Attending matches in Dublin when working in a parish which is halfway to Limerick presents logistical challenges. To drive to a match on a Friday evening, through the weekend traffic in the city, could take longer than the match itself. When the match is scheduled for 7.05 on a Thursday evening and when it’s against an Italian club short of fifteen players on international duty, the thought of the drive to the capital doesn’t even arise.

The television commentator says that 15,000 tickets have been sold for the match but the pictures show the 18,500 capacity ground at Ballsbridge is less than half-filled – when there are over 12,000 season ticket holders, to report that 15,000 tickets have been paid for is hardly newsworthy.

Watching Leinster take their time to establish a stranglehold in the match, there is time to ponder obscure matches watched in the past.

In schooldays, we were allowed to go Torquay on a Saturday afternoon. The bus would collect us at five o’clock at the south end of the seafront and there would have been afternoons when there was not much of interest in the town an I would have wandered to the ground of Torquay Athletic, the town’s rugby club, close to the pick-up point,  the most scenic sportsground I knew, and free admission. There was once a match against Penzance & Newlyn and, it being the 1970s, I think I might have seen the England international Stack Stevens play, but, close on forty years later, it is hard to be certain.

Rugby became a television spectacle for me in the 1980s and 1990s, watching the Five Nations each spring, but never going near the ground.  Moving to Dublin in 1999 brought the odd ticket to watch Ireland at Lansdowne Road and the growth of the habit of going to Donnybrook or the RDS to watch Leinster – but those weren’t obscure matches.

The favourite obscure moments, those moments that required an anorak-like devotion to being present, were occasions that demanded extreme patience on the part of the family.

There were the friendly matches. An August evening match between Agen and  Bordeaux Bègles at Sainte-Foy-la-Grande: heard of them?  I thought not. What about Bordeaux Bègles against Northampton Saints? The latter would be well-known.

Then there were French Top 14 matches; fixtures like Bayonne against Montauban, or Biarritz against Bourgoin-Jallieu. My children at some future date will recount tales of extreme eccentricity.

It wasn’t about who was playing; it wasn’t even about the result (though driving from a French campsite down into Spain and seeing Bayonne beat Stade Francais was a very fine night out); it was about the game; about chess-like movements, about speed and agility, about physical strength and sheer brute force.

The obscurity or prominence are not important – it’s the game that matters.

,

‘Oh, they are, Rector, they must have been put in around 1960′.

‘Thank you’, I smiled, ‘I was born in 1960; that is not old!’

‘Ah, Rector’, he said, ‘don’t worry. You’ve a while yet before you catch up with me’.

At least a generation older than me, fresh-faced and with a great head of wavy, white hair, he is still farming. To be as young as him at his age will be a challenge.

The exchange brought thoughts of lines from a passage in the opening chapter of Milan Kundera’s Immortality, lines to which I have often returned, lines which capture that sense of timelessness that many of us have:

‘She passed the lifeguard, and after she had gone some three or four steps beyond him, she turned her head smiled, and waved to him. At that instant I felt a pang in my heart! That smile and that gesture belonged to a twenty-year-old girl! Her arm rose with bewitching ease. It was as if she were playfully tossing a brightly coloured ball to her lover. That smile and that gesture had charm and elegance, while the face and the body no longer had any charm. It was the charm of a gesture drowning in the charmlessness of the body. But the woman, though she must of course have realized that she was no longer beautiful, forgot that for the moment. There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless. In any case, the instant she turned, smiled, and waved to the young lifeguard (who couldn’t control himself and burst out laughing), she was unaware of her age. The essence of her charm, independent of time, revealed itself for a second in that gesture and dazzled me. I was strangely moved.’

While the laughter of the young lifeguard in the story points at the ridiculousness of trying to pretend one is not one’s age, the woman’s action must find resonance with many people who feel that their outward appearance is not a reflection of their inner age, that what people see is not the whole story.

‘I was strangely’, moved says the narrator in Kundera’s story; he seems almost to feel a sense of pathos at this woman of advancing years behaving as if she were twenty.

Perhaps, age is external, but the exceptional moments when it is noticeable seem to come more frequently.

