Watching the Edwardian Farm on TV last night I remembered growing up in Wiltshire, visiting family in Somerset and having an Edwardian landscape all around me. My grandparents live in Nailsea, about 15 miles and many years southwest of Bristol. The village was changing all around me and our family seemed balanced on the blade edge of the changes. Looking at Google Earth today I can’t recognise any of the streets I walked along then; the village is a town, roundabouts have swept landmark buildings away and the back lane to Tickenham across the moor looks like not the best place to allow seven year-olds to play unsupervised if they aren’t going to end-up as bonnet ornaments. Ducks used to swim in the ditches alongside the lane on the moor.
The sanitised idyll. Not mentioning repeated childbirth, typhoid, scarlet fever and death from lockjaw, which killed my great-uncle.
My uncle found some boys with an old gun along the gravel track that joined the lane and took it off them, for their own safety, he said. My uncle had a direct way with young people that would have seen him in jail today and was borderline even then. He was quite Edwardian himself. He once beat some boys senseless when he thought one Bonfire Night that they were going to put bangers through my grandmother’s letterbox. When he was done he recognised one of them as his wife’s young brother, who was dropping in to see if the old lady was alright.
Mad as a bag of cats though he may have been, Uncle Leonard was the face of change in our family. My grandmother survived my grandfather after they’d retired from running their pub, The Bird In Hand and lived in a freezing cold stone house out on the western edge of the old village, towards Clevedon. Just across the new road, with drains and kerbs and everything was my uncle’s house, that came with his job as driver for the slaughterhouse owned by the other family in the village, the Bakers. According to the vicar the Bakers and the Summerells had divided the village up years ago and it changed hands between them every few decades. Until the 1970s, when the Bakers stopped the game forever by selling the farmland for new Abigail’s Party houses, the ones there today and not now so new anymore. It was a big house they’d given him though, brand new, with a false wrought-iron balcony outside the big bedroom window, a double garage, lawns and a wooden fence, the whole Dallas in Somerset rig-out. My aunt used to hear a game of tennis going on when she was thinking of nothing, and half-saw the shadow of tennis balls in flight past the big window in the kitchen when she was washing up.
Quite why the Bakers paid a lorry driver like this and set him up in a big new four-bedroomed house is a mystery to this day, but they did. I met Mr Baker once when I was on holiday there, helping my uncle on his wagon. He was having his tea, as I called it, but this took the form of a roast chicken and a bottle of beer. This struck me as an unimaginable level of hard-earned luxury, especially during the week. He was obviously so rich he didn’t just eat chicken on Sundays. There was a palpable feeling of energy and change in the air then. Big new trucks filled the slaughterhouse yard driving past a big long stone shed that had been some kind of factory, because it had the rusty axles and drive wheels for a power system still fixed into the roof. Not an electrical power system; this went back to the days when factories had a steam boiler that turned a wheel that drove a belt that turned another wheel that drove a drive-shaft that ran the length of the roof. Whatever it was that needed power was driven off belts from the drive-shaft. It was literally a different world. I was told not to go in there because it wasn’t safe and it probably wasn’t, with no floor and only habit and the rusty iron drive shafts keeping the walls upright, but I preferred being in the old Edwardian factory, whatever it was, to the bright glare of the slaughterhouse yard. Eventually my uncle bought my grandmother’s house, she moved into sheltered accommodation that was small and hot-house heated and she was happier than she’d been since she was a young girl until she died, about ten years later.
Before that, before she moved out of her cold old house, I drove her back across the Mendips from our house where she’d been staying. I was about 18 and being about 18 I didn’t really know how old she was.
A Renault Six, but not ours. Ours was white.
We had a Renault Six, a weirdly quirky good car with the gear-lever on the dashboard that suited me to the ground.
