A Somerset Lad

Tracing the story of a Great War soldier from his birth in Ruthin in North Wales in 1895,  through the ugly hell of the Western Front, I came upon a moment of beauty,

In December 1918, he had been married at Blean in Kent. He had survived the conflict and one can only imagine his joy at being married a month later. He was to live another six decades, dying at a grand old age of eighty-six. How much difference to his life had that single moment after the war made to his view of life?

Beauty is a strange thing, it can allow a moment of escape from horror and ugliness.

In one of the most profound books I ever read, words in the space of a single page out of five hundred put the other four hundred and ninety-nine into a different context:

The hedgerows were deep and ragged where he walked, covered with the lace of cow parsley.  The air had a feeling of purity as though it had never been breathed; it was just starting to be cool with the first breeze of the evening.  From the tall elms he could see at the end of the field there was the sound of rooks, and a gentler calling of wood pigeons close at hand.  He stopped, and leaned against a gate.  The quietness of the world about him seemed to stand outside of time; there was no human voice to place it.

Above him he saw the white moon, early and low above the elms.  Over and behind it were long jagged wisps of cloud that ran in ribbed lies back into the pale blue of the sky, then trailed away in gestures of vapourous white.

Stephen felt himself overtaken by a climactic surge of feeling.  It frightened him because he thought it would have some physical issue in spasm or bleeding or death.  Then he saw that what he felt was not an assault but a passionate affinity.  It was for the rough field running down to the trees and for the pathgoing back into the village where he could see the tower of the church: these and the forgiving distance of the sky were not separate, but part of of creation, and he too, still by any sane judgement a young man, by the repeated tiny pulsing of his blood, was one with them.  He looked up and saw the sky as it would be trailed with stars under darkness, the crawling nebulae and smudged lights of infinite distance; these were not different worlds it now seemed clear to him, but bound through the mind of creation to the shredded white clouds, the unbreathed air of May, to the soil that lay beneath the damp grass at his feet.  He held tightly on to the gate and laid his head on his arms, in some residual fear that the force of binding love he felt would sweep him from the earth.  He wanted to stretch out his arms and enfold in them the fields, the sky, the elms with their sounding birds; he wanted to hold them with the unending forgiveness of a father to his prodigal errant but beloved son . . . nothing was immoral or beyond redemption, all could be brought together, understood in the long perspective of forgiveness.  As he clung to the wood, he wanted also to be forgiven for all that he had done; he longed for the unity of the world’s creation to melt his sin and anger, because his soul was joined to it.

The book is not a spiritual one, not even one by a religious author.

The words are from Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong.  In the hideous grimness of the bloody slaughter of the First World War, Faulks’ character Wraysford is allowed a few days leave and encounters a moment of sublime beauty. Time looks different because of a single moment.

My friend thinks Glastonbury is a magical place, she is not alone in her opinion.

The walls of a circular room at the county museum in Taunton are inscribed with comments on Somerset and its people. Quotes from famous writers include words that are pejorative as well as ones more complimentary, words from unexpected sources appear, among them a comment from John Steinbeck, who stayed in the east Somerset town of Bruton in 1959:

The other night, I discovered that fifty feet from our house, through a break in the trees, you can see St Michael’s Tor at Glastonbury.  There is no question that there is magic here, and all kinds of magic.

“You should have come to High Ham, instead,” I thought, “you wouldn’t have had to go fifty feet from your house.”

When a blanket of mist comes down over the Levels, if you look north-east from the village, the Tor, that had caught the eye of John Steinbeck, rises like an island from a sea of white fluffiness.

It would not have been hard to imagine how Steinbeck had looked across a nocturnal landscape and thought it had a certain undefinable quality.

A Nobel laureate, John Steinbeck was a writer who captured a sense of 1930s America, the years of the Great Depression. His novel The Grapes of Wrath describes lives lived in the context of grim realities, not much magic of any sort. Why would a writer remembered for detailed depictions of people’s struggle for daily existence talk in terms of a place possessing “all kinds of magic?”