Bus Éireann seemed always a rather half-hearted attempt at a name for a bus company, though given the failed attempts at rebranding public companies in Britain (remember Consignia?), perhaps something dull and predictable was advisable. For a Sasanach, Bus Éireann never had the full-blooded Gaelic feel of  Córas Iompair Éireann, nor would it ever have the same memories.

CIE was at the heart of my introduction to Ireland. Arriving at the end of August 1981 and buying a fifteen day travel pass, the CIE buses brought us to a place very different from the England from which we had travelled.

A CIE bus took us to Kildare, where we found the cathedral closed and the Japanese Garden an uninteresting prospect, and caught the next bus back. A CIE bus took us from Cork to an unspoiled Kinsale and back to Cork, having stayed in Summer Cove. A CIE bus took us from Cork to Killarney over roads the like of which is now a fading memory. A CIE bus took us out the Cahirciveen road and dropped us at the road for Aghadoe, where a wasp sting at a youth hostel brought a journey back to the hospital in Killarney and an invitation from a group of young women to abandon our planned itinerary and instead travel westward with them.

A CIE bus travelling west on the Ring of Kerry lulled an anti-histamine dosed, twenty-year old student to sleep, while his companions chatted and enjoyed the beauty of the landscape, only to be woken when the bus reached Cahirciveen and the group left it to walk to the ferry for Valentia.

A CIE bus returned the party to Killarney, and another took them to Cork, and one the following day took them to Kinsale; the two young Englishmen presenting themselves a seasoned experts on the ancient town.

Two days later, a CIE bus would take the Englishmen away to Cork for the train to Dublin, from where they would travel to Dun Laoghaire for the ferry that would take them away from Ireland. The departure from Kinsale would be as the end of a story, a long since lost photograph pictured a dejected-looking Englishman sitting with his back pack on a wall in the Co Cork town.

But it was not to be the end and there would be many encounters with CIE in the years that followed, and even the beauty of the Irish Setter used as a logo by Bus Éireann cannot match the dull CIE wheel for the romance of its memories.

In a former age, the progress would have been monitored by the stations passed. There would have been the halt at Alford and the stations at Keinton Mandeville and Charlton Mackrell. In the daylight, the crossing of Somerton Viaduct would have been obvious, before passing the town’s station and going into the long tunnel. Emerging from the tunnel there would have been the little station serving Long Sutton and Pitney, then Langport East station, before Langport Viaduct and the flat moorland leading to Athelney. The cuttings after Athelney were passed and the train ran beside the Bridgwater and Taunton Canal before reaching Creech Saint Michael’ followed by the train’s arrival in the county town.

Such a possible marking of the journey was long past, no station remained between Castle Cary and Taunton. The only certain landmark was the tunnel at Somerton; the noise of the train reverberating from the walls. Beyond that point, progress was hard to judge.

Not wearing a watch in those days and finding the passing of time hard to judge, there was a feeling that it was time to move my book-filled suitcase to the door. The 1970s BR carriage was sparsely filled; it was not as though there was a crowd to  negotiate, but there was always an irrational fear of still being aboard the train when it pulled out of the destination station.

Clearly, judgement of time and distance was awry, for having slid back the door to the seating area to reach the open area at the carriage doors, and half carried, half slid the suitcase through, there seemed an interminable wait before Taunton was reached. Feeling faintly ridiculous at having moved so early, and fearing that someone might wonder what had prompted such strange behaviour, I stared earnestly out into the impenetrable darkness, as if knowing something unknown to anyone else on the train.

Since that time, the tendency has been to be the last rather than the first to move; the Ryanair queue, the 21st century equivalent to those 1970s train journeys, has to be down to two or three people before I move from my seat.

A fear of missing Taunton station would have served well today. Sitting on the Luas as it headed south from Saint Stephen’s Green, a moment’s reverie meant completely missing the stop at Beechwood and having to get off at Cowper, the next stop, and walk back along Palmserston Road; at least there was no suitcase to carry.

Sitting at our weekly Tuesday morning parish staff meeting, the saintly, long-suffering Rector under whom I served, inquired as to where I would be taking my wife for our wedding anniversary, which fell the next day. ‘To be honest’, I said,’we’re not going anywhere – the money is a bit tight this month; we’ll go some other time’. He passed no comment.

