A Somerset Lad

The Year 10 students have all been withdrawn from Religious Education, the time saved is to be devoted to English, maths and science.  Maths seems a particular problem in schools, basic numeracy is a challenge for many of the students.

Maths is promoted as the gateway to the future. “21 seriously cool careers that need maths,” said a poster on a classroom wall. Being a teacher was not among the twenty-one.

Once, I asked a class in Dublin, “would you like to be a teacher?”

I remember that just three of them answered “yes,” and the answers were for things like having long holidays rather than anything to do with the job itself. The rest of the class told me that school was boring and being a teaching would be boring. Perhaps it was just the perspective of middle class suburbia that skewed the answers, perhaps they aspired to far more lucrative employment. Perhaps the same question asked in a rural community, or in the inner city, would have produced a raft of different answers; perhaps there had been a shift in perceptions.

In rural Ulster in the early-90s, traditional attitudes persisted.  The principal of the local village primary school was referred to as “Master McCann” rather than “Mister McCann” by the people of the village.  It seemed a quaint but pleasant custom, perhaps an acknowledgment of times past when the schoolmaster was one of the few people of learning in a mostly unlettered community, but, probably more importantly, a mark of respect for the post.  Had the people not held the principal in great affection, they might have called him many other things.

The school was at the heart of the life of the community, its calendar shaping village life and its joys being joys shared by the whole village. It would have been be hard to have imagined that in such a school the overwhelming majority of a class would have dismissed the thought of teaching, while the remaining three would have been half-hearted.  The school teacher for them was someone held in respect by their entire community.

Growing up in this corner of rural England, the teachers at our village school would have been treated with a deep respect; there was a deference, even a fear, felt towards them.  Had we been asked about teaching, we might not have been anymore enthusiastic about such a career, but we would probably have been a good deal less dismissive.

Perhaps teaching was never a seriously cool career, and being good at maths would have offered much more enticing prospects. No-one who could be an astronomer or a doctor would be likely to opt for years in the classroom, but it is a pity that even a school mathematics poster did not even suggest a career as a teacher.

In primary school days in High Ham, the approach of Saint Swithun’s Day would create a sense of trepidation. What would happen if rain fell on 15th July? Would a single shower on a single day mean that our six weeks of summer holiday were wet? Would our hopes of playing outside for day after day be washed away? Would our few chances of being on a beach be overshadowed by dark clouds and rainfall?

It is odd that a rhyme we learned should have had such power to affect our thinking. Every year, the lines would be recalled:

Saint Swithun’s day, if it does rain
For forty days it will remain
Saint Swithun’s day, if it is fair
For forty days it will rain no more

The medieval church capitalised on traditions that came to be associated with Swithun posthumously. Claims of him having miraculous powers to answer the petitions of those who sought his help led to various of his bones being incorporated in shrines in churches around the country.

Even in the 1960s, no-one at our school thought to ask the teacher why an Anglo-Saxon bishop of Winchester should be associated with the weather. No-one asked how could someone who was dead more than a thousand years affect what our summer holidays were going to be like? We never challenged the story, it was one of those traditions that people accepted. Just as we accepted many other things we were told.

Of course, Saint Swithun’s Day became significant because it was a day in mid-July, not because it had any link with a dead bishop. it is a time of year when weather can be settled and be warm and dry, or be unsettled and be cool and damp. What determines the likely pattern of weather for the days ahead is not the alleged powers of a saint, but the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO).

The Met Office describe the NAO as “a giant see-saw across the Atlantic.” The two ends of the sees saw are described thus:

The common pressure features seen in the North Atlantic Ocean are for large regions of relatively high pressure centred over the Azores islands (west of Portugal, known as the sub-tropical or Azores high) and low pressure centred over Iceland (the sub-polar or Icelandic low). The NAO describes the relative changes in pressure between these two regions

Mid-July is a time when high pressure over the Azores has become established, pushing the jetstream northward, bringing warm dry weather to the British Isles, or it has not become established, allowing cooler, damp air to predominate.

The NAO was discovered by Sir Gilbert Walker in the 1920s, yet a century after the weather patterns were scientifically explained people are still talking about Swithun. Perhaps stories are more attractive than science.