A Somerset Lad

We laughed at the superstitions we used to have, not that superstitions seemed ever to be about anything happy. Death and misfortune seemed generally to be the order of the day for those who failed to observe the necessary precautions.

Owls were the worst omen in our rural community. They were said to be the call of the dead.

One Saturday this time of the year, my parents were out in the garden as the light was dying. As would be the wont of owls, one flew low across the field beyond the garden fence. Alarmed at the sight, I ran inside to find refuge in the television.

BBC Final Score programme was broadcasting sports results from around Britain. It would have included results from matches involving Scottish teams whose names were poetry – clubs like Selkirk and Hawick and Stewart’s Melville FP. They were rugby clubs of big, softly spoken Scots whose tries and penalties were as worthy of note as goals scored by the great soccer clubs.

It was a refuge from a deathly owl because Saturday teatimes seemed always to be moments of contentment.  There would be television programmes to watch and still the vast emptiness of Sunday to follow. Only when Annie Nightingale began her Radio 1 programme after dinner on Sunday would the reality of the approaching Monday strike home.

Sometimes there are moments when life seems to pause, when sights and sounds might be recalled with a freshness that denies their age.

Perhaps it’s simply a vindication of Einstein’s contention that time happens all at once and that the linear sequence we observe is no more than a matter of convenience.

Perhaps the result of Selkirk against Hawick on a black and white television screen seems at a paused moment because that is the case. If the whole of time is at one moment, then there is no replay nor a fast forward, each second of it is now.

If Einstein was right then the human aspiration to travel in time will never be possible, Doctor Who will forever be a television fantasy.

Not that one would wish to contradict one of the greatest intellects in human history, but it would be sad if there were never ever to be the opportunity to occupy any moment other than the here and now.

The superstitions regarding mortality, among them owls being the call of the dead, might be entirely nonsensical, but they point to a human need for the past and the future to be something other than the present.

Perhaps among the writings of Freud or those of Jung, there is an explanation.

Why are there certain images from childhood that recur in the memory? They are not images from significant moments, they are not images from occasions shared with family and friends, instead they are random and often ill-defined. Some cannot be located in a place or a time. The content of the images is not susceptible to either verification or falsification because no-one else recalls them.

One that recurs is a glimpse of a figure in the night. It is illogical that it should be troubling, perhaps its potency is in its evocation of childhood fears of the unknown.

It is the summer of 1969. The weather has been warm and dry. I am with an aunt and uncle and five cousins on a camping holiday in Charmouth in Dorset.

Should I return to Charmouth, I believe I could find the spot where we camped. The site was beside the River Char, a bridge crossed the river and from the site it was possible to walk to the river bank and under the bridge.

A group of six children aged between five and nine years of age on a camping holiday are not likely to go to sleep peacefully at night time and undoubtedly there were silly tales of ghouls and ghosts.

Whatever conversations had taken place, a memory remains from the early hours of a morning.

The tent was large, three bedrooms, a store area, and a living area, so that what might be seen by one person might have been invisible to most of the others. In memory, I hear sounds from outside and stand up to look out through the mesh window of the room at the front of the tent.

Outside in the gloom, there is the silhouette of a figure who appears to be standing looking in.

I remember feeling frightened and hastily getting back into my sleeping bag. I do not recall sharing the experience, or perhaps I did and the story was dismissed.

The only place where I have found a story that captures the intensity of that childhood feeling is Chaim Potok’s My Name is Asher Lev which captures in a paragraph the intensity of that childhood feeling:

“He came to me that night out of the woods, my mythic ancestor, huge, mountainous, dressed in his dark caftan and fur-trimmed cap, pounding his way through the trees on his Russian master’s estate, the earth shaking, the mountains quiver­ing, thunder in his voice. I could not hear what he said. I woke in dread and lay very still, listening to the darkness. I needed to go to the bathroom but I was afraid to leave the bed. I moved down beneath the blanket and slept and then, as if my moment awake had been an intermission between acts of an authored. play, saw him again plowing toward me through giant cedars. I woke and went to the bathroom. I stood in the bathroom, shiver­ing. I did not want to go back to my bed. I stood listening to the night, then went through the hallway to the living room. It was dark and hushed and I could hear the sounds of night traffic through the window. I opened the slats of the Venetian blind and peered between them at the street below. It was a clear night. I could not see the moon, but a clear cold blue-white light lay like a ghostly sheen over the parkway and cast the shadows of buildings and trees across the sidewalks. I saw a man walking beneath the trees. He was a man of medium height with a dark beard, a dark coat, and an ordinary dark hat. I saw him walking in the shadows of the trees. Then I did not see him. Then I saw him again, walking slowly beneath the trees. Then he was gone again and I did not know if I was seeing him or not, if I had been asleep before and was awake now, or if I had been awake before and was dreaming now.   Then I saw him again, walking slowly, alone; then he entered, a shadow and was gone. I do not remember going back to bed. I only remember waking in the morning and staring up at the white ceiling of my room and feeling light and disembodied, as if I were floating on the shadows cast by dark trees beneath a moon.”

