Thin as a string bean A cropped head Cheekbones like a dairy cows hips With shaving cuts and cotton wool stuck We’d scraped up 30 quid and he played for a chilly hour (We’d pay him after…it seemed wise) To five of us … crunching crisps and creaking our chairs And Kevvo with his nasty cough Then he legged it down to Princes Avenue Where such a god could buy the thing he needs While I held his guitar until he came back…healed. “Wow! ” They say, “You saw him play?” “You lucky thing!” “A legend!” “You held his actual guitar!” “But he was so seminal man!” Well he wasn’t at his best that night (The less naive would pay him in advance) But I did slip him 50p for chips and scraps
I remember that… …and the frail coldness of his hand when I shook it. Davey Graham
I love bumping into Tom when I’m waking my parents’ dog Nell. How it usually goes is that I interrupt him doing some odd job, and we have a quick chat. Today Tom is in the lane, sweeping up the trimmings from his well-manicured privet hedge with a dustpan and brush. Fair enough… except the lane gently slopes up to Andy’s milking bay and is a six-inch-deep river of cow slurry.
Tom is a a determined man. The dustpan is full of a mess that looks sort of like privet madras, and you can’t see the bristles on the brush for cow shit. Tom’s hands are somehow spotless though and we shake. We would have done so regardless, because I was brought up in cow slurry.
Tom was a lorry driver most of his working life. He started in the early 1960’s; not a particularly long distance driver, but distance is a psychological construct…and a 250-mile job in a 1965 Commer was probably the equivalent of taking an artic to Budapest nowadays
One thing about our chats is that Tom talks Northwest Devon. It’s a rare accent now; and it never was common. I find myself slipping into the verbal patterns of my schooldays when I talk to him…not so much the accent, as I never had much more than a tang of it; but more the structure of the way we spoke as schoolkids. We all do it ..a kind of mirroring which probably has its own name.
The other thing is: Tom rambles a bit, about his travels and local gossip but, almost always, he’ll slip in something that you’ve never really thought about…an aside that makes you think, ‘hang on a bit…’ as you walk away with an impatient dog. Sometimes it’s a preposterous thing, sometimes it’s a thing to ponder.
Today it’s a questionable fragment, hidden in a very brutal bit of local history…wrapped up in a tale about a lorry load of eggs. Events I never heard about as a kid, although they’re well documented in the sort of history books kids don’t read. I grew up thinking, ‘nothing exciting ever happened here’. Except that, in The Summer of ‘49, far too much happened.
Transcribing this to give some sort of impression of a rare variant of the Devon accent has been difficult. I probably shouldn’t have even tried but I need to practice writing dialogue because people don’t talk like they do in books. In fact, I only utter one embarrassing line, so it’s not really a dialogue at all.
“For ee come out the depot at Harwich, an ee said to ees mate, ee said. ‘ I got one of the Wurzels out ere with a load’, Cos I ad them eggs … I ad atchen eggs”.
“Gedd-on! Action eggs?..Wots one of them then…like a Kinder egg?” That’s me I’m afraid. I still can’t believe I actually said ‘Gedd-on! for the first time since I was 18.
“No,..atchin eggs! Eggs wots abaout to ‘atch..for broilers it was.”
“I says to im ‘Don’t you bloody called me wurzel!’, Cos The Wurzels was Somerset, wannit…Don’t talk nothin like Devon …Once you get over the Blackdowns they have a harder way of talkin.
“The Wurzels would be what I call my era. Well, I’m not sold as your Dad, but I shall be aydy-seven now in a fortnight. But I can’t change how I talk. Not for anybody …even thiccy Prince Charlie come down the road and give me undren pound to do it. You young un’s talk better ’n’ me cos you had the brains to leave your voices on the school bus, but you was from over Broadwoodkelly way…Alchey Down wasn it?”
“But I can’t change it. And anyway theym ‘We’ people…. Somerset people. What strung us up with the Cornishmen way back in olden times. Them Somerset ‘We’ people, well, mostly they got what you might say is untrussworthy ‘istry.”
My mind does a double take. As a kid I had absorbed those stereotytpes that Somerset people weren’t trustworthy,that Dorset and Wiltshire people were good, that the Cornish were a bit odd in the head. But they were long forgotten and I had never any thought to their origins.
“Us aint bloody Cornish neither. Us is no more Cornish ‘an that dog. You go down in Cornwall, them’s ‘We’ people too. The proper Cornish is everything is ‘We’ is’nit? Here us all said ‘Us’. Weem us people. You can say ‘weem’ though meanin ‘us is’…I suppose”
“Back in old times, they say, after the big rumpus, they could tell the Cornish by that, an if ’em said ‘We’… well then they was for hangin. Hung a load of us too they say…for bein led on by Cornishmen. Thousands…’specially over Samford Courtney way.”
Nothing ever happens here. We’re not in the history books, But once, in 1549, it did. Thousands were slaughtered and that horror was buried for centuries and never spoken of. Eventually the industrial revolution, Wesley and World Wars eclispsed it. But there are still fragments.
