High Ham and Somerset – Page 22 – For the fainthearted . . .

Dog and bone

Visitors a fortnight ago brought our faithful Millie a large bone. It was gnawed with delight for much of an evening before being deposited at the foot of the basement stairs. The next morning the bone was carried into the garden and disappeared.

With our absence from the house for eight nights, Millie reluctantly gave up her place in front of the stove and went to the kennels. Arriving back today, Millie gave us a disdainful look, as if removing a dog from her accustomed place was a matter for …

A final halt

Among the Christmas presents came a book with the capacity to revive vivid memories from early childhood days. “Branch Lines Around Chard and Yeovil from Taunton, Durston and Castle Cary” by Vic Mitchell and Keith Smith was published in 1999 and found in a Taunton bookshop during September.

There are photographs of Thorney & Kingsbury Halt on the Yeovil to Taunton branch line. The authors note that “the halt was brought into use on 28th November 1927, but there were few dwellings in the vicinity. It was more than a …

Boxing night

Boxing Day and tea at my sister’s. The table is laden with food sufficient to feed twice the number for a week.

The evening passes and the clock strikes nine. My father’s car is covered in ice, the temperature has dropped sharply in the clear night air. The passing years mean it is I who will be driving. In a teetotal house there is no fear of being over a limit; the absence of alcohol is not even noticed, so different is the culture. Perhaps in some future time the …

Goodbye to Joy

Memories of Joy were unalloyed: a maternal warmth and instinctive kindness; a genuine interest in what might be said by a shy, unimpressive boy from the council houses at the edge of the village. Living in the farmhouse of the Manor Farm might have been associated with an aloofness in some communities, but Joy had no regard for one’s social class. The criterion by which Joy seemed to assess people was whether they worked hard.

It had been six or seven years since I had lost spoken to Joy, a …

A place changed completely?

By the 1970s, our village had entered a gentle slumber. A Women’s Institute scrapbook in 1965 suggested there had once been a vibrancy, tradesmen, local enterprise, strong community organisations, but by the 1970s, most of the things remembered were no more than memories.

Elements of decline are apparent, a village shop and a village post office are distant memories. The village pub has closed. It is hard to imagine that there was once a garage where cars were repaired and where it was possible to fill a car with gallons …

No longer local

One of the disappointments of the year has been the disappearance of a local newspaper’s website, the Western Gazette was the newspaper that described the world of my childhood and youth. As with many newspapers, its title was more expansive than the community it represented. Its coverage was of the affairs of Yeovil and south Somerset, the description of the area as “western” would have seemed odd to anyone living in Devon and Cornwall; our home village was closer to London than to Saint Ives, and we were at the …