A soft moor road

Posted on 18th September 2018 by Ian

Nythe Road is closed.

It must be forty-five years or more since the new bridges were built on Nythe Road was closed. It was officially closed for weeks at the time, but farmers could not be cut off from their fields and temporary wooden bridges were placed across the River Cary and the Eighteen Foot Rhyne. Of course, if a bridge would bear the weight of a tractor and trailer, it would easily bear the weight of a family car and the journey to Street or Glastonbury took little longer than it had done ordinarily.

The problem is again one of subsidence. The bridges remain serviceable, even if it is hazardous to cross them at much more than twenty miles per hour, but along one stretch of the road, the verge has slipped into the ditch beside it. But what else might one expect from a road in such a place? It crosses a peat moor and no matter how much money is spent on improvements, there will still be places where it will be liable to sink into the soft soil.

Nythe Road is a tiny microcosm of the perennial struggle with the natural world. No matter what is built, no matter how high, how strong, how expensive, nature will always take its toll. The capacity for things like bacteria and other micro-organisms to cause damage is extraordinary. The power of the elements to erode, to undermine, to bend and to break, is well-known.

One of the earliest natural phenomena encountered when working in a parish was what was described as “spawling.” Water would penetrate the surface of the porous sandstone with which the Strawberry Hill Gothic church had been built, then when there was a frost, the water would freeze, cracking the stone and causing flakes of it to fall away. Spawling was not such a problem elsewhere, instead there would be dry rot and wet rot, and woodworm, and weeds taking root on ledges and roofs, and rain coming in through slates displaced by storms. The struggle against the weather was relentless. Even sunshine could be a problem. Excess heat would soften the lead in which stained glass was mounted. The weight of the glass would then pull the lead downward, causing either or both to crack and bringing costly repair bills.

If humanity disappeared tomorrow, how many of our artefacts would endure? Unrepaired, would Nythe Road just disappear into the black soil beneath?

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Turning the pages

Posted on 16th September 2018 by Ian

Two weeks into the autumn term, and where would we have been? The memories of the summer holidays would have rapidly receded; when you are at primary school, a fortnight is an eternity, but what thoughts would have filled the days as the autumnal equinox approached?

School was a serious matter. Learning was a serious matter. Trained in the 1930s, our teacher treated the education of the twenty or so children in her class as a matter of the utmost gravity. The classroom was not a place for levity, and, unless you wanted a slap, it was not a place for failing to do exactly as instructed. Among the gravitas and the silence, there must have been a great deal of learning, or, at least, attempts at learning, though it is hard now to remember how most things were taught. On the third week in September, what things might have occupied the timetable?

Even the concept of a timetable seems absent from those times, undoubtedly the teacher had schemes of learning planned, but the sequence did not seem apparent. There were fixed times in the week for particular activity.  The final act on a Monday was to copy the week’s spellings from the Word Perfect textbook, they would be tested after break on Friday.

On Wednesdays, Mr Shield, who had been a member of an RAF bomber crew during the war, would come to teach us art. He had been a teacher in civilian life and enjoyed coming to schools to teach art in his retirement. His great passion was the pigeons he took to local shows and sometimes he would bring some of them to school in small, box-like cages so that we could sketch them.

On Fridays, the ageing clergyman would walk the short distance from the vicarage to our school, which was under the control of his parish. The parish was in the patronage of an Oxford University college and the rector, a kindly and gentle man, probably found it difficult to engage with a class of rustic children. He would read from the Prayer Book catechism and, if we had sat in silence, then read from CS Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. 

The classroom teaching was supplemented by BBC Schools programmes on television and radio, was there a television programme called Science Box? There was certainly a radio programme called Singing Together, it was the highlight of the week.

There must also have been other teaching, yet, apart from the class reciting the times tables, no memory remains of arithmetic. History classes linger in projects on the Sumerians and prominent Victorians. Learning cursive handwriting with ink pens was a lesson abandoned at secondary school, as soon as it was possible to do so. Apart from a comprehension exercise on The Water Babies, English lessons have been forgotten.

What pages might we have been turning on the third week of the autumn term?

