A Somerset Lad

It’s probably here somewhere, tucked away among my Dad’s books and papers. It is a book called En Route. It was an out of date edition brought by my father from the air station at which he worked.  It was a handbook of airports and aerodromes and airfields and airstrips; a comprehensive directory of all the places where it might be possible to land an aircraft.  It had details of the lengths and directions of runways, of the landing surfaces, of what lights there were, of what radio facilities there were.  When you are an awkward teenager with limited social skills, the book was a treasure trove.  It was possible to imagine being a pilot in some part of the country having to make an emergency landing and taking out his faithful copy of En Route to decide where best to attempt to put the plane down.

It was not as though I had ever been in an aeroplane; I would be 23 before I ever flew anywhere, and that was a British Midland flight from Belfast to Heathrow, hardly the stuff of adventures.  The nearest I ever got to a cockpit was sitting in the front row of a KLM flight to Amsterdam in the days when the door could be left open and it was possible to see the crew at work. Yet, if I could find the copy of En Route, I would still leaf through its pages, searching for those old wartime stations where the wind still carries the sound of returning Lancasters and for those remote locations where Cold War V bombers waited silently for the orders to scramble.

The book is probably no longer published; most of the places are probably now under the tarmac of new roads or the gardens of new houses.  A decade ago, an acquaintance in Dublin told the story of his twin-engined plane losing an engine and he asking permission from air traffic control to make an emergency landing.  Diverted from the commercial airports, he was instructed to land at the airstrip of a flying club.  He did so – just.  The runway was too short and as he overran, his undercarriage collapsed and his propellers were mangled in the grass.  There was a temptation to say, “There used to be a book called En Route”, but what use was something in another country, thirty odd years ago?

Maybe it’s all on computer now, maybe as you fly along you can get details of where you can land nearby.  It would be nice to think so – nice to think the captain doesn’t have to say, “does anyone know where I put the book?  We’re in a spot of bother.”

It was Steve Wright’s, “Serious Jockin'” (that’s jocking without a “g”) on Radi0 2 this afternoon. At 4.15 each Friday, calling himself “DJ Silly Boi,” he plays forty-five minutes of disco and dance music from the past four decades. It is sometimes unsettling.

Forty years ago, there weren’t many things that inspired fear. Going to football matches, where full scale fights between rival groups of fans might involve dozens or hundreds of young men,  was never a worry. All you had to do was to stand to one side, watch the game and no-one took any notice of you: it was easy to be invisible. Attending rock concerts never prompted a moment’s hesitation, people went for music, not hassle. The only hostility would be towards police officers charged with the thankless task of searching likely suspects for cannabis.

The sort of music played by Steve Wright was far more threatening than a fight between rival groups of football fans, or a gang of bikers gathered for a gig, it was the sort of music favoured by people who dressed in a particular way, who went to particular discos (as they were known then) and who were into particular ways of dancing. I’m never quite sure, but they always seemed much more cosmopolitan, much more sophisticated. I always avoided such company and I would never have had the confidence to set foot in the clubs. I always had the wrong clothes, anyway. Far better to encounter a greaser looking like an extra from the cast of Easy Rider, with big boots and studded leathers, than to encounter one of the in-crowd.

Steve Wright knows that his listeners are an ageing generation and speaks a plain English. But there are other radio stations, where programme presenters arouse that sense of being intimidated; the ones who speak with their own patter, their own language, their own vocabulary, a language which would have excluded people like me in those far off years, those who play music that would have filled 1970s dance floors lit by glittering lights.

Such fear is entirely illogical, the people who went to the discos weren’t particularly cosmopolitan or sophisticated; they were just people who would have spent their money on clothes and looked forward to the weekends, dressing up and enjoying nights out.  They were not aggressive, they were not violent, they were hardly dressed for a fight, anyway, the slick venues the attended were policed by bouncers at the door.  So why should the disco music cause discomfort? Perhaps it is that most primeval of all fears, the fear of the unknown.