When did popular music become popular? There were folk songs that people knew that were passed down from generation to generation, and there were the music hall songs from the Nineteenth Century known and sung in urban and industrial communities up and down the country. But popular music, that which cuts across geography and class and even age, seems to have come with the advent of the radio and the record player.

Donovan was played on the radio this evening. I have never bought a Donovan record, never been at a Donovan concert, I could not name more than a couple of his songs, but his voice was instantly recognizable. He belonged to a time when popular music fulfilled its name, when tunes would be heard in homes throughout the land, when an appearance on one of the two television channels would guarantee an audience of millions and where a seven inch single might sell hundreds of thousands of copies.

The song played this evening was Catch the Wind, a ballad lament of a love that has been lost, but the concluding line of the refrain might be used to express a wider sense of loss.

In the chilly hours and minutes
Of uncertainty, I want to be
In the warm hold of your loving mind
To feel you all around me
And to take your hand, along the sand
Ah, but I may as well try and catch the wind.

The fragmentation of society brought by postmodern worldviews and electronic media has brought the loss of opportunity for the creation of music that is truly popular. To try to create a song that would capture an audience as broad as that enjoyed by Donovan and his 1960s contemporaries would be as futile as an attempt to catch the wind. Who is there who would listen?

Popular music of the sort that would be played by diverse people in diverse venues is disappearing. How long has it survived? A century, perhaps a century and a half if the music hall songs are to be included.

In fifty years’ time, it seems unlikely that many people will play much music from the present era for the simple reason that little of the music commands a wide enough audience to be remembered. It is not that there is not good music, nor that the artists are not as talented as in former times, just that everyone now listens to their own playlists.

Catching the wind would be a simpler proposition than the defragmentation of our culture.

“Sid was a boy from the streets.”

My mother recalled the conversation at her first meeting with my paternal grandmother some sixty-five years ago. My grandmother had been dismissive of my mother’s interest and had steered the conversation in another direction.

My great grandmother had been unhappy with the answer my mother had received and had spoken to her later. “Ruby, that’s not quite true. Sid was in a children’s home, but someone took him out of it.”

My grandfather seemed to have been discouraged from recalling any details of his childhood, he remembered being in a home and thought he might have had a brother. He remembered living with the person my grandmother referred to as “that old woman.”

None of the four children of my great grandmother lived to a ripe old age. My grandfather died at sixty-five, Stanley died at sixty-seven, Frederick died at forty-five, only Ida reached the three score years and ten, dying in 1979 at the age of seventy-two. Perhaps if one of them had lived into the digital age, it would have been simpler to piece together the information.

On the birth certificates, no father’s name is entered for the 1906 record of Sidney’s birth or that of Frederick in 1910. In 1907, Ida is registered as Ida Frederica Stanley with the father’s name recorded as Frederick Stanley. A year later, in 1908, Stanley is registered as George Stanley Stratton, his father’s name given as Frederick Stratton.

The hours spent reading and re-reading records must now run into many hundreds. Having no television leaves time for such reflection.

Ellen, my great grandmother, seems to have been credulous in her acceptance of the tales told by Frederick, father of at least two of her children. On Ida’s birth certificate he is shown as being a soldier. On Stanley’s birth certificate, he is shown as a civil engineer. The most candidate for being the Frederick the father was a clerk in the railway clearing house. Perhaps the roles he claimed for himself provided him with excuses for the times when he was at home with his wife.

Stanley and Frederick were sent to a Poor Law School in Crondall in Hampshire. Ida went to a foster family nearby. Stanley and Ida remained lifelong friends.

But what of Sidney? “That old woman,” Martha Rideout would have been fifty when he was born. Twice widowed, she had raised eight children. Boarders appear on the census returns for her house in 1911 and 1921. Why would she have taken in “a boy from the streets” and recorded him as her “adopted son?”