Bathtime Fun

Accident

This salutary video has emerged of a fatal crash near where we live on 6th July. Only one car was involved. 

I realise there is an element of judgemental voyeurism in posting this. It must have been devastating for the driver's family and those who knew him. However, the video has been re-posted many times on various platforms, and watched with appalled horror by many who live here or know this junction. 

It is the most dangerous junction I know: a staggered crossroads across a major road with a petrol station on one corner and a pub opposite. The major road is a steep hill. The junction is complicated by vehicles entering and leaving the petrol station which has entrances on two corners. There is a high volume of traffic in all directions. The major road has a 30 m.p.h. speed limit which vehicles often disregard, especially descending the steep hill. Many local drivers make a long detour to avoid having to make a right turn here. 

A 20-year-old lad in a black BMW with heavily tinted windows, may have tried to cross the staggered crossroads at high speed. Either that or he did not notice the junction. He failed to make it, hit the pub wall opposite, and flipped his car over. Cars in the pub car park were also damaged. Fortunately, no one but the driver was injured. 

In the security camera video, the car shoots out from the side road on the right beside the petrol station. The accident is then seen from a second angle. Arguably, all new young drivers should be made to watch it. 

The driver died in hospital. A day or two later, residents of the nearby area, including children who had to go to school the next day, were woken by loud, prolonged, late-night fireworks organised by the driver's family and friends. The owners of a local field in which animals are kept said they had had to clear up rubbish left behind. Complaints about noise by parents on the local Facebook group were met with comments such as "at least you can still hug your child". 

The Horse Race Game

We had a Blue Peter afternoon. 

For those not from the U.K., Blue Peter is a BBC Television children’s magazine programme that has been running at least once a week since the nineteen-fifties. Amongst a wide variety of content, it is known for encouraging children to make things out of cardboard, pipe cleaners, household waste items, and “sticky-backed plastic”. One of its best-remembered creations was a version of the Thunderbirds Tracy Island in the nineteen-nineties. 

That was amusing in itself. Television re-runs of Thunderbirds generated a stream of toys and merchandise, and Matchbox Toys brought out a Tracy Island play set just before Christmas. It sold out within days. Blue Peter responded with a home-made version made from paper mache. Thunderbird 1 was launched from a Yoghurt pot, the hangar for Thunderbird 2 was a tissue box, and Thunderbird 3 launched out of a toilet roll. The BBC was inundated with so many requests for the free instructions, they had to stop sending them out, and instead released a VHS video of presenter Anthea Turner making it (see the BBC archive). 

Our Blue Peter afternoon was spent making a horse racing game for the memory group Mrs. D. runs. The theme that week was Royal Ascot. 

We came up with a track made from long pieces of card marked with lines, with cardboard fences. For the horses, I printed out two-sided chess knights in different colours. They were stapled around movable cardboard stands.  

The rules were kept simple. Each player has a horse to move according to the throw of a dice (I can hear my maths teacher telling me if there is only one it is a die). If you land on a space before a fence, that counts as a refusal and you have to move back three spaces. The first to the finish line is the winner. With around ten participants taking turns, the game lasts more than half an hour.

Horses are go. F.A.B. Anything can happen in the next half hour. 

It was fantastic fun, with laughter and excitement. One lady must have had a “donkey”, because it kept refusing the first fence when most of the others had nearly finished. Some wanted to bet on the outcome, but that was not allowed, although they could try to predict the winner. One could not remember which was her horse, and one kept taking the die out of the cup and turning it in his hand, not knowing what to do. They laugh at each other because they think that they are the only one that is with it, and that all the others (including the volunteers) are completely gaga. 

“Parka”
“Yuss Billaidi”
“Put down one hundred pounds each way on the green-yellow one, at 7:2”
“They won’t allow it, Billaidi” 
“Oh! And Ascot used to be such fun” 
“Yuss Billaidi”

Of course, I wanted to strive for perfection by colouring the track green and drawing white railings along the sides, having water jump, colouring the horses in jockey colours, and making one a zebra, but Mrs. D. said we had spent long enough. Perhaps we should send off for our Blue Peter badges anyway. 

We spent days making things like this as children. One of the best Christmas or Birthday presents you could get was a roll of Sellotape, a bottle of glue, a ball of string, and a few cardboard boxes. My brother made himself an aeronaut’s flying suit out of cardboard, complete with streamlined leggings, gauntlets, helmet and wings. He bounded around the house in it, jumping on and off the furniture making flying noises. 

Would many of today’s youngsters, who seem to spend most of their time playing games and messaging each other on their phones, have the interest, persistence, or even the practical ability to make such things?

Credits: The voices of Lady Penelope and P. were provided by JayCee and Parker, with American and Australian versions by Steve Reed and Andrew High Riser, and German sub-titles by Meike Riley. The horses were fed on silage grown by Dave Northsider, their stables built by Debby Hornburg, and the zebra ridden side saddle by Debra who seeks. The horses are writing a guest post for Tigger’s Mum. Tracy Island and the race game were made by Mrs. D. who let Tasker think he was helping. Thelma played Anthea Turner, and Yorkshire Pudding was Brains. 

Great-Grandma: Another Painter

In writing recently about my wife’s eccentric great-aunt, who spent her life painting, I might have mentioned that her mother, my wife’s great-grandma, was also no mean artist. She travelled with her second husband to European “Grand Tour” locations in the twenties and thirties, which inspired several paintings. This Venetian scene hangs on the wall above my desk. It is difficult to photograph behind glass.  

