Shy passers-by

Posted on 20th February 2021 by Ian

At one time, there seemed few people in the village to whom we were not related. Members of the Crossman family seemed not to have moved far from the parishes that surrounded the town of Langport.

If I wanted to identify myself, I would name my mother and my maternal grandfather. The name was enough to establish my credentials with most people, even with the workmen among whom I sat in a van one day who whistled out at teenage girl who was cycling past.

“That’s a cousin of mine,” I said.

“You’m not a Crossman?”

“I am.”

In the village, my mother could travel road by road in her mind, naming the family who lived at each of the houses. One of the roads was named after Mary Cox, one of the forebears in the tangle of limbs that is our family tree.

Going to university in London at the age of eighteen was something to which I never adjusted. I was a registered student at the LSE, but spent little time there. It was a place full of strangers in a city full of strangers.

In rural Ireland, I found communities like the one in which I had grown up. In the Lecale peninsula in Co Down, and in the borderlands of Co Laois and Co Offaly there were families whose interconnection would have rivalled that of the Crossmans, families who had worked the same land for generations, families to whom no-one is a stranger.

The past year has been a strange time for anyone used to a sense of connectedness. My mother now relies upon telephone calls to her three sisters and two brothers. She still speaks of how she misses a fourth sister, who died from motor neurone disease in 1998. For many of us, the online world has replaced the actual, the only disadvantage being that the interactions are not comparable.

A shy passing stranger visited For the Fainthearted, my other blog, this afternoon. In 2014, a friend had sent me a zip file of photographs from days at the strange Dartmoor school I attended. I had often meant to upload the photographs, so spent time today posting all 670 of them on my blog.

The shy passing stranger arrived late this afternoon and could have looked at the photographs as a single gallery, but clicked to enlarge and then went through the images one by one, spending almost an hour looking at 350 of them.

Only someone who had gone to the school would have spent so much time, so I thought there would be a comment, a word, by which they might have given a clue as to who they were and when they had been there, but there was nothing.

Whatever the benefits of the online community, there is nothing like seeing real physical people. No-one would have lingered outside our house without leaving with a nod or a “how be on” word of greeting.

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A distant hilltop

Posted on 19th February 2021 by Ian

“A great view here.”

“Yes,” my father would say, “If you look out at the middle of the most distant ridge, you can see a hill beyond it more faintly – that’s Pilsdon Pen. It’s above Lyme Regis. It’s twenty-seven miles from here.”

I loved and still love Lyme Regis. I could spend a lot of time standing, staring out of the window, glimpsing the distant point and imagining that if I were there I could look down to the coast.

I don’t know if it was twenty-seven miles as a crow flew or twenty-seven by road. It was probably the bird flight distance, I am not sure that Pilsdon Pen is accessible by road.

Our village is not on particularly high ground, three hundred and twenty feet above sea level lingers in the memory. However, that might be a mistaken altitude, I also remember the population of High Ham as being three hundred and twenty-eight. Whatever the exact height, being three hundred feet above sea level would not ordinarily be regarded as being on high ground, it was just that we were surrounded by the lowlands of the Somerset Levels (the elevation has not changed, the population of the village has grown considerably).

In all that time spent looking out a Pilsdon Pen, I do not recall giving much thought to the countryside that lay between the window and the hilltop.

Staring straight at the hill, there must have been a couple of hundred square miles of Somerset and Dorset that lay between. Certainly there were no big towns or cities, but there would have been small towns and dozens and dozens of villages, villages with the sort of names you might find in novels. Why in the imagining of the view from Pilsdon Pen was there never an imagining of all the places from where you might have seen it?

Perhaps it was a tunnel vision, or being above ground, corridor vision. All that mattered was that distant point and what lay beyond it, the foreground and middle ground did not exist.

Looking back, there is almost a sense of regret. How much delight might there have been for a child who looked at a map and then tried to imagine all of the places he could see beyond?

Looking back, there is also an awareness of how much that distant hilltop meant to my father, its significance being not that it stood higher than the hills in between us, but that it stood above Lyme Regis, his single most favourite place on Earth.

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Cures from a bottle

Posted on 18th February 2021 by Ian

Sainsbury’s has a startling range of bottles of olive oil. How many types of olive oil do people need? Can most of the customers surveying the choices tell the difference between one sort and the other?

When I was a child, we used to have a bottle of olive oil in the house, but it was in the bathroom cupboard and not the kitchen. A little would be warmed and drops put into the ear of my baby sister if she had earache. I’m not sure if it was efficacious, or even if it was safe, but it was part of the folk wisdom of our community. It’s hard to imagine that we were the best customers of the olive oil business.

Olive oil was not the only questionable medication in our house. There was always a bottle of rose hip syrup, presumably bought from a supermarket or a chemist’s shop, for there would have been no other options. Rose hip syrup now is available from health shops, which suggests that our use of it was probably not something suggested by Dr Ingram, the chain-smoking saintly country doctor who literally kept alive members of our family and who had time to make unannounced calls to our house when I suffered severe asthma.

Olive oil was for external use and rose hip syrup had a benign taste.  Less tasty was a yeast extract of some sort that came in a large tin and had the consistency of Marmite without any of its charm.  A dessert-spoonful was considered to be beneficial to children.

Some of the other concoctions taken for health were not so pleasant, and might have been downright dangerous.

