Missing the childhood magic

Posted on 26th September 2021 by 192.168.1.1

The poster on the toyshop window announced that Thomas and Friends were in stock. Another generation would grow up, as I did, with the railway characters created by the Rev. W. Awdry.

Growing up? It seems an odd concept, both for oneself and for one’s children.

Those whom you love are young children at one moment and the next moment they are adults in a world different from your own, adults who seem far removed from the people you thought that you once knew.

It was the Thomas and Friends poster that recalled my conversations with Ben.

Ben must be seventeen or eighteen now, but I still have a clear memory of sitting on steps one Sunday morning to talk about Thomas and friends. There were another ten minutes before we needed to move and there were few people around.

Trains have always been a comfortable topic of conversation, there is something reassuring about railways, a design, a purpose, a mind behind it all.  There are many people who will take holidays just to visit particular railways.

I have never felt I would go to such extremes, but I think I can understand the fascination, particularly with the steam railways, the artistry and the craftsmanship have few modern parallels.

Sitting on the stone steps, Ben and I talked about the steam trains we remembered, each of them with their own character, and I tried to remember their colours.

“What colour was James, Ben?”

“Red,” he said.

“And Henry?”

“Green.”

It was 1025 and we got up from our seat.

Ben, who was three at the time, took his Thomas the Tank Engine cards back to the pew where his mum and dad were sitting, and I went off to finish getting ready for the morning service.

Any of the hundred or so people who had come in the church door would have found it odd that the Rector was sitting on the chancel steps talking to a small boy.

It was a magical moment, for just a couple of minutes the world was suspended.

Ben taught me a lesson that has endured since that distant Sunday morning.

He had a completely unselfconscious devotion to the things that mattered to him, and all the time in the world in which to do those things which he thought to be important.

Perhaps more attention to those moments by adults would mean children would turn out differently.

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Tolkien characters in the mist

Posted on 24th September 2021 by 192.168.1.1

It is that time of year when clear blue mornings in the village contrast with the mist shrouded day beginning on the moorland below, when the clear, sharp colours in the sky contrast with the blanket of greyness at ground level.

If J.R.R. Tolkien had not found inspiration in the Norse and the Welsh sagas, standing on a Somerset hilltop looking into the sea of mist that covers the Levels at this time of year might have prompted thoughts of mythical creatures.

Tolkien writes of Huorns and Ents, trees that are sentient, trees that have the capacity for thought and speech and movement and action.

After the destruction brought to their lands by the wizard Saruman and his armies, there is a sense of ecological justice in the revenge the trees wrought upon their erstwhile destroyers. In The Lord of the Rings, the coup de grace at the Battle of Helm’s deep is administered by the huorns :

Where before the green dale had lain, its grassy slopes lapping the ever-mounting hills, there now a forest loomed. Great trees, bare and silent, stood, rank on rank, with tangled bough and hoary head; their twisted roots were buried in the long green grass. Darkness was under them. Between the Dike and the eaves of that nameless wood only two open furlongs lay. There now cowered the proud hosts of Saruman, in terror of the king and in terror of the trees. …

The Orcs reeled and screamed … Wailing they passed under the waiting shadow of the trees; and from that shadow none ever came again.

The Two Towers, Chapter 7, Helm’s Deep

There were moments more mysterious, strange trees moving through a countryside, eliminating all trace of the evil that had been among them:

… in the middle night men heard a great noise, as a wind in the valley, and the ground trembled…. But in the morning … the slain Orcs were gone, and the trees also. Far down into the valley … the grass was crushed and trampled brown … but a mile below the Dike a huge pit had been delved in the earth, and over it stones were piled into a hill. Men believed that the Orcs whom they had slain were buried there; but whether those who had fled into the wood were with them, none could say…. The Death Down it was afterwards called, and no grass would grow there. But the strange trees were never seen in Deeping-coomb again; they had returned at night…. Thus they were revenged upon the Orcs.

The Two Towers, Chapter 8, The Road to Isengard

Watching the black shapes that loom and disappear in Somerset autumn fog, it would not have been hard to believe in battling trees.

