Above: an easter bonnet competition at Sealed Motor Construction, Bridgwater, c.1973.
For years when I told people I was from Somerset their response would usually be something like “Oh, how lovely!” at which I would laugh inwardly, and grimly.
I knew that they were picturing a summer day at Minehead, the roaring log fire of a country inn, or perhaps Bath, or maybe even confusing it with Devon at its most lush and rolling. They were thinking about the cover art on Ravensburger jigsaw puzzles.
What they did not have in mind was the industrial estate on Wylds Road in Bridgwater where Grandpa vacuum-formed plastic cups for vending machines and Mum packed aerosol solvents. They weren’t picturing the heat and filth of the factory where my Dad worked nights making pistons, or the one before that where he waded in chemicals, or the one before that where he (and Mum, and her parents) put together waterproof motors, or… You get the idea. They didn’t have in mind the thundering lorries or freight trains and the infrastructure that served them.
Bridgwater was shaped by industry even if many of the factories have gone, and there are other places like it up and down the West Country. What I want to do here, for my own learning, is highlight some of those industrial towns and villages and the sheer, mad range of work undertaken in a part of the world more usually associated with tourism and agriculture. It’s nothing like complete and I’ll no doubt come back to this subject when I’ve done more reading.
From 1933, via the British Newspaper Archive.
1. At Bathampton outside Bath, for example, William Harbutt’s factory produced Plasticine, the non-drying modelling clay, from 1900 until 1983. This might sound like a bit of a joke but it was a substantial industrial operation. You can see some (small, watermarked) photos of the factory at Bath in Time.
2. Street, Somerset, was home to shoe manufacturing firm C &J. Clark, founded in 1825, and was the site of the original factory. Clark’s eventually had factories all across the West Country in places such as Radstock, Bridgwater and Minehead. The last, at Ilminster, closed in 2005. Clark’s head office is still in Street but the original Clark’s factory buildings have been absorbed into Clark’s Village, a rather characterless discount shopping centre with upmarket pretensions.
3. The Wansbrough paper mill at Watchet, Somerset, was a major local employer for several hundred years, from the middle of the 17th century. It closed in 2015.
Yeovil, also in Somerset, has been a centre for the manufacture of helicopters since the end of World War II. What was Westland Helicopters is now owned by an Italian firm, Leonardo, whose almost 3,000 staff build military and civilian models including a licenced version of the Apache Longbow for the British Army. Growing up I remember that the local news was always either ‘Westland in trouble’ or ‘Westland to expand’; a helicopter came and landed on the school playground one day but I’m not sure if they were recruiting for Westland, the armed forces, or both. An oral history project recording the experiences of workers at Westland is online here.
From 1960, via the British Newspaper Archive.
5. Centrax has been making industrial gas turbines and jet engine components since the 1940s and relocated to Newton Abbot in Devon in the 1950s. Today it employs around 700 people. From 1964 to 1979 one of the local football teams was called the Newton Abbot Dynamos and played at the Centrax Ground. (Very Soviet.)
6. Cornwall is of course known for mining and its landscape is marked by the debris, architecture and scars of this once great industry. At Geevor near Land’s End you can visit the remains of a tin mine that only ceased operating in 1990 and which is preserved much as it looked in those final days with lockers unemptied and curling calendars on the office walls. At Par outside St Austell a large and fully operational China clay works sits surrounded by fences on the seafront – a gritty two-finger salute to the tourist industry. China clay has been mined and processed in Cornwall since the 18th century and still employs around 2,000 people today.
7. Bridgwater in Somerset and Tiverton in Devon shared a notable brewery in Starkey, Knight & Ford. It was taken over by Whitbread in 1962 and operations were concentrated in Tiverton which became Whitbread’s western outpost until operations ceased there in 1982. Devenish, another big West Country brewer, had breweries in Dorset (Weymouth) and Cornwall (Redruth), with the latter still working as a brewery into the 21st century. There are still substantial historic working breweries at, for example, St Austell in Cornwall, Bridport in Dorset (Palmer’s) and Devizes in Wiltshire (Wadworth).
* * *
For starters, then, that’s a vast range of industry, from toys to war machines, and I haven’t even touched on bricks, dairy products, seafood processing, furniture manufacturing, chewing gum, chocolate bars, semiconductors…
One day when I was about 13 I realised I could just walk out of town whenever I liked, with the only limits being time and the weather.
My home town is really one big outskirt – not confidently urban, but not quite rural either; a place where you can stand surrounded by concrete and factories while enveloped in the stink of manure.
