EVASIVE ACTION..

My  last rant and a subsequent bout of correspondence with my reader (see comments under `NOT SO DAFT AFTER ALL?` below) brought back to my fading memory tales of wartime Swindon, as handed down to me by my late mother.   For a time during the war, whilst my late father was cooped up in the German Prisoner of War Camp Stalag V111B, my mother and I were living with my grandparents in their house in Hughes Street, deep within the GWR housing enclave of Rodbourne. 

To try and keep the wolf from the door, my mother got a job as a bus conductress for Swindon Corporation.  There were many times that I went with her, to be plonked on the seat at the back of the bus for what seemed hours on end as the bus made its repetative journey from one end of Swindon to the other.   I suppose I was about three or four at the time and I have often wondered  whether those times in Swindon were any better than the ones we had after we moved from there to stay with my mother`s sister and her husband at Blackfield, close to the shores of Southampton Water.

For me, at that impressionable age, at least the experience of sleeping under the stairs at Blackfield and hearing the bombing of Southampton every night seemed somehow preferable to having tedious bus rides.   I`m not sure that Swindon was bombed very much if at all and so the decision to move as close to Southampton as we did was perhaps puzzling - there must have been a good reason, although the only one I can think of was that it was part of the rotation of `homes` my mother and I had throughout the war.   We seemed to live a kind of semi-nomadic existence, spending some weeks or months with assorted relatives and always, it seemed, moving from one to another and never really calling anywhere `home.`

But I digress.  Back to Swindon and the buses.   Now, I had an uncle in Swindon with the improbable name of `Bubbles,` who was himself a bus driver, which I imagine may have been a `safeguarded occupation,` keeping him away from being conscripted.   On the other hand, it might have been because  he was completely mad.  Bonkers.  Daft as a brush.  Quixotic.  Unpredictable.  But he knew how to drive a bus.

One night, the story goes, he was driving his empty double decker bus back to the depot at the end of his shift when, approaching the Whitehouse Bridge (pictured above) he thought he saw a German plane coming out of the night sky and heading directly towards him.   He would normally have taken a turn away from the Bridge but, with a swift calculation born of panic and self-preservation, he headed straight into the Bridge knowing that he might go in with a double decker bus but possibly come out the other end with a single decker.   And so he did.   To this day, Swindon`s Whitehouse Bridge is as infamous as the town`s very own magic roundabout as this video clip explains -   http://vimeo.com/12689753  

 But maybe, after that kind of experience, my mother decided to move out of Swindon and go and live close to Southampton before she was put on the same bus as Bubbles.  Thank goodness she did otherwise I might have ended up a Swindon Town fan rather than a Saint.   And that would have been just too much to bear.

NOT SO DAFT AFTER ALL?

I was a little surprised, not to say alarmed, to see that Swindon in Wiltshire had come last in a survey carried out by BBC2 to find Britain`s `most ignorant town.`  One of the reasons for my alarm is that my mother`s side of the family all came from Swindon.  My mother, her brother and three sisters were all born there and my grandfather spent his  working life as a pattern maker in the Great Western Railway works before spending his long retirement until he died, aged 98, in what was then the GWR enclave of Rodbourne.   I still have relatives living there, so you can imagine the shock of discovering that the good folk of Swindon have apparently been revealed as the dimmest in the country. 

The survey tested the intelligence of 50 residents of each of 17 towns and Swindon`s residents seemingly struggled to name the colour of oranges, were confused about the number of legs an octopus has and hadn`t a clue as to when Advent began.  Now, over the years people from Wiltshire had gained something of a reputation for being slow witted but that reputation was founded almost entirely on the story of the Wiltshire moonrakers.

The story is simple and its message clear. A pair of Wiltshiremen, engaged in smuggling brandy, hide a barrel of the contraband from the excisemen in a nearby pond and when they return at some later time, in the dark, they are caught in the act of raking the barrel back to land.   They immediately claim that they are trying to rake cheese - the reflection of the moon - from the pond and the excisemen, amused by the apparently simple-minded rustics, leave them to it.

The moral of the story is that, despite their earthy accents, Wiltshire folk are not as slow-witted as some would believe and, to this day, people born in the county are proud to call themselves moonrakers.  Maybe they`re not as daft as the survey suggests or maybe, like the excisemen of old, BBC2 had simply misinterpreted their answers.   After all, a town that has given us Melinda Messenger, Diana Dors, Justin Hayward, Gilbert O`Sullivan and half my forebears surely can`t be as dim as all that.  Can it?