three times a week. Uncut, crusty loaves that still bore the scent of their baking. Times being what they were, treats were not always plentiful, but occasionally we would be allowed a bag of doughnuts. They were bought in precise numbers; never more than one doughnut per person.

The eating of doughnuts was a serious affair, to be undertaken at the red formica-topped kitchen table with plates to catch the crumbs. Doughnuts were not something to be rushed; each mouthful was eaten with relish. The sugar that inevitably gathered around the mouth of a small child would be gathered with a lick of the lips. Care would be taken to eat the doughnut in a particular way, trying to keep the jam until the final bites. A misjudged bite might result in jam being lost, it landing on the plate, or worse, on the kitchen table.

A bag of Tesco doughnuts lay on the kitchen worktop when I came home from work this evening. At £1 for four, they must be a fraction of the cost in real terms that they had been in the 1960s. People would think nothing now of spending £1 on a bar of chocolate or a fizzy drink. Taking a doughnut from the bag and eating it whilst waiting for the kettle to boil, there was a moment’s memory of being a few feet from where I stood, sat at the kitchen table with a doughnut from Alan’s van.

It seems odd, in retrospect, that something as mundane as a doughnut could have brought such a sense of delight, its taste and texture lingering in the mouth fifty years after it was eaten.

There is a joy in hearing children’s voices emerging from the greyness of an autumn evening. Every last minute of daylight is spent in the company of friends. Roller skates and bicycles are used on the road with a casual disregard for the fact that cars occasionally come and go. Drivers are expected to give way to the younger road users. The exceedingly mild temperatures for mid-October mean that t-shirts are still the normal wear; the days of warm clothing and waterproof coats are still to come.

There is a reassurance in the presence of the voices. Children still choose outdoor life when it is possible, still prefer their bikes and their skates to sitting in front of a screen, holding a console, engaged in pointless electronic battles with non-existent enemies. Nothing can beat real games with real people.

In a moment when past and present roll into one, there is a memory of such an evening fifty years ago.

The summer of 1968 had brought delight – a blue RSW 14 bicycle. Having reached the age of seven the previous October, I had been able to sign the withdrawal slip needed to take money out of my Post Office savings account toward the cost of the purchase. The bike had been used for countless hours over the course of the summer, but the shortening days had meant the opportunities to ride up and down Windmill Road at frantic speed were becoming limited.

Having an October birthday did mean there was a monent to which to look forward in a long autumn season that would drag its way to the Christmas holidays that seemed a lifetime away. My eighth birthday that year brought the promise of being able to ignore the dark evenings – I had lights fitted to my bike for my birthday. Lights meant being able to head out into the darkness and join others cycling the roads around the village.

In retrospect, it seems extraordinary that an eight year old boy and his contemporaries were allowed to head out on their bicycles on dark evenings. Fifty years later, there are still no street lights in the village; in 1968, there were far fewer houses and those there were did not have the numerous bright electric lights that are now the norm of modern homes. Dark evenings meant a real darkness, but with dynamo powered lights on your bike, darkness was no problem.

Darkness now brings the disappearance of the voices – the times have changed.