I was raised as a town boy – the countryside was a thing you sped through in a car on the way to the seaside or Taunton – but couldn’t help wondering what was out there, beyond the sign that announced our twinning with La Ciotat and Uherské Hradiště. What was on those hills I could always see in the distance, where snow sometimes sat while town was as grey as ever? What was up that lane? Where did the filthy old river go?
First, I tested the boundaries, walking a little further each time. The motorway felt like a barrier but I crossed that easily enough, my flat feet slapping their way across a pavement barely used. On the other side, just barely, I found the hamlet of Horsey and thought, well, there it is: I’ve walked to another place. I tried the same on the other side of town, passing under the motorway this time, and found Dunwear.
Then I really stretched myself, walking beyond the point where the pavement ended, past the absolute feathertips of town. Trudging alongside the A39 was dangerous which added to the thrill but I knew the rules (face the traffic) and there were verges to retreat to if need be.
It’s impure countryside out that way: stalked by crackling pylons, littered with fast food wrappers and fly-tippings, and with the constant sound of the motorway boring away like a dental drill. At certain stretches it feels as if there’s more roadkill than road. But compared to the estate it was open, wild and fecund.
That time I made it to the King’s Sedgemoor Drain, which looks like a river but was built by men. There was a path that I wanted to follow but it seemed as if I’d already gone too far from home so I turned back.
Next time, I did go that way, stopping to eat a sandwich with a view across fields of gaudy yellow rapeseed, with the tower of Sutton Mallet Church in the distance. I may have read some poems, which was the kind of thing done by the kind of person I thought I wanted to be then. It was warm and insects as big as shuttlecocks made ceremonial flypasts. I thought, ah, there it is — this England I’ve heard so much about.
I went out time and again, taking different routes, going beyond and beyond again, until one day I was taken with the most pathetic, suburban version of exploration mania you can imagine and didn’t turn back when I should have. Stranded in Huntspill as night fell I found a payphone and called to be picked up. In the car home, with aching feet and muscles, I felt like Edmund Hillary.
All of this, I suppose, was training for life, a kind of straining at the leash. Timid and reticent as I was, and am, I never wanted to stay at home forever.
My life would be a lot easier if I didn’t have to spend all day, every day, looking after this obnoxious kid.
I’m trying to live a life here – to have fun, get things done, make the most of my allotted time – but there he is, bringing me down, looking up at me with that pathetic expression.
And he’s a coward. If I think of doing anything messy or dangerous he gets into a terrible state, holding me back with all his petulant strength. He’s much happier when we do the same things, in the same places, with no chance of humiliation. Every now and then I assert my authority and take a risk despite the kid’s pleading and it’s almost always worth it, which makes me resent the drag he generates all the more.
When I want to make conversation with strangers he distracts me with constant demands for attention, pulling at my sleeve, in agonies of shyness so that I stumble over my words and end up only half-engaged. When I come away, I’m as angry at myself as I am at the kid.
Can you believe I have to take him to work, too? Have you ever tried to project dynamism and ambition when there’s a child standing next to you giving the old stage whisper: “We shouldn’t be here. You’re making us look stupid. These people are laughing at us.”
The kid likes me to keep my head down because he equates being noticed with being mocked. He makes me eat too much, and bad food at that. He won’t let me wear anything too smart or stylish, pointing mournfully at his own clothes – the cheap coat from the market stall, the hand-me-down trousers, the black daps. I end up watching the same old films, the same TV programmes, because he finds some comfort in them and shuts up for a few bloody minutes.
He has catalogued every time I’ve ever put my foot in my mouth or done something stupid and will suddenly remind me of those moments when I’m feeling at peace or content. How does he know the worst possible time? Does he do it with malice?
In his nastiest moments, the kid even tries to stop me writing, though he’s the one that got me started on all this. He knows the more I write, the less time I have to address his constant, petty neediness. In fact, the more I write about him, the more he fades into the background. He’s telling me right now not to post this, not to share the link on Twitter, listing reasons it will backfire on me.
Of course he’s not all bad. If it wasn’t for the kid it would never occur to me to stop by the waterside and skim stones, or sit cross-legged building sandcastles. Every now and then – this is when I like him best – he laughs, and it’s a lighter, freer laugh than mine.
And when I see the kids some other people have to drag around with them – bruised, broken, full of rage – I know I got off easy.
A gentleman scientist fills a laboratory with primitive electrical equipment and, through experiments considered blasphemous by his peers, summons life.
