A Somerset Lad

In childhood years, we thought the railway line that passed by my grandfather’s farm at Pibsbury was the most important line in the country.

As a teenager,  I remember someone from elsewhere challenging my description of the railway as “the Taunton to Paddington line.”

‘No, it’s not,” I was told, “it’s the Penzance line.”

Undoubtedly, there were times when the train ran non-stop from Paddington to Taunton before going on to other places, but it became hard to imagine that there was once an express service from London to Somerset; hard to imagine thar Taunton station once required a multiplicity of platforms.

I remember a train journey that must have been long after that era, for the train had stopped at Castle Cary in east Somerset on its journey from the capital.  It must have been winter time, for beyond the carriage windows there was darkness. Pulling out from the lights of Castle Cary, the British Rail diesel locomotive gathered speed as it rolled westward.

In former times, the progress along the line would have been monitored by the stations passed. There would have been the halt at Alford and the stations at Keinton Mandeville and Charlton Mackrell. In the daylight, the crossing of Somerton Viaduct would have been obvious, before passing the town’s station and going into the long tunnel. Emerging from the tunnel there would have been the little station serving Long Sutton and Pitney, then Langport East station, before Langport Viaduct and the flat moorland leading to Athelney. The cuttings after Athelney would have been passed before the train ran beside the Bridgwater and Taunton Canal, reaching Creech Saint Michael and then arriving in the county town.

Such a possible marking of the journey was long past, no station remained between Castle Cary and Taunton. The only certain landmark was the tunnel at Somerton; the noise of the train reverberating from the walls. Beyond that point, progress was hard to judge.

Not wearing a watch in those days and finding the passing of time hard to judge, there was a feeling that it was time to move my book-filled suitcase to the door. The 1970s British Rail carriage was sparsely filled; it was not as though there was a crowd to  negotiate, but there was always an irrational fear of still being aboard the train when it pulled out of the destination station.

Clearly, judgement of time and distance was awry, for having slid back the door from the seating area to reach the open area at the carriage doors, there seemed an interminable wait before Taunton was reached. Feeling faintly ridiculous at having moved so early, and fearing that someone might wonder what had prompted such strange behaviour, I stared earnestly out into the impenetrable darkness, as if knowing something unknown to anyone else on the train.

Opening a 1922 edition of Bradshaw’s Railway Guide, recalled that journey, recalled the places passed in the darkness, and, confirmed what I knew as a child, being the first page of Bradshaw, our line was undoubtedly the premier line.

I must declare an interest. My mother’s family have been farmers for generations, raising stock, milking cows, growing crops, in a small area of Somerset, definitely since the Eighteenth Century, and probably for centuries prior to their recorded activities on the land.

Perhaps, then, I have accumulated centuries of prejudice against those who would presume to criticise my family.

I know of no-one who cared more about animals, or had a greater love for the natural world around him, than my late grandfather. I would defy anyone to claim they were better at caring for animals than a man who called each of the twenty cows in his dairy herd by name, or that they were better environmentalists than someone who would spend cold winter days laying hedgerows by hand.

It is galling, then, to see vegans present themselves as people who care for animals and as people who protect the environment. They do neither.

Human beings have been omnivores since prehistoric times. An omnivorous diet has not only been what has sustained humanity through millennia, it is what permits the survival of countless millions of people. Fishing communities, indigenous peoples in inhospitable terrains, there are numerous examples that could be cited of lives that could not continue without animal produce.

Veganism is not an option for many people, nor should it be for those who believe in the conservation of rural landscapes.

William Blake’s ‘Green and pleasant land’ was not something that occurred by chance, it arose from centuries of work by farmers, hard work, often unrewarding work. The vegan vision is of numerous landscapes gone to waste, for many areas are suitable only for grazing and without the work that goes into sustaining that grazing will become places of thistles and docks. The vegan vision is of the disappearance of livestock, for no-one can afford to maintain stock for no reason. The vegan vision would bring the destruction of rural England, the end of farming across much of the country.

There is an unscientific anthropomorphism in vegan objections to farming. Animals are accorded a status equal to that of humans. Given the choice between saving the life of a human and that of an animal, some vegans give the impression that they would save the latter.

Inevitably, vegan choices are choices that affect market prices, but they would be loath to accept that their desire for imported foodstuffs such as rice inevitably affects the cost of those staples for poorer people. Nor do they acknowledge that their diet requires the considerable processing of foods.

If vegans wish to pursue their anti-environmental lifestyle, rejecting millennia of human development, that’s their choice. I’m not going to go around putting up posters highlighting the destruction they would bring, perhaps it is too much to expect that they would show a similar tolerance in return.