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Looking for Four Strong Winds

Posted on 22nd September 2021 by 192.168.1.1

The sun crossed the celestial equator into the southern hemisphere this evening. Even the most beautiful photographs of the harvest moon over the Somerset Levels cannot disguise the fact that the dark days are coming

I remember a friend returning from a visit to the Canadian Province of Alberta at the time of the autumnal equinox.

“What was the weather like?” I asked

“Beautiful, just a touch of frost in the mornings, but blue skies and fine days.”

It is the stuff of a song sung by Neil Young song. The atmospheric Four Strong Winds declares, “Think I’ll go out to Alberta, weather’s good there in the fall.”

It’s a song from the folk revival of the 1960s, which perhaps explains its capacity to endure, to speak to people long after its time.  Four Strong Winds has a melancholic mood, but it seems always to have something liberating about it. It seems a declaration that the year is not dying, that life is still there to be lived to the full.

Going out to Alberta is the opposite of closing the curtains and switching on the television. It is depressing that whilst former generations saw Saturday and Sunday evenings as occasions for going out, for, at the very least, calling with family and friends, people now see the hours as a time to sit and watch mediocre television, for mediocre it is.

Would anyone sit and watch an amateur league soccer match on television, or a live broadcast of a band playing in a pub? Why then watch the formulaic programming that dominates the schedules with the affected gravitas of its judges and its pretence that the results are matters of importance?

Maybe going out to Alberta is not an option for most people, but surely they can manage more that just sitting and watching dross. Surely, there comes an autumn when people say, “Enough, there has to be more to life?”

The lyrics of Four Strong Winds tell of someone whose life has become stuck in a rut, someone whose relationship has come to an end, someone who has made repeated efforts to re-capture the magic of former times, but who now realizes that it is time to break out, time to find freedom from the things that break the spirit.

The first frosts can be a reminder not of winter, but of a sense that it doesn’t have to be this way. Get up, turn off the television, go for a walk, call with someone, stand and look at the night sky; do anything except sink into the quagmire of another winter.

Posted in The stuff of daily life | 2 Comments

Anally retentive rules for changing the sheets

Posted on 19th September 2021 by 192.168.1.1

The weekend is a time to get washing and ironing done.

The rules of the apartment complex bar hanging any washing outside, so a change of bed linen requires having time to allow the wash cycle to complete and for tumble drying it. The small indoor clothes airer is not adequate for a duvet cover, fitted sheet and pillow  cases.

It is hard to imagine what rules for such activity might have been devised by the housemaster at the special school for the sick and the delicate on Dartmoor that I attended from 1974 until 1977.

Were the housemaster to have undergone Freudian psychoanalysis, terms like “anally retentive” would have arisen.  He had an obsession with things being done according to each and every detail he stipulated, this included the making and changing of beds.

Beds came with cotton sheets, heavy woollen blankets and heavy, dark counterpanes.  Beds were to be made according to the exact instructions he set down.  The top sheet was to be folded back over the blankets at the point where the blankets met with the space occupied by the pillow.  The counterpane was to be tucked in at the foot of the bed with 45 degree hospital corners.  At night time, the counterpane was to be folded back at exact right angles to the line of the mattress.

Perhaps the obsession was defensible in terms that it kept the rooms looking tidy, there being an almost military air about the stern lines and exact angles.  What was completely absurd was the requirement concerning the changing of the beds.

Every week, a clean sheet was left on each bed. The bottom sheet was to be removed, the top sheet transferred to the bottom, and the fresh sheet put on top – all of which would have been reasonable, were it not for the requirements concerning the bottom sheet.  Instead of simply throwing it into a laundry basket, it had to be folded into a neat rectangle, no more than a foot long, and placed at the bottom of the bed, where it would be collected.  Failure to fold the sheet according to the prescribed dimensions, or to ensure that it did not appear unduly creased, resulted in some absurd and arbitrary punishment.

The sheets were part of the absurd and arbitrary control of our lives.

