A Somerset Lad

It was on this day in 1953 that Ernest Hemingway won the Pulitzer Prize for his book The Old Man and the Sea. The book is a tale of the dignity of Santiago the fisherman and his quest for a catch after weeks and weeks of having caught nothing. Santiago’s fishing expedition almost costs him his life, but his perseverance and his dignity command the respect of his community.

Fishing in my boyhood was never a matter of drama or a question of dignity, it was generally fruitless hours spent on West Country riverbanks, perhaps it was a sense of feeling ridiculous at catching nothing that brought an end to my fishing for it is close on five decades since I last held a fishing rod in 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 a local river 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.

Sometimes, the thought of hours on a riverbank seems very attractive, dignity perhaps, and not one moment of danger.

A Google search for the Pink Floyd song See Emily Play revealed that Syd Barrett, a founding member of the band, would have been 75 this year.

Pink Floyd were the musical accompaniment to the one term I really spent at university.  The following term, I moved out of the hall of residence to live with family in Kew, the term after that, I dropped out altogether.  When returning to the LSE a year later, I turned up at lectures, wrote the essays and sat the exams, but never re-engaged with student life.

For one term only, I lived London student life: going to see the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych on Monday nights on student standby tickets that cost £1.10 each; going to concerts in places like the Tottenham Court Road; going to discos and parties.  Every experience seemed an intense contrast with an upbringing in rural England.

In 1979, London was at the point of transition from its old down at heel self to the new, brash self it was to become during the Thatcher years.  There was still a pie and mash shop in a street close to the student hall in Rosebery Avenue.  Clerkenwell Market still had market traders who could have told tales of the city in wartime.  Mount Pleasant sorting office was at the heart of the post office when writing letters was still a key means of communication.  At the tube station at The Angel, the platforms were still reached by lifts with folding gates.

There was an intensity about everything in those weeks, even the colours are bright in the memory: the reds and greens of the Underground trains in the days when carriages on some lines still had wooden floors; the blues and yellows of the British Rail locomotives; the whites and the purples of discos lit with ultra violet light.

All through those autumn months, Pink Floyd played.  My room mate seemed to have every album, including those from the days before Syd Barrett parted company with the band in 1968.  In 1979, 1968 seemed a different age.  When you are 18 going on 19, something eleven years before belongs to a different world.

Never taking as much as a puff of the cannabis joints that would be passed around at student gatherings (the tobacco in the roll ups would have triggered an asthmatic attack), there was still something about  Pink Floyd’s music that conjured  thoughts and images that would find a place in a realm of magical realism.

Syd Barrett left Pink Floyd when he was barely older than the undergraduates who hung on the lyrics of his group.  Watching See Emily Play for a moment, it is 1979 again.

My grandfather’s farm lies on the road between Huish Episcopi and Long Sutton. It is deep within rural Somerset. The road that passes the farm is designated as the A372, but it never seemed like a “A” road; it was just a country road like countless others.

Perhaps it was the isolation and the quietness of the area that allowed a lax attitude to security. Anyone who should not have been around, anyone who should not have appeared in a yard, anyone who should have been calling at doors, would have quickly been spotted.

Perhaps the feeling that there was little need for security also owed much to the local policing, which was nothing if not attentive.

Farm work was hard, much of it was manual, machinery was limited in its functions and such machinery as was available was expensive for a small farmer. My grandfather would sleep well at the end of a day.

One night, as was his custom, he was sat in a front room of the farmhouse. The lights of the house were on and the doors were unlocked. My grandfather saw no reason to lock doors and was absent-minded about switching off lights.

He had a tot of whisky in his hand. It was after midnight and everything was quiet. Reflecting on the work of the day, he heard a voice from the back door.

“Mr Crossman, is everything alright? All the lights are on and the doors are unlocked? I would have thought you would be in bed by now?” The police constable from the local station in Langport was on his motor cycle, heading back to his house in Long Sutton.

My grandfather explained that he was having a glass of whisky after a long day, did the constable want a glass?

“Well, as I am off duty,” I might.

They sat and drank a tot together.

The calls after the evening shift must have become a common occurrence because there was a surprise one night when my grandfather had dozed off in his armchair. He woke to find the constable seated in the other chair, a glass of whisky in his hand. It is hard now to imagine such a feeling of ease at finding a uniformed police officer sitting in one your armchairs after midnight, happy to sit and share the quietness.

The constables in Langport must have had countless other counterparts around the country. Such policing seems unimaginable now.