Encountering Bombadil

Posted on 22nd August 2022 by Ian

Miss Tucker was recalled in conversation with an old school friend yesterday. I used to hold Miss Tucker indirectly responsible for the loss of my first copy of The Lord of the Rings.

It was at Christmas 1974 that I was given a copy of The Lord of the Rings, my aunt sent it from Canada to be given me as a Christmas present.

A thick paperback, it caught the eye of Miss Tucker, one of the teachers at our school as I sat reading it one evening in January 1975.

“You need to get that book bound, otherwise the pages will fall out.”

Miss Tucker was was not someone with whom one argued, book binding was one of the after school activities that took place in her classroom. Apart from removing the cover, the binding did not proceed very far, the book lay in the storeroom of her classroom for two years. Its absence did not cause undue upset, I had not understood the pages I had read.

When the storeroom was engulfed in a fire in January 1977, there was simply the thought that Miss Tucker’s book binding meant that I would never now read The Lord of the Rings. 

Twenty years would pass before the story made a reappearance, I took our son, then six years old to see a puppet performance of the story at Belfast’s Grand Opera House. The story was not much better comprehended by a thirty-six year old than it had been by his fourteen year old predecessor.

Four years later, the six year old had become a ten year old and the story had become one of his passions, it became an important part of the marking of each Christmas to go to the cinema and to see each of the trilogy of films as they were released.

During the summer holiday of 2002, twenty-eight years after being sent my first copy, I borrowed our son’s copy and read it for myself. The story seemed straightforward, the asides and the details remained baffling, I vowed to re-read it when the opportunity presented itself.

Seven years later, preparing for a trip to Africa, I decided that the journey would allow for a re-reading of Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong and of The Lord of the Rings. Birdsong was left on the airliner that transported us from London to Nairobi. Our son had wisely suggested I buy my own copy of The Lord of the Rings, fearing it too might be left somewhere. Laid low with food poisoning, I had started to re-read it, but had not got beyond the first forty or so pages.

It would be another seven years before I completed my second reading of the trilogy. Elements of it remained hard to understand. The most enigmatic element of all is the character of Tom Bombadil, a man unmoved by the malevolent power of the ring:

‘Show me the precious Ring!’ he said suddenly in the midst of the story: and Frodo, to his own astonishment, drew out the chain from his pocket, and unfastening the Ring handed it at once to Tom.

It seemed to grow larger as it lay for a moment on his big brown-skinned hand. Then suddenly he put it to his eye and laughed. For a second the hobbits had a vision, both comical and alarming, of his bright blue eye gleaming through a circle of gold. Then Tom put the Ring round the end of his little finger and held it up to the candlelight. For a moment the hobbits noticed nothing strange about this. Then they gasped. There was no sign of Tom disappearing!

Tom laughed again, and then he spun the Ring in the air – and it vanished with a flash. Frodo gave a cry – and Tom leaned forward and handed it back to him with a smile.

Tom Bombadil defines himself as a timeless one:

Eldest, that’s what I am. Mark my words, my friends: Tom was here before the river and the trees; Tom remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn. He made paths before the Big People, and saw the Little People arriving. He was here before the Kings and the graves and the Barrow-wights. When the Elves passed westward, Tom was here already, before the seas were bent. He knew the dark under the stars when it was fearless – before the Dark Lord came from Outside.

In his correspondence, Tolkien suggests that Bombadil is a personification of the countryside, the English shires with which he was familiar; a countryside unmoved by the evil of the world around. Bombadil is generous, hospitable, protective, joyous, delighting in beauty.

An evangelical Christian opposed to evolutionary science, I suspect Miss Tucker would have recoiled at the idea of Tom Bombadil.

 

Posted in This sceptred isle | 3 Comments

Digital discombobulation

Posted on 20th August 2022 by Ian

Scrolling through the Freeview television guide, I tried to select a channel. The wrong button must have been pressed or the wrong box selected. Something told me I had set a reminder, it was not clear of what I was to be reminded.

