A Somerset Lad

The August bank holiday, the last shout of summer. The M5 motorway is filled with traffic, people searching for a bit of happiness, a bit of fun. A prayer said to have come from the wall of an inn in Lancashire seems apt:

Give us, Lord, a bit o’ sun
a bit o’ work and a bit o’ fun;
give us all in th’ struggle and splutter
our daily bread and a bit o’ butter.

Give us health, our keep to make
an’ a bit to spare for poor folks sake;
give us sense, for we’re some of us duffers,
an’ a heart to feel for all that suffers.

Give us, too, a bit of a song,
an’ a tale, and a book to help us along,
an’ give us our share o’ sorrow’s lesson
that we may prove how grief’s a blessing.

Give us, Lord, a chance to be
our goodly best, brave, wise and free,
our goodly best for ourselves and others
till all men learn to live as brothers.

It is a picture of contentment with the ordinary things of life – a job and laughter and food on the table, and a few shillings in the pocket and the company of friends for songs and stories, and a book to read so as to be quiet at times – and maybe a trip out on a bank holiday. It’s not all ale and jokes: there’s a wish for an understanding of sorrow and a wish to be a brother to all whom one meets.

An idyll of rural England? It finds resonance in A Month in the Country, JL Carr’s brilliant evocation of the summer of 1920 in a small village community. Tom Birkin, an atheist through his experience of Hell on the Western Front, comes to the village for a summer’s work restoring a wall painting in the parish church. He falls into company with the chapel people of the north of England village, because they are the ones who show him warmth and generosity. One Saturday, he finds himself with them as they travel on horse dawn wagons for their Sunday School treat:

There was a throaty smell blowing off the bilberry shrubs and withering heather when we disembarked on a sheep-cropped plain high up in the hills. There was no shelter from the sun, but it was dinner-time and the women and girls unpacked hard-boiled eggs and soggy tomato sandwiches wrapped in greased paper and swaddled in napkins. It was Mr Dowthwaite (for you laboured for your prestige amongst the Wesleyans) who built a downbreeze fire of twigs and soon had tin kettles boiling. Then he struck up the Doxology and, when we’d sung it, we settled to some steady eating.

Afterwards, most of the men took off their jackets, exposing their braces and the tapes of their long woollen underpants and astonished their children by larking around like great lads. The courting couples sidled off, the women sat around and talked. So eating, drinking, dozing, making love, the day passed until evening came and the horses were led from their pasture. Then, as the first star rose and swallows turned and twisted above the bracken, our wagons rumbled down from above the White Horse and across the Vale towards home: the Sunday-school Treat was over.

The unalloyed pleasure captured by the prayer in the Lancashire pub and Carr’s Sunday school treat, aren’t they our bank holiday dream?

In the days before the Internet, the days of the very distant past before the establishment of local radio stations, to hear any reference to local places was rare. Of course, the local newspaper carried snippets from around the villages, but most of the time the names known to us remained known only to us. To go somewhere ten miles from home would be to enter a world where people might know few of the places with which you were familiar.

A name that seemed more familiar than many was that of the River Yeo. It was not until the M5 motorway was built, complete with signs advising drivers of the names of the rivers that the bridges crossed, that I realised that there was more than one River Yeo. It was not until an Internet search this week that I discovered there are no less than eleven River Yeos in south-west England, six of them are in Somerset. The Wikipedia entry lists the six:

River Yeo (South Somerset), which joins the River Parrett near Langport
Congresbury Yeo, which runs from Compton Martin to the Bristol Channel near Kingston Seymour
Cheddar Yeo, a tributary of the River Axe
Mark Yeo, a tributary of the River Axe
Lox Yeo River, a tributary of the River Axe
Land Yeo

Perhaps each of the versions of the Yeo would have been thought special by the people living in its area. Among them, the Cheddar Yeo flows through Wookey Hole caves while the South Somerset Yeo is an important feature of the Levels. The common name for the rivers allowed people from different places to think that others shared their opinion of their home place.

“Exceptionalism,” the idea that your own country has a special or, even, unique place in the world, has become a significant feature of contemporary international politics. It has long been important in the thinking of the United States, and the approach of Brexit has led to the emergence of a British form of exceptionalism. Undoubtedly, numerous other countries might as examples of exceptionalist thinking.

As the word “Yeo” might apply to any of a number of rivers, so “Home” might apply to any country. If there could be a mutual recognition and respect of the differing claims to be exceptional, the conflicting exceptionalisms would be no more troubling than the different notions of what was meant by the River Yeo.

If I had to choose my favourite line in an English novel, it would be the final sentence of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, where one of the characters declares, “This is England, you can do whatever you like.”

It seemed an odd line to recall, but it was a line that came to mind standing in a field at the edge of our village looking at a Chieftain tank. How likely is it that you would encounter such a vehicle at the edge of pasture land, electric-fenced to prevent the cattle from wandering? It seemed an extraordinary statement of liberty, to be able to buy a tank and park it behind a roadside hedge.

For such idiosyncratic hobbies and pastimes pass to pass unremarked requires  community where individuality is valued and cherished, it requires a place where you can be whatever you want to be.

Living in Northern Ireland in the early-1980s, the society seemed the antithesis of the liberty that was assumed in England. The Free Presbyterians and the Baptists and the other assorted dour Protestant sects presumed to dictate how the entire community should behave. In his poem Tate’s Avenue, Seamus Heaney wrote of  “locked-park Sunday Belfast.” In four words, Heaney captured a sense of the repression of a people by the life-denying religious zealots, people who presumed to tell everyone that they must live by the narrow Puritan rules by which they themselves lived. The owner of the tank, going to shows and fairs on Sundays would have not enjoyed the favour of the fundamentalist pastors and their flocks. Had Monica Ali been writing about Belfast in the 1980s rather than about Brixton twenty years later, “you can do whatever you like” would not have formed part of the dialogue.

The freedom celebrated in Brick Lane, like the freedom acquired in Northern Ireland through years of struggle, is a freedom that is only possible by consent, people are free if other people allow them to be free. Freedom is about being allowed to form our own opinions and make our choices, without duress. Individual freedom, no matter how oddly that freedom may be expressed, has been assumed as an essential element of English culture. There has been an assumption that new arrivals to the country will become part of the liberal culture where tolerance and individual freedom are cherished. Tensions that have arisen have owed much to the perception that other cultures do not allow the freedom that is expected. The simplest way for such tensions to be defused is for communities to demonstrate that individual liberty is as much part of their lives as it is part of the life of someone who drives a tank for a hobby.