A Somerset Lad

Today was spent moving to another apartment, a place by myself. It comes fully furnished, right down to every electrical appliance and the cutlery in the kitchen drawers. It is the the fifteenth change of address in forty years (and that doesn’t include student years).

In the previous twenty years, I moved only once, it was fifty-five years ago in 1967.

To a six year old, the suggestion that we move from my grandfather’s farm, to a village of which I had never heard, was one that brought many tears. I can clearly recall standing in my grandmother’s kitchen saying that I did not want to move, that I would not move.

Even though I would not have been worried at leaving the primary school where the infant teacher was a persistent bully, I was worried at the thought of starting another school. High Ham was no more than three or four miles away, but might have been another country. The daily life of the farm to which I was accustomed would be lost and gone forever.

Of course, the protests of a six year old boy were of no avail and the day for the move seemed to come all too quickly.

It was a Saturday and the coal lorry belonging to Charlie Brewer from Somerton was brushed down to carry our furniture. Dot Lucey, a friend of my mother came to lend a hand for the day and it all seemed to be completed in a fraction of the time required for my own house moves in more recent times: we probably had a fraction of the stuff that most households now accumulate.

The house was different from the farmhouse in which we had lived. It was semi-detached and although, like the farmhouse, it had an outside toilet, it did have a bathroom, something absent from our farm dwelling. It belonged to Langport Rural District Council and had been built in 1926. For a 1920s house, it was probably not bad, thick walls and fireplaces in both of the downstairs rooms made it warmer than many homes. The toilet was the coldest of places though, in the winter temperatures we then experienced a paraffin heater would be left in the toilet to prevent the water in the cistern and bowl freezing.

The house was at the end of a row. Beyond it, in front, and behind, there were open fields. The location seemed only to exacerbate a small boy’s sense of isolation, a sense of being in a different world.

On Monday, the moment came to start at the village primary school. Standing with Miss Everitt as she asked if there was anyone I knew is a moment fresh in the memory.

It is odd that it is fifty-five years ago. It seems such a long time and no time at all.

There were men in the village as wide as the proverbial barn door, men who would pick up a hundredweight sack of corn and stand with it on their shoulder while talking to friends. There were men who would work around the clock and seem as energetic on the second morning as they had been on the first. There were men who would each prodigious amounts of fried food, potatoes, butter, white bread, red meat, full cream milk, biscuits, cake, and anything else that offered large amounts of everything unhealthy, and still be as lean as they had been in teenage years.

From the waking moment, at six o’clock or earlier, there was work to be done. There were cows to be milked, animals to be fed, work enough for two days before the evening came. Only if the weather was bad or darkness had fallen would there be a retreat inside to spend time with paperwork spread out on the kitchen table, paperwork that seemed to increase year upon year.

Despite the massive consumption of calories, despite eating food that people would not be told to avoid, obesity seemed something rare. Certainly, some farmers seemed as wide as they were tall, but watch them pick up something and you quickly realized how much of the weight was muscle. Watch them wield a sledge hammer to knock in fencing posts or move a trailer by hand in order to hitch it up, and the reason for the tightness of shirts and jackets became apparent.

The idea of taking time every morning to drive somewhere to exercise to stay as fit as they already were would have seemed a strange way of using an hour. The idea that you needed to park as close as possible to the doorway of the place so as not to have to walk would have seemed even stranger.

Passing a gym at seven o’clock each morning, it seems odd that people have to dress up to get sweaty. If it is just about exercise and fitness, why does there have to be a certain mode of dress? Why does there have to be mirrors? Why does there have to be music?

Were I looking for farmhands, I would not want to give many of them jobs, they haven’t the barn door build and they seem to spend much of their time watching each other.

Having just had a couple of Mr Kipling cakes for supper, I rest content in being the twelve stone I was when I was twenty-nine. I discovered that the secret was not to go to the gym, but to follow the Darragh Ó Briain diet book. He says it has two pages, the first says, “eat less,” the second page says, “exercise more.”

Mature Cheddar cheese, Branston Pickle, a handful of baby tomatoes, pickled beetroot, granary bread with full cream Irish butter, probably not the healthiest of teas, but one that has a Sunday feeling about it. (Perhaps a wedge of fruit cake should have been added, but it would have been an unnecessary addition of calories).

To be honest, it is a tea that I probably have rather too often, justifying to myself the large amounts of cheese eaten by reference to the half dozen baby tomatoes which must surely balance out the negative effects of the cheese. (And pickled beetroot must surely stand on the side of the angels when it comes to the balance of the good and the bad foodstuffs).

Teatime on a Sunday used to be different from teatime on other days, perhaps it was an economic matter, treats could only be afforded on one day of the week.

Sunday was a day when there might have been fruit cake. Not slices from the sort of round cake that might have been iced at Christmas, but slices from a rectangular, square-ended cake baked on a base of paper. Choosing the right slice was important if one wanted a cherry.

Sunday was a day when there might have been ice cream. The Wall’s ice cream van would visit the village on a Sunday afternoon and a block of vanilla might have been bought. It would be served with tinned sliced peaches and the dish would have been scraped for every last taste.

Sunday was a day when there might have been boiled eggs. There was no reason why there could not have been boiled eggs on any other day, eggs were a thing in abundant supply. Perhaps it was that there was more leisure on a Sunday teatime for boiling eggs and making toast. The eggs had to be soft-boiled, runny yolks, no more than four minutes in the pan. Hard-boiled eggs were no use for the sliced toast that became bread soldiers.

Occasionally, Sunday might have been a day when there were toasted crumpets. Presumably, crumpets now include preservatives of some sort that extend their shelf life, for they do not now have the flavour they seemed once to possess.

Perhaps it is the flavours that are now missing. There was a richness of taste seems to have become hard to find, even bread and butter would taste special.