A Somerset Lad

A friend suggested writing a memoir. ‘What of?’ I asked.

More important than memoirs are memories. Memoirs might, or might not, interest someone else (mine would fall into the latter category). Memories, on the other hand, can be deeply important to the person recalling them.

The Internet is a boon for the business of memories, it allows cross-schecking. It allows the possibility of verification of what year something may have happened, and sometimes more precise dating.

So an online search was able to tell me that the time I recall stopping to allow a train to pass at level crossing gates in Martock must have been when I was three or four years old.  The station closed to passengers in June 1964 and to goods the following month, although, before its complete closure, the line was used for training in the winter of 1964-65.

From a similar time comes a memory of a moment standing on an empty platform with my mother at Langport West station, which was on the line from Yeovil to taunton that passed through Martock.  It has to date from before 13th June 1964, because that was the Saturday on which the last passenger train departed from the station. My mother tells me that we were going to Taunton to visit my father who was in hospital. The oldest I could have been, in that clearly recalled scene, was three years and eight months old.

Why do steam trains loom so large in those early memories? Perhaps to a small boy, they had often seemed to be fearful machines, prone to making loud noise, or sudden bursts of steam.

From that steam train era comes a recollection of a day trip to Weymouth. There was a  train that went along the line that went through the streets on its way to the harbour, from where ferries left for France and the Channel Islands, and there was a fire engine, its bell ringing loudly, which passed us on its way to a call in the town.

My mother’s recollections go back to when she was even younger.

Asking my late grandfather about them seeing an airship, my grandfather had responded, ‘How do you remember that, Ruby, you were only two? I had taken you out to Aller with me on the bicycle. On the way back, we were at Whitehill when it went over. I stopped and we stood and watched it for a long time.’

It was a story that was often questioned. Was it imagined? Was it a retrojection of a later moment? One local telling of it by a man in our village had embellished the story to the point where it was said that Adolf Hitler had flown over.

It was the possibility of an online search that had offered the possibility of verifying the memory. The British airship experience had ended in the early 1930s, the famous German airship the Hindenburg had ended in flames in 1937. How then could there possibly have been an airship over Somerset in 1939?

A search of the web confirmed that a German  Zeppelin had flown over Yeovil before the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. Reconnaissance pictures it had taken included photographs of the Westland aircraft factory.

Such memories have a deeper fascination than mere memoirs.

My nephews return to school next week. The all too short English summer holidays are drawing to a close.

Having attempted on various occasions to borrow from them things like a rubber or a pencil sharpener, I realise that teenage boys have not changed. The only difference is the selection of equipment that might be lost or put to other uses seems to have multiplied.

Supermarkets have had an abundant array of pens and pencils, assorted accessories, sophisticated calculators, highlighter pens and erasers. When did buying things for school  become a matter of deciding between so many and varied options?  One could spend the best part of a good deal of money and still go away feeling there was more that could have been bought.

One thing always brings a giggle – a Helix Oxford Folding Ruler.

There was a plentiful supply of folding rulers in schooldays, their chief drawback was that they did not fold back.

Plastic rulers were appearing, but the standard classroom ruler was wooden. On one side, there were twelve inches marked in whole and quarter-inches, on the reverse, thirty centimetres marked in centimetres and millimetres.

Rulers were not much used for mathematical purposes: they were for drawing lines, if such were necessary. They were for flicking screwed- up balls of paper across the classroom. Or they were for or enacting battle scenes from Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers.

The soft wood from which they were manufactured allowed one to easily engrave them with the point of a pair of compasses, or to write the names of miscellaneous football clubs, pop groups, or girlfriends, in different coloured ink.

It was a rare ruler that resembled the condition in which it was purchased. The folding of one’s own ruler could be a mark of frustration; the folding of someone else’s ruler was generally a mark of annoyance. Having a ruler reduced to half of its former size was rarely a problem; lines in exercise books could still be drawn with what remained.

The shop shelf space required to supply an average schoolboy of the 1970s with the necessary equipment for his education would have been fairly limited. Along with the ruler there would have been a Platignum cartridge pen, the nib of which would have been bent and much of the contents of the cartridges would have appeared as blots on the page. Pencils would have been chewed and sharpened to stubs. A tin of mathematical instruments would have included a pair of compasses, a set square and a protractor. If the ruler was in too bad a state for drawing lines, the set square would suffice, and, in its absence, the straight edge of the protractor might have been used. Erasers were invariably in short supply, probably because they had been employed as missiles in classroom battles while the teacher was writing on the board. Of course, there were the options of having felt tip pens and coloured pencils, but colour and beauty were considered too ‘feminine’ to be the product of a boy’s pencil case.

Judging from my own classrooms, things have not changed.