 

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Nursery days

Posted on 14th September 2018 by Ian

Gardeners’ World never includes the sort of activity that occupied two of my summers, do you ever see Monty Don doing dull and repetitive activities? Activities like cutting literally thousands of iris rhizomes.

Cutting iris rhizomes was among the jobs summer casual workers were allowed to perform. The foreman would arrive with the quantity of each variety required to make up the orders received at shows and by post and we would be allowed to cut individual rhizomes from the clumps that grew in the long rows of the nursery fields. Occasionally, the orders would become confused and plants cut from different varieties might end up in the same sack. Without flowers, they looked identical and the foreman would turn puce and mutter expletives as he emptied the now useless plants onto the rubbish heap.

It seemed always a waste that plants that might have sold for up to a pound each – more than we were paid in an hour – should be so casually thrown away. The foreman had no objection to us taking plants from the rubbish heap and forty years later, unknown, unnamed varieties still grow in the gardens of my parents’ and grandparents’ houses.

The cut rhizomes were wrapped in peat and damp newspaper to keep them fresh and put in Jiffy bags to be posted to customers across the country. If the foreman was in a good mood, he might allow you the odd afternoon working in the packing shed rather than out in the fields, but such a privilege was not often extended to casual staff.

Despite our best efforts, sometimes plants would still be not what people ordered, or might not grow as they had expected, or might not grow at all. It seemed odd that people would expect anything horticultural to be so predictable, but if what grew in their garden did not match what appeared in the catalogue, some of them would become very irritable.

The worst customers were those who would arrive at the nursery with their complaint, intent upon imparting a piece of their mind to the nurseryman responsible for the fact that their purple irises were white, or their flag irises were dwarfs, or that the irises they had received had not grown at all. Their mistake was to assume they could outwit a wily old nurseryman.

Standing in the packing shed on a rare afternoon, the foreman spied through the dirty glass a woman crossing the yard from the office, a determined look on her face. “Here comes trouble,” he muttered.

The woman opened the door, “I want to speak to the foreman. I was told I would find him here.”

Without flinching, he said. “I’m terribly sorry, madam, he’s not available this afternoon. May I give him a message?”

If the summers of 1978 and 1979 taught me nothing about plants, they did teach that the way to deal with difficult people was to avoid them.

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Four and four and one make ten

Posted on 12th September 2018 by Ian

This was an unsuccessful entry into the annual Yeovil Literary Prize Short Story Competition.

The garden gate of the cottage opened directly onto a road where someone unaware of the hazards of country roads might legally drive at sixty miles an hour. Sitting among a cluster of farm buildings at the crest of a hill, and at a bend in the road, it would have been be easy to drive the road without even noticing the cottage was there. Driving at speed, there would not have been opportunity to take in details of the small low building set a dozen or so feet back from its roadside gateway.  Closer examination revealed that the cottage had about it an air of neglect. Grey, slate-roofed, it showed signs of needing a lot of maintenance, broken gutters, a cracked window, peeling paint.

The discovery that the cottage was occupied came by chance one summer’s day as he drove northward. In the gateway stood a woman whose age would have been hard to guess. The woman waved as if for him to stop and he thought there must be some emergency for her to be standing at the roadside. Drawing to a stop and lowering the nearside window of the car, he leant across to inquire if all was well.

The woman looked confused at the question. “I’m fine. Could I get a lift into the town?”

He rarely carried passengers and the passenger seat had disappeared beneath miscellaneous newspapers, sandwich wrappers and letters that should have received an answer. He gathered the accumulation together and threw it onto the back seat. As the woman stepped into the car, he was aware that traffic from behind was braking hard and swerving sharply to avoid him. It was not a safe place to be parked. “We are causing an obstruction here”, he said, “we had better move”.

The woman looked at him as if he were speaking in a foreign language. He felt compelled to try to explain to her what he had meant. “The gateway there is not really a safe place to stop; there’s no place to pull off the road and the traffic on this road sometimes goes very quickly”.

The woman seemed unimpressed by what he was saying. He felt that what he had told her had been received as an infringement of her property rights, as if the drivers of the passing cars should be told of her habit of waving down cars. “That’s my gate”, she asserted.