There were cough mixtures which seemed to be bought on the basis of how unpleasant it tasted. Syrup of figs was still sold to ensure the regular functioning of the digestive system. Mercifully, I was able to rely upon others for accounts of its vile taste. Liver salts were effective, a tin of Andrews was always in the cupboard. There was also a tin of something called Eno’s, which seemed fizzier than Andrews.

In retrospect, the alarming medication was kaolin and morphine: the kaolin to settle the upset stomach, the morphine to settle the pain. I don’t even think it required a prescription. A bottle of medicine containing morphine would very quickly disappear from the shelves in more addictive times.

Perhaps the homespun cures were rooted in days before the NHS. How much money was spent on medications of dubious efficacy is incalculable.

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Remembering a storyteller on Ash Wednesday

Posted on 17th February 2021 by Ian

Suffering asthma severe enough to be dispatched from my Somerset home to the pure air of Dartmoor, I remember days on the moor when the outside world could have ceased to exist, the snow was so deep, Then the winter would break and the snow would clear to reveal the brown greenness of the growth beneath.

The school lay in a fold in the hills, three miles from the village of Manaton, four from Widecombe. It was unreachable without crossing open moorland in some direction.  Yet the spartan regime of the fundamentalist education could detract nothing from the beauty of the place; there was a magical quality in the valleys and the tors and the place names.

Sally Vickers’ Mr Golightly’s Holiday captures a profound sense of the moor, with all its contradictions, its beauty and brutality, its earthiness and transcendence.

For Vickers, it is the stage on which to ask big questions. The casual sex, drinking and backbiting of the characters he meets are not sufficient to pull Mr Golightly completely from his thoughts or his encounters with the profound.

Mr Golightly goes to the moor in the spring.  He would have enjoyed the stark scenery of the winter, though might have recoiled at seeing corpses of animals that had not survived the short, dark days.

It is in this place of contradictions that Mr Golightly ponders the loss of his son, like himself, a storyteller who once spent forty days in a place as remote as the moor:

In times past, when he had been quick to anger and quicker still to take vengeance, there was no doubt he commanded more respect. Nowadays, there was a tendency to treat him as a busted flush, a toothless tiger . . .

. .  annoying questions were goads, the latest seeming to point mockingly at the difficulty Mr Golightly felt himself labouring under. ‘Unicorns’ were the stuff of fiction – a medium in which he was stuck fast.

But the question provoked another: was a unicorn less ‘real’ for being fabulous? There were those – poets and artists – who had ‘bound’ the unicorn, rendering the imaginal creature as distinct and palpable as if they had seen and conversed with it. Some might say – his son had been one – that it was in the artefact of the ‘impossible’ that reality showed its true reach.

Looking outside he saw a spider’s web, one of many whose delicate dentations decked the cottage windows. The spider spun its web simply to trap flies – but what was designed by nature for a natural function may take on more than nature’s ends. The fragile structure had caught, in its subtle mesh, the drops of rain from a morning shower and the diamond beads shone in the sun, fragments of some larger, profounder, more luminous light, reflecting the mysterious power of creation to recreate, from its own forms, an infinite scintillation of possibilities; possibilities which gestured at realms far beyond the demands of immediate survival.

Why should that wholly practical, sticky emanation, devised by evolution to trap the food to fill the hungry spider’s belly, be able also to catch the human imagination and draw in the impressionable heart? The power of the universe to create and ascend beyond itself was also part of the reality of things – every bit as ‘real’ as the dead fly in the spider’s maw.

And had not his son, his own dearest creation, been just such a spinner of spells, a weaver of stories to catch human hearts?

On  a mild February day, Mr Golightly would have delighted in the remote place.

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December taste on Shrove Tuesday

Posted on 16th February 2021 by Ian

If the sense of smell is deeply connected with memory, is there a similar connection between memory and the sense of taste?

Biting into a Cadbury’s Twirl, there was a moment of being transported back in time, perhaps more than fifty years.

It was one of those days at the dog end of the Christmas holidays. It was at a time when people had Christmas Day and Boxing Day off and the world then returned to work, so the school holidays that ran into January were a dead time. The imagined magic of Christmas was past, the decorations were looking tired, the Christmas card curled at the corners, the toys that had been greeted with glee on Christmas morning had already lost some of their sparkle.

Chocolate variety packs were a special treat, no more than one might have been expected at Christmas and the chocolate in my variety pack  had mostly been eaten. The bars were all of a miniature size and the taste of the Twirl revived the moment of biting into the Flake that had come in the pack.

The Flake was perhaps half, perhaps a third of the normal size of a Flake bar. The chocolate was in a yellow cellophane wrapper. There were crumbs of chocolate to be carefully caught as the wrapper was opened. Flake bars were not common and deserved to be eaten with relish, each bite being savoured.

But why should such a moment surface into consciousness some two months after Christmas?

Perhaps thoughts of Shrove Tuesday carries subliminal messages about missing chocolate. As someone who usually gave up chocolate for the season of Lent, a last taste of chocolate for forty-six days would have been a moment not to miss. More likely, it is the mood of despondency that was captured by the taste of the chocolate.

In those post-Christmas days, there was a sense of gloom as the winter stretched ahead. It would be weeks before the light and the weather permitted the outdoor life loved by a small boy. There would be weeks of going to school and coming home and there being nothing to do. There would be weeks of not being able to go out with friends.

Oddly, those distant year end days seem an anticipation of lockdown life. Fifty years ago, there would still have been the irrepressible optimism that fills the mind of a child. Now there is just a hope that sooner or later the times must change.

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