A Somerset Lad

“Aunt Ella said Great Aunt Annie use to have trouble with her legs. She would suddenly fall.”

There seemed little purpose in trying to ask in which generation Great Aunt Annie had lived, my mother lives in an eternal present. Aunt Ella was a great aunt to me, two generations back, so was Annie my mother’s great aunt or Aunt Ella’s great aunt? Three generations back or four generations back, Great Aunt Annie was someone with mobility problems, as present now as she had been in the Nineteenth Century.

Finding a similar sense of being present in centuries of time is not easy, perhaps the iPhone calendar allows imagination of it. It is said that the iPhone can provide dates to AD 60,000 and beyond, though why anyone should need such a calendar is baffling.

Perhaps some of us are like the elves in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s mythical heroes always seemed an attractive race of beings. The Elven king Thranduil had fought Sauron the Dark Lord some three thousand years prior to the events of The Fellowship of the Ring. Wouldn’t such longevity completely transform our lives? When the elves do depart from the present world, they don’t die, they sail to the grey havens. It seems a prospect infinitely more attractive than the brief moment of human life.

Yet, if life could be prolonged, what difference would it make?

If we could live hundreds of years, with a reasonable quality of life, would it make a great difference to the way we live now? Would the additional years be devoted to the achievement of things for which there is presently not enough time – studies for which there had not previously been time, reading all the books which we had promised ourselves, planting the perfect garden, learning skills we had never considered, doing all those things we missed out on?

Or would the extra time be used much as much of the present time? Upon the death of a mutual friend, a friend once pointed out the old adage, “it is not the years in your life, it’s the life in your years that matters.” At the time, it seemed a pointing out of the obvious, but the passing years have reinforced the truth of his comment.

Perhaps it’s possible to live 500 years, and still be only 50, and perhaps it’s possible to last until the age of 500 having lived only 50 years. If one reached 2521, how much would be done?

10th March, the first anniversary of the death of my father, it is also the thirtieth anniversary of the death of my maternal grandfather, who died on 10th March 1991. Thirty years on and his soft words and gentle smile remain clear in the memory, together with his capacity for work and his enjoyment of silence

He was a farmer behind his times. He farmed in the Somerset parish in which the family had lived for generations He was a man not given to change, happy in doing things in the way he had always done them.

In the days before having to  go to school, I remember sitting on the back of the old carthorse, Dinah, as she pulled the hoe up and down between the rows of mangold wurzels.

Harvest time was no more modern. The binder, pulled by a grey Massey Ferguson tractor, would go slowly up and down through fields of wheat. The sheaves would be put into stooks until they were gathered on a trailer and taken back to the barn. It always fascinated me how he could bind sheaves together with twists of straw when the binder twine broke – it never worked when I tried.

He was a master of recycling before the word was invented. Everything was stored away, every piece of twine, every nut, screw and bolt, every box, every sack, nothing was wasted; nothing was disposed of without thought. His neighbouring farmers were as frugal in their ways; every bit of machinery was fixed and re-fixed and coaxed along years after its reasonable life expectancy. There was no money to pay for new things and no-one would have contemplated going into debt, if it couldn’t be paid for today, it couldn’t be paid for tomorrow.

The farming life was hard and unrelenting, I remember him with an old coat on, tied with string around the middle, with a hurricane lamp in one hand, and a pitchfork holding a bale of hay held over his shoulder with the other hand, heading out into the rain and mud on a Christmas Day evening when the rest of the country was sitting down to watch Morecambe and Wise. 

Not once did I ever hear him complain, it was a life lived in a community where hardships were shared and where there was a common understanding of what daily life was about.

His capacity for work was matched by an ability to be quiet. It is not hard to establish some tangible link with the past through which he lived. Sit at the farmhouse kitchen table and drink tea from cups and saucers, and, for one moment the years will slip away and he will be back in his usual seat at the kitchen table staring out.

He would always sit on after his evening meal. Perhaps he was dog tired after a day on the farm, perhaps he just liked to sit and ponder the world over the top of the china teacup in which my grandmother would always serve tea.  He would stare fixedly out through the window to the garden and the orchard beyond.  Passing the window would barely stir him from his reveries; his contemplations seemed deep and detached.

Such moments seemed odd in those years, why would you want to sit and stare out the window?  Why would you not want to go outside, or even drive somewhere else to talk with people?

There have been many moments since when it seemed possible to understand how much he valued his quietness; perhaps it was a retreat from other people, perhaps it was a retreat from the ugly things of the world? Perhaps it was a sense of timelessness.

When he died in 1991, he was buried a sheaf of wheat was placed on his coffin – a sign of his lifelong work as a farmer; a sign that he had been gathered in like wheat at the end of the summer; a sign that just as the wheat sown in the ground springs up in new life, so one might believe that those who are buried will rise again from the dead.