4 of 24 - Bodmin moor 1963

 

Up until I was about 12 my family lived in a very small Cornish village on the fringes of Bodmin moor. The village had no shop or pub. The only other buildings it had apart from farm buildings and houses was a Church and a vicarage. The church dates to the 1430’s and had hosted notables such as John Wesley the Methodist evangelist, and John Couch Adams the astronomer who predicted the existence of Neptune.

Back in the early sixties it was common for children to play outside entirely unsupervised. This was not considered a dereliction of parental duty. Rather the assumption was that the freedom to roam would teach children valuable lessons regarding all manner of natural and manmade hazards, like stinging nettles, farm gates and gravity. I think I was about seven years old when I learnt my first tough lesson in gravity when I went exploring behind the vicarage.

Parked up and out of commission behind the vicarage was a Rover P4. The Rover P4 was a splendid example of British post-war engineering. It was solid and built to last. And heavy. I found this out when I attempted to look inside the boot. I managed to lift the weighty boot lid high enough to peek in, but then my strength failed me, and gravity brought the lid crashing down onto my face, breaking my spectacles and bruising my nose.

I assume that my howls alerted the vicar and his wife who rushed out to find a sobbing seven-year-old standing in their rear courtyard, with blood streaming from his nose, holding a pair of broken spectacles.

I don’t suppose that it was immediately obvious what had caused this injury, or why one of the village children was in their rear courtyard in the first place, but being good people, they took me into the vicarage, stemmed the flow of blood, mended my national health spectacles with pink sticking plaster and sent me home.

My abrupt reappearance at home with two black eyes, an enlarged nose and wonky glasses elicited hoots of laughter rather than sympathy, a pointer to the metal required of us children by my parents’ generation who had to weather far worse things during the second world war.

The church and the graveyard formed part of my playground. On sunny days I would spend hours kneeling between the graves catching the slow worms and trying to catch the lizards that basked on the green decorative Fossite on the newer graves.

Around the same time as my encounter with the vicar’s car, the open door of the church beckoned me, and I entered its cool gloom. I remember the dusty smell of time and congregations past. Flat spice. Damp plaster.

My family sometimes came to Sunday services, and on these occasions the church was usually at least half full. But on this day, I was alone and the door to the steeple was open and from the shadowy spiral staircase came vague scuffling noises. I thought perhaps there was a bird or an animal trapped in the tower. I was a little bit frightened, after all old churches even smell a bit spooky, but my curiosity was such that I started to climb slowly and quietly on all fours up the age worn stairs.

Every now and then the scuffling noises would suddenly stop. When they did, I froze until the noises resumed. Several times the noises stopped, I froze, the noises resumed, as did my slow crawl. I jumped out of my skin when a frightened voice shouted “Christ, what the hell are you doing boy?” a voice several octaves higher than nature intended.

In retrospect I do think that the handyman’s reaction was quite reasonable in the circumstances. You think that you are working alone in a shadowy 500-year-old church tower when you distinctly hear an entity stealthily ascending the stony stairs towards you. Nerve jangling stuff to be sure.

I remember a similar reaction when I unexpectedly and suddenly emerged from a stormwater culvert I had been crawling through in a farmer’s yard. My appearance scared the cows who were ambling towards the milking parlour, they scattered and the farmer had to pacify them. She was more angry than scared but her words were almost identical.

My proneness to accidents made me the natural butt of jokes within my family and the cause of much mirth. Looking back, I can see the funny side and believe the humour was mainly affectionate.

One of Bob Monkhouse’s most iconic quips goes “They all laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian. Well, they’re not laughing now.” You can imagine my family’s reaction when in the 1990.s I told them I was training to be a safety officer.

Earlier that year my family and I were snowed in to our farmhouse for several weeks. The huge snowfall and "Big Freeze" in Cornwall occurred during the winter of 1962–1963. 

Known as one of the coldest winters in over 200 years, this event began with severe blizzards on Boxing Day 1962 and persisted until March 1963

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

1 of 24 - Introduction to "From Camborne to Doha by Accident"

  This blog was not supposed to happen, stitched together as it is from memory, mistake, and the occasional mechanical epiphany. By Accident is a record of things that went wrong, and some that nearly did, and the lessons learnt, both legal and life. I have charted a course through technical lore, atmospheric travel, and the semiotics of everyday objects. There are linen rounds and archaeological interludes, Doha site visits and Falmouth echoes. Some chapters are precise as a lathe cut; others meander like a seaside walk with no destination but plenty of weather. The first construction company I worked for sent me to the Brooklands Weybridge campus to begin learning the formalities of health and safety. I already knew some of the practical side, thanks to my Holman apprenticeship in 1972.  After fifty years of work—including thirty-four as a construction safety professional—I retired as a Chartered Member of IOSH.    Over the decades, I’ve had the privilege of ...
Read more

2 of 24 - Cornwall 1958

Wikipedia tells us that “Accident-proneness is the idea that some people have a greater predisposition than others to experience accidents , such as car crashes and industrial injuries ”. This idea is of course dismissed by most safety professionals who see a loophole developing by which employers could duck their responsibilities towards the less safety-conscious of their employees. I am in two minds about this as in my youth I was, with good reason, labelled by my family “accident prone”, and yet later in life and for 34 years I pursued a career in construction safety management. The earliest example I remember of my “accident proneness” occurred at the end of my cousins wedding reception one sunny day in 1960 when I was just 4 years old. My cousin and his new wife were preparing to drive off and were waving to us from the car. But they were stopped short by my wail of pain as I had got my finger caught in one of the closing doors. The honeymoon departure came to a complete halt...
Read more

21 of 24 - Construction safety in Qatar

  The Flowering Bush Qatar is a desert country. In Doha, the city blooms—palms and bougainvillea tended by an army of gardeners, irrigation lines humming beneath the pavements. But out in the suburbs and beyond, bushes are rare and trees even rarer. The land reverts to dust and rock, broken only by pylons and the occasional discarded tyre. One day as I was driving between sites I spotted a large bush flowering beside the road. Delicate white blossoms were scattered like confetti across the sand. It was such a lovely sight—unexpected, magical. I pulled off the road and drove across the gravel to get a closer look. I wound down the window and leaned out, peering at the flowers, admiring their grace against the grit. Then I sensed movement—an energetic commotion from inside the bush. A moment later, an Indian gentleman emerged, adjusting his trousers with brisk efficiency. He had, presumably, been relieving himself in the privacy of this rare and handy bush. And now, from his ...
Read more