A Somerset Lad

The pandemic has not been without its benefits. I no longer have to pay for a haircut. The clippers I bought during the first lockdown enable my hair to stay at a uniform No 3 length. From time to time, my sister will correct the mistakes I have made and tidy the bits I missed.

Of course, it does not look stylish, it looks like someone has used clippers with a No 3 comb, but there is no need to look stylish. The lack of stylishness does bring with it the consolation that my hair looks tidy.

It was very different fifty years ago when my mother would give me the saliva and handkerchief treatment.

You know, you are just about to go somewhere and your mother says, “You can’t go looking like that,” and she licks a corner of a hankie and starts dabbing at your face.

You looked fine when you looked in the mirror, but judging by the amount of rubbing your face now requires you must have looked like a commando about to go into combat, or a bowler on a sunny day at the Sydney Cricket Ground.

Of course, that was only the start of it.

Despite having used Head and Shoulders since infancy, there was always some micro speck of dandruff to be brushed from the shoulders.

Then there was the straightening of the collar and then, “Would you tuck that shirt in, anyone would think you had been sleeping in it, the way you look.”

The shoes were always a problem.

The guards outside of Buckingham Palace might have had boots that looked dull in comparison.  Were it a sunny day, there would be a danger of dazzling people with the reflection from the toes; but there would be the inquiry, “Did you clean your shoes?” The most common memory from childhood is taking the polish and brushes out of a little cupboard and cleaning the shoes, every day.

Sometimes it would have been simpler to have gone in gardening clothes and wellies; the response would hardly have been different.

When the handkerchief came out, it meant that the visit was important; one had to look what was judged to be “your best.”

Should the tidying exercise take place in the front of people from outside the family, it was a source of major embarrassment.  It was hard to imagine that anyone else’s mother would treat them  in such a manner.

The makeover would be completed, the handkerchief put away, and there would be a second survey, and a nod.  Not perfect, but I would have to do.

Having hair that is neither straight nor curly, but prone to stick out in big cow licks, it was probably a mercy that it has been cut short for most of those years.

However, to be all going out together meant it was some special occasion. It was some gathering where it was important to be looking one’s best. There was an innocent delight, even when suffering the indignity.

Something got lost in growing up;  maybe something that didn’t even need to be put aside.

A teacher was absent and no cover had been sent. One of the boys asked if he could leave the classroom as he had caught sight of me passing in the corridor. I had a free lesson, so stood and talked with him for half an hour.

Going into the staff room, the teacher who had allowed the boy to leave the room looked bemused. “What were you talking about?” he asked.

“Football,” I shrugged. “Nothing serious.”

“Who do you support?” asked another teacher.

“Saint Patrick’s Athletic and Yeovil Town.”

“No, I mean real teams. Premier League. Who do you support in the Premier League?”

“Those are real teams. They are supported by real fans in real places.”

“Did you ever support a Premier League team?”

“I did. I even went to see them sometimes. I could go from Somerset to London and watch a match for under a tenner.”

There was a look of incredulity.

I explained that I remember travelling to Chelsea matches when I was a sixth-former in the late 1970s. I would have been seventeen or eighteen years old at the time.

The claim of a day out at a top football match for under a tenner sounds like a line from Tony Capstick. The lyrics of Capstick Comes Home include:

Do you know when I were a lad you could get a tram down into’t town
Buy three new suits n an overcoat, four new pair of good boots
Goo n see George Formby at Palace Theatre ,
Get blind drunk,
Have some steak n chips, bunch of bananas n three stone of monkey nuts
And still have change out on a farthing.

Except in 1978, it really was possible for a teeanger to go to Stamford Bridge

To buy a return ticket from Castle Cary in Somerset to London cost £3.15. The journey by tube from Paddington to Fulham Broadway was a matter of pence. A pie and a pint in a pub was £1. Getting onto the terraces at the Shed End of the ground was £3. There was enough money left over from a £10 to buy egg and chips for tea at Paddington station on the journey home.

It sounds a laughable sum of money, except it cost me most of what I earned in a month. I had a job pumping petrol from 8 till 1 on Sunday mornings earning 60p an hour, £12 a month – £10 in a day was a big commitment.

Many of the sixth year students have weekend jobs paying €10 an hour or more. Perhaps if I had said my day out had cost the equivalent of €160, it wouldn’t have sounded like a Capstick song.

Spending eleven days in Somerset, there were moments of temptation to get in the car and to drive. To go to places that were filled with memories of childhood, places that were unalloyed in the happiness of their recall. Then there was the thought of what could happen when I tried such outings. Westward Ho! was an object lesson in not going back to somewhere that was fondly remembered.

It is ten years since I was last there. The disappointment began with the fact that The Malibu Café had gone. Perhaps it had been gone for a while, for it had been thirty-three years since I had last visited.

Sadly, the village where we spent family holidays had disappeared, almost without trace.

We first went there in 1972 – and then for five years in a row from 1975 onward. Each visit was to leave its own impressions.

In 1972, the memory was of  The Malibu and its jukebox, which was probably the first I had seen. 1975 saw a fourteen year old drinking lager and blackcurrant, one of the foulest concoctions ever devised. By 1977, entertainment was being sought further afield, James Bond was being screened  in Bideford. In 1978, there was a day trip to Tintagel, amidst the traffic of a Cornish summer. 1979 was the last visit, the only memory that lingers is of catching a bus from Barnstaple to Taunton on the day of the Mountbatten murder and the Warrenpoint massacre.

The definitive Westward Ho! holiday was in 1976. Camping can be miserable, but that August it was perfect. Sitting out under afternoon blue skies, playing games on the vast beach, listening to music in the beer garden at nights; there could be nowhere better. Skin cancer had not arrived among us and tans were deep and dark; suntan lotion was something used by people who flew off to Costas on holidays far beyond our pockets. Only on the journey home did the weather break and the drought end with a cloudburst.

The seaside village had never been more than a cluster of streets, a string of caravan and campsites, and extensive grasslands leading down to the beach. In the three decades since the last family holiday, virtually all that had remained in the memory had disappeared – the beach, the pebble ridge and the cricket pitch seemed all that was recognizable.

Perhaps it was progress. Progress rarely pleases anyone and someone who has not been near the place in thirty-odd years can hardly have grounds for complaint, but development had been uncoordinated and without a trace of sympathy for the Victorian origins of the resort. Would it have been so hard to have had sensitivity to the character of the village, character that took our family there for holidays in six years out of eight?

Nostalgia is never what it used to be. Sometimes there are places that can evoke the delight they did on visiting them years previously; more often, it seems, the disappointment of a lost past is only compounded by the reality of a found present.

It’s best not to go back.