LEJOG Day 22: Bridgwater to Wedmore

Weather: Cloudy with howling Easterly

Distance covered today: 25.6km (16.0mi)

Last night's B&B: Brooklands Hotel (£30.0)

Cumulative distance: 397.4km (246.9mi)/ % Complete: 22.6%

GPS satellite track of today's route: Day 22 (click!)

Bridgewater will remain for me a town of contradictions. It isn’t going to make much progress in a beauty competition. Indeed, its more illustrious and I suspect snooty neighbour to the South East, the county capital, Taunton, is much more architecturally attractive. And yet! There is more to Bridgwater than meets the eye. For a start, it seems to be renewing itself, probably because it is easier for it to do so; less objections! The new industrial estates straddling that old sewer, the M5, which I crossed yet again, look both modern and extensive, and the transport links are therefore excellent.

There is a dark and fascinating aspect to its history, which plays out annually in the West Country Carnival that has its focal point in Bridgwater. The Guy Fawkes parade is claimed in a local poster to be “the most spectacular illuminated event in the world” and indeed the West Country Carnival has a rich tradition.  The reason Guy Fawkes is celebrated with such relish here is apparently because this part of the country was more passionately protestant at the time of King Henry’s dissolution of the church, to which the Fawkes gang was reacting, so stringing Fawkes up on a bonfire went down really well here.

The religious origins of the carnival are important to this blog, because it turns out that it wasn’t Mr Fawkes who was responsible for the gunpowder under parliament plot at all. It was his mate, Robert Parsons who was a Jesuit priest from near Bridgwater. Father Parsons had previously sided with the Catholic nobility in Northern England and the Spanish Armada to try to oust the Tudors, and the gunpowder plot was his final, failed attempt.  It just goes to show that you have to be careful of the Jesuits!

Talking of which, I heard that Pope John Paul II was beatified yesterday, which is the first step to being made a Saint, despite the fact that he had done little to clean up the rank and file priesthood after all the allegations and indeed the many proven cases of sexual assault on minors by members of the Catholic clergy.  It got me to thinking about Father Johnson again, the Director of Studies at my Jesuit school.

I was desperately unhappy at boarding school, but I stuck at it for five years, thinking there was no alternative.  Part of my problem was that at eleven years, I was the youngest boy in my class by more than a year. In fact when I first arrived, after a two day steam-train journey, during which as the only new boy I was bullied all the way, they tried to demote me (as I saw it) into an age-appropriate class, but I wouldn’t have it and demanded to see the headmaster.  He tried to dissuade me, but I put up such a fuss about having done all the work before that he eventually capitulated with the proviso that if I didn’t make the grade, I would be put back. That was a red rag to a bull. I did make the grade. Despite being the only new boy, I came first in every subject.

I had made my point, but had also succeeded in antagonising just about the whole class, especially the heavies in the back row. I didn’t fit in, and in fact I never did. I thought for a long time that it was my fault, and I’m sure I didn’t help my cause. But most of the boys came from very different backgrounds, and in retrospect, I think many of them were sent to that boarding school as much to correct behavioural problems as for a sophisticated education.

Boys used to run away from school regularly, especially if, like me they were not happy, but they were usually rounded up by the police in one of the neighbouring towns or trying to stow away on the railway, and were brought back to school.
 
Towards the end of my school career, one of the fellows in the class a year above me, a particularly odious character, bunked out of school one night. He allegedly joined up with a girl from the local convent who had also bunked out, together they stole a car, he managed to find some alcohol, he raped her and then he smashed the car with her inside it on a mountain pass outside the town, seriously injuring himself and, I seem to remember, seriously injuring her. He was of course expelled and I have no idea what legal action was taken. The important thing for me though was that he was regarded widely as a hero amongst the boys. That was when I decided finally that it was legitimate for me to feel that I didn’t fit in.

Father Johnson watched all this with increasing alarm.  He was I’m sure aware that I was unhappy and probably wanted to do something about it, but inadvertently, he contributed to the problem. I remember once I was summonsed to his office and after a brief period in which not much was said, while he looked at his books and I stood before him rather nervously, he intoned, “Come on, boy, out with it! What’s the problem?”  I stammered that there was no problem. He insisted on waiting for me to talk, but I had nothing to say, and I certainly wasn’t going to talk about being unhappy!  To have done so would have shattered what was left of my self-esteem. And so I stood there. And stood there.

Meanwhile, a number of prying eyes were watching all this from outside. They were aware that I had been summonsed. Father Johnson had regularly been accused by the heavies in the back row of being homosexual and of abusing boys in his charge, and my long sojourn in his office was all they needed to convict us both of an illicit affair.  I had no way of dealing with this crisis. Of course I was far too ashamed to discuss it with Father Johnson. To this day, I don’t know whether he or any of his fellow priests were even aware of the accusations of child molestation that were doing the rounds in the school. All I know was that I never had any evidence of any misbehaviour on the part of the Jesuits. They were clearly dedicated, highly educated and sophisticated men, but I do not think that they were sufficiently in touch with the realities around them. Perhaps they were insulated by the closed nature of their order. They were not of that time.

On the day of my final exam, I left that school, went downtown (by myself, of course) and ordered my first illicit beer (I was 16) in a local hotel, which they gave me to my surprise, and then caught the train for the long journey home. The school closed a couple of years later after more than 100 years of existence. I was completely unmoved and I have unsurprisingly resisted every attempt at reunion.  The years which followed, which included a scholarship to America, conscription to the army, and university were extraordinarily happy years. It took a very long time for me to realise that my school-days were not normal, and I was not altogether to blame.

Unhappy thoughts for a rather long trudge across the Somerset Levels. The landscape was very different to the hilly country that I have been traversing since the start of my journey, but I had plenty of time to think in those long, straight stretches. In my attempts to avoid the main roads, I stuck instead to the “droves” which stretch in straight lines between the “keeps”, which are in turn bordered by “rhynes” (pronounced “reens”)  that drain the lowlands into the artificial rivers of the Levels. The droves are called by colourful names, such as Plain Heath Drove, Gold Corner Drove, Middle Furlong Drove and Long Moor Drove and the rhynes made me stick to the droves so that I progressed across the landscape like a rook on a chessboard.

The countryside reminded me of the polders of Holland and even more so of the long straight roads of Africa. Perhaps that is why I was drawn to those melancholic thoughts of my long-distant youth. 

Hand-drawn poster advertising the Bridgwater Guy Fawkes Carnival

Inevitably, in Bridgwater!

We've had a tiff and were not talking!

New yellow flowers (?) amid the cowslips

Back across the sewer, with the new industrial parks in the background

Well! They've certainly upped it since yesterday! BP didn't get fined £50,000 for fly-tipping oil in the gulf!  These guys are serious!

A lovely walled path on my way down to the Levels

One of the major artificial rivers controlling water levels in the Levels. This is the Huntspill River

 

Now they tell us! Before or after their bonus payments?

An intersection of rhynes

I told the lad on the left I was headed for Scotland. After we had established where that was, he called his mate and little sister and said, "He's crazy!"

England or Africa? The land is crying out for water (but I'm not complaining!)

A long, straight drove to nowhere

Kerbside pumps!  My day was made!!

So many NIMBY campaigns. This one against pylons. Together they are a modern phenomenon