As he resumed the journey, he asked the woman, “Do you ever take the bus into town?” It seemed a silly question; no bus driver would risk stopping at such a spot.

The woman was dismissive of the idea, anyway. “The bus? The bus never goes at a time when I want to go to town. I stand at the gate until someone stops – as you did.”

No-one could argue with such logic. Anyone who saw someone standing in at the cottage gateway and waving would have assumed that the person was in need of help. They would have assumed, as he did, that some emergency had occurred, and would have stopped.

The woman sat in silence as the journey continued.

“Do you farm?” he asked her.

“I did, but I have the land let, now. I keep a few acres and a few cattle to have something to do”.

There was another silence. The woman was presumably used to many hours spent in her own company and was at ease with quietness. They approached the speed limit signs.

“Where do you want to go in the town?” he asked.

“Either of the supermarkets will do. Sure let me out just before them; I go into both of them – to see what they have”.

“Will you take the bus back?”

“It depends if the bus suits me”.

Presumably, the woman stood at the edge of the town with a hand raised in appeal to passing motorists; perhaps she was well-known to local drivers.

Perhaps a month passed before he saw the woman again. Seeing her standing at the gate as he approached the bend, he looked into the rear view mirror and, seeing a clear road, slowed to a halt outside the cottage and leant across and opened the passenger door. “Going to town?”

“I am”, she said and stepped into the car. “That was good timing, sometimes I have to wait a while”.

The following Saturday, as he walked down a street in the town, he saw the woman. The woman was carrying two shopping bags; her morning must have been busy. He wondered what might have caught her eye in the shops. Feeling that it was important that he should acknowledge the woman as they passed on the pavement, he asked, “How are you?”

“I’m well”, smiled the woman, and hurried on up the street with her shopping, showing no inclination to stop to join in any further conversation.

“Who were you talking to?” asked his companion as they continued their walk to a cafe. It seemed an odd question, wasn’t it obvious?

“She is a farmer to whom I have given a lift a couple of times. She lives in a cottage a couple of miles out. It’s easy to miss, it’s where there is a bend on a crest of the hill, you’ll have passed it.”

“Oh”.

No further comment passed between them, even the encounter slipped from the mind until it became a point to ponder.

A year or more must have passed until a bright May afternoon when he was driving toward the town. A familiar figure stood at the cottage gate. He braked and drew up where she stood. His car was much more untidy than usual and he gathered a pile of papers and put them on the back seat of the car, among the chaos that would spill onto the floor at a sharp bend or sudden stop.

“I haven’t seen you for a long time”, said the woman, as she opened the passenger door and got into the car.

“No”, he replied, “it must be at least a year. How are things on the farm?”

“Oh, they are fine. I have had some unpleasant callers. There was a man trying to sell me a knife for £5 . . . I had to tell him where to go . . . I won’t tell you what I said”. The woman seemed anxious at recalling the incident.

It seemed an odd story; perhaps the woman was a little muddled. Why would someone call trying to sell a knife for £5? Even if the knife had cost the salesman nothing, there would have been little income earned during in a day spent trying to sell such knives to women who chased you from their door. 

He felt that it was better to stick to safe and familiar stuff; stick to the farming and not ask further about something that had obviously caused the woman a good deal of upset. He looked across the farmland that lay on both sides of the road. The spring was past and there were routine questions that might be asked, without there being any risk of upset or offence.

“How did calving go?” He asked her.

“Oh, I don’t worry about calving, now. I’m past the age of being able to look after cows that are calving. I buy stock in and fatten it before selling in the autumn. I bought ten animals a couple of weeks ago”.

He thought about asking from where she had bought the cattle, but she might think it was an intrusive question. Certainly, she would think it intrusive if he asked if the cattle had come at a good price, not that he had any idea what a good price might be. When it came to money, the buying and selling of cattle was a delicate business.

“What stock do you keep?” he asked.

“Oh, I have four black and white ones, four black ones, and one speckled one.”

