High Ham and Somerset – Page 6 – For the fainthearted . . .

No longer going to the pub

It is not hard to imagine where he would have been on a Friday evening. Cycling through the village, he would have left his bicycle propped against the pub wall and gone in to enjoy a pint and the company of the village elders.

He was a memorable figure, all in black. His thick black hair was Brylcreemed to one side, his glasses had thick black frames, his old suit was a black jacket and trousers, his pushbike had a heavy black frame and dynamo-powered lights.

Working on a local …

Memories of the mill

My sisters gave me a framed photograph of the windmill at High Ham for my sixtieth birthday. Living on Windmill Road, the mill was a constant feature of our landscape, a sight we saw every day.

We moved to the village of High Ham in Somerset in February 1967. Our house was the last in a line of council houses built in 1926. Beyond our house, the road passed between open fields before reaching Stembridge Tower Mill, the only thatched windmill in England. It had stood semi-derelict for years, before …

Mud-larking

John Masefield’s So Long to Learn recalls moments from his childhood days. The memories seem to belong to a lost age of innocence:

Sometimes I was taken on a mud-lark up the mill-stream, dressed for the occasion in my oldest clothes and strongest boots. Passing under the viaduct, I came to that water, as it ran through a pasture turned up into red heaps by multitudinous moles. Here, for hours, one could sail home-made boats down the stream, prodding them with sticks when they stuck, and getting filthy and happy

…

Sanitised singing

People of a certain age will remember the ITV children’s programme, Magpie. Intended to be a rival to the BBC programme Blue Peter, it never seemed as interesting to an earnest little boy who would sometimes sit and watch it. Both programmes had very distinctive theme tune. Blue Peter had a sailor’s hornpipe, while Magpie had an English folk song dating back to at least the Eighteenth Century.

The Magpie tune was accompanied by lyrics that are easily recalled fifty years later:

One for sorrow, two for joy,…

Gas mantles and electric lights

Power cuts caused by the high winds that hit the west of England over the past two days prompted my mother to recall a moment from the early years of the Second World War.

A younger sister had climbed over the side of the cot in which she had been placed to sleep and had fallen. Mercifully, the fall was onto an adjacent bed and she was unhurt, but the fall had shaken the house so much that the light from the delicate gas mantles had been extinguished and my …

Looking forward to school?

The return to school approaches. Is it possible there are still children who face next week with the degree of apprehension we felt in the 1960s?

Arriving in her blue Ford Anglia each morning, bespectacled and stern, our infant teacher Miss Everitt took education seriously. There was never homework, but there was hardly need for it. The school day for infants ran from 9.15 until 3.30. Apart from breaks, the day was filled with active teaching, there was rarely a moment to drift, rarely a moment when concentration was not …