High Ham and Somerset – Page 21 – For the fainthearted . . .

Jumpers for goalposts

Dressed in a full soccer strip, with the manufacturer’s swoosh logo in white on the black shirt and the black shorts, he ran up and struck the ball with force. It flew far wide of the right-hand goalpost. The goalkeeper, standing between the pristine white posts and with a goalnet behind him, stood still and watched the ball pass.

It all seemed very grand for a village playing field, and a very far remove from the days forty years ago when boys played football with a heavy leather ball in …

Thank you, Miss Rabbage

There was a moment filled with regret this evening. I did look for Miss Rabbage in the past, maybe ten years ago or more. Perhaps I was just too late, perhaps if I had been more diligent, perhaps if I had just asked more people, I might have found her. Not finding her in the telephone directory, I assumed she had died long before. This evening, in the village cemetery, I found her memorial stone at the plot where ashes are interred. Miss Rabbage had only died in 2003, a …

This land is my land

A fine June evening and the mist had begun to gather across the moorland. Glastonbury Tor is no more than a blur in the darkness. Shades of green fill the landscape, a multiplicity of smaller farms absorbed into a handful of large holdings. It is easy to forget how warm southern England has become, the balmy atmosphere makes it pleasant to sit on a bench in the village pound in a gentle breeze.

The village pound, the place of enclosure of stray animals, perhaps it was an appropriate place in …

Mists and romance

He spent much of his time hiding in his room. It was small, but became a point from which to survey the world. The levels would be covered in mists in the winter time and it would be possible to imagine the land as it once was, covered by water that stretched to the Bristol Channel. Tradition said that Joseph of Arimathea had once sailed through those waters, bringing with him a young Jesus of Nazareth. Tradition in the village said that Joseph and Jesus had landed at Turn Hill, …

Missing a hippy

What was her name? Perhaps I never knew it; if I did, it has gone far beyond recall. The sixth-form college wasn’t large, four hundred students, but people tended to stay within their year groups. Apart from her being a year junior, nothing is known; either then or now: the course she might have been following, the subjects she studied, where she went afterwards; all are unknown.

A single image of her remains in the mind, a girl with straw-blonde long hair, cut in a straight fringe. In memory, there …

A High Ham Half-Century

It is fifty years ago this month that we moved house, February 1967.

To a six year old, the suggestion that we move from my grandfather’s farm, to a village of which I had never heard, was one that brought many tears. I can clearly recall standing in my grandmother’s kitchen saying that I did not want to move, that I would not move.

Even though I would not have been worried at leaving the primary school where the infant teacher was a persistent bully, I was worried at the …