Four, four and one didn’t make ten; he refrained from doing the mental arithmetic aloud, lest she thought he was suggesting that she was not truthful. What was more surprising than the arithmetic was a farmer who seemed not to know the breed of her cattle. “Are the black ones Aberdeen Angus?”

“Oh, yes, I think so”, said the woman. “I don’t know what the others are”.

He didn’t venture further suggestions of what the breeds might be. Perhaps the white ones were Charolais, perhaps not. The speckled one, who knew? Did farmers really talk about cattle as “speckled”? Wasn’t it a word from children’s stories? Perhaps he should go to a cattle market sometime and find out what words were used. If the woman did not know the breeds of her cattle, how would she know if she was being offered a fair price for them? Even he knew that one breed of animal might command a considerably higher price than another. Perhaps the woman was not too worried, perhaps the cattle were just a hobby. He wouldn’t like to think she was not getting a fair deal, some dealers could be unscrupulous.

They approached the point in the town to which he had driven the woman on previous occasions. “Do you want to be dropped off near the supermarkets?”

“Yes, please”, the woman replied.

“Which one is it to be today?”

“Either will do, you could let me out up here on the left”.

The street was wide, the traffic was light, and it was easy to pull up without causing delay.

“Thank you very much,” said the woman and opened the door of the car and stepped out on to the pavement.

Going to the supermarket on the left-hand side of the street would have meant the woman just walking along the pavement to the shop doorway just a few paces further up the street. Going to the other supermarket on the other side of the street would have meant her crossing the road behind the car. Sitting in the car, there was no sign of the woman walking up the street to the supermarket on the left. Looking into the car mirror, there was no sign of her crossing the road to go to the supermarket on the right. Turning around and looking to the left and to the right, there was no sign of her anywhere. She seemed just to have disappeared.

He paused and pondered her absence, her disappearance into the warm May air. “Hmm”, he thought, “that would explain £5 knives and speckled cows”.

Doubting what he had not seen, in the months that followed he watched for her each time he passed the cottage. Once, he thought he saw her crossing the road that passed her gateway, a white bucket in her right hand, a collie dog at her heel, but there were no cattle of any colour in the field, neither nine nor ten. Vendors of £5 knives would find little custom. Not that he believed in ghosts.

 

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Red engines

Posted on 10th September 2018 by Ian

Heading southward on the M5 motorway, a fire engine was travelling north on the other carriageway. Traffic was streaming past it as it made its sedate way. A vintage engine from the 1950s or the 1960s, it must have demanded hundreds of hours of work. Presumably, it had been at a vintage fair over the weekend and was now homeward bound, or perhaps was making slow progress to an event yet to take place. Moving at, perhaps, a top speed of forty miles per hour, its journey times would always be lengthy.

Do fire engines still have a fascination for those who see them? Do they still have the capacity to beguile small boys, even when those boys have reached pensionable age?

One of my earliest memories, perhaps from the age of three, was being in a seaside town, in a van driven by my uncle, when suddenly all the traffic came to a sudden halt. There was the clanging of a bell as a red fire engine went flying down a street, in times when forty miles an hour was fast, it was probably not going so fast as I remember. There was a moment of both fascination and fear; fascination at the complexity of the machinery, the urgency with which it proceeded, and the priority it was accorded, and fear at what the firemen might have to face. There was smoke visible above a building some streets away, perhaps it was not even a serious fire.

From that age onward, fire engines have always attracted my attention. Wherever they might be going, whatever their task, the blue light and the bell, and then blue light and the siren, had a magnetic quality. Only in teenage years did an awareness grow that the fireman’s lot was not a happy one, that the emergency calls to house fires and to the scenes of motor accidents might bring encounters with horrific scenes.

Perhaps it was the very brief stories about my grandfather’s war service in London as a member of the National Fire Service that had planted a fascination; he had served through the Blitz, though never spoke of it. Perhaps there was an unfulfilled subconscious desire to  follow in his footsteps. Perhaps it was something much more basic, just a fascination with the unexpected and the unusual. 

It would have been good to have been able to ask the driver of this evening’s fire engine about how his interest arose, he’ll probably pass along the road again when the spring comes. He wouldn’t be hard to catch.

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