“Magic” is always a subjective quality attributed to a place or experience by a person; where one person saw a stone tower, John Steinbeck saw something else.

It does seem, though, that some places are more likely to be ascribed ethereal qualities, that some places possess a capacity to inspire the imagination. Perhaps it is the accumulation of custom and tradition, perhaps it is the passing on of stories and folk tales, that imbue locations with qualities that cannot be photographed or measured.

Glastonbury Tor is not magical, instead it is the focal point of centuries of storytelling, what Steinbeck saw was not magic, but a great mass of interwoven tales and traditions. Places now prosaic might become magical for those of generations to come.

Travelling from Lyon to Marseille on a Saturday afternoon had been a delightful experience.

I had never travelled on a TGV before and sat in the top deck of a carriage watching the Provençal countryside pass by. The end of May and the cornfields seemed ready for harvest. Wondering why we seemed only to be rolling along through the Saturday afternoon sunshine, I opened the web page that was home to the train’s Wifi system. It included a live map that allowed you to track the progress of the train and showed the current speed. We were ‘rolling’ along at 296 kmh, 24 kmh short of the maximum operational speed of 320 kmh.

It had been such a delightful experience yesterday that I had looked forward to this morning’s return journey. The train was due to depart from Marseilles at 0810. Who would want to be catching a train to anywhere at such a time on a Sunday morning?

The queue for the train was rather longer than it had been yesterday. Looking at my ticket, I saw the seat was ‘bas’ rather than ‘haut’, the view would not be as good. I also noticed that it said ‘famille’, I wasn’t sure what this meant. When booking in March, I had just accepted whatever seats I had been allocated, travelling alone, what did it matter where I sat?

Finding seat No 38 in Carriage No 17 on the train which had the final destination of Mannheim in Germany, I found it was indeed a family seat. Beside me was a young mother with a baby, opposite her sat her husband, and opposite me sat Laurelle.

I struggled along in my schoolboy French until the mother revealed she had studied engineering at an English university, at which point I thought I could stop my destruction of the language . Laurelle, however, wanted to continue in French because Laurelle was six years old.

‘Apprends tu l’anglais?’ she asked me.

‘Mais, oui,’ her father laughed.

‘Je parle anglais,’ I replied, ‘Et toi?’

Laurelle was just beginning to learn English at school. It was refreshing to discover that she had not grown up on a diet of English language television.

Laurelle told me about her school and about her teacher, whom she liked. She told me that she liked living in Marseilles and asked me what Dublin was like.

She asked me my name, ‘Ian, I replied, ‘en francais, Jean.’ Thereafter she prefaced each question with, ‘Jean.’

‘Jean, quel age as-tu?’ She thought sixty-one was a very old age to be.

She told me about the red plastic Disney figure she carried with her. I had no clue to the name of the character in English, so would have had no chance of identifying it in French. She showed me her Disney colouring book and offered a lengthy explanation as to why she was colouring the tree trunks in one picture purple.  I muttered ‘oui’ at what seemed to be appropriate moments, hoping that I was not saying that I hoped her character would be eaten by a dragon or run over by a spaceship.

An alarming moment came. Laurelle’s mother had gone with the baby in one direction, her father then stood up and went in the other direction. I was riding in a train at one hundred and eighty miles per hour with a six year old French girl who greatly overrated my ability to understand what she was saying.

Then there came a realisation that this was probably one of the greatest achievements to which I might ever have aspired. Parents prepared to entrust their six year old daughter  to the supervision of ‘le professeur.’ (I love the way the French accord their teachers such a title). To be a complete stranger and to be thus trusted brought a smile.

Laurelle appeared not to notice the absence of her parents. She explained in detail the colour scheme she was going to use for one of the Disney pictures. There was to be a lot of ‘marron’, brown, I think. I wondered why there had not been more brown used for the trees.

We pulled into Lyon and went our separate ways. I wished them well as they walked towards the platform where a train bound for the Gare de Lyon in Paris stood waiting.

Never before in my life have I attempted to speak so much French. It was a lesson, if one were needed, that immersion is far more effective than classroom lessons