High Ham and Somerset – Page 19 – For the fainthearted . . .

A nursery drive

There is a postcard beauty about the villages on the road to South Petherton, not that there would have been much prospect of its appreciation when travelling in the back of a Land Rover, shaken as it travelled the rural roads. Even now, enter the journey from Langport to South Petherton into Google Maps and it gives a journey time of twenty minutes for the eleven kilometre journey. Even at primary school, it would have been possible to calculate that travelling the journey in that time represented an average speed …

Who is daft?

An hour to spare yesterday allowed a chance to drive the short distance from Street to Glastonbury and to enjoy the ambience of a town for which the word “alternative” is an entirely inadequate description. Glastonbury is filled with the esoteric, it is a place where people can be whatever they want to be and inhabit whatever world in which they wish to live. It is filled with characters who might have stepped straight from story books; if one wishes to walk the street as a witch or a wizard, …

Time of the signs

Perhaps we have become overly self-critical, perhaps we have developed a tendency to over-analyse, but sometimes there are things that would cause one to wonder. There are things like the cast iron road signs that would warn drivers of Morris Minors and Hillman Humbers that they were approaching a school.

Even in schooldays, it was an annoying sign. The primary school teacher had drilled into us, “look right, look left, look right again, if it is all clear, go straight across,” a piece of advice that was to be superseded …

Night flights

A crispness fills the night air, the light of the dying sun promises brightness tomorrow; from a distance, the sound of a helicopter breaks the evening silence. Only helicopters now appear in the night sky; fixed wing flying from the Royal Naval air station at Yeovilton having ceased some years ago. Fifty years ago, the sound of jet engines would have been unremarkable, their flights frequent.

Saturday morning work was normal for the technicians working for Airwork Services and occasionally a small boy would be allowed to go to work …

Voices in the gloom

Each evening is noticeably shorter than its predecessor, walking the village roads will soon demand an awareness of the complete absence of street lighting. Wandering high-hedged lanes with barely a verge to which to retreat has become much more hazardous than the days when drivers rode in Morris Minors, Austin A35s and Land Rovers that travelled at thirty miles per hour. A week into the autumn and there was sunset worthy of high summer, a fiery orange glow in the west and bars of pink cloud in the sky above. …

That would be Sir Humphrey’s department

A single memory of the place lingers from childhood, standing with my mother on the platform as a steam locomotive pulling carriages came into the station. Neither of Langport stations survived the Beeching axe, so it must have been in 1964, when I was three years old that I stood at Langport West, waiting for that train to Taunton. Langport East was on the mainline from Paddington to Penzance, so although no trace of the station remains, the line is very active. Langport West was on the Yeovil to Taunton …