This is the plot of one of the elemental gothic horrors, that’s true, but it is also something that really happened, not among the romantic mountain peaks of Mitteleuropa but on Somerset’s Quantock Hills. And the scientist was not a doomed young Byronic hero but a distinctly middle-aged Englishman called Andrew Crosse.
Crosse was born in July 1784 at Fyne Court, a country house built by his family in 1620s on the edge of the Quantocks between Bridgwater and Taunton. Though now we now think of the Quantocks as a landscape dominated by conifers it was then covered with ancient woodland, its heathlands bright with yellow furze and purple heather, pockmarked here and there with sandstone and limestone quarries, and richly populated with deer and other game animals. A place of ‘free, wild solitude,’ in the words of Crosse’s biographer, his widow Cornelia.
Andrew’s father, Richard, was strict to the point of being intimidating and though his mother cooed over her ‘little Andrew’ his parents sent him away to board with a tutor in Dorchester at the age of six. There he learned Ancient Greek, oddly before he had learned to write English, before moving on to a school in Bristol at the age of eight.
In Bristol, on a grim diet of black potatoes and ‘hashed mutton’, he developed a fascination with fireworks and electricity. His father had known the famous electrical experimenter Benjamin Franklin and perhaps that laid the foundations of his interest, but the real spur to action was a lecture he heard about at a tavern where he had got into the habit of taking meals to avoid the dreadful school dinners.
A school friend, John Jenkyns, provided Cornelia with a note for inclusion in her biography which recalled what came after that formative experience:
I dare say he has mentioned to you our first joint attempt in the science of electricity, and the wonderment occasioned to a circle of school boys by giving them a shock with a Leyden phial… charged by a broken glass of a barometer…
Crosse and Jenkyns used this contraption to tease – or, let’s be honest, bully – younger boys who were marched up to a terrifyingly gothic witch-like figure sitting next to a box. (The witch was Crosse in costume.) Inside the box there was a depiction of hell with a devil dancing in front of it, pitchfork in hand. (A clever trick in itself: the figure was hanging from a single human hair.) The little lads were made to look at this macabre scene for a moment before the jar was discharged, giving them a physical jolt to match and intensify the psychological one. (At my school the bullies just gave you a dead arm in the corridor but this is presumably what you’re paying for with private education.)
Andrew Crosse. (This picture is all over the internet but I can’t find the original source.)
Crosse left Bristol for Oxford in 1802 taking with him an ‘electrical machine’ that he had acquired from a ‘philosophical instrument maker’, and a hunger to learn more. After university he returned to Somerset and made an abortive attempt to study law while, now orphaned, he also managed the family estate. His true fascination could not be resisted, however, and he soon had a new electrical apparatus to play with – a huge cylindrical electrostatic generator attached to a battery made up of 50 Leyden jars. This machine was made by his friend George Singer, another electrician, as such scientists were then known, though the word now refers to a specific, less glamorous trade. They would spend all day running electrical experiments together and then, in the evening, walk on the Quantocks engaged in intellectual debate.
In around 1807 Crosse was inspired to begin a new line of investigation. He kept finding himself drawn to Holwell Cavern, a fissure in the limestone rock the roof of which was covered in star-like Aragonite crystal formations caused by the dripping of mineral laden water through the rock. A true man of the Romantic age, he of course wrote a poem about the cave, which begins:
Now pierce the hill’s steep side, where dark as night
Holwell’s rude cavern claims the torch’s light;
Where, breathless, dank, the fissure cleaves in twain
Th’ unchisell’d rock which threats to close again,
And swallow in its adamantine jaws
The bold explorer of creation’s laws.
Crosse later said: “I felt convinced at an early period that the formation and constant growth of the crystalline matter which lined the roof of this cave was caused by some peculiar upward attraction; and, reasoning more on the subject, I felt assured that it was electric attraction.”
He took water from the cave and, back in his lab at Fyne Court, connected it to a battery and ran a current through it. Nothing happened for days and he was about to give up when, after almost two weeks, he spotted sunlight glinting on crystals that had grown on one of the wires.
In the years that followed, he married, had children, and continued working on his ‘electrical poem’. He argued politics and philosophy with his brother Richard, and travelled to Plymouth where, from the deck of a hired boat, he caught a glimpse of Napoleon Bonaparte imprisoned aboard HMS Bellerophon.
Napoleon’s Bellerophon depicted in ‘Scene in Plymouth Sound’ by John James Chalon, 1815, via Royal Museums Greenwich.