I wondered whether I could identify the location. The street name on the wall to the right is “Calle Di Mezzo” but the name on the street ahead is indistinct. After some time on Google Maps and Street View fruitlessly clicking up and down the Calle De Mezzo (with an E), which is different, I found this building at the junction of the Calle Di Mezzo (with an I) and Piscina Sant’Agnese. I think this is the place, although she seems to have altered the layout of the streets and buildings. It was probably painted back home in England from a sketch made at the scene. Presumably, a market stall once stood in the corner at the side of the building, or did she invent that too?    

The painting could date from a trip to Venice in 1929. To state the obvious, it was not usual to be able to travel around Europe and Egypt at that time. This was the English wealthy classes on holiday. My own ancestors were then at sea, on canal boats, or labouring in paper and sugar mills. We could not travel abroad until decades later. My wife’s great-grandma was able to do so because of her second marriage. 

Her life was twice touched by tragedy and good fortune. Born in the early 1860s, her father died when she was three months old. Her mother remarried a high official and relative by marriage of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, who was forty years her senior. Great-Grandma therefore grew up in Ireland, comfortable, educated, and well-connected. 

At the age of eighteen, she too married a much older man, a divorced London solicitor twenty-four years her senior, who ruthlessly packed the children of his first marriage off to Canada. There were three further children at wide intervals over the next twenty years, but the marriage does not seem to have been close. It ended when she was widowed in her mid-fifties, receiving just a small income from an insurance policy. The Will contained the following diatribe against her: 

I exclude my wife ... the implied obligation on her part that she would be a true and faithful wife during our married life and would love honour and obey me which she observed for some two years only after which she persistently disobeyed my proper and reasonable requests neglected her home and children and was frequently guilty of shameful conduct with divers men making my life miserable and my home unbearable 

Within less than a year she was remarried to a wealthy bachelor of her own age. This was the source of her new good fortune. I suspect they had known each other a long time, possibly from her days in Ireland. She still had a fifteen-year-old daughter at home, who her new husband brought up as his own. The rest of their lives were spent in enviable privilege, painting, writing, and travelling. 

Our family histories contain some fascinating stories that would once have been well-known, but are barely remembered now, if at all. I have been researching my own and my wife’s families for over thirty years, from the days when it was a painstaking process, when you had to visit archives, search through microfiche, and send away for documents. I helped transcribe parts of FreeBMD, my own contribution to making things as easy as they are now. I have many more stories where this one came from. 

Cheery Little Pansy

I love a cheery little pansy.

These four are called Ed, Nigel, Keir, and Rishi. All have their points, but which is best? 

Perhaps Deutzia or Philadelphus would be a better choice.

Road To The Isles

New Month Old Post: first posted 2nd June, 2016

Sure by Tummel and Loch Rannoch and Lochaber I will go

As step I wi’ my cromack to the Isles.

Rannoch Moor fires the imagination with mystery and romance: the myths and legends; the forgotten history; the departed people; the abandoned ruins; the strange Gaelic names.

Said to be one of the last remaining wildernesses in Europe, it is a bleak stretch of blanket bog, lochans and rocky outcrops to the West of Loch Rannoch in Scotland. The West Highland Railway crosses it on the way to Fort William and Mallaig, over peaty terrain so wet that the Victorian engineers had to float the track on a mattress of brushwood, earth and ashes to stop it sinking into the bog.

Other than by train, the only way to Rannoch Station is by thirty miles of narrow B road meandering along the northern shore of Loch Rannoch from Pitlochry or Aberfeldy. Neville, Kev, and I, had driven there the previous Easter to sit cheerfully swigging our pints outside the Moor of Rannoch Hotel in the warm April sunshine. We watched a goods train rumble slowly north across the Rannoch Viaduct.

But it was the enigmatic wording of the signpost that caught our attention:

PUBLIC FOOTPATH TO

FORT WILLIAM BY CORROUR

(THE ROAD TO THE ISLES)

What a walk that must be!

The following year, Easter was a full two weeks earlier and the seasons over two weeks later. A letter from Major J. D. Rennie of the Moor of Rannoch Hotel, Rannoch Station, Perthshire, replying to our enquiry, said that, yes, we could leave our car at the hotel for a few days provided we left the keys so they could move it if necessary. However, he still seemed surprised when we turned up in the snow. We camped that night beside the nearby lochan. By morning, the pan of water left outside had frozen solid. At least it was too cold and early in the year for the midges.

It would not be beyond endurance to walk the thirty miles from Rannoch to Fort William in a day, but it seemed ideal for a first attempt at backpacking. We loaded our aluminium framed rucksacks, left the car keys with the Major, and set off northwards beside the railway track. And apart from the railway track, there was little else to see for the first ten miles but vast, uninhabited empty moorland. Being Easter Sunday, there weren’t even any passing trains to disturb the isolation. Remote, beautiful, desolate! We saw no one else all day.

The land gradually rises to a summit beyond Corrour, the next station on the line. It was shrouded in mist. The station, since made popular by the film Trainspotting, is now busy with walkers and mountain bikers, and Corrour Station House is a popular restaurant and guest house, but in 1975 there was very little there. We passed without much pause heading for our first overnight camp at Loch Treig. It could not come soon enough. My feet were a mess. Idiotic to attempt such a walk in new boots.