An hour later, watching Midsomer Murders on ITV3+1, DCI Barnaby suddenly disappeared to be replaced by a programme set on an oil rig. Trying to recover the Midsomer Constabulary, I pressed Channel 10 for ITV 3 and was confused to find Barnaby investigating the death of someone who had not previously appeared. A few scenes passed before I realised that I was watching the wrong episode because I was watching the wrong channel

The vagaries of digital television are challenging at times.

One evening, the ITN news had ended and we had waited for the West Country news. It had seemed odd, the stories hadn’t related to anywhere we knew. Then came the weather forecast, would there be rain in Somerset in the morning? We were never to find out, instead the following day’s meteorological predictions for Birmingham were shared by a woman whose accent was definitely not Bristolian. Afterwards, a caption appeared on the screen, “ITV Central.”

“Oh dear,” said my sister said, “the storm must have been stronger than we thought, we seem to have been blown North.”

The idea of the picturesque town of Ilminster being blown three counties northward  by a strong gale had conjured visions of it landing on the Midland equivalent of the Wicked Witch of the West. All it would have needed would have been for a young Dorothy to step out of the town into a Birmingham Land of Oz.

Rather than the sudden displacement of an entire community, the explanation that had seemed more likely was that the digital television set had switched from its default signal to one from a neighbouring region.

My mother’s Freeview box frequently decides she is in the south-west and plies her with stories of Devon and Cornwall instead of their own locality. It demands a search through the various control options to change the default channels; Bristol has to be recovered so that all is right with the world.

Digital broadcasting can bring an abundance of choice, but also a dislocation. Gone are the times when one’s choice was entirely determined by geography. Terrestrial digital television has some geographical reference, but satellite digital broadcasts allows the potential to listen to anything from anywhere. And if the television does not provide adequate choice, then online broadcasting adds innumerably more opportunities.

The extension of choice brings with it the loss of a community dimension. Like the local newspaper, the local television news brought one the news of one’s own place, it created a sense of shared stories, a sense of identification with a place, a sense of being part of somewhere. Digital dislocation breaks the ties of former times, it is as if one had been suddenly gathered up in the wind and set down in a distant city.

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Fishing gone

Posted on 17th August 2022 by Ian

My oldest nephew is thirty-four this year. He has a wisdom beyond his years – his idea of a perfect weekend is to pitch his bivouac on a river bank and fish for carp or pike.

Once, I would have joined him, but it is now almost fifty years since I last sat on a river bank, the long distant summer of 1975.

Going fishing was one of the things the restrictive fundamentalist Christian regime of our school allowed, and one Saturday in June of that year three of us passed on the opportunity to go on the schoolbus to the seaside town of Paignton, and instead walked to a river that ran through a nearby Dartmoor valley.

The river was was known for its trout and it was an opportunity to use the fishing rod that had been a present the previous Christmas and which had received little use. There was no requirement to fly fish the river, which was a good thing because none of us had the equipment needed for such sport fishing, nor could we have afforded the price of the sort of permit generally required for trout waters.

The afternoon was unsuccessful, only one fish was landed, and it was foul-hooked by a boy called Kevin. There arose a good-natured disagreement between Kevin and the other boy about the fish having been thrown back into the river.

A boisterous exchange ensued in which Kevin received a push in the chest, stumbled backwards and fell over the edge of the bank and into the river. In the wintertime, the depth would have been much greater, but on a warm Saturday in June, it was no more than a couple of feet. Kevin sat on the riverbed calling every curse he knew down upon his assailant, who stood on the bank, speechless with laughter.

The fishing was abandoned as we sought to dry Kevin’s clothes. Each garment was wrung out and hung on the bushes. Kevin sat on the grass in a state of undress, muttering about not going fishing in such company again.

Kevin’s complaints were unnecessary, we did not go fishing again that term; we didn’t ever go fishing again. Back in Somerset for the summer holidays, I cycled down to the River Yeo at Pibsbury a couple of times, it seemed dull without the companionship of schoolmates.

When the new school year began in September, fishing seemed the activity for younger people and I have never picked up a fishing rod since.

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When cheap food becomes costly

Posted on 14th August 2022 by Ian

My sister is sat working out which vegetables she will plant for the winter. Beds are now becoming clear and the prospect of rain next week brings an opportunity to sow root vegetables for winter harvest.