He also continued his experiments, constructing an ‘atmospherical conductor’, a copper wire of about a mile in length which he used to attract lightning during thunderstorms and bad weather, creating ‘terrific… noise and brilliant light’. Crosse himself described how one experiment created “explosions… [and a] stream of fire too brilliant to look at”. Calmly harnessing the power of the atmosphere he used the electricity to boil liquids, fuse metals and cause fires. Locals would turn up at Fyne Court and ask to be zapped to cure their various ailments which, according to Crosse, sometimes worked. It is easy to see how this kind of experiment inspired the modern vision of the mad scientist.
As recounted in Brian Wright’s 2015 biography, it was Singer who convinced Crosse to talk at one of the regular lecture events hosted by the parachutist, balloonist and showman-scientist André-Jacques Garnerin at a London theatre. On the night of Crosse’s lecture on 28 December 1814 two more famous figures from history happened also to be present: Mary Shelley and her husband, the poet Percy Shelley.
We know from her diary that Mary took note of Crosse’s lecture, whether she paid attention to its details or not. A year and a half later, at the Villa Deodati on the shore of Lake Geneva, she would write her most famous book, Frankenstein. Did Crosse inspire Victor Frankenstein? Perhaps partly, or perhaps Frankenstein inspired Crosse, because back in the peace and quiet of Somerset he continued his experiments into batteries and crystallisation in relative obscurity for another 20 years, long after Mary Shelley’s book had become a bestseller.
Crosse was in his early fifties when an accidental discovery, and the equally accidental announcement of its results, brought him fame or, rather, infamy. In 1837 he carried out a month-long experiment attempting to grow crystals by electrifying a chunk of porous volcanic stone. On the 26th day he observed what looked like insects. Then, on the 28th day, to his astonishment, he saw them wiggle their legs. A few days later they wriggled free and began to move around the frame where the experiment was being conducted. They were, Crosse concluded, mites of the genus Acarus, and there were soon a hundred or more, some with six legs, others with eight. Where had they come from? And how on earth were they surviving in an acid solution?
Crosse mentioned this odd occurrence to some friends in what he thought was private conversation but one of the group was the editor of the Somerset Gazette and couldn’t resist running an account of the experiment. That article was picked up and reproduced or quoted in newspapers across the country, usually under the headline EXTRAORDINARY EXPERIMENT.
Outrage commenced almost at once. Who did Crosse think he was, claiming to have created life, and bragging everywhere about his amazing discovery which was obviously a complete con? Crosse was hurt by those accusations: he hadn’t made any such claims and certainly hadn’t sought to publicise his experiments. He was blamed for crop blight and received a letter calling him “a reviler of our holy religion” – in other words, he was accused of playing God.
For another decade he and other scientists attempted to replicate the results, often with success, but without reaching any convincing conclusion. Was the electricity reviving fossilised insect material in rocks or soil? Was the water contaminated, or the apparatus? Or had Crosse really discovered the secret to summoning life?
These days, the consensus is that the equipment probably was dirty — inevitable, almost, in those days of imperfect sanitising techniques. Hardly the stuff of legends, and Crosse certainly did not go on to ‘create’ any more substantial form of life such as, say, a murderous, misunderstood monster created from cadavers rifled from graveyards.
Even though Shelley wrote her novel twenty years before Crosse’s mite experiments, and though in reality the links are tenuous, in recent decades the connection has become indelible, and it is probably fair to say that the Thunder & Lightning man owes his lasting fame to Mary Shelley. Peter Haining, that master of the fun but unreliable horror-history hackjob, called his 1979 book about Crosse The Man Who Was Frankenstein which, clearly, he wasn’t. And, well, I’ve done it here, haven’t I?
There is something irresistible about the idea of so macabre a fiction having any basis in reality, especially when that reality occurred in the wooded hills and heathland of Somerset where the red deer roam.
Sydenham Road was where town met the countryside — where the grey council prefabs pointed their rear ends at the tall golden grass of The Fields.
The Fields seemed infinite and wild to me as a frankly cowardly child. There were things concealed in the growth I did not care to encounter – hunks of rusting metal; plastic bags full of hardened glue, all sniffed out; the remains of illicit bonfires; and, most terrifying, nests of adders. In autumn low mist would lie on The Fields, and only on The Fields, like a gathering of ghosts. On one of the rare occasions I did dare to explore my foot got sucked into mud and I lost a trainer to the avaricious earth, which felt to me like a near-death experience.