 

The next morning, bright sunshine reflecting from the loch and mountains bathed everything in a brilliant blue light. We set off west, away from the railway, along the southern shore of Loch Treig. The loch is dammed at the northern end, and two lost communities, Kinlochtreig and Creaguaineach, lie submerged beneath the waters close to where we were. As if drawn to them, my blistered feet refused to go far that day and we camped again about a mile and a half beyond the loch, near the Staoineag ruin beside the Abhainn Rath river we were following. There was wood to light a fire and, again, no one around to complain.

 

We covered about eight miles on day three, struggling with our heavy rucksacks across difficult ground. Continuing west, the river becomes angrier and whiter, the wide banks giving way to a steep-sided valley sparsely lined with silver birch. It then becomes still again, with banks of stony mudflats, and the country opens up into wide, browny heath and moorland. But as you approach the once fine house of Luibeilt, now a lonely ruin, you have to ford the river.

We knew the technique. Trouser legs up, socks off, boots back on, wade across with caution, and most importantly, do not lose your footing. The river was not particularly high and should have been trouble free, but it wasn’t. At least I was not the one to slip and fall in, losing the capacity either to give or refuse consent to be photographed ignominiously paddling out.

While drying out, two countryside rangers waded across, the only others we saw on the whole walk. As you would expect, they made it look easy. We chatted with them for the next few miles. They asked whether we had been staying at Luibeilt. It was listed by something called The Mountain Bothies Association as a place of overnight refuge. It sounded good for the future and I joined fairly soon afterwards. 

The rangers sped ahead and disappeared into the distance as we approached the east-west watershed where the water flowing east towards Loch Treig along the Abhainn Rath becomes the water flowing west to Fort William down the Water of Nevis. Several valleys converge here and it was not immediately obvious which one to take, but a bit of map and compass work put us safely in the right direction. No G.P.S. in those days. The slight uncertainty makes for much more fun.

We camped again surrounded by the mountains of the Nevis valley: Aonach Beag, An Garbhanach, and Binnein Beag where deer came down the slopes in the night and made their way back up the next morning, avoiding the worst of the snow that sprinkled the tent.

We were soon up and on our way again, descending through the steep gorge of Glen Nevis to the end of the road at the base of Ben Nevis, where the misspelt signpost indicated whence we came.*

Public footpath

to Carrour 15

and Rannoch 25

But that was not the end. We still had to face another five gruelling miles along the narrow road to the Glen Nevis camp site.

We allowed ourselves the next day off, and early the day after that packed up and hiked into Fort William for the train back to the car. It was a little further to walk than now. The original Fort William station alongside Loch Linnhe, with its turreted entrance on the main street, was still in use. It closed and moved east to the present site two months later.

I did that walk twice again with different friends, once in 1978 and again in 1988, both times by taking the train to Corrour from the new station at Fort William, thus omitting the wearisome Rannoch to Corrour stretch. Sensibly, we also left one of our cars at the end of the Nevis road making it just a fifteen-mile walk – a good day out. On both occasions we were the only ones to leave the train at the deserted Corrour halt, to the incomprehension of the other passengers who looked down (both physically and metaphorically) from the carriage windows with bemusement at our cagoules, walking boots and daysacks. 

I doubt it would be such a solitary walk now that most days the train deposits scores of walkers and mountain bikers at Corrour to follow numerous routes around the moor. The station is used by over twelve thousand passengers per year, an average of over thirty a day, but probably many times more in summer and fewer in winter. “Like a Wallace Arnold bus trip,” my dad would have said. It is a privilege to be able to say I was there in quieter times, nearly fifty years ago, but it would be wonderful to go again.

Take it away, Andy:

https://youtu.be/KtsAfk6h8mI

Notes

* The same sign and post are still at Glen Nevis (or were until relatively recently). The sign is considerably weathered, but the spelling of Corrour has been corrected and further signs to Spean Bridge, Corrour Station and Kinlochleven affixed in both Scots Gaelic and English. 

On one of the later occasions there were signs of construction taking place at Luibeilt, but I see from more recent accounts that it is now a ruin without roof, woodwork or some walls.

I would not be so confident drinking water from mountain streams now. 

The Beatles Song Book

Another memory of the shared house.

Evenings wasted instead of working for exams. To the beer-off for a big bottle of Woodpecker or Strongbow cider each (were they 3 pints i.e. 1.5l?), then out with the songbooks and guitars? What a good thing the walls were solid. We never heard a squeak from the neighbours.

Brendon had the Simon and Garfunkel book, but that became too difficult as the cider went down. So, we would switch to songs made up ourselves, mainly about the chap who owned the house, known as “Pete may I trouble you gentlemen for some rent please.”

There was the song to the tune of The Ball of Kirriemuir: “Pete does all the cleaning, and that’s a job he hates, and so to appease him we have to wash the plates.” Or the one to the tune of The Tavern In The Town about what he liked to do with sheep. Delightfully juvenile.

Best of all was The Beatles Complete song book. My guitar playing improved no end through that. I still have it, its tattered and patched-up pages showing the use it had. We played it beginning to end, through all the old favourites from “Across The Universe” to “You’re Going To Lose That Girl” and “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away”. We never seemed to get “Across the Universe” right, especially the “Jai guru deva, om” bit. One of Brendan’s friends could do all the harmonies to “Because”, which was pretty impressive. 

