A Somerset Lad

“So this is Christmas?”

So what is Christmas?

The frantic piling of unnecessary items into supermarket trolleys, the frenetic activity in the streets, the frenzied buying as if no shops would be open for days to come? Is this Christmas?

Has any of it anything to do with the birth of a child in an obscure corner of Palestine?

Of course not.

The celebrations are rooted in something far more visceral than the thought of divinity becoming incarnate. There is a human instinct to celebrate at triumph over adversity; the days are turning, the winter will pass, we have survived and the year ahead will offer opportunities as yet unknown. The undercurrent of sexuality among the Christmas revels reflects the instinct to survive, to continue the line, to have a presence in the future. Look at the history of the pagan midwinter festivals and what might be encountered on the streets of any city is not so far removed from the past: look at Saturnalia, at Yule, at the numerous festivities that marked midwinter and what now takes place may seem mild.

No, this is not Christmas, but what is Christmas?

The people in their Christmas jumpers, the friends exchanging gifts in a cafe, the shoppers with multiple carrier bags, these are not people celebrating Christmas, in any religious sense of that word, but what is Christmas?

There are times when it would be more honest for the church to take its celebration and move it to some date in the year where it did not disappear under a pile of presents and countless bottles of drink, but perhaps there is no cause to be unduly concerned. The early church did not celebrate Christmas at all, its introduction into the Christian calendar only coming in later centuries when the church sought to supplant the pagan celebrations with a feast of its own.

And if the presence of Jesus of Nazareth is not acknowledged in most of what takes place, he is probably relieved. Would he have wanted to be associated with excess and drunkenness?

It is not as though many people noticed his presence when he was born – bachelor farmers down from the hills, unwashed, unkempt; a group of foreigners who would probably have problems getting through immigration  – hardly an impressive list.

People did not welcome him, “he came unto his own and his own received him not”, as Saint John puts it in the King James Version of the Bible.  Bethlehem and Nazareth and Jerusalem were probably as rough as any city on the days before Christmas.

So this is, Christmas.

A happy Friday evening: tea with an old friend in Belfast and then to Ravenhill to watch Ulster triumph over Northampton in a European Champions Cup match.

Driving back to Dublin, I switched on the radio. It was the Late Date music programme on RTE Radio 1. The presenter Fiachna Ó Braonáin has an instinctive understanding of how radio works best, he addresses every listener personally. He creates a sense of community among those to whom he broadcasts.

A listener sent in a request for Tom Waits’ song Martha. The request said the song was for the listener’s little girl Martha, who had been born on Tuesday of this week and had sadly died on Wednesday. He wanted the song dedicated to the staff of the hospital who had looked after his baby daughter and his wife.

Anyone familiar with Tom Waits will know his voice is one that hits you in the pit of the stomach, his deep gravel voice expressing the depths of human emotion.

Pondering the request and the sense of overwhelming grief that must have lain behind it, I wondered how anyone might ever recover from the death of a child, how siblings ever come to terms with the loss of a brother or a sister.

I struggled to remember the words of a Seamus Heaney poem, perhaps they are the least inadequate of all the inadequate words that people say on such an occasion.

I
Your mother walks light as an empty creel
Unlearning the intimate nudge and pull
Your trussed-up weight of seed-flesh and bone-curd
Had insisted on. That evicted world
Contracts round its history, its scar.
Doomsday struck when your collapsed sphere
Extinguished itself in our atmosphere,
Your mother heavy with the lightness in her.

II
For six months you stayed cartographer
Charting my friend from husband towards father
He guessed a globe behind your steady mound.
Then the pole fell, shooting star, into the ground.

III
On lonely journeys I think of it all,
Birth of death, exhumation for burial,
A wreath of small clothes, a memorial pram,
And parents reaching for a phantom limb.
I drive by remote control on this bare road
Under a drizzling sky, a circling rock.
Past mountain fields, full to the brim with cloud,
White waves riding home on a wintry lough.

From where was the father of baby Martha sending his request? Was his wife still in hospital? Was he alone, or was there someone to sit with him in silence because there are no words to be said?

“Drive by remote control?” Life itself becomes a matter of remote control in the face of such grief.

Phoning my mother last night, she said, “Did you hear that Jethro has died?”

“He can’t have been very old,” I said.

“No,” she said, “only seventy-three. I think he died from Covid.”

“He’ll be missed,” I said, “he made lots of people happy.”

I have never seen Jethro perform, never heard him tell one of his stories, but what I have heard is the laughter he brought to the people who saw him. When my mother said that Jethro had died, there was no need of an explanation that there was a sense of loss among people across the West Country.