There was no formal access to The Fields from the estate because, after all, why would we need to go there when we had public greens and playgrounds? (I once found a bag of dead rabbits behind the tank-shaped climbing frame in the park on Chamberlin Avenue.) All that meant was that kids clambered over back-fences, crushing the chain-link to the ground over the course of years, while certain enterprising residents installed their own back gates. During the day, and especially during the summer holidays, that meant cousins and friends could run in and out of each other’s gardens using folk paths worn through the vegetation. At night it facilitated more sinister goings-on – the whine of ‘borrowed’ mopeds and motorbikes, muttering, scurrying, cold torchlight, clothes-line raids, and outright burglary.
They started building on The Fields when I was about 10-years-old, and I wasn’t sure if it was good or bad news. On the one hand, I knew it would bring the wilderness into line – no more snakes or child traps, and an end to the sinister whispering of the grass beneath my bedroom window in the blue small hours. On the other hand, I disliked change — I sulked when they installed double-glazing and pebble-dashed the council houses — and this amounted to a fundamental reordering of the very landscape. Much as The Fields scared me they were also natural and beautiful in their own way and it felt wrong to turn them into yet more streets. Perhaps I also picked up on grown-up grumbling: a council house with something even approaching a natural view is a coveted thing and here They came to take the view away.
During the building The Fields became fearsome in a different way. First, infrastructure had to be laid, which meant heavy plant roaring all day long and then lying around, yellow and silent, after hours. Tarpaulins flapped and snapped in the wind, louder and more alarming than the grass had ever been. And concrete pipes were set about waiting to be laid underground, half-heartedly fenced off, with signs to warn kids away. But my best friend wouldn’t be warned away from anything.
I can’t remember how we met. I was shy and small; he was swaggering, round-fisted, and a year older. We wrote and drew comics together, planned elaborate bases, and pooled our collections of toy cars to make a museum in his parents’ garden shed. We played American football, too – he taught me to throw the ball with a twist so it would spin and find its target, and insisted that we tackle each other with full force despite the absence of armour or helmets. (I wonder, with hindsight, whether he had decided it was his duty to toughen me up in preparation for secondary school.)
Like a lot of intense childhood friendships, though, it couldn’t last, and as the building went on I lost him to The Fields and the company of naughtier, more adventurous kids than me. He kept ringing the doorbell and inviting me right to the end – “Coming over Fields?” – but I was too afraid and so he would go without me.
Then one day my uncle turned up, white-faced, and sat me down to tell me the bad news: my best friend was dead. A concrete pipe he had been clambering around and inside had rolled free of its anchoring and crushed him.
So when I say I lost him to The Fields, I really mean I lost him.
Within a few years The Fields became the Bower Estate – hundreds of just-too-small red-brick private houses arranged in whirls and loops along dusty new artery roads. Now the frontier with the countryside is old Bower Lane beyond which there is a stretch of flat farmland right up to the motorway. It’s muddy alright, but not wild or free. Enclosed, carefully tended, and private, it is no haunt for serpents or ghosts.
This blog post has two purposes: first, to introduce this new project of mine; and secondly, to answer a question fundamental to it – where exactly is the West Country?
What I’m hoping to do this year is really focus on the part of the world I’m from, learn more about it, and share what I discover on the way. I’ll be doing that primarily via Twitter (@wildwestward) but with occasional blog posts here when I need more space to stretch out.
It’s weird to admit that I need to learn more about the West Country. I was brought up in Somerset, spent several years in Devon as a child, lived in Cornwall from 2011 to 2017, and have recently moved to Bristol. My ancestry includes pilots on the Bristol Channel, Somerset sheep rustlers and servants at seaside retreats. When I go Home (with all the complexities that word entails) it is to Bridgwater, and I say ‘gurt’ without the slightest irony.
The problem is that being from the West Country, I wasn’t interested in the West Country. As a kid I wanted to read books about Los Angeles, New York, Berlin, London, outer space… Places utterly different to Bridgwater or Exeter. I’ve read near-as-dammit every word of Raymond Chandler but not one lick of Laurie Lee; I’ve devoured Dickens but dodged Daphne Du Maurier; I had to read Hardy at school but resisted, perhaps because all that gloomy, doomed, class-crisis bumkpinry seemed too close to home.
I only developed a slight, sneaking interest when I went to university and homesickness kicked in. That’s when I started buying second-hand books with titles like Rambles in Somerset or the Penguin guide to Devon. But still, even now, I’m more confident navigating east London where I lived for eight years than the Somerset Levels where my Dad grew up.
So that’s part of the plan for this year – to read as far as possible only books by people from, or books about, the West Country. (Suggestions are welcome.)
And that brings me to the first big question.
