Notebook
High Littleton, to which I have recently Moved, is in that part of the county of Avon Which used to be Somerset. I have now lived In all the counties of the beloved West Country. High Littleton is not the kind of Village you see on the candy boxes. It was a mining place, in the middle of the North Somerset. coalfield, a coalfield now dead, and indeed dying almost from the time it Was born: those lumpy little hills which add tich charming variety to an already beautiful landscape are mostly old slag heaps, Mastered by grass for a century or so. We live, as best we can until the builders have finished the renovations, in a house which began life about three hundred years ago, as a huddle of tiny labourers' cottages (they Must have been tiny labourers, because every time I stand up incautiously I bump !Ily head). It became a pub during the mining boom, and though it must have been a small pub, it makes a substantial cottage.
When I was a young man, I held the office Of Foundsman No. 1 in a beer-drinking society, based on the BBC in Bristol, though its Influence spread far beyond it, called The Weaker Brethren. Frank Gillard had inadvertently christened it ('Some of the brethren are inclined to be a little weak in these Matters). The principle of the society was that when you were asked to have another Pint, you weakened, and had one. Certain exceptions were allowed under the general needing offorce majeure. A wife; a mistress,
If she was pretty (but whether she was pretty Or not had to be decided by the Committee of Foundsmen, and I do not remember any member putting this clause to the test); a division in the House of Commons, in the case of brother Mallalieu; a suit to plead in court, in the case of brother Foot; a rugby International, in the case of brother Kendall-Carpenter. Brother KendallCarpenter was allowed not to drink on Friday nights, a privilege of which he did not always avail himself. He is now headmaster of Wellington School, Somerset, and unlike Most direct-grant headmasters, Has endeavoured to take his school into the comprehensive system, only to be rebuffed. The song of this society was taken from a Mediaeval Latin carol, by Foundsman No. 4 (as I remember), who was also granted the title of Motto-Maker. (He is now Religious 8roadcasting Organiser in Northern Ireland, which when you come to think of it is Much what you would expect.) The verse began, Meum est propositum In taberna mori (which may be translated, roughly, 'It is my Intention to die in a pub'). Vigorously did ' we sing it to the tune of 'Good King Wencer.
slas.' So when I saw that this little house in High Littleton was called 'The Old Market Tavern', I knew that the shell had my number on it.
The village itself is long, hardly more than one busy main road, with a few housing estates hobbled on. The side roads usually tilt down to the main road, and the skateboarders do their best to kill themselves. The chairman of the parish council, who is also a builder, has offered to make a rink in the rec., for a thousand pounds, which I dare say might be a generous gesture. The High Littleton Skateboard Club is organising a jumble sale to raise the money, and the lads have been washing cars and selling firesticks to help. All this, I think, is good. It is not so much that you mind the little blighters getting killed; it is the awful thought that you might kill them. But what a waste of money High Littleton's skateboard-rink will seem in, say, five years' time, when everyone has forgotten about the stupid game, as they did the cycle speedway, and come to that the yo-yo. What shall we be left with then? A useless lump of curving concrete in the middle of our recreation ground. I expect if it saves the lives of a child or two, and the agonies of a driver or two, it is worthwhile. I promise not to write about skateboards again. My ten-year-old son has one, which adds at least thirty seconds to my evening prayers.
Now that we are sufficiently settled in to haul some of the books from their packingcases, I was pleased to be reminded that I have aboul a dozen of R. A. H. Goodyear. In this paper on 10 December I read that when Benny Green was a boy, of all the books he was given at Christmas, only one provided a perfect confluence of hope and fulfilment, a volume whose title and author
he had never heard of since, The Four Schools, by R. A. H. Goodyear. Now Mr Green is up on me in one respect. I have never read The Four Schools. I did not know that such a book existed. But not to have otherwise heard of Goodyear! During the year 1977 my son Adam and I, who enjoy a reading session in the evening, read six Goodyear books, much to our pleasure. We varied them occasionally (Three Men in a Boat, The Wind in the Willows) but when it was Adam's turn to choose, he went for the Goodyears. Goodyear was one of an almost extinct breed, the public school story writers. The public school story, a genre neglected by critics, did not really begin with Thomas Hughes (far too candid) and Dean
Farrar (far too moral). It was Talbot Baines Reed who got it going, in the early days of
the Boys' Own Paper. He was holy — at least
he felt it necessary to make holy gestures to his publishers, the SPCK — but if anyone
who has read them does not think that, for instance, The Fifth Form at St Dominic's, or The Master of the Shell are not good books, then the man is an ass.
After Reed came Frank Richards, who wrote for working-class boys, wrote in enormous quantities, survived to make George Orwell apologise for thinking he was a syndicate: I wonder if any man has ever had more words printed? There were much more solemn books, not all of them bad, written by people with names like Gunby Hadath and Hylton Cleaver. And there was Goodyear, muddling along in between, never quite sure which sort to be, but writing about two books a year for twenty years — probably more. I wonder who he was. A northerner, certainly. A soccer man (he makes a Robert of himself when he tries to write about rugby). Probably a schoolmaster at some stage of his life. I would be interested to hear from anyone who knew him. In the meantime, I promise, next time I go to London, to take to Benny Green — only lending — The Captain and the Kings, which is one of the best school stories I have ever read.
I have wandered some way from High Littleton, and I have not got round to saying a word about the Lib-Lab pact (like every other Liberal, .l hold deep feelings about it, but am not quite sure what they are); and I meant to tell you about The Times, a paper! love and strive to serve, which has just issued a crushing memorandum on the use of the word 'gambit' (if the memorandum is right, the Shorter Oxford is wrong, to say nothing of Stepher Potter); but I have not left myself space. I sit here at High Littleton, and if there was a moon I could see Glastonbury Tor on the horizon. Meum est propositum in taberna mori. My cat Crumbs, the only cat the names of whose kittens were balloted for by Times readers, sits comfortably at my feet. She wishes a Happy New Year to all her readers, and reports well of country life.
Alan Gibson
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