A Somerset Lad

The photograph is my favourite from my childhood. It dates from perhaps the spring or summer of 1963. It is taken beside the corrugated iron door of the shed that was used as a garage for cars on the home farm in Pibsbury, the yard being needed to be clear for agricultural vehicles.

Sixty years later, the garage still stands there, still has corrugated iron doors, and is still used each day. Seeing it each time I return to the farm creates a sense of continuity,

The photograph shows a small boy, two or three years old, dressed in a pullover and tartan trousers and wearing the most outlandish wig, giving him a hairstyle that would compete with that of Albert Einstein on a bad hair day.

The wig is hardly something one would expect to find on a small Somerset farm in the early-1960s. Rural Somerset was nothing if not conservative and there would not have been much demand for wigs, particularly wigs that did not conform with traditional ideas of style and elegance. Spiky, blond hair was not something that might have been encountered in the Langport era in 1963.

The photograph has been in circulation among members of our family for the past sixty years. For more than five decades, the boy pictured was told that the wig had belonged to an aunt who lived on the home farm.

In a county where the arrival of the hippies in the late 1960s had brought an awareness that life could be lived in many and diverse ways and that a blond wig was quite conventional when compared with the garb and hairstyles preferred by the new arrivals in our county. It seemed odd that my aunt, who worked for Clark’s Shoes would have identified with the hippies, but the photograph seemed proof of hidden radical inclinations.

Of course, 1963 was too early for the hippies to have been on the English scene, and who had suggested the wig had anything to do them? A boy had made an assumption on the basis of what he saw around him at the time he was asking questions.

One morning, a few years ago, I sat drinking tea with my aunt who was said to have been owner of the wig. ‘There is a photo of me, I wearing a spiky blond wig: was that yours?’

‘It was, it was part of the costume for the carnival club.’

More than fifty years of imagining her a secret radical had gone in a moment. The boy in the wig continues to live in the mind of the person he became.

He is thirty-two years dead tomorrow. Many memories linger, a quiet man, a gentle man, a stoic, a grandfather loved by us all. A picture of him from 1975 captures a sense of him.

Grandad stands on the left-hand side of the photograph below, a broad-shouldered man in flat cap, sleeveless pullover, white shirt, brown trousers and heavy black boots. The nine men with him include my two uncles.  It is threshing time and every available hand was needed.

He was a well-built man, so too were the machines with which he worked, except they had all seen better days. The machines were old, nursed along by affection and necessity. Sometimes things would slip, shear, break; running repairs were accepted as a normal part of the working day.

The gathering for the threshing was necessary because Grandad still used a reaper-binder. I remember one morning when he had had brought it to a field of barley, two or three men with him to assist with the harvest.

It was a labour intensive business, one man to drive the Fordson tractor, one man to operate the binder, one or two men to follow behind, picking up the sheaves and putting them into stooks. It was a day that could not be lost, for the other men had their own work to do.

Hardly had the day started when the binder stopped. The blades were not working, the barley was not being cut. Long years of experience of the machine meant Grandad straightaway knew the problem. As he corrected the fault, something slipped and he gashed his hand. A handkerchief was taken from his pocket to cover the wound, he tied it around with binder twine and the day’s work proceeded.

By the end of the day, no part of the handkerchief was left white. Returning to the farm at evening time, my father was waiting to collect me. Seeing my grandfather’s hand, he suggested a visit to the local doctor’s surgery, where emergency attention for local farmers was part of the everyday activity. The cut required fourteen stitches to close it. It was a matter of fact, not something for comment: we did not mention it.

Grandad was one of those few farmers who actually retired, though his death at the age of seventy-seven meant there were not many years away from the hard daily labours of the land. In the photograph, he would have been sixty-one years old, as solidly built as the machines which still appear at the vintage shows.

The girl was wearing a pair of classic black and white basketball boots. The wearing of such incurred the displeasure of the deputy principal and she was required to phone home from the school office and ask that her mother bring to the school a pair of shoes approved for use with the school uniform.