“Me and you from here is ‘us’ see. Not ‘we’.”
“Don’t get me wrong I ‘ad a Cornish mate one time…ee’s dead at the moment..but Tommy ee was alright. But for ee t’say it… it was ‘we’. Like them posh… wotsit… DFL lot say …’cept them’s not posh down there…down Bodmin way… to be fair…never was money to be made down there.”
“I drove eggs all over. Cornwall, Somerset. Een Newcastle one time. I’d geddon with all…dun matter where they’m from, whatever town or country’s all the same to me. But for ee to say I was a Wurzel was proper vexin…ad to put un in ees place”
“Them’s We people. Me and You an thiccy dog weem Us. Not We!”
I wish this plaque had been there when I was growing up.
How much of this is true? I know Cornish do say ‘we’ and that’s not a modern affectation; for they always have. I know Devon people say ‘us’ . I don’t know about Somerset (it may depend where you are in that county). I know that the brief 1549 Prayerbook Rebellion was put down with shocking brutality in this small part of Devon…largely because in Devon, as with Ketts rebellion in Norfolk (which happened the same year), it became increasingly revolutionary against big landowners and enclosures; rather than about resisting Cranmer’s Book Of Common Prayer.Also Somerset’s troops, from over the Blackdown Hills, were the most hated and brutal of all. All that stuff is well known…but could it be that uttering that simple pronoun ‘we’ was once a death sentence? Maybe. The only people who could answer that for sure … theym dead at the moment so us’ll likely never know.
In memory of those who sailed from Liverpool on The S.S.Arandora Star, without a destroyer escort and who tragically lost their lives when the ship was sunk by torpedo 75 miles northwest of Donegal on 2 July 1940. Of the 1673 people aboard, over 800 mainly non-combatant internees drowned. Many were refugees from fascism, or who’s families had lived in the UK for decades. The majority were Italians from cities like Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool and Cardiff. Many even had sons who were away fighting with Allied forces. Many thanks to Trudie Pandolfo for telling me of this sorry outrage.
We talked so hard we lost the time We forgot our bodies. Well she forgot mine! When the tallest girl with the kindest eyes Told the bitterest tale on the wettest of nights And I can’t fit it all into one little song But I can give you a clue I can help you along The simplest thing is I give you her name And we dredge up this story of sorrow and shame
Arandora… Arandora Star...
Was she cutting up chips in Wythenshawe? Or making ice-cream in Ancoats? Was she making a bomber at Newton Heath? …Those Italian ladies work hard. There’s a knock at the door and the neighbours walk in “That Churchill he’s collared the lot!” And they’ve taken our men In a paddy wagon Down to the Birkenhead docks
Arandora …Arandora Star...
Well there you are
So, she set off in the dead of night And there’s nobody there to wave And there’s no Red Cross Nor no blue flag She’s just battleship grey in the dark
They’ve locked the old men on the decks below
And headed for Canada But they got no further than Ireland and drowned Far from Little Italy
Just what does a mother tell her son When he comes home with his medals? That the cause that he fought for has stolen his dad And he lies somewhere nobody knows? So she kept quiet like many did Believing there must be some shame. While her man who fought fascists at Cable Street Lies unfound in the Donegal rain
And here we are. We talked so hard we lost the time We forgot our bodies… But that was just fine
I probably need to explain this ballad. Late one night in 1916, near Iddesleigh in Devon, a girl pinned white feathers to the front door. She wanted to shame her sleeping ‘conchie’ brother into enlisting…which he did. Bendigo was a common name for draftthorses…as Bendigo (William Thompson the bareknuckle fighter and political activist) had long been a symbol of strength for the rural working class…I suppose the Muhammad Ali of his day. Many horses were requisitioned by the army during WW1. They never came back and old farm workers in the Duke Of York pub were still bitter about that 60 years later…and that girl was never courted.
The day they took old Bendigo
Walter was away
I fought them in the farmyard, but they took him anyway
When the girl my brother loved pinned feathers to our door
He said ” you know, I’m tired of fighting”
So he signed up for the war
“You know you loved that horse too much”
“I know I miss him too”
“I’ll take your love to Bendigo, yes that’s what I will do”
“I’m bound to see him out in France; our paths will surely cross”
“I’ll buy him back for Christmas no matter what the cost.”
Well he came back without a heart and hardly ever spoke
Lost himself in working and drank and till he broke
Made himself the hard man and hit me every night
He hanged himself on Christmas Eve
Did it out of spite.
If there is an afterlife
And I rather think there’s not
Walter and old Bendigo will be ploughing up the lot
To look down on old Iddesleigh
Tell me what I lost
When I let my brother go to war just to find a horse
It’s club day in the Duke of York
Comes round once a year
There was a time when hundreds would march to drink good beer
In the days when we had horses and brothers strong as trees
A war’s no good for man nor beast and now there’s only me
