A Somerset Lad

Before six o’clock on an August morning and there is the sound of children’s voices coming down the road. Perhaps it is the warm weather prompting people to venture out early. With the windows open, the morning news is audible from the next door neighbour’s radio. Looking across toward Dorset, the lack of rain has turned the landscape more gold than green.

It was such mornings as this which seemed special in my childhood years, the times when the world was occupied only by the early risers and when the sights and sounds of workaday life were yet to appear.

Perhaps it was growing up in this rural village distant from large towns or cities that helped preserve the quietness of the hours before 7 o’clock. The village still remains too distant for its tranquility to be broken by commuters setting out on their daily journeys, instead the earliness is the space of farmers embarking upon their day’s work, and children enjoying the days of their summer holidays.

In childhood days, on some farms, cattle would have been inside after the milking of the night before. Once morning milking was complete, they would have been turned out to pasture for the day. If meadows were not contiguous to the farm, they would have been moved sedately along the road, always a source of frustration for the odd person who might have wished to be going somewhere.

Traffic in those times would have chiefly been farm vehicles, grey Massey Ferguson tractors, or perhaps blue Fords with cabs. Land Rovers were battered, canvas-roofed, with little by way of comfort in the cab, ventilation might have required opening vents at the front. The single windscreen wiper had an electric motor, but a small arm projecting from the motor allowed the driver to operate the wiper by hand. The indicators were of the semaphore variety, offering little warning to any car driver who might have been following.

The beauty of those early mornings was the sense of there being ample time, no matter what might need to be done in the day ahead, there were many hours in which to achieve it. Time before seven o’clock in the morning seemed to move much more slowly, there was less requirement to rush, less stress in completing task. Once the clock moved towards eight, the movement of the hands began to accelerate.

There were people in those mornings who became invisible in later hours. Perhaps once the tasks demanding movement beyond their own farm were completed, they stayed within their own yard. Perhaps encountering no-one and being expected to speak to no-one suited their inclination. Perhaps such people would have enjoyed the sound of voices in the morning.

Sunday evening – once it would have seemed a moment of disappointment.

Weekends in Somerset in my teenage years had a format.  It was a format that cannot have been prolonged or frequent, but which seemed to have a quality never recaptured in later years.

Perhaps it was the second half of 1978, for it could have been neither much earlier nor much later.  There was a routine, a pattern, a sequence that shaped the hours from Friday until Sunday evening.

Sixth form college discos and birthday parties were always on a Thursday, perhaps the venues were cheaper, so there would be no going out at the weekends.

Friday night was spent listening to Tommy Vance’s Rock Show on BBC Radio 1, ‘TV on the radio’, declared the slogan. It was ostensibly a time spent working on ‘A’ level studies, though examiners would later agree that more time had been spent listening to music than on reading books.

Saturday mornings were a lazy time.

At two o’clock the radio would be retuned to BBC Radio 2 for the sports coverage, real attention being paid from four o’clock onwards when there would be live commentary from the second half of a featured Division 1 match.

In an age of constant live football coverage, it is hard to imagine it then being such a rarity. At five o’clock, the kitchen would be filled with the sound of the theme tune of Sports Report and the unmistakable voice of James Alexander Gordon would read the classified football results. Even if one missed an actual score, the inflection of his voice would indicate how the match had finished.

Saturday evening television was from a time when BBC programmes might attract tens of millions of viewers. There was The Generation Game, and Parkinson and Match of the Day.

Looking back, it’s hard to imagine why so many watched The Generation Game, even Bruce, the ever cheerful presenter must have felt frequent cringe moments. But when there are only three television channels, only one television in the house, and there is not much money to go out  do anything else, there was little alternative.

Late on Saturday night, there would be the Hammer House of Horror or Westerns where the bad guys would commit some heinous crime and would be tracked down and shot by the good guys. There was something unsatisfactory in the films where the bad guys did not get shot.

Sunday morning was a time for sleeping. Turning on the radio at midday, the Old Record Club would challenge the recall of songs and artists while the Sunday lunch was being cooked. At two o’clock, the music of Annie Nightingale’s programme  accompanied the doldrums of a Sunday afternoon. By evening time, there was a realisation that the work attempted while listening to Tommy Vance was still unfinished.

It would be difficult to pretend that there was much by the way of ‘enjoyment’ in such weekends; there was never anything remarkable, never anything exciting, never anything that might have made one say on Monday morning, ‘do you know where I went?’

Yet, in the nothingness, there was a contentment.