Later, I used the Beatles book for [tautology warning] improvisation practice, making double and treble backing tracks with my Akai 4000DS tape deck. Of course, you can do this kind of thing today with digital mixing desks, or even free software such as Audacity on a laptop. It was not so easy then. 

Here, from 1978, is “Yesterday” with an improvides middle eight. After 45 years, I now tend to hear the snatched notes, clumsy phrasing and track synchronisation problems, which might mean I’m a better musician now, but I still find it has something. The held note in bar 5 of the last verse, followed by slowing down at the end, releases tension.   

I have only just noticed that the song has 7 bars per verse rather than the usual 8.

https://youtu.be/8lgucFMNC1o 

Bangers and Mash

We opened a tin of country garden vegetable soup. Sheer laziness, I know, but it was fine. However, we were surprised to see that the contents included rice and pasta. I know they have to keep the price down, even though it was not a cheap brand, but country garden vegetable soup containing rice and pasta, well, you wonder which country’s garden vegetables they have in mind. 

I am not the first to say this, but before around 1970, at least in the north of England, rice was for puddings, and few knew what pasta was. “Foreign muck”, as my mother would have called it, was laughed at. 

From somewhere in my head, came this forgotten song about an Englishman who married an Italian, who, in the days when men never entered the kitchen, gave him only Italian food.   

https://youtu.be/aGFpVN2xwXU

Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren recorded the song as a follow-up to their hit, ‘Goodness Gracious Me’, which arose from their roles in the film, ‘The Millionairess’ (1960).

Sellers was at the height of his popularity. I never understood why. To me, he seemed a self-regarding show-off, and not a particularly likable person. I found much of his humour unfunny, and in retrospect it was often cruel, with every -ist and -phobia going. He was brilliant at inventing comic voices and characters, as you can hear in the song, but it was the kind of humour that laughed at odd accents and eccentricities. I side with the eccentrics. Underneath, I think he was an immensely talented but flawed, deeply unhappy soul. He seemed unable to be himself. He died of a heart attack in 1980, aged 54. There are conflicting views about the exact nature of his relationship with Sophia Loren. I suspect she had better sense. 

Diverticular Disease

I don’t like writing about health problems, but if it could help or inform someone else it is probably worth it. 

A difficult week: exhaustion and weakness, stomach and abdominal pains, bowel problems, sickness, too tired to do anything, even television and Blogger. Dark thoughts. Five days and you are sure the you-know-what is back. Is this how it ends? 

Then a flash of insight. It is probably a diverticular flare-up. Everything fits. This is not just diagnosis by Dr. Google.

Until about 15 years ago I had regular colonoscopies because of my brother’s early death. The last two times I was given a standard feedback form with the box ticked for diverticular disease. No other information or advice. We wondered briefly what it meant and then completely forgot about it. 

Mild symptoms have occurred infrequently through the years, but we never made the connection and assumed it was just me. This time it was worrying because of the severity. And I had a similar episode only a month ago. 

I said it felt like how people describe irritable bowel syndrome. A bit later, Mrs. D. asked what was that box ticked on the last colonoscopy form? 

Apparently, almost all of us have signs of diverticular disease after the age of fifty, but usually without problems. 

If you don’t eat you get weaker and weaker. You have to work out what sets it off, and avoid it. You have to eat small amounts until it starts to improve. Energy drinks help: there are some excellent ones made at Tadcaster in Yorkshire, and Keighley. Landlord Dark is good. One plus is that almost everything they tell you about eating lots of salads and vegetables and fibre is wrong. 

I hope I am right. You often have to work these things out for yourself. 

It is something to consider if you have these symptoms from time to time. And, if you find this diagram revolting, on no account look for any photographs. 

Diverticular Disease

Shoot The Ruddy Sods

Following recent posts about the cats with a bank account and the survivor of the Titanic disaster, I have been browsing further through the BBC archive. This 7-minute gem from 1973, from the Nationwide reporter Bernard Falk, would not have looked out of place in an episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. It is about the god-forsaken East Yorkshire seaside resort of Hornsea, and a controversy about a proposed nudist beach that had the locals spitting venom: 

“It’s objectionable. All this sex and every wretched thing, more and more of it.”

“I’m telling you it will attract the wrong class of person ... The hooliganism ... Drinking and everything else. ... You’ll get all the scoundrels out of hell coming ... all the riff-raff out of Hull, Leeds and all over ... And they’ll be breaking in ... And crime.”

“What difference does it make covering their private parts up to their health? I ask you that much. Not the slightest.”

“I don’t think children should be watching people in the nude. This is a family resort. ... Why don’t they find themselves a little plot, fence it in, and cavort about to their hearts’ content?” 

“I don’t think I’d like to meet a party of nudists.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZWHVpB21ec

Good East Riding folk like these were in abundance where I grew up, less than forty miles from Hornsea. I sometimes went to a friend’s caravan there, and in the nineteen-thirties my great-grandfather’s cousin owned a newspaper shop in the town. They could be my distant relatives. However, as you may know, Yorkshire Pudding’s formative years were spent not a beach pebble’s throw from the place. Could that man in the Fedora be his dad? 

The Blue Mini

New Month Old Post: first posted 10th February, 2016

What do you think of those who, watching films or television programmes set in the past, say: “they would not have used the phrase ‘too right’ in the twenties”, or that nineteen-fifties midwives would never have taken such an attitude to abortion, or that a locomotive shown in a wartime scene had not been built until the fifties? Are they nit-picking pedants or defenders of authenticity? I am about to join them. 