Our school was a special one for people with asthma and frail health.  It was not cheap, back in the mid-1970s, fees were around £2,000 a year, as much as a working man was earning.  Fees were paid by local authorities, who deemed a special education necessary because each of us had missed so much time at ordinary schools.

The school was run by fundamentalist Christians who regarded it as their duty to educate us in their faith.  Morning assemblies, evening epilogues, worship twice every Sunday, no opportunity was missed to preach to us their version of the Christian Gospel.

Their work was presented to us as charitable, we were reminded of the generosity of those who had established the trust that had founded the school. There was never any reference to the fact that it was the taxes of working people that were funding the whole operation.

In the first decade after leaving, I had a very benign view of the school, I might not have agreed with their theology, but they sought to do the best they could.  Forty years after leaving, it is hard to be so sanguine.

I personally recall no real physical abuse, the odd staff member might have been over-enthusiastic in punishments, but there was nothing systematic.

There was persistent bullying, to which the staff mostly turned a blind eye, as was normal in the 1970s.

More seriously, there was an ongoing emotional and psychological battering.  Staff considered it reasonable to have strange and arbitrary rules, like the folding of dirty sheets.  I once had to clean the gym for three days because a friend lent me his football boots to play in a match.

They considered it reasonable to subject us to a borstal-like regime in the remote Dartmoor buildings that accommodated the school.  They considered it reasonable to constantly preach a version of Christianity that regarded even other Christians as doomed to eternal damnation.

Since those days, changing sheets has recalled the grimness of fundamentalism.

Posted in Unreliable memories | Leave a comment

The English aren’t really royalists

Posted on 16th September 2021 by 192.168.1.1

Why was it necessary for the media to carry stories of the will of the Duke of Edinburgh being sealed for ninety years? As much as there was no public interest to be served in the details of the will being made public, there was equally no public interest yo be served in the will being locked away. Whose business would it have been to know who received bequests from the late Duke?

As much as they might lay claim to be royalists, many, if not most, English people seem to regard the monarchy with intrusive curiosity rather than with solemn allegiance.

The relationship between the people and the Crown has often been shaky.

The execution of King Charles in 1649 would not have been possible if it were not for the fact that the Parliamentarians commanded the support  of a large element of the  ordinary population. Forty years later, the fact that James II was the reigning monarch was not sufficient to prevent seven leading peers to invite the king’s son in law, William Prince of Orange and his wife Mary, daughter of James II to take the throne. Religious conviction far outweighed allegiance to the king.

Twenty-five years later, after the death of Queen Anne, George Louis of Brunswick-Lüneburg, the Elector of Hanover, was invited by the Whig government to become king. King George I was not popular, he was said to mistreat his wife, and to devote too much of the Crown income to the maintenance of his two German mistresses.

George IV, who reigned from 1820-1830, and who had been Prince Regent during his late father’s illness, prompted one biographer to write, “With a personal income ‘exceeding the national revenue of a third-rate power, there appeared to be no limit to his desires, nor any restraint to his profusion.” His wife Queen Caroline, had to suffer the indignity of her carriage being stoned in the street.

In more recent times, the public reaction against the Crown at the time of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales suggested a people very fickle in their loyalty.

The story did not go away, there are people who still believe that there was a plot to murder Diana. Motivations which were advanced for such a conspiracy include suggestions that Diana intended to marry Dodi Al-Fayed, that she intended to convert to Islam, that she was pregnant, and that she was to visit the holy land. Organizations which conspiracy theorists suggested were responsible for her death included French Intelligence, the British Royal Family, the press, the British Intelligence services MI5 or MI6, the CIA, Mossad, the Freemasons, or the IRA. It was suggested that the intent of some of the co-conspirators was not to cause death. Alternatively, Diana and Dodi Al-Fayed were believed to be alive and living incognito! None of which speculation suggests a respect and trust for the Queen who would have needed to be complicit with any of the fantastic ideas proposed.

Much loyalty to the Crown probably owes much more to the extraordinary dignity and integrity of Queen Elizabeth, than to inherent royalist sentiment. When she is gone, it is hard to imagine what will happen.

 

Posted in This sceptred isle | 6 Comments