A Somerset Lad

The gradual advance in years bring moments when benches are welcome.

So it was that I sat on a wooden bench on steel legs that offered a place for weary shoppers to stop to catch their breath.

A line of steel bollards protected the pavement on either side of the entrance to the car park.  The bollards had been painted green at some point in the past, but the paint had suffered weathering and knocks, leaving a dull, metallic darkness. Moss and grass grew around both the bollards and the legs of the bench. The wood had once been stained, but had become grey and cracked and without beauty.

However, weathering and cracks did not catch the eye of the small boy who came running up to the bench and stepped up onto it. Perhaps three or four years old, he turned and smiled at his father who held out a hand to him.

The boy wanted to jump from the bench to the nearest bollard.

Even the most athletic of people would not have attempted such a jump. The tops of the bollards were spherical and there would have been nowhere to land on a firm footing.

The boy’s father did not demur from the request, instead placing his arms around the boy he lifted him high into the air before bringing him down so that the boy’s feet just touched the top of the bollard. The leap from bench to bollard was just the start of the flight as the boy was carried aloft to the car park, delighted at his aerial exploits.

There was a moment’s connection with the world of imagination before it fell under the shadow of reason and sternness; a moment’s recall of times when anything seemed possible.

The Standard car driven by my father could be transformed into something that had the capacity of a James Bond-vehicle. Household appliances could become devices for resisting alien attacks. Even the most ordinary things could be imbued with a sense of wonder and boundless possibility.

Had someone asked, “can this car become a boat?” or “can this food mixer become a ray gun?” of course, the answer would have been, “no.” Even a small boy knew the physical limitations of ordinary things, and yet there was always the possibility of holding the two dimensions in tension, always the possibility of clinging to the world of imagination.

Somewhere along the way, we lose our capacity to fly.

Preparing the First Year history lesson for tomorrow, I wistfully perused the material for the lessons. I wish there had been such resources when I was at school.

Before they even begin to look at historical materials, the First Year students are taught about sources, about asking questions, about looking at evidence. They are enthusiastic in their responses.

The focus of the course is on skills as well as knowledge, on making history a lifelong activity. There is the cultivation of an awareness that history is to be found in their own area as well as in distant locations. It took me half of my life to learn what they are learning in the opening weeks of first year.

Working in an Ulster parish south of Downpatrick, a parish with traditions that dated from the days of Saint Patrick, there was an anniversary festival in 1995 which included a bus tour of the parish.

The bus tour was not for outsiders, but for the parishioners themselves. An archaeologist from Queen’s University was numbered among the people of the parish and was our guide for the tour. An Ulsterbus was hired and, at the most distant point, from where we started we must have been three miles from where we had begun.

What had seemed a piece of silliness when it was planned, became an experience people were to remember. Each pile of stones, each fold in the hill, each grassy mound suddenly assumed an identity of their own.

Standing at the gate of a field, in which a single wall standing alone was all that remained of a medieval building, the archaeologist described the digs that had taken place there and how what was found told the story of the everyday lives of the people who had lived there. There had been laughter when he had talked about the excavation of what had once been the cess pit of the medieval house and had commented that it was amazing what people dropped when they were going to the toilet.  A place that had been passed by many people everyday became more than just a stone wall in a meadow.

It is unlikely that a professional historian or archaeologist will emerge from among the First Year students, such talents are few and far between, but if the lessons should prompt their adult selves to pause and to see the past around, then the course will have been a success.

The poster on the toyshop window announced that Thomas and Friends were in stock. Another generation would grow up, as I did, with the railway characters created by the Rev. W. Awdry.

Growing up? It seems an odd concept, both for oneself and for one’s children.

Those whom you love are young children at one moment and the next moment they are adults in a world different from your own, adults who seem far removed from the people you thought that you once knew.

It was the Thomas and Friends poster that recalled my conversations with Ben.

Ben must be seventeen or eighteen now, but I still have a clear memory of sitting on steps one Sunday morning to talk about Thomas and friends. There were another ten minutes before we needed to move and there were few people around.

Trains have always been a comfortable topic of conversation, there is something reassuring about railways, a design, a purpose, a mind behind it all.  There are many people who will take holidays just to visit particular railways.

I have never felt I would go to such extremes, but I think I can understand the fascination, particularly with the steam railways, the artistry and the craftsmanship have few modern parallels.

Sitting on the stone steps, Ben and I talked about the steam trains we remembered, each of them with their own character, and I tried to remember their colours.

“What colour was James, Ben?”

“Red,” he said.

“And Henry?”

“Green.”

It was 1025 and we got up from our seat.

Ben, who was three at the time, took his Thomas the Tank Engine cards back to the pew where his mum and dad were sitting, and I went off to finish getting ready for the morning service.

Any of the hundred or so people who had come in the church door would have found it odd that the Rector was sitting on the chancel steps talking to a small boy.

It was a magical moment, for just a couple of minutes the world was suspended.

Ben taught me a lesson that has endured since that distant Sunday morning.

He had a completely unselfconscious devotion to the things that mattered to him, and all the time in the world in which to do those things which he thought to be important.

Perhaps more attention to those moments by adults would mean children would turn out differently.