Mrs Dyer would be hard to match.

The A361 at Pedwell is a two lane road. Were it not for the 30 mph speed limit signs, turning out onto the road, from either of the side roads that join it, would be a hazardous undertaking. Oddly, immediately you turn off the main road to cross the moor, the speed limit ends. Legally, you could drive at 60 mph, though to do so would invite a damaged sump or broken suspension. It is a road across peat moorland with a series of dips and rises and a propensity to cave into the ditches that run alongside it.

However, between the River Cary and the bends at the bottom of the hill that rises to High Ham, there is a stretch of road that is straight and relatively flat. Perhaps the soil beneath it is different from the black peat, perhaps it was built with firmer foundations. It is here that Mrs Dyer would push down hard with her right foot and the needle of the speedometer of the brown minibus would hover around 60 mph.

To attempt such a speed in my Peugeot 207, with just a few inches of clearance between the surface of the road and the front bumper would probably be to invite irreparable damage to my car, which has 260,000 miles on the clock and which has to be nursed along.

Mrs Dyer would accelerate for the fun of it, because she knew that we enjoyed the sensation of hurtling along. Mrs Dyer was always fun, always smiling, always positive, always with a kindly word for those of us she drove to and from Strode College each day.

Somerset County Council always had an eye to saving money, and in the second of the two years I attended Strode, Mrs Dyer was expected to drive us to a pickup point where we would meet a larger bus, rather than drive us herself. Frequently, on the return journey, she would drive to the college herself to save us the extra journey time. There would have been no extra mileage payment for her, but it saved us about half an hour each evening. In retrospect, I have a sneaking suspicion Mrs Dyer would have driven us for no payment, that was the sort of person she was.

An abiding memory was of her handing out Christmas cards on the last day before term ended. I have put a £5 note in one of them she announced, as she handed out the cards. I was delighted to discover the money tucked inside my own card, supposedly handed out at random. I always suspected she knew I had no money.

Are there still Mrs Dyers out there, people who make the world happy by being happy? Or have we been engulfed by a universal mood of whinging and grumpiness?

There is a new toilet block being built at school, a state of the art place. It will never smell like the toilets at our primary school in High Ham smelt in the 1960s. They smelt of Jeyes Fluid.

Jeyes Fluid always evokes images of High Ham Church of England Voluntary Controlled Primary School with its two classrooms divided by a corridor leading to the cloakroom. Infants to the right, juniors to the left; was there knowledge worth learning that was unknown to our teachers?

The school had a definite set of smells to go with each season: the conkers from horse chestnut trees on the village green in September; the glue with which we stuck crepe paper to toilet roll tubes to make “candles” in the week before the Christmas holidays each December; the coke carried in scuttles from the bunker to feed the pot-bellied stoves in the cold days that marked winter fifty years ago; the school milk from third of a pint bottles that had been left near the stove to warm; the scents from the school playing field as the county council tractor and mower cut stripes across the football pitch when the spring days returned; the chlorine in the water of the swimming pool with its blue plastic sides which was put up at the beginning of each summer term; the perspiration from kids in the Langport area junior sports, held each summer at Huish Episcopi, kids anxious not to let down our little school in competition against places hugely bigger than our own.  But amongst all the smells, none compares with the Jeyes Fluid.

Jeyes Fluid brings memories of cleanliness and memories of discipline.  It went with the toilets and the cloakroom, where you were not to be without permission. It was the smell of the school after everyone had gone home at the end of the day and the cleaning began; it was the scent you caught when arriving for a new day.  If it is possible for smell to have moral value, then Jeyes Fluid was the smell of virtuosity; it was the smell of hard work and strict instructions.

Are associations between smell and memory different for every person, or are there certain links that are unbreakable? Is there a generation for whom Jeyes Fluid will always be the smell of education? Are there still primary schools where it would be possible to step back fifty years? No school toilets today could have such a power.