I’ve never had the opportunity to take a photo of this view before, although we’ve driven along the route and caught buses many times. For reasons too dull to repeat, the nurse that used to keep my ears free of wax – moved from the end of the road where we live and went to Fairfield Park where I took the pictures today. Being a creature of habit I started going to her new clinic which is 250 feet higher up on the side of Lansdown and three miles up a steep hill.
I left an abundance of time to catch the bus this morning but the bus company must have seen it was a fine sunny day and so (without any warning) they cancelled two buses in succession and gave me the ‘opportunity’ to keep my appointment by walking there as fast as I could. At the top of Walcot street, before I’d begun to warm up I began to wonder. Imagine the humiliation of lying on the pavement waiting to be carted off in an ambulance. But as always, when in doubt, I slow down a bit and I can’t begin to say how pleased I was when I arrived with 1 minute to spare and without having to stop and clutch a handrail whilst turning blue. It was such an unexpected achievement I also walked home later and stopped off at the allotment to collect Madame who’d been pruning apple trees.
Anyway, enough of this misery lit stuff. I noticed the distant hill in the photo as I hurried along the road and I knew that Madame and I had explored the wildlife up there as well as the canal at its foot but aside from that, my geographical understanding of the countryside around Bath is still at the separate places stage. So back home after a cup of tea I put the OS map up on the screen to make sense of the wonderful view.
Jump back say 15 years and I’ve never forgotten a funeral visit I made to an elderly woman who unexpectedly told me she thought we were distantly related. I had no idea how that could be, but she mentioned the village of South Stoke and said there had been Poles (my surname) living there for many generations in the past. The village of South Stoke lies behind the hill in the photo and it is very beautiful. I was inspired to do a bit of research and I discovered that she had been quite right and that little story tied up in my mind with a fleeting conversation I’d had at the back of St Mary Redcliffe church where I was a curate, when a very tweedy lady demanded to know if I was one of the “Somerset Poles”
Meanwhile, and in a previous generation my Dad liked to tell a tale about visiting two old aunts as a young man on a motorcycle “down Cheddar way” who made – as he soon discovered – ferociously strong cider. As he drove home to Hotwells, he said that he lost all feeling in his legs and had to drive into a hedge and sleep until the alcohol (not hemlock in this case) wore off. Here were three very short fragments of an unknown family history. The one troubling detail is that my parishes were in prime cider-making territory, and I couldn’t think of any women who made it. There were such strong folktales about women and their effect on fermentation that even in the early 21st century one old boy I went to to buy cider from refused to let Madame anywhere near his shed. His cider was life threateningly bad anyway and so I never went back with or without Madame – who, by the way – worked for several years in cider research and grew many now rare varieties of tree; which is why she was pruning the apple trees this morning.
By complete coincidence, an apple tree we’ve spent years trying to identify on the allotment site has grown a tremendous crop of small, almost black apples. We picked a couple of fruits today to try to name them. We were told it was a French apple and its name was “l’abris” which could – apart from a whole cloud of further meanings, mean shelter or car-port. I’d never have thought of naming an apple after a car-port. However Madame got to work on the internet this afternoon and has come up with a more likely American candidate known as Arkansas Black. We tried one, and it is delicious and very unusual because for me, at least, it tasted like apples and custard growing on a tree!
So there you go. Apart from the earwax, the thread that may or may not hold this entire post together for you as a reader is trees; family trees, cider apple trees, rare apple trees and the fruits of all of them – cider – a glorious drink as long as you don’t overdo it.
But to return to the question as to whether I am a Somerset Pole, I’ve never experienced the smallest stirrings of nobility in my DNA and so in response to the tweedy lady’s question I answered that so far as I knew I was a Staple Hill Pole which, I accept, was a pretty testy reply. I assumed that she was referring to Lady Margaret Pole whose house, on the Close in Salisbury, we once visited. Her Son, Reginald was the last Catholic Archbishop and got himself into trouble for trying to reintroduce Catholic ritual against the Protestant tide, claiming – in the manner of the overpromoted everywhere – that the people would soon get used to it. They didn’t. Nothing would please me more than to inherit a windfall couple of manor houses from the estate of Lady Margaret, but I wonder whether the tweedy lady was more likely referring to the yeomanry of South Stoke where, for all I know, her deceased husband made a fortune from building motorcycles of the very kind that my Dad fell off. False hopes, I fear, but I love a yarn that begins and ends in the same place. And I’d love to move up a notch from peasant to yeoman.