A Somerset Lad

“People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion,” wrote Albert Einstein. His reflection upon the nature of spacetime might have been a reflection upon the nature of time in a deeply rooted rural community. There is no sense of time having flown by because the past seems eternally present,

In Huish Episcopi parish, my mothers’ family have been present in an unbroken line since since 1716. There is then a break in the written records before the next probable forebear in 1625. My grandmother’s family tree, Luxton, follows a direct documented line back to 1669. Thomas Luxton of Bampton, Devon is my great, great, great, great, great, great (that should be great six times) grandfather.

They were yeomen farmers working pocket handkerchief sized farms. Their families married into other local families and the cycle of life continued from generation to generation. Baptized in the medieval parish church, married there, buried within the walls of the churchyard; there was a reassurance in the continuity of the family.

It might seem a picture of timeless pleasantness, but the picture of rural life wasn’t as pleasant as it seems. In difficult times they lived in poverty, there is record of one family going to the workhouse, and death lurked at the door.

My great great great grandfather, Thomas Luxton moved to Aller where he married Hannah Sawtell in 1827. They had seven children. Jemima died at the age of one month in 1830. Daniel died at the age of four years in 1843, his baby brother William died at the same time at the age of four days, and they were buried on the same day. Four months after the death of her two youngest children Hannah herself died at the age of thirty-four. In the next generation there were fourteen children, six of whom were to die between the ages of four and twenty-one.

Reading through the family tree, there is a feeling for those forebears who endured such a catalogue of pain and heartbreak. Perhaps the sense of timelessness arises from the transmission of an hereditary meme. Perhaps the feelings that they had are as much part of the family heredity as the biological genes which have produced generations of people clearly identifiable as family members.

Past, present and future may be stubborn illusions in the field of theoretical physics, in our family they are only a means of determining to which generation a person might belong. When there is a sense of the presence of all the generations, time has never flown by.

“For a few years, we lived in the cottage across the road from the farm. There was an old lady called Mrs Hartland who lived next door to us.”

“Your great grandfather was very worried. The bullocks all seemed sick with something. No-one knew what was wrong with them or what to do. They looked ill.”

“One day your Grandad was going out to work on the farm and Mrs Hartland said to him, ‘Tell your father not to worry, those bullocks will be alright.”

“She was right. They all began to recover and were healthy again. I don’t know if she could see into the future, or what.”

Being a rationalist, I said, “maybe she had seen cattle with a similar illness before.”

It was an odd story, one I had never heard before. My mother will be eighty-four in a couple of months’ time, so it was from seventy or seventy-five years ago.

Mrs Hartland sounded like the sort of woman towards whom fingers would have been pointed in former times, a woman who was seen as having powers that were not natural.

Even if her having encountered such a disease before is the logical explanation, Mrs Hartland did not present her opinion in such terms, instead she behaves as if she had been a seer of some sort, as if she possessed some inexplicable power. Perhaps she felt that she was being a good neighbour in offering words of reassurance.

In pre-scientific communities, curses, or, more accurately, the fears of what might happen if someone cursed you,  were taken seriously. A mysterious illness coming upon your cattle might easily be seen as due to the malevolence of someone who had used magic against you.

Of course, there are tales of people being cursed and then suffering misfortune, but such misfortune owed little to the magical power of the curse and much to the subject of the curse believing something bad might befall them. Nervous, worried, anxious, constantly tense, losing sleep, because of the belief that someone might have unseen powers, of course the cursed person suffered misfortune, they worried themselves into ill health and accidents.

The other reaction to the notion of a curse was to accuse a person of witchcraft, an accusation that could be fatal in pre-modern societies.

Stories of Mrs Hartland deserve pursuit. Were there other powers she was deemed to possess? Was she someone who had cures for humans? Or was she just someone with long experience of cattle?

The news reports that Noddy Holder has had his vaccination. It is extraordinary to think that he is seventy-seven years old. He will forever be the rambunctious lead singer of Slade whose records captured the rebellious mood of 1970s teenagers.

Noddy Holder always had a wonderful head of hair, hair to which I could never aspire. Long hair was never an option for me, certainly not the 1970s standard of what constituted long hair. As soon as my hair reached my ears, it would turn east and west instead of continuing its journey south.

At school, long hair was not permitted. A barber would be brought in once a term. It was suggested that he was no more a barber than anyone in the school, it was just that he was cheap. His termly achievement was to complete sixty haircuts in a five hour stint, each person emerging with the standard pudding bowl haircut. The fact that my mother, a trained and experienced hairdresser, might have cut and layered my hair the previous week was not sufficient to dissuade him from his hacking. Photographs from those times at school remain from those days. In the normal world, the hairstyles of Rod Stewart and Noddy Holder were in vogue while we were boys with haircuts for which no sane person would ever have paid.

Sixth form college and university offered the opportunity to do whatever I wished with my hair, but there were things more important than hairstyles that demanded attention. Sometimes I wore my hair shorter than the length that had been permitted in the days of the school barber. Time spent on hair seemed to be time wasted.

Once training for ordination had begun, a short back and sides had become the norm. There were trainees who wore long hair, but it was the sort of thing that might have attracted adverse comment from disgruntled church members.

Reaching the age of fifty, a decade ago, there was a relief at still having hair that demanded a regular thorough cut, but also a feeling that the shorter it was, the less trouble it might cause. Teacher training and the first teaching appointment meant early mornings and a wish not to have to worry about spending much time either washing, drying or brushing my hair. Shortness was pragmatism.

The current times, with the renewed closure of all those businesses deemed to be “non-essential” means there was no barber to whom to turn to address the growth of my hair since my sister gave me a trim before Christmas. There was no option other than to order from Argos a £10.99 replacement pair of clippers for those my sister confiscated last year after I managed to use a No 1 on one side of my head and a No 3 on the other. I managed a cut upon which no-one remarked when we returned to school yesterday.

It would have been wonderful to have had hair like Noddy Holder.