The Shape of the West
One of the reasons I like the concept of the West Country is that it is vague with soft edges but as I suspect I’m going to get asked – indeed, have already been asked – which regions I consider to be within scope, I’ve decided to probe the term.
Maybe it’s “the five south-western counties of England” (Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset, Devon, Cornwall) as argued by John Payne, who excludes Gloucestershire as mostly “Cotswold country”.
Perhaps it’s just Devon and Cornwall, as many practical guidebooks not prone to navel-gazing over identity seem to suggest?
(I realise this last bothers some Cornish people who see this kind of thing — and, indeed, the whole idea of the West Country — as the first step on the slippery slope to full-blown Devonwall annexation by England.)
In the world of local TV, BBC West covers Bristol, and parts of Dorset, Gloucestershire, Somerset and Wiltshire; while BBC South West serves another chunk of Dorset, the rest of Somerset, Devon, Cornwall and Scilly. (The remaining bit of of Dorset is covered by BBC South — what a carve up!)
Thomas Hardy’s Wessex includes not only Devon, Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire but also Berkshire, Hampshire and Oxfordshire. It excludes Cornwall. The ancient Kingdom of the West Saxons from which it draws its name shifted its boundaries and influence over time but like Hardy’s Wessex (to simplify grossly) stretches further up and closer to London than most ideas of the West Country might allow.
The South West Region defined by the government includes Bristol, Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Somerset and Wiltshire. Another bureaucratic body, the EU, says that a cheese can only be described as ‘West Country Farmhouse Cheddar’ if it is produced in Cornwall, Devon, Dorset or Somerset.
And, finally, I’ve always thought of the Great Western Railway line that runs out of London Paddington all the way to Penzance as a kind of spine for the West Country. As a result, I tend to look up on Swindon and even Reading as far appendages of the West Country. Maybe Paddington counts, too, like our Voyager probe poking into the western side of the capital.
So, for now, here’s my conclusion: the heart of the West Country is Devon and Somerset; neighbouring counties are deeply entangled; but the next counties out again might or might not be in the West Country, depending on the angle from which you view them, or which story is being told.
I hope that doesn’t mortally offend anyone. I suspect my view will change the more I learn and read, or perhaps you want to try to change my mind. To which I say, go for it!
When I say Home, I mean Bridgwater in Somerset — a town I haven’t lived in since the 1990s, where I didn’t live for large chunks of my childhood, and where even my parents no longer live. But I was nursed there, went to junior school, secondary school and sixth-form college there, and so it is and always will be Home.
Perhaps I felt more than usually moved by the experience this time because I really had no reason to be there. I was delivering some Christmas presents to a cousin but, honestly, I half engineered that as an excuse to visit. No, this time, I was there because I wanted to be, with the express intention of giving the old place my full attention.
I felt quite overcome at times, standing opposite the house where my uncle died, passing my cousin’s workshop, and then wandering through terraced streets where various members of my family lived at one time or another. I didn’t remember the curve of the road or the beautiful soft-edged red brick. Its Victorian completeness, or complete Victorianness, had never struck me before.
For a full minute I stared at a derelict property, boarded up as long as I remember it, and somehow as faded and poignant in real life as an unlabelled Polaroid from the back of a discarded album. How could something so small, so mean, be so beautiful?
That habit some people have of reflexively dismissing their home towns as ‘dumps’, ‘toilets’, ‘the arse end of nowhere’, has never afflicted me. I’ve always insisted that I am fond of Bridgwater even though I know — of course I do — that there’s nothing much to recommend it to strangers. (Carnival, perhaps?) Hating one’s home-town has always struck me as a bit of a cliche, to be frank, like introducing yourself as ‘A bit of a cynic’, or saying that your band’s music ‘defies classification’. A sort of low-fat alternative to any actual personality.
Still, that contempt for the familiar must have been lurking, even if I didn’t acknowledge it. When I was 17 I was tasked with writing a script for a short film at Bridgwater College and what poured out was a grotesque stream of consciousness full of cracked paving stones, foul sewers, and grim reflections on the town’s sinister history. “Where did this come from?” asked the lecturer when I handed it in, perhaps concerned that I had previously unsuspected psychiatric problems.
On this visit, the same fear and loathing manifested in a strange tug of emotions. Much as I was delighted to be there I could also feel a tightening in my spine — a sort of shudder-in-waiting as my fight-or-flight response came out of sleep mode. It was as if my stranded teenage anxiety met me off the train and was following me around like an insinuating familiar.
