A Somerset Lad

It’s Battle of Britain Day, although there seemed little acknowledgement of the anniversary.

In our area, it was not the Fighter Command who rose to meet the Luftwaffe who were the presence of air forces, but aerodromes from which both fighters and bombers flew in the war of attrition against the Nazis.

The nearest airfield to us was Weston Zoyland, used by both the RAF and the USAAF in the Second World War. Surrounded by undergrowth, shrouded in ivy, the few remaining airfield buildings there become less and less visible as the years pass.

Perhaps the ownership of the land is unclear, perhaps the deeds lie gathering dust in a distant office, perhaps no-one wants to claim responsibility for the pockets of rough land and the ruinous structures.

Once they were the property of the War Office, or the Royal Air Force, or whichever branch of government that was responsible for airfields and their associated installations. The purpose of the short, squat tower-like buildings never seemed entirely clear, when aircraft flew took off from the runways built across flat Somerset moorland, the function of each building would have been more apparent.

In my younger days, the buildings brought an ambivalent feeling. There was something reassuring about their presence: they were a declaration that my family and my neighbourhood had been part of something for which the aircrews would take off into the darkness, uncertain of what dangers may await them.

The reassurance came with a dark shadow. The bomber crews sustained heavy losses; the aircraft returning fewer in number than those which had departed. The bombing missions might have been against military targets, or they might have been against cities whose streets were not so different from those of London, where my grandfather had been a fireman during the Blitz.

The airfields in our community had brought with them their own dangers, Luftwaffe attacks in the area might be against the airfields, or might be against much more vulnerable targets. In 1942 the Cow and Gate milk factory in Somerton had been bombed by a bomber flying at roof height in daylight; eleven of the forty people working in the factory had been killed.

Each brick in the airfield buildings tells a story of times now disappearing from memory.  The drone of aircraft engines and the sound of airfield vehicles and the bells and sirens of alarm and the thud, thud, thud of anti-aircraft guns and crump of explosions are sounds now only to be imagined. It is good such fearful noises are no longer to be heard, but their absence, and the gradual disappearance of the runways, and the year on year decay of the buildings, brings with it a forgetfulness.

To have served in the forces between 1939 and 1945 and still to be alive means being at least ninety years of age. In the next decade or so, the bricks will be the last reminder, still in their original place, of events that once seemed so fresh in the memory.

Is the bookshop still there? Or has its odd eccentricity disappeared, carried away like so many things by the government’s lockdowns?

It had only been encountered because the door of the barber’s shop had been firmly locked. A shutter was down and a sign in large letters declared, “Lunch, 1 pm – 2 pm.”

I had looked at my watch and it was twenty-five two. There was insufficient time to do anything other than wander up the street, looking in the shop windows.

Coming to the eccentric bookshop, I went in through the open door.

“Can I help you?” called a voice behind a desk at the far end.

“Um, no, it’s OK, I’m just browsing.”

It had been a combined bookshop and wine merchant, the bottles on the lower shelves and the books on the upper. It had seemed strange to see bottles of claret and burgundy juxtaposed with chick-lit.

Looking for something that might provide reading over the approaching autumn, I came upon a collection of Franz Kafka’s works with a crumpled front cover. Taking it to the far end of the shop, I handed it to the man sat behind the desk.

“This book has no price,” he said, accusingly.

I shrugged.

He picked up a bar code scanner and stared at a computer monitor. “It’s not scanning, either. It doesn’t seem to be on the system.”

“Perhaps Kafka would smile,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“Franz Kafka’s story The Trial, the character in the story is arrested and put on trial and has no idea why any of it is happening. Perhaps a book that doesn’t exist in the system belongs to that strange and arbitrary world.”

“I’ve heard of Kafka,” he said.

“The Trial is short and makes you think.”

“£2.50.” he said.

It seemed a lot for a book that might have been bought for a pound in a second hand bookshop. I handed him the coins and returned to the barber’s shop, where I had sat on the window sill and read Kafka until 2 pm.

Browsing Kafka’s work for something to express that moment, I found Give it up, a short story of just 126 words written between 1917 and 1923.

The bookseller might have been the policeman in Kafka’s story.

It was very early in the morning, the streets clean and deserted, I was on my way to the station. As I compared the tower clock with my watch I realized it was much later than I had thought and that I had to hurry; the shock of this discovery made me feel uncertain of the way, I wasn’t very well acquainted with the town as yet; fortunately, there was a policeman at hand, I ran to him and breathlessly asked him the way.

He smiled and said: “You asking me the way?”

“Yes,” I said, “since I can’t find it myself.”

“Give it up! Give it up!” said he, and turned with a sudden jerk, like someone who wants to be alone with his laughter.