From Trowbridge to Nailsea you go down past my school and out onto the Wingfield Road, along over the moor where there used to be highwaymen years ago like, as my uncle would have said, along the side of the river into Farleigh Hungerford then left at the top of the hill, past the castle. Then on to Midsummer Norton, the real place, where no-one ever gets murdered and on out, down the hill, through the hamlet of two houses and the haunted pub, Tuckers Grave, where the ashtrays used to move around the tables when you weren’t looking, out past the cheese farm on the top, over the crossroads and on into deep Mendip, the hard country where the stone breaks through the ground dotted with Roman lead mines and all the road signs are gone, taken away in the big war to confuse the Germans, if they’d ever had a need to visit Stanton Drew or go down the gorge at Burrington Combe, where John Wesley wrote Rock of Ages in a thunderstorm, where there’s a huge cave just right there at the side of the road, where I liked to pretend Red Indians were just at the top of the canyon rim when I was small, where two younger, un-warlike German tourists were killed when they pitched their tents under an unstable cliff one summer.
Then you’re out at the bottom of the gorge, onto the flat meadows running down to Nailsea and Clevedon and the sea. I hadn’t really ever talked to my grandmother before that trip, when she told me about riding down these same roads before she was married, riding pillion on my grandfather’s motorcycle, around about 1920. He was just too young to go to the Great War. Luckily for him. By the time of the second war to end all wars he was 38 and already had eight of his nine children to provide for, so once again the call of the bugle passed him by; the War Office exempted him from service because it would cost them too much if he got killed with so many children.
It was the first time I’d ever had any idea of my grandmother as a real person, the girl on the back of that old motorcycle, chilled and wrapped up in a raincoat on a summer’s day riding the lanes I’d ridden, along the same roads, all that time ago, so long back that I could only think of it in black and white, seeing the grandmother I’d never seen, a girl only a bit older than me, nearly 70 years before.
Florence May Summerell, my grandmother, around about 1920.
There was something about that place, something about that imagined time that’s always attracted me. It gets in the blood and for years I thought that if only I could find the right leather soled boots, the right moleskins, the right shape of cap or twist of neckerchief that golden Edwardian past would rise up around me, the time when they’d invented railways and aircraft but not yet the country-smashing mass-produced car.
I wasn’t the only person with this infection, as the TV programme clearly showed. Years later I was in Dorset, staying with a friend while her non-marriage disintegrated like a building being demolished around us that week. Her idiot partner, already ex-partner in his mind but weeks before he had the guts to say so, had stumbled onto rather than launched a cider business. He went to pubs selling it, his mate in another stone barn made it.
Dorset farmyard, just down the road from my friend's house, apart from the phone line and kerb-stones, still the same as in Edwardian times.
I went over to have a look. His mate showed me the cider press he was restoring, made in Bristol in 1946. Originally it had its own little engine to power it, but now it ran on electricity. Other than that it was the same as the day just after the war when the juice was first crushed out of the cider cheese.
He gave a big speech about how the big brewers added chemicals to speed the fermentation up and get the units out of the warehouse to market, then other chemicals to slow it down in case the barrels burst and the product investment was wasted. Some of them, he hinted, added chemicals to give the customer a headache, just to let them know this was pretty strong stuff they were drinking. The fashionable cider at the time was Red Rock and you could believe it had headache chemical in it, along with Saturday morning remover chemical added-in to the mix. He didn’t do any of that, he said. He wanted to make his cider the old way; local apples, local press, local customers.
And that was about where the tradition ended.
He was using man-sized plastic orange juice barrels from Israel instead of casks. The apples were all local, but the local apples were bitter, too bitter for modern tastes he thought, so he added some sweetener. I asked what kind of sugar was best, but it wasn’t sugar he was using at all, only saccharin. Good old carcinogenic, metallic tasting, gives-you-a-cracking headache sulphonamide-based saccharin. Don’t believe me? Read about it here. Why saccharin? It was cheaper than sugar.
So that was another tradition gone to where old dreams go. We can’t get the past back, we can’t get the majority eating local food, we can’t ride out on an antique motorcycle with my grandmother in that suddenly chilly summer evening 90 years ago, anymore than we can live in those Edwardian summers before the Maxims and Vickers guns scythed down the tallest of the crop in Flanders fields.