I also caught myself trudging at times. Though I knew I should be move to be once again on Monmouth Street, for example, my legs and brain conspired to loop me back in where I left off. For whole stretches I forgot to look at all, as if I had somewhere to be by a certain time (I didn’t) — town is town is town.
Perhaps its natural to have that desire-hate, comfort-fear, fascination-boredom relationship with places you truly know.
As it is, this time the balance tipped towards the positive. I saw things for the first time that I’d seen a thousand times — ghost signs, the gorgeousness of the old Edwardian cinema, the sprinkle of classical buildings at Cornhill that speak of a time when the town had pretensions, and even the space-age oddness of the stillborn shopping mall. I looked at — was mesmerised by — the golden reeds on the riverbank backlit by a bone idle winter sun that had barely lifted itself above the bandstand in Blake Gardens.
I suppose my advice might be that if you’re going to wherever you call home for Christmas, and dreading it because it scares or bores you, or some mixture of both, try looking at it as a stranger might. Forget what you know, forget the well-practised routes your muscle memory insists upon, and let yourself love it.
I’ve never smoked but I spent my childhood in smoky rooms, surrounded by grandparents and parents, aunts and uncles, all smoking.
Bronzed fingers, yellow nails, picking at cellophane and gold paper. Those fingers flicking at lighters, pressing a fresh cigarette to the orange glow of another already underway, or pushing one through the bars towards the orange-purple flames of a gas fire. Those fingers hooked around cigarettes, lifting them to lips that kissed me goodnight or spat into tissues to wash my sticky face.
The smoke itself had a warm smell of home, not the wholesome smell of a wood fire but sweeter and dirtier. Like an animal. It created its own fog, sepia toning as practical effect, until breathing was like chewing and my eyes ached and ran wet. And there was no escape: “Shut that window, it’s bloody knottling.”
There were ashtrays on tables, windowsills, the arms of chairs, all full of smooth grey dust and bent filter tips, some with lipstick stains. Ashtrays were souvenirs, gifts and ornaments — the lozenge of green and red glass, the magic machine with the button to open the trap, the porcelain Whitbread promotional piece the size of a toilet seat, the vintage car with the red plastic seats — and yet nobody could ever find one, which is how cigarette ended up in tea cups or the empty foil trays from Sunday’s jam tarts.
All the houses were tanned brown, nicotine jam on every smooth surface, from fireplace tiles to the smoked grey plastic lid of the Hi-Fi. Scrape it with a nail and it would come away, pleasingly, in curls. There were burns in odd places, like either the tracks of tiny meteors or wormholes, depending where and how the tip of the fag had landed.
Smoking was a mode of personal expression: Uncle Ernie’s meagre roll-ups, Grandpa Newman’s stubby naval non-filters, Dad’s attention-grabbing pipes, his mate Mark’s cigars, all made some sort of statement. Some brands were ladylike, others masculine, and everyone had a preference.
I asked my Grandpa Roland what he wanted for Christmas every year and he always gave the same reply: “Packet of fags.” (Players No. 6.)
We woke to morning coughs — to the sound of lungs trying break the belts that bound them with a hack, hack, hack, rattle and release, and then repeat. Later there were inhalers and oxygen tanks, and yet still cigarettes. Give up smoking or you will die, the doctors said, and most of my relatives looked from cigarette to doctor and back again, and took another drag.
I sometimes miss the smoke, the smell, and especially the smokers, happily smoking, sharing cigarettes to show their affection for each other, sitting in a cloud they made together.
Do you know the Comprehensive Club on Pall Mall? It’s an extremely exclusive institution whose members are required to have attended a non-selective state school.
It’s housed in a plain brutalist building built in around 1964, and quite discreetly advertised. The bar is a pub, the restaurant a canteen, and instead of leather armchairs and grandfather clocks it’s all knackered but comfortable sofas, and plastic school chairs. There are TVs and lots of noise and if you want a cup of tea, there’s the kettle, make it yourself.
But for some reason – I’m vague on the details – membership is much sought after by posh types. They grovel and beg to be admitted but, no, they’re simply not the right sort of people. It sometimes seems as if the committee takes a perverse pleasure in humiliating them as it turns them down in favour of someone from one troubled council estate or another. The chair can sometimes be heard to mutter, “Taste of their own bloody medicine…”
Other than the comprehensive school requirement, the rules are quite simple. First, only fifteen new members may join in any given year, based on their personal achievements, and bearing in mind the circumstances of their upbringing. Secondly, members must avoid wearing jackets, ties, black tie, gowns, or any other symbols of formality at any time. And, finally, it is a serious offence to do anything to belittle, embarrass or otherwise ‘lord it over’ (those are the words in the constitution) any other member. If someone wants to eat chips with their fingers, mind your own business.