While making lunch in the kitchen of the curate’s house later that day, there was a rattling sound from the letter box. Walking up the hall, there was a glimpse of the Rector stepping into his car and driving off. There was a brown envelope on the floor with ‘Ian’ written on it in his unmistakable hand. I had only left his house half an hour previously, something must have been forgotten, but why couldn’t he just have phoned?

Opening the envelope, it contained £15, a sum equivalent to one-sixth of my weekly pay, enough to go out for an evening. It was a gesture that has remained a vivid memory – unnecessary and unmerited kindness.

Going to an ATM at lunchtime today outside the AIB branch in Grafton Street, the screen declared it temporarily out of service. Stepping inside, there were three ATMs and a handful of people waiting. At the middle of the machines, a young woman who seemed probably a student from nearby Trinity College had tapped the keys to inquire as to her bank balance – €77.31 declared the screen in digits so large that it was easy to read from a distance. The young woman paused before proceeding to tap further keys to withdraw cash, obviously pondering how much she might afford.

The memory of my Rector suddenly returned. I stepped forward to withdraw cash. I could hand her €20 of it and would not even notice, but the machine seemed to take an inordinate time to issue the notes and by the time I stepped outside she had disappeared into the crowds on Grafton Street.

The recession has frightened us into spending less and saving more. As prices have fallen, it has left those with secure incomes and paid mortgages with more money in their pockets. As prices have fallen, it has led to fewer jobs and fewer opportunities for people to earn money. While I have more, the young woman at the next cashtill has less.  Handing her cash would not even have been an act of kindness, it would simply have been a matter of justice; and it would have made one small corner of the world seem a happier place.

Miss Everitt, I discovered for the first time today, had been there since 1947 and taught for thirty years until her retirement in 1977. Miss Rabbage retired in 1972, at the age of 60; had she been a teacher there during the war years? They were questions that an eleven year old would never have thought to ask for fear of a slap for being cheeky.

Teaching was never exciting, but it was solid and it was lasting. The daily recitation of the times tables in the infant class created a capacity that has never declined – anything up to 12 x 12 and my response is instant and automatic. We were expected to answer without needing to think. Spelling was based on textbooks called ‘Word Perfect’. There were sixteen words set from the book each Monday and a test each Friday morning. Sixteen correct out of sixteen earned a gold star; fifteen out of sixteen and the star was silver; much below twelve, and Miss Rabbage was not pleased.

Miss Everitt taught ‘nature’ – we would have to sketch sepals and petals and stamens and label them neatly. Miss Rabbage taught ancient history – there were charts on the wall telling of Sumerian civilisation; and modern history – we once had to draw slips of paper with the names of people in Victorian times about whom we were to write a project, I drew Disraeli, but being unsure of who he was, swapped with someone who had drawn Shaftesbury, they got a much more exciting subject!

There was pressure to work hard and to do well. Never having the tidiest handwriting (I reverted to printing when I was fifteen because my joined up writing was so bad), I dreaded the handwriting classes where we were given inkpens and books from which we were to copy copperplate script.

There were moments of respite: programmes to watch on the school television; BBC Schools broadcasts on the radio, particularly ‘Singing Together’; our attempts to play recorder, (‘Every Good Boy Deserves Food’ might have meant something to someone who could hear the difference between the notes E and D); art classes taught by Mr Shield, who came one afternoon a week and  who had been in an RAF bomber during the war and whose passion in life was his pigeons.

Of course, if asked, there would not have been a day when I could have told anyone what I had learned, but we learned, and we learned, and we learned.

Our old Victorian school building was demolished some years ago. The present village school is new and it’s beautiful, built in fine Somerset stone. It’s a great school, one of the best in the country, and I am proud to have attended it, and I hope it upholds the best traditions of Miss Rabbage and Miss Everitt.

A journey in June 1981 remains vivid.  It began with catching the District Line train from Kew Gardens to Waterloo, carrying a case that could only be moved in fifty yard bursts, the weight of books being so heavy. The tube train defied the label ‘underground’ as it made its way through the scenery of west London, only dropping just below street level as it approached the centre, like an uncertain swimmer not wanting to get out of their depth; being overtaken by the speeding trains from the Piccadilly line which did not hesitate to dive deep into tunnels.