Until I Googled him this evening, I was not even aware that his stage name Jethro was simply a contraction of his own name Geoff Rowe.

Jethro possessed a genius for comedy, for telling stories that people remembered years after they have heard them. He had a genius for telling stories so well that other people could tell them to me and I could remember them.

A dozen or so years ago, a Cornishman told me Jethro’s story about Denzil Penberthy and the Antiques Roadshow, it is a story that still makes me laugh. Two other stories that remain are the train that don’t stop at Camborne on Wednesdays and missing the bus to Saint Just.

A man was on board a train for Penzance and, anyway, when the guard comes round to check the tickets he sees this man has a ticket for Camborne.

“I’m sorry sir,” said the guard, “but this train don’t stop at Camborne on Wednesdays, you’ll have to get off un at Redruth.”

Anyway, the man says to the guard, “I must get off at Camborne I’ve got an important meeting to go to and if I get off at Redruth, I’ll miss it.”

“Sorry sir,” says the guard again, “this train don’t stop at Camborne on a Wednesday.”

“Can’t you do something?” says the man.

“You wait there sir, I’ll go an’ ask the driver if he can make an unscheduled stop.”

Anyway, the guard returns an’ he  says, “The driver says the train is already late, all he can do for ‘e is to slow down through Camborne. So what I’ll do is this, what I’ll do is get ‘e to come up to the front carriage and I’ll hang ‘e out the door. You start running in the air and when your legs are going fast enough, I’ll lower ‘e down on the platform.”

Anyway so, the train comes into Camborne station. “Faster, faster” says the guard. When he thinks the man is running fast enough he lowers un down on the start of the platform.

Off the man shoots along the platform, trying to slow down as the end of the platform approaches. Anyway, he’s finally slowed to a gentle pace as the rear of the train passes un.

A door in the last carriage opens and a pair of hands grabs him and pulls un on the train.

“You’m lucky to catch this train mate, it don’t stop at Camborne on Wednesdays.”

Denzil Penberthy, the embodiment of much of Jethro’s humour, appears in the story of the bust to Saint Just

Jethro and Denzil went out in Penzance one night on the ale and they drank so much they missed the last bus home to Saint Just.

Anyway, Jethro says, “Lets go down to the bus depot and borrow a bus to drive us home in.”

When they get there, it’s all locked up with the buses in the yard.

“I”ll tell ‘e what, boy,” says Jethro, “You go inside and get a bus while I keep a look out.”

Anyway, Denzil Penberthy goes in and it’s ages before he comes out driving a bus.

‘”What happened to ‘e?” asks Jethro

“It was like this,” says Denzil, “I had to move the buses round because the Saint Just one was at the back of the garage.”

Frequently politically incorrect, often given to the odd expletive, Jethro had an eye for the surreal and the absurd and the comic in life, and he made people like my mother smile.

May he dwell in a land where trains stop and where buses always run.

14th December, the anniversary of the birth of my grandfather in 1913. He died in 1991, I never really thought about how much he meant to me, until he was gone.

The last time I saw him was when on a visit to England in September 1990. He stood at the back door of his farmhouse as I was leaving and said, “I’ve had a good life. Whenever it comes to an end, I am ready to go.”

It seemed a strange thing for him to have said. When he died, I wondered if he had some sort of prescience. Only recently did I discover that he knew that he was ill and that he knew that he was going to die. These were deliberately chosen parting words.

In the years before his death, I regret that I sometimes only saw him once in a year.  By the time I felt that had time and money to travel more often, he was gone. Perhaps I should have found the time and the money. Now, when I am in Somerset, I go to his grave, as if to reach out to some past that is gone beyond recall.

He wasn’t the sort of grandad who played games with us, nor the sort who was full of stories and laughter, instead he was a quietly spoken man, an undemonstrative man, a wise man.

He was grandfather to twenty of us, and he was loved by each of us. He was loved for his always being there for us. When the need arose, he would get into his 1950s Land Rover or his old Rover car and act as a taxi driver. In the summertime, his five-bedroomed farmhouse was a place where grandchildren spent many happy days and nights.

At the funeral, the local vicar insisted on giving the address. His description of my Grandad barely began to capture the man we laid to rest in the soil of the parish that has been home to the Crossman family for centuries and looks set to be the home for centuries more.

When he died in 1991, he was buried with a sheaf of wheat placed on his coffin. It was a sign of his lifelong work as a farmer. It was a sign that he had been gathered in like wheat at the end of the summer. It was a sign that just as the wheat sown in the ground springs up in new life, so we hope that those who are buried will rise again from the dead.

Each time I go to the grave, now, I remember the sheaf of wheat buried there with him and look forward to seeing him again.