A Somerset Lad

The chief memory from the geography that I learned at High Ham Primary School is the time when I turned the country around.

In those times when making photocopies was a rare phenomenon confined to large institutions where xerox machines could reproduce cloudy images, tracing paper was the way to transfer an image from one place to another.

The class was given the task of reproducing a map of Britain in their exercise books. This required placing a sheet of tracing paper on the relevant page of a school atlas and holding it firmly in place while following the outline with a pencil. Once the map had been traced, the paper was turned over and, using the side of the lead, we scribbled over the line we had drawn. We then placed the tracing the right way up on a page of the exercise book and drew along the lines we had drawn. The lines scribbled on the reverse allowed enough lead to be on the paper for the lines to appear on the blank page.

It was a very simple process, except when you scribbled on the same side as you had traced and then turned the paper over to draw the line from the reverse side – a process that led to Wales and Cornwall being to the east of the country and East Anglia and Kent facing westward.

Perhaps it was an omen that geography would not be a strong subject, for the only other fact that I can recall from those days is that our part of Somerset was in a “rain shadow”, the upland areas to the west and south-west of the county received a lot of relief rainfall, meaning that there were only thirty inches of rain each year in the heart of the county.

Going to school on Dartmoor, where the annual rainfall was sixty inches a year or more brought an appreciation of how relatively rain-free our area was.

Rain-shadowed, it might be; dry, it is not. The autumn storms each year bring rain that arrives sideways. Autumn and winter on the Levels might be mild compared with the seasons elsewhere, but they are marked by a pervasive dampness.

People who lived on the moors in times before there was the option of central heating and dehumidifiers would talk about there being a year round moisture in their walls, about the damp being in everything.

The pervasive nature of dampness would have been a useful lesson in geography.

The rugby match kicks off at five o’clock on Saturday afternoon and will be over by seven o’clock, which means there is plenty of time to get to the gig – if I have the courage to go.

It is a band from the 1970s where the fans will dress in a particular way, and that inspires fear.

In the 1970s, 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.

People dressed to dance for particular music was a prospect far more threatening than a fight between rival groups of football fans, or a gang of bikers gathered for a heavy metal gig.

I’m never quite sure, but the dance goers 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.

There are still radio programme presenters who have the capcity to reawake that sense of being intimidated.  They are the ones who speak with their own patter, their own language, their own vocabulary.  It was a language which would have excluded people like me in those far off years, they are 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 sort of places that scared me 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 venues they attended were often policed by bouncers at the door.

So why should the prospect of going to listen to dance music cause discomfort? Perhaps it is that most primeval of all fears, the fear of the unknown.

The first day of the month.

Do people in primary school in England still go up to friends, pinch them on the arm and then give them a punch on the arm, and not always a friendly one, while saying, “Pinch, punch, the first of the month, white rabbits and no return?”

Such was the custom in 1960s Somerset, a custom that no-one thought unreasonable. The “no return” meant one was honour bound not to retaliate.

Where did we learn such nonsense?

An Internet search offered one explanation that says that the “pinch, punch” bit was supposed to come from times when people believed in witches and thought a pinch of salt, followed by physical force, would repel them.

Another explanation offered says that George Washington would meet with Native Americans on the first day of the month and offer them fruit punch flavoured with salt.

To be honest, neither explanation sounds convincing and no-one seems certain about the saying’s origins. Perhaps it is an amalgam of sayings, each with a source that has long since been lost.

What seems odd, more than five decades on from those early school days, is that we uncritically accepted stuff that was patent nonsense. It is hard to imagine that children in 2022 would believe someone could reasonably walk up to them and pinch them and punch them and then remove any cause for complaint by saying “white rabbits and no return”.

Perhaps it is that children are far more educated about what is and what is not acceptable, perhaps it is because within seconds of someone saying something it might be verified or falsified by Google. Perhaps it is because children now are smarter than we were in the 1960s.

The idea that kids today might be smarter came from a conversation some years ago with a pair of sisters, who were then both in their late 80s and who both graduated from Trinity College, Dublin in the early 1940s:

“Did you catch the train to Harcourt Street?”

“No, I don’t think we ever used that line. We used to get the train to Westland Row. I hated the train, it was smelly and dirty and you got soot on your clothes. Not that we were as bright as the young people now”.

“But you’re both graduates”.

“Yes, but that was in old subjects, you just learned dry stuff. The young people now have to think much more”.

“The young people have to think much more?”  Maybe not, but they don’t believe rubbish like “pinch, punch, first of the month.”