But beyond that, despite having been a member for 25 years or so, I’m not entirely clear about how it all works – about the practical details. Where does the money come from? Surely the members can’t be expected to pay huge fees, unless it’s only for people who’ve somehow got rich, which would hardly be desirable. I’ve never been asked for a penny. Another thing: what does it offer that the real world doesn’t? Why not just go to the pub, or a café? And isn’t the idea of an exclusive club, even on these terms, just a bit… wrong?
Truth be told, I go there less often these days. I don’t need it as much as I did in my teens and twenties when I found it a refuge – somewhere my manners could never be too clumsy, my tastes never too crude – and, at the same time, a delicious means for exacting revenge against the public school set. In fact, as the weight on my shoulders has lifted, and the wounded creature that used to whisper in my ear has become less insistent, I sometimes wonder if the Comprehensive Club ever existed at all.
Through the scratched visor I can see my hands in heavy duty gauntlets fumbling another dented aerosol into the cradle and slamming down the handle. The nail on the end of the lever pierces the can and the gas escapes with a satisfying bang, followed by a nosebleed of Hammer Horror red as the penetrant dye inside leaks into the oil drum beneath. I give it a shake to release the last of the liquid and hurl the crumpled shell into the skip at my side with another pleasing sound – this time, a cymbal crash.
This was my summer job between school and sixth-form college – puncturing cans that for one reason or another hadn’t passed quality assurance – and I rather enjoyed it. For the first time in years, and for the only time for years to come, I didn’t have revision or reading to do, and the mindlessness of the task suited the state of my post-GCSE brain.
For a dorkish introvert like me the situation was perfect, too. I’d worked on the shop floor in the factory proper for several stretches and found the constant supervision and chatter more exhausting than the labour itself. Out in the yard, it was different. Once or twice a day the foreman would appear from the side door to ask me how it was going, or just give a questioning thumbs up; sometimes someone would turn up with a fork lift and dump another load of cans into the TO DO box, usually with obvious glee at my misfortune; but mostly I was left alone. Looking through a chain-link fence and out across blonde-tipped wild grass, I could breathe.
View along the river Parrett to the Wylds Road Industrial Estate c.1997.
Well, breathe is the wrong word. I had to wear a forest green body suit, coarse on the inside and glossy out, to protect me from being sprayed with solvents. The mask preserved my eyes and also insulated me from the worst of the fumes, but meant I could hear myself respire, and had to peer through a warm fog of my own making. It was hot in there under the kind of summer sun I’m sure they cancelled after about 2001 and I sweated like tinned ham.
Because it was so hot, my favourites among the dinged and mislabelled cans were the ‘air dusters’ which when popped gave out a magical breath of cold wind, dusted my gloves with ice and chilled my fingertips.
Oddly, doing this job is the only time I’ve ever been high. At the end of the day I had to clean my suit, removing the grey, sticky layer created by one puff after another of solvent, dye, orange-scented label remover, varnish, lubricant, and any number of other goops and greases. I did this job in a stairwell using rags and a can of the firm’s strongest ‘degreaser’. My induction, which took about five minutes altogether, included a stern warning to do this with the door open, which having grown up on anti-glue-sniffing propaganda in the 1980s I took very seriously. But one day, somehow, the stop slipped and the door betrayed me, gliding soundlessly into its frame. Innocently, I kept spraying until the job was done, but when I stood up my legs had disappeared. I knew they were there, I could see them, but I was hovering above the ground. I smirked, then frowned, then giggled, then felt sick. I realised what had happened and drifted out on to the shop floor. Oddly, nobody noticed that I was levitating, though I was sure everyone was looking at me – all those eyes! I bobbed up to the first person who crossed my path and said, earnest as ever, ‘I think I’ve abused solvents by mistake.’ As they guided me outside, manoeuvring me like a loose barrage balloon, I oscillated between laughter and seasickness. I gave someone my Klix key, I think, which is how I ended up with a beige plastic cup of foul, powdery vending machine orange pop which definitely tipped the scale from hilarity to nausea. My legs rematerialised after a few minutes along with a crushing headache. I haven’t felt inclined to repeat the experience.
For months after I finished the job I dreamed about it – a looping cinemagraph of concrete and blue sky soundtracked by the distant digestive grumbling of the factory and the clatter, POP, hiss, clang of one can after another.
Precast Reinforced Concrete Heart 