In 2016, a television programme, “Back In Time For The Weekend”, took a family back to live as in the past. Episode by episode, their house and its contents were changed to how they would have been through the decades from the nineteen-fifties to the present day. Their furniture, decorations, kitchen and household appliances, and home entertainments were appropriate to the date. At the start of the series they had no television set or refrigerator, and they did not have a home computer until Episode 4 set in the nineteen-eighties. 

Episode 2 was about the nineteen-sixties, when car ownership became more common. Supposedly in 1961, the family were given a blue, D-registration Morris Mini (above). The problem was it was a 1966 Mini, in 1961, five years before it was first registered. I know because I had one, blue, D reg., exactly the same, as in my blog header. Was the BBC research department taking shortcuts? 

Those Minis had something called hydrolastic suspension. Instead of separate springs, the front and rear wheels were connected by pressurised pipes. The idea was that when a front wheel went over a bump, the pressure would tighten its paired back wheel to reduce the bounce. It was rubbish. Mine kept gradually losing pressure and sinking down into its wheel arches. It had to go every few months to be pumped up. It is astonishing after fifty years they found one that had not been scrapped years ago. The family of two adults and three teenage children in the programme would have weighed down the back and shone the headlights up into the air. 

Here is my uncropped picture taken on the Cam Gill Road North of Kettlewell late in 1974 as we were putting on our boots for a walk to the top of Great Whernside. It was blowing a gale on top, but we were able to shelter in the large hollow summit cairn. 

Near Kettlewell, 1974

Great Whernside Summit Cairn, 1974

The Deaf Duster

My wife was looking for a clean duster. I surprised her by producing a brand new one, forty years old. A BBC archive clip of programs I wrote for deaf children reminded me of it recently (the one-minute clip is here). Someone gave me the duster at that time.  

We decided the duster was much too nice to use as a duster, so it went back in the drawer. 

I never did manage to learn the sign alphabet. I can spell out my name, but little else. 

Memories churned around in my head, as often happens these days, and in the middle of the night, out of nowhere, there emerged a song.

To the tune of the old British music hall song Let's All Go Down The Strand: 

           Let's all go through the codes (Have a banana)
           Let's all go through the codes (Gertie Gitana)
           A B C D    /    E F G
           H I J K    /    L M N O P
           Q R S      /    T
           U V W X Y    /    Zee
           A B C D    /    E F G
           Let's all go through the codes.

What a great way to learn it: 

He's as daft as a brush. 

Right, who wants a part in The Semaphore Version of Wuthering Heights, or Julius Caesar on an Aldis Lamp? 

Stiff Upper Lip

The phrase “stiff upper lip” has cropped up in blogs and comments recently. For example, behind the seemingly idyllic 1930s village childhood of my last two posts lay unmentionable death, disease, and hardship. And, all too soon, those children would have to face conflict and events in distant lands. They just got on with life, and made the best they could of it. 

I recently came across this BBC archive clip which captures the phrase perfectly. It is 7 minutes long, but I can almost guarantee you will watch spellbound from beginning to end. It is very powerful: an eyewitness account of the loss of the Titanic in 1912. 

Frank Prentice was an assistant storekeeper on the ship. As it began to sink, he helped lower and load the lifeboats, and then, when he could do no more, took refuge high on the stern. He jumped into the water at the last moment. On the point of freezing to death, he was fortunate to be pulled into one of the lifeboats. 

He was 23 at the time of the disaster. Soon afterwards, he would have had to face the First World War, in which he was awarded the Military Cross as a Major in the Royal Tank Regiment. The film was made in 1979 when he was 90. There is a Wikipedia page.

Stiff upper lip: we will need a lot more of it if the world takes a turn for the worse. Shirkers, moaners, and preening attention-seekers should take note. Unfortunately, they are unlikely to read this. 

The Carnival Is Over

Yorkshire Square Eight

My last post created some nostalgia for village community life, now remembered only vaguely. Little remained beyond the nineteen-fifties. Much of what we know is second-hand. 

I could have said so much more. Pre-television, pre-car-ownership, pre-eating out, pre-foreign holidays, people created their own entertainment. There were dances, a drama group, a music and opera society, and sports teams. 

I remember the annual fairs on the village green, which my grandma oddly called the village “Fe-ast”, when parts of larger fairs stopped off on their travels around the country, possibly on the way to Hull Fair. The loud piping of fairground organs, the ring of slot machines, the smell of saucy hot dogs, the colour and blur of the rides, the force of bumping cars (dodgems), swings, roundabouts, rifles with rigged sights, brightly coloured wooden ducks swirling through torrents of water, excited voices, all above the hum of diesel generators, still take me back there, to the age of six or seven. 

Then there were the village carnivals, maybe not every year, fading away by my day. So much time, energy, organisation and creativity went into them. There was real talent in the village. The costumes were particularly impressive. 

The 1937 carnival programme named more than 150 participants, mainly children. Proceedings opened with a procession of Heralds, The Lord Chamberlain, the Crown bearer, Standard bearers and Pages, and the crowning of the May Queen. The Queen was presented with a bouquet, and her Courtiers and Maids of Honour received representatives of Britannia, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Peace. 