Reflecting on memories of fifty years ago, I thought I should have liked such a pair of basketball boots. Perhaps they would not have evoked such painful recollections as the black plimsolls that I had.

There were people in the school who had lace-up versions of such shoes, but for most of us the elasticated version was used for those activities which filled me with a sense of dread and foreboding. Black fabric and rubber soles, they provided little support for the feet of someone who always walked awkwardly.

Our plimsolls were worn for physical activities, gymnastics, basketball, running; things that were approached with delight by some people, but not those of us who had no aptitude for anything that demanded speed or agility.

The problem with plimsolls was that it was not even possible to drag out the time putting them on, to pull on each took no more than a couple of seconds, and then we were expected to gather around the teacher to listen with enthusiasm to the instructions that the teacher would give.

The capacity of a pair of canvas shoes to cause a feeling of unease, fifty after such footwear was last worn, suggests that physical education really did instill a feeling of fear into the hearts of many of us.

The worst part of PE was rarely the game itself. There was nothing inherently wrong with basketball in the school gym, or athletics on the field, or our attempts at gymnastic manouvres, the pain came with the attitude of the teachers. Those of us not good at the prescribed activities were subject to belittling and sometimes even insults.

The worst treatment ever (albeit we were wearing football boots that day) came from a teacher who decided to try to teach first form boys the rudiments of rugby, despite the fact that we did not attend a rugby-playing school. One boy displayed a lack of skill in his attempt at kicking a rugby ball, something he had probably never done before in his life, when the teacher ran up from behind the boy and kicked him in the buttocks with such force that the boy was sent stumbling forward.

When those charged with caring for the health of the nation complain about the high incidence of obesity among middle aged Englishmen, they might ask themselves why there is an aversion to physical activity.

If a pair of plimsolls can bring painful memories from the early-1970s for me, then how many more people had similar experiences?

A colleague has a Seventeenth Century flintlock musket standing in the corner of his classroom. In need of restoration, we have been trying to discover something of its history. It has more the appearance of a piece of art than of a lethal weapon. On his farm at home, locked securely away, he says he has a modern shotgun with which to defend livestock.

When I was a child, shotguns were an everyday sight.

At our family home farm at Pibsbury, between Long Sutton and Langport, there is a passageway that runs between the farmhouse and the dairy. It was a repository for miscellaneous ‘useful’ items placed there by my grandfather, it was the place where the shotgun was to be found. A conventional 12-bore in calibre, its double-barrels were a polished, dull black and the wooden stock was a rich chestnut colour. The gun had a frightening fascination for a small boy, it meant both danger and safety.

There were guns in the locality that were used for game, the shooting of rabbits, or pigeons, or pheasants. Occasionally, there would be clay pigeon or skeet shooting, but on most farms the gun was a utilitarian piece of equipment. Perhaps cartridges were expensive, perhaps there was not much time to put the guns to other uses, perhaps there was not a great inclination to do so, but the shotgun would only have been lifted against foxes and rats.

Words of warning regarding the shotgun brought a hesitation about approaching it, and certainly there would have been no thought of ever touching it, even though to have picked it up would have brought no danger, live cartridges were stored beyond the reach of inquisitive hands. Dead cartridges might sometimes have been found when walking the fields after someone had crossed in pursuit of game. Orange or blue, brass caps with the smell of cordite, there was a strange sense of wonder in handling a cartridge, to imagine that something so inconsequential could have such a devastating impact.

Never was there ever a suggestion that a gun might be used to defend oneself against a threat from another person, although there must always have been an awareness of that possibility; the Western films that occupied much of the air time in the 1960s frequently depicted cowboys firing shotguns. Yet the shotgun always brought a sense of security, perhaps it derived from those childhood memories.

It is hard to imagine a Seventeenth Century flintlock evoking similar feelings, by the time it was loaded the fox would have killed half of the henhouse.