Buying a single ticket for Yeovil Junction and lugging the case into a compartment of one of the old Southern Region carriages that were still pulled up and down the line to Exeter; there was poetry in the list of stations called out by the British Rail station announcer: the next train from Platform 10 will be the 1435 for Exeter Saint Davids, calling at Basingstoke, Andover, Salisbury, Gillingham, Sherborne, Yeovil Junction, Crewkerne, Axminster, Honiton, Exeter Central and Exeter Saint Davids. A man walked the length of the train, swinging closed the carriage doors, each resounding thud bringing nearer the moment of departure. A shrill whistle and then we pulled out, heading south through Clapham.

The compartment was empty except for myself; I leaned against the glass and watched the grey suburbs which were followed by the greenness of English shires on a June afternoon.

The train pulled into Yeovil Junction at twenty to five; opening the door meant sliding down the window and leaning out to turn the handle. My Dad stood waiting on the platform and moved to help with the weight of the suitcase. We walked up the stairs and over the bridge to reach the car park.

Having dropped out of college after two terms, and having returned twelve months later for the summer term in order to complete the first year, that arrival at Yeovil seemed like the end of a very long journey. We called at my grandmother’s West Coker home where tea was made; its taste as memorable as the sound of the carriage doors.

The sheer number of railway books one could buy evince the capacity of railways to evoke memories and emotions in a way that may never again be possible.

My grandfather would sit on after his evening meal; perhaps he was dog tired after a day on the farm, perhaps he just liked to sit and ponder the world over the top of the china teacup in which my grandmother would always serve tea.  He would stare fixedly out through the window to the garden and the orchard beyond.  Passing the window would barely stir him from his reveries; his contemplations seemed deep and detached.

Such moments seemed odd in those years, why would you want to sit and stare out the window?  Why would you not want to go outside, or even drive somewhere else to talk with people?

There have been many moments since when it seemed possible to understand how much he valued his quietness; perhaps it was a retreat from other people, perhaps it was a retreat from the ugly things of the world? Perhaps it was a sense of timelessness.

Staring, later, across a Somerset landscape at the brilliant colours of a frosty January sunset, a desire for timelessness seemed not such a bad thing.

A friend in Ulster once told of a conversation with a friend who was a pastor, ‘What’s heaven like?’ he had asked the pastor

‘Heaven?’ said the pastor, ‘Heaven for for me will be standing with my dog on a bridge in one of the glens of Antrim; just standing there looking down the glen.  And someone will come up and say, ‘What are you doing?’

And I’ll say, ‘I’m just standing here enjoying the view’.

And they’ll say, ‘Are you standing here long?’

And I’ll say, ‘Ach, no, not more than ten thousand years’.

Of course, it was not a story to be repeated in the wrong company.  A stern minister set me right on the subject.

‘Do you know’, he said, ‘some people imagine heaven as a great big family reunion?’

‘Aye.’ I said. His doctorate was from Princeton and he was a good Scripture scholar. I wasn’t about to challenge his line of thought.

‘I have to try to point people to a right understanding’.

‘Aye’. I said.

My grandad would have understood someone just standing with his dog and enjoying the view down the glens, he could have sat long with that evening cup of tea; and he would have not had much time for those who were certain in their answers.

If Einstein was right in his understanding of time happening all at once, then my grandfather was enjoying his tea as we sat there on a January afternoon. It was good to have tea together.

Someone in High Ham has reproduced that scrapbook, having each page scanned and printed on high quality paper.  Each page of it is a delight, the photographs and the handwritten items providing first hand accounts of the place that was home and I am grateful to primary school classmate Les Plant for a copy.

There are faces instantly familiar, Miss Rabbage our school teacher conducting the WI recorder group brings memories of the discordant  noise we would generate in the classroom. But those most recognizable are those whose work brought them to our door.

