A Somerset Lad

Postman Pat was a favourite in our house in the early 90s.  We would sit and read stories and watch videos of life in Greendale and when driving through Cumbria would tell imagined stories of the Greendale community living their lives in the villages and lanes passed by the M6 motorway.

Postman Pat had the power to evoke memories of my childhood days in Somerset. Tthe characters were not so different from  those in any English village and the way of life and the daily concerns corresponded with those of countless communities across the country.  Perhaps the success of Postman Pat rested  on the fact that children could identify with the stories.

There was one story that always had a melancholic touch to it.

It was read to a boy a month short of his third birthday in France in September 1993 and told of Postman Pat helping with the harvest while the children played in the field.  It seemed odd that children in story books could play in mown wheat fields without their shins being scratched by the stubble.  Stubble in Somerset required shins to be washed in hot soapy water with a generous dash of Dettol thrown into it.

It wasn’t the stubble that was melancholic, though, it was Postman Pat’s loss of his cap.  Helping with the harvest, he inadvertently leaves his cap down, and it disappears.  Months later, when a bale of straw is cut open in deep midwinter, the cap reappears, it had gone through the baler.

Reading the story on a September day, when even France was turning towards autumn, there was a realization that the harvest was past and that the dark days approached.

There are times deep in December when Postman Pat’s summer days seem like a dreamtime, another age in a different world.

The finding of Postman Pat’s cap in the story was intended as a funny epilogue to amuse attentive young ears, something at which it was very successful.

Reading it those twenty-nine years ago, it seemed symbolic of the dying of the year, the passing of the happy times.  (Retrojection adds to the way in which memories are perceived: the months that followed were particularly unhappy and the thoughts evoked by the story became remembered as a prologue of the times that followed).

The cap should have served as a reminder that there are seasons other than winter, and that days in corn fields were as much part of life as snow and ice – but, being a melancholic, I overlooked the light and warmth.

It was on this day in 1944 that the aircraft carrying the American bandleader Glenn Miller. It would have been three days before my late father’s eighth birthday, yet decades later he would talk about the music of Glenn Miller.

Perhaps the music infused popular wartime culture to the extent that a primary schoolboy remembered it, perhaps there was also a subliminal factor at work.

My father often recalled a poem he had learned in childhood days. It had a sinister, threatening tone, and it had haunted him as a boy. For as long as I could remember, he  expressed the wish that it had not been taught to him.

The poem Antigonish was written by William Hughes Mearns, an American writer, in 1899 and subsequently re-published with various revisions:

As I was going up the stair
I met a man who wasn’t there!
He wasn’t there again today,
Oh how I wish he’d go away!”

When I came home last night at three,
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall,
I couldn’t see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don’t you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don’t slam the door…

Last night I saw upon the stair,
A little man who wasn’t there,
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away

The likelihood of a wartime London schoolboy encountering the work of a poem written for Harvard seemed slim, books were in short supply and American poetry books in London would have been a rarity.

I discovered that the explanation of his remembering the lines probably lay in it having been recorded by the Glenn Miller Orchestra in 1939, with Tex Beneke singing the lyrics.

In a world where death and destruction were daily realities, haunting songs might have made a deep impression upon a young boy.

Perhaps the fear felt at “The little man who wasn’t there” was an encapsulation of the fear of the dark and sinister world that existed beyond the front door of the boy’s home in Chiswick in west London. It was a house where his grandfather had died from injuries received when the local dairy had been bombed in February 1944. Perhaps it was an expression of the fear that must have filled the boy’s mind when his fireman father returned from firefighting duties and told the adult members of the family of the duties of the grim duties of the previous night. Rather than being a comfort to the boy, perhaps the music of the Glenn Miller Orchestra had added to the fears.

A friend is going home to Australia for Christmas. To someone for whom Australia is a land in the imagination, it seems something from a childhood dream.

Ideas of Australia had come from a jigsaw puzzle. Perhaps it had come as a Christmas present. Unlike most jigsaw puzzles, it was not square or rectangular, but was the shape of Australia itself.

For a primary school-aged boy, the shape made the puzzle more interesting, putting in the pieces that formed the outline of the Australian coast. The puzzle was very visual, there were pictures of Australian wildlife: koalas, kangaroos, and other creatures that seemed very exotic to a child in 1960s England, together with important landmarks, like the Sydney Opera House.

The puzzle’s most intriguing place of all was called “Woomera.”

The picture beside the placename was of a rocket blasting off and I was told that it was the base for Britain’s space programme. When the news seemed full of stories about the United States’ Apollo missions and when Mission Control Houston and the Cape Canaveral launch site, the thought that Britain might have its own spacecraft caught the imagination of a young boy.

Of course, Britain’s space programme was not the stuff of boyhood speculation, Woomera was more a missile testing range than a rocket base, there would be no British spaceships heading for the Moon.

There had lingered in the thoughts of a schoolboy the idea that his country was still a major power. It had only been a generation before that Winston Churchill has boasted of the country having five million men in the armed forces. It had only been a generation before that a quarter of the map of the world had been coloured pink. It had only been a decade before that Britain had still celebrated an annual Empire Day.

Rather than inspiring a false confidence, Woomera should have been an indicator of the way in which Britain’s place in the world had changed. No longer was there an area shaded pink that might provide the location for a rocket base, instead there was a dependence upon a friendly dominion.

To a schoolboy, it seemed baffling that a country that had won two world wars should have become so weak; no-one explained that it was the winning of the wars that had brought the weakness, draining the country of its reserves. Even if the realities of the post-war world had been explained, such economic niceties would have been lost on the boy making the jigsaw puzzle.

Woomera remains a word that is evocative of Dan Dare and the space travellers of the comics, a place significant in the imagination, of a place which did not belong to the world beyond the living room where the jigsaw was made.