When I press the 'off' button

There are times on long journeys - and on short ones too! - when the chatter, or the music, or the serious talk coming out of either radio or mp3 player just don't satisfy, and I press the 'off' button.  Admittedly, it doesn't stay off for long, and I soon resort once more to the entertainment machine, but now and again it's nice just to be quiet and let the thoughts flow.

Often, I find, such times happen when I'm driving through the countryside, or when I've just been listening to something that has a 'pastoral' flavour.  At times like this I find that my thoughts turn back to my childhood in Norfolk, or to how I imagine my parents' life to have been in the twenties and thirties, or during wartime.

The town where I grew up had survived the war virtually unscathed - in material terms, anyway.  A stray enemy fighter had strafed the town centre one lunchtime, I believe, but there had been no intense bombing as in larger places up and down the country.  Inevitably there were human casualties of the war, including my uncle, who had died while working as a PoW on the Burma Railway.  But by the time of my boyhood (I am old enough to have had a ration card, but not old enough to remember it!) the town had recovered, and was getting to grips with the New Elizabethan age.  My parents took possession of a brand new Council House two weeks before their wedding, and my widowed mother was still living there when she died some 56 years later!

Many of the shops in the town centre and local businesses still bore the names of their nineteenth or early twentieth century founders - some engraved into the facades of the buildings!  Names like E E Anness, W Gostling, Wallace King and W D Chitty; partnerships such as Aldrich & Bryant, Bateley & Stratton and Watson & Smith were part of the overheard conversation with which I grew up.  Even though many of the businesses had since been taken over by sons-in-law, or bought by new proprietors, they were still known by the names they had borne for decades.  Change came slowly to country folk - and probably still does!

My parents kept themselves to themselves.  Maybe this was because neither of them had been born in the town - although they had lived there for over twenty years when they married!  Whatever the reason, this isolation left its mark on me.  For good or ill, the outlook that my parents had on life shaped my own development.  It gave me a strong sense of independence and self-sufficiency, but I also found it difficult to mix with others ... and still do.  Although quite willing to pull my weight, I wouldn't describe myself as a 'team player'.  Some of the prominent families on our estate got together in the early 'fifties and formed an Association to enable the people who lived there to gather together socially for outings and the like.  One of their achievements was to obtain, and have erected on the green in the middle of the estate, a roundabout and a set of swings to provide a focus for the many children who were growing up there.  My parents had never joined the Association, and I was forbidden to play there.  There was a definite 'us and them' demarcation, of our own making.  It was many years before I realised this, and many more before I was able to get my mind completely around it - long after it had ceased to have any relevance for me!

And then something jerks me back to the present, and the radio goes on once more ....