Having been in Somerset for the past seven weeks, it has not been hard to notice when vegetables from the garden have been part of the dinner, the taste is altogether better.

The omens for the winter in England are not good. The government is forecasting inflation at 13%. If newspapers like the Daily Mail and Daily Express are to be believed energy costs are going to be twice or three times what they were last winter. Food prices are already rising.

There can be no controlling the international prices of oil or gas, but where the government could have been more pro-active is in looking at the price of food. In times past, the cost of food constituted around one-third of a family’s weekly budget, that proportion has fallen to around one-seventh. People have become used to cheap food. What response can be made when that cheap food suddenly becomes costly?

Oddly, the answer lies not in measures like the wartime Dig for Victory campaign. In 1939, Britain was importing two-thirds of its foodstuffs, some fifty-five million tons a year. The Dig for Victory campaign was a major propaganda success and was significant in reducing the need for imported food, dependency on imports fell from two-thirds to one-third.  However, that level of dependency was still comparable with the level of imports at the current time.

According to figures from the National Farmers Union, Britain currently produces around 64% of its food. The current situation is an improvement from the point where that figure had fallen to 61%. The NFU points out that in 1984 Britain was producing 78% of the food it needed, which is a proportion that exceeds the wartime levels.

The answer seems to lie in a coherent agricultural policy on the part of the government. Now the Common Agricultural Policy has gone (a good intentioned post-war measure that became an opportunity for massive exploitation), there is an opportunity to reorient policy to promote one of the chief objectives of the original 1957 CAP – food security.

The government could declare that self-sufficiency should be an aspiration, that, at the very least, there should be a return to the level of the 1980s. Of course, it would mean an increase in some prices, but they would be stabilised, and there would be a reduction in the availability of such products a sugar snap peas, but it would mean that there could be an elimination of uncertainty and fear.

Posted in This sceptred isle | 4 Comments

Voices in the morning

Posted on 11th August 2022 by Ian

Before six o’clock on an August morning and there is the sound of children’s voices coming down the road. Perhaps it is the warm weather prompting people to venture out early. With the windows open, the morning news is audible from the next door neighbour’s radio. Looking across toward Dorset, the lack of rain has turned the landscape more gold than green.

It was such mornings as this which seemed special in my childhood years, the times when the world was occupied only by the early risers and when the sights and sounds of workaday life were yet to appear.

Perhaps it was growing up in this rural village distant from large towns or cities that helped preserve the quietness of the hours before 7 o’clock. The village still remains too distant for its tranquility to be broken by commuters setting out on their daily journeys, instead the earliness is the space of farmers embarking upon their day’s work, and children enjoying the days of their summer holidays.

In childhood days, on some farms, cattle would have been inside after the milking of the night before. Once morning milking was complete, they would have been turned out to pasture for the day. If meadows were not contiguous to the farm, they would have been moved sedately along the road, always a source of frustration for the odd person who might have wished to be going somewhere.

Traffic in those times would have chiefly been farm vehicles, grey Massey Ferguson tractors, or perhaps blue Fords with cabs. Land Rovers were battered, canvas-roofed, with little by way of comfort in the cab, ventilation might have required opening vents at the front. The single windscreen wiper had an electric motor, but a small arm projecting from the motor allowed the driver to operate the wiper by hand. The indicators were of the semaphore variety, offering little warning to any car driver who might have been following.

The beauty of those early mornings was the sense of there being ample time, no matter what might need to be done in the day ahead, there were many hours in which to achieve it. Time before seven o’clock in the morning seemed to move much more slowly, there was less requirement to rush, less stress in completing task. Once the clock moved towards eight, the movement of the hands began to accelerate.

There were people in those mornings who became invisible in later hours. Perhaps once the tasks demanding movement beyond their own farm were completed, they stayed within their own yard. Perhaps encountering no-one and being expected to speak to no-one suited their inclination. Perhaps such people would have enjoyed the sound of voices in the morning.

 

Posted in Unreliable memories | 2 Comments