‘Nipper’ Knowles drove a milk float for Cricketer Dairies and called six, if not seven, days of the week; the crates of gold and silver topped milk bottles announcing his progress along the road. His passing resemblance to footballer Alan Ball made him easy to identify. Den Legg is pictured with a basket of bread in his right hand. ‘Maisey’s Door to Door Shop’ declares the sign along the side  bakery van he drove which called three times a week with fresh baked bread; loaves that came with thick crusts and which were cut in thick slices with a breadsaw; slices that were thickly buttered (and, if you could not see your teeth marks in the butter, you hadn’t enough). A white-coated man stands with a van from Bryant’s, the hardware merchant from Somerton; the van would call each Monday evening and we would buy paraffin for the heaters from him.

Handwritten notes on the postal service explain, ‘The morning mail for High Ham and Low Ham is delivered by van to High Ham post office. Subsequent delivery was made by Mr Hunt until his illness in the summer, since when it has been done by Mr B. Bown. The Henley mail is delivered direct by van, as is the afternoon mail for High Ham and Low Ham’.  It is difficult to imagine a time when post came twice a day, but Mr Bert Bown is pictured standing beside his Austin A35 van.

It is odd how the trivial and the commonplace can become so valuable, how people to whom one would generally have not given a second thought now figure prominently in the recall. People long dead suddenly become vigorously alive, even their voices can be heard, rebukes and laughter, stories and arguments.

Will there be such a record of the current times? Will people make scrapbooks of village life in 2011? And, if they do, what will they put in them? So much has gone that the pages from 1965 cannot be matched by contemporary equivalents.

There are more pictures to look at, more faces to remember, more names to bring back to life.

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Postscript

Some other High Ham related posts:

http://www.forthefainthearted.com/2011/08/28/the-world-is-getting-smaller-or-high-ham-is-very-big/

http://www.forthefainthearted.com/2010/12/21/another-solstice/

http://www.forthefainthearted.com/2010/04/05/searching-for-the-dead/

http://www.forthefainthearted.com/2009/11/29/unravelling-mysteries/

http://www.forthefainthearted.com/2009/07/18/last-day-at-school/

http://www.forthefainthearted.com/2009/06/10/the-person-at-the-front-of-the-classroom-is-real/

http://www.forthefainthearted.com/2009/02/21/scents-sense/

http://www.forthefainthearted.com/2008/03/21/forty-years-on/

http://www.forthefainthearted.com/2007/11/09/at-the-going-down-of-the-sun/

Listening to a radio report on the 2-2 draw between Macclesfield (from the fourth tier of English soccer) and Bolton wanderers (from the top tier), there was a sense of the old FA Cup magic still being present and memories of the scent of Bovril in the nostrils.

Being honest, I have no recall of ever drinking a mug of Bovril, but it has acquired mythological status in my consciousness. Its associations are standing on the concrete terraces of miscellaneous football grounds around England, terraces at the sort of grounds where Macclesfield might play. It brings the warmth of the camaraderie and laughter of those occasions; it spells the ease of Saturday afternoons with nothing needing to be done on Sundays. It goes with the smells of beery breath and sweat and the sounds of banter. It goes with the bone chilling coldness of damp English winter days.

It is so long since I attended a football match in England that Bovril may by now be as archaic as jellied eels and pie and mash shops. No matter; like the snowdrops and the FA Cup third round, it is the symbol that matters more than the substance.

Perhaps the working class world of Bovril and meat pies was never a secure environment; perhaps the men who stood around on the terraces had as many anxieties and fears as their counterparts in a new century who stand watching matches on a big screen in the local pub, but maybe there was a solidarity in those times that has disappeared in a fragmented society. The smell evokes happy thoughts, feelings of well-being and stability and security. It is evocative of an age when anything seemed possible; well, at least, anything seemed possible at the beginning of the match.

Perhaps things only become symbols in retrospect, perhaps it is only in looking backwards that we project onto objects or experiences meanings and associations that they never carried at the time; perhaps, thirty years ago, the idea that a mug of Bovril would attain some symbolic status would have been laughable, as laughable as the thought that, at the age of 51, I would take a picture of a clump of snowdrops.

Should I be granted another thirty years, I wonder what the symbols of security will be. Will there be objects and experiences from these times that I might remember if I ever become an eighty year old? Or is security something one can only feel when one is young? Once gone, gone forever?