The main proceedings consisted of children’s dances. There was a Yorkshire Square Eight, Butterfly dancers, Milkmaids and Boy Blues, Spring Flower dancers, a nursery rhyme medley, Indians and Palefaces, Fairies and Elves, Sailors hornpipe and signals, and Jockeys. There were two maypole dances, the first creating a single plait and gypsy tent, the second a double plait, spider’s web and barber’s pole. Later there were larger group dances: a Circassian Circle and a “Mage on a Cree”. The day ended with a march led by the Queen, her Court and a band of toy soldiers. No doubt there were other adult activities well into the evening. I don’t have the pages naming the organisers. Nor do I know how the music was provided, or who designed and made the costumes. 

The programme lists the names of my mother, her brother and sister, and many of her “cousins” and friends. She danced in the Yorkshire Square Eight (above, top row, left). Her cousin, Jean, is in front of her. Jean would later lose a son in an awful railway accident. Another cousin, Alfie, is third from the right on the top row. Her friend, Kitty, is fourth from the right on the bottom row. I went with my mother to watch the Coronation on their television. 

Mother’s brother was an elf (below, top row, third from left). Her sister was a milkmaid (second picture below, top row, fourth from left). Her sister was the only one of four siblings to live to a good age. Other cousins and relatives appear in these pictures, too. 

Fairies and Elves

Milkmaids and Boy Blues

What does any of it matter now? The kids aren’t bothered. And those earlier children were soon to be shaken from their idyll, violently thrown into today’s world of conflict and events in far away lands. My uncle, the little boy in the elf outfit, died overseas on National Service in a tragic air force accident at only twenty-three. I can just remember him. He was clever; a plumber. He would have done well in the building boom. His widow, astonished that after sixty-five years without contact I still called her “Aunty R”, told me how she had arrived back on the bus from work to be told the awful news by my grandfather. My poor grandfather, who had lost all his own siblings when young, and now a son. And his own father would have told him how he was only one of two out of eleven to live beyond their thirties, their names and dates recorded carefully in the family bible. It was all so long ago. It’s just nostalgia.  

The Village

Village Dance Class, 1930s.
My mother (top, 3rd from right) is one of four “cousins” in the picture.
She would have been 100 years old today.

“It was a lovely place to grow up”, said Aunty Olga the last time we spoke. “The best anyone could want”. She talked of a High Street with no motor vehicles to stop you playing in the road, all the relations living nearby, and how everyone knew each other and were friends. There were shops with all you could want, and clubs and groups and things to do. The buses ran late so you could get back from the pictures in town. “Not like now”. 

“Aunty” Olga. We called them all “Aunty” or “Uncle", or if they were the same age as us “cousins”, no matter whether they were really great aunts, great uncles, second cousins, half-cousins, cousins once removed, or some other combination. It was simpler. There were loads of them. “Your mother was more of a sister than a cousin to me”, Aunty Olga said. 

I caught it right at the end, and don’t doubt her. I fetched milk from the farm dairy and talked to the pig in the butcher’s sty. I bought pop from the sweet shop, chips from the fish shop, rolls of gun caps for my cowboy pistol and foreign stamps for my collection near The Green. I marvelled at the old village water pump near the church and walked on my own the three-quarters of a mile along the river bank to my aunt’s smallholding at the ferry houses. I knew the local names that appeared on few maps: Gander’ill; Cock’orner; Cuckoo Park. 

A walk down the High Street with my grandma meant talking to everyone we passed. 

“Who was that?”  
“My cousin.”  
“And who was that?” 
“He’s my cousin too.” 

“How many cousins have you got?” 

I’d wish I’d not asked. 

“Well, there was Aunty Bina who had Blanche, Tom, Gladys, Lena, Olga, Fred, Ena, Dolly, Albert and Jack. She brought up our Jean as well, although her mother was really Ena. They had fish and chip shops all over.”

“Then there was Aunty Annie who married Uncle George, and had Mary, Fred, and Bessie.” She pointed to ‘M, F, and B’, scratched long ago into the bricks of number 88 (still visible today). 

“Do you mean Aunty Mary?” I asked. Aunty Mary had the prettiest face I’d ever seen. 

If Grandma was in the mood, she would go on to list the millions of children of uncles Fred, Bill and Horner, who had moved away to run a paper mill in Lancashire.  

All were prefixed “our”: our Fred, our Bessie, and our Mary. Aunty Olga’s children were our Linda, our Sandra, and our Gillian. It distinguished them from Aunts and Uncles who were not relatives at all, such as Aunty Annie ’agyard (3 syllables). What funny names some had. 

And that was only one of Grandma’s sides. The other was worse. 

Even more confusing, my mother’s Great Aunty Bina was married to my dad’s grandpa’s cousin, which meant I was doubly related to Blanche, Tom, Gladys, and the rest. 

I heard it so often I could recite it to my wife decades later: “Blanche, Gladys, Ena, Lena, Gina, Dolly, Molly, Mary, Bessie, Ella, Olga, Linda...”

“They sound like a herd of Uncle Bill’s cows,” she said. 

Uncle Bill (don’t ask), was from across the river and had married into the family. He said that if the Blue Line bus had not started running through the village, they would have all been imbeciles because of inbreeding. 

I went less and less as I grew into my teens, not realising it was coming to an end. It would never be the same again.  

Marie Tidball

I find it astonishing how some overcome illnesses, difficulties, and barriers that to me would seem overwhelming. 

I think of a student on the university course I took. He had brittle bone disease, and at one time or another had broken just about every bone in his body. Despite the small stature and deformities that often go with the condition, he lived independently in the university halls of residence. He travelled in each day in his three-wheeled Invacar, and moved from class to class in a wheelchair, with books and notes hanging in a plastic carrier bag from the rear handles. We took turns to push. He always had a cheery smile. 

Later, there was Mahir who had muscular dystrophy. He had arrived in England in his early teens as a Bosnian refugee, speaking no English. By then, he had lost the ability to walk, which in Bosnia had excluded him from school. Once here, he did well enough to go to university, and enrolled on the course I ran. He struggled to control his limbs, used an electric wheelchair, and was accompanied everywhere, even to the toilet, by Brian, a full-time paid assistant. What incredible dedication that must have required. 

When you had a bit of a cold or headache, and looked out at the weather in the morning and it seemed tempting to crawl back to bed, the thought that Julian or Mahir would be there shamed you into getting up and going in. 

I came across Brian a few years later, looking after another special needs student. He said he’d heard that Mahir had died, still in his twenties. Julian did not have a long life, either, but lived into his forties. 

Recently, we came across another inspirational figure, Marie Tidball. She was born with multiple physical difficulties, including no hands. It was unclear whether she would live. She did, but missed years of school through medical treatments, such as surgery to enable her to walk. She has just one finger. From school in Penistone, Yorkshire, she won a place at the University of Oxford where she got a degree in Law and a Doctorate in Criminology, and has since worked as a legal researcher, disability rights campaigner, and local councillor. She has now been selected as a Parliamentary candidate for her home constituency of Penistone and Stocksbridge at the next General Election. Our ceilidh band played at the launch of her fundraising campaign.  

Going by last week’s local election results, she is almost certain to be elected, and will quickly make an impression as a Member of Parliament, not because of her difficulties but because she is every bit the fiery, determined woman her story suggests. You heard of her here first. 

“I learned there was no such word as ‘can’t’ and that you have to go out in the world and develop your own skills to use them for others.”   

So, let’s have no more whingeing and procrastinating. Just get on with it.  

https://www.marietidball.com/

Paul McCartney’s RAM

New Month Old Post: first posted 7th November 2018

We can be very dismissive when young, especially about music. 

When Paul McCartney’s long playing record Ram came out in 1971, a lot of people hated it. They were irritated by the embarrassing sight and sound of Linda McCartney and her wooden, astringent vocals. Why was she on the record anyway: as if it were a primary school class where everyone has to join in banging tambourines and triangles, even the talentless? Why was she accredited fully as co-creator, which no one really believed?

I simply dismissed it. It was not The Beatles. I was fed up with it emanating from Brendan’s room in the shared house. After all, didn’t I have more sophisticated tastes? Didn’t I think of myself as a knowledgeable connoisseur of serious music like progressive rock, particularly Jethro Tull who had just released Aqualung? How could the McCartneys’ frivolous, inconsequential warbling possibly compare?

The only legacy, for me, was that to this day, whenever we drive past a certain cut-price supermarket I sing the following mondegreen:

Lidl Lidl be a gypsy get around
Get your feet up off the ground
Lidl Lidl get around.

I recently looked up the lyrics to discover that the actual words are “Live a little” from the track Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey who “had to have a bath or he couldn’t get to sea” – another misheard lyric, it’s “berth”.

One thing led to another and I ended up getting the CD as a birthday present (I don’t do streaming). What a revelation! Judging it inferior to Jethro Tull was being Thick as a Brick.

I now think Ram is amongst Paul McCartney’s best and most innovative output: so rich in ideas – melodies, harmonies, arrangements, decorations, quirky bits – almost every part of every track is different. It‘s an amusing, joyful record, a bit late-Beatles, like the brightest parts of Abbey Road and The White Album.

It has been described as a “domestic-bliss album”. Despite personal and contractual pains in disentangling himself from the Beatles, Paul was now living a contented and enviable life, very happy with Linda and children in their rural retreat. You hear it throughout. And Linda’s voice is just about OK too, or at least you get used to it. 

Maybe I liked Ram all along but did not want to admit it.

https://youtu.be/XI6C7L66zq8

Sunday Silliness

Silly Songs With Simple Chords
C and G7 

         Cows in the kitchen, moo moo moo,
         Pigs in the pantry, grunt oink ooh,
         Lambs on the landing, baa baa boo,
         Skip to my Lou my darling.

         There’s a horse in the hallway, neigh neigh neigh,
         A donkey in the doorway, bray bray bray, 
         Ducks and chicks in the chairs all day, 
         Skip to my Lou my darling. 

         Get all these animals out of this place,
         They make a lot of noise, they take a lot of space,
         There’s no room left for me or you,
         Can’t skip to the loo, you can’t get through.  

The Cats With A Bank Account

Anyone seeking evidence that the BBC is not what it once was, look no further than this report from Nationwide in 1973. 

https://youtu.be/zEp-bigGqYI

As someone who was working in accountancy at the time, several things in this report trouble me greatly.  

Aside from tax and inheritance questions such as whether the correct tax was paid on interest received (cats do not have a tax allowance), and what happened to the money after the cats died: how did the beneficiaries or next-of-kin proved their right of inheritance, I have questions about the operation of the bank account. 

Presumably, Quicksilver and Quince had someone write the cheques for them, possibly the lady in the film, but how did they sign them? If it was with a paw print, then how did the bank verify the signatures as genuine, rather than the paw prints of criminal cats who steal cheque books? One paw print looks much like another as far as I can tell. 

And if the account required joint signatures, rather than either one, then how did the bank verify that both have actually signed, rather than just one that has put its paw mark on the cheque twice? That Quince looks a bit shifty to me.  

We need assurances that the bank account was operated legally and not in false names. 

Blog Address

I have removed the custom address for A Yorkshire Memoir and reverted to the original taskerdunham.blogspot.com (instead of taskerdunham.com). If reading this, you are in the right place. 

This is to prevent the blog from becoming inaccessible when the subscription to the custom domain expires. It still has over a year to run, but I have made the change early because custom domains are often bought by others for illicit use. 

Thanks. 

Technical and Other Considerations (for anyone considering doing it themselves) 

Removing the custom address turned out to be easier than anticipated. I thought I would be wrestling with the technicalities of canonical names (cnames) and the like, but that was not the case. 

All I had to do was:

1) Delete the custom domain name in the blog settings. The blogspot.com version of the address worked straight away. The taskerdunham.com address began to be shown as unknown. 

2) I created a completely new blog called "A Yorkshire Memoir (Old Address)" saying what I was doing, and also a note in the title that the address had changed. 

3) Then, on the Old Address blog, I simply added www.taskerdunham.com as the custom domain. Surprisingly, that URL immediately began to redirect to the "Old Address" site. It did not require any change to the cnames on the domain provider's site. It did, however, take a few minutes before the https version of the address became active after I switched it on.

The outcome is that access to taskerdunham.blogspot.com now links straight to the active blog, and access to taskerdunham.com links to the "Old Address" site. I will leave it like that for now as a reminder to those who use that route to change their links.

Please let me know of any problems. 

Internal links within the blog - The blog archive, list of popular posts, etc. changed automatically. Links in blog posts that reference other posts still work correctly so long as they point to a taskerdunham.blogspot.com address, but if they point to taskerdunham.com a message appears saying either that the post does not exist or that the site cannot be accessed at all. It depends on how http/https and www are specified in the link. Fortunately, I have always used the blogspot version within the blog, so don't have to change them. 

External links -  Where others' blog posts or websites have included a link to one of my blog posts, these links now point to the "Old Page" site, i.e. taskerdunham.com, with a page not found message. The same happens with sidebar links on other Blogger blogs until they are updated. 

Google, Bing, and other search indexes - Initially, the results from searches remained unchanged, i.e. they referenced the custom address. Clicking these links led to the "Old Page" site, i.e. taskerdunham.com, with a page not found message. I assume the search indexes will automatically update in due course, but it may take several months. 

I was soon receiving emails from Google to say that pages addressed as the custom domain could not be indexed, and they disappeared from Google search, but the .blogspot.com versions did not appear either. I have tried forcing the issue through the Google Search Console which appears under Crawlers and Indexing in the blog settings, but do not really understand what I am doing. 

Warp Land

The flatland where the River Humber branches into tributaries was once an expanse of permanent marsh. It dried out gradually over the centuries with the construction of river banks and drainage ditches, making agriculture possible. Some areas were improved by a process known as warping.

In warping, river waters are diverted into the fields to deposit layers of fine, fertile silt. It is carried out by building low embankments around the fields and filling them through a breach or sluice in the river bank. The water flows into the fields at high tide, and after being allowed to settle, is drained back as the tide goes out, leaving silt behind. When carried out regularly over two or three years, three feet of silt might be laid down. 

I remember my uncle, the farmer (see Aunty Bina’s Farm), explaining why he preferred certain fields for crops, and others for his “be-asts”. Potatoes, sugar beet, and wheat grew best on warp land, whereas the cattle grazed on pasture. 

I may be mistaken, but looking now on Streetview, I fancy that the line of the low bank around the field followed the line of the lane. The fields were for crops, while the cows grazed behind the house. 

But thinking about it now, it puzzled me. The buildings in the far distance are on the other side of a railway line, and there is a canal beyond that, with the river at the other side of the canal. How could the river water have been diverted into the fields? 

Perhaps the water came from a different river. The River Aire is around two miles to the North behind the camera, and the River Ouse about three miles to the East, but I think these would have been too far, and several main roads, the villages of Rawcliffe and Airmyn, and the town of Goole were in the way. My guess is that the warp water must have come from the river beyond the railway, canal, and buildings - the Dutch River (or River Don). 

Wikipedia provides an answer: “The first reliable report of warping seems to come in the 1730s from Rawcliffe, which is near the confluences of the Ouse with the Aire and the Don, where a small farmer called Barker used the technique.” Neither the railway nor the canal would have been there then. The Knottingley and Goole Canal was opened in 1826, and the Wakefield, Pontefract and Goole section of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway in 1846. The warping must have been done before these dates. Some of the brick outhouses at the farm could easily have dated from that time, and knowledge of the warping would have been passed down by word of mouth. 

The railway, canal, and Dutch River can be seen running parallel in the lower left quarter of this 1962 map (pre-motorway). The oddly straight Dutch River is clearly another man-made feature. It was constructed in the 1630s by Dutch engineers, who diverted the River Don to drain the moors of Hatfield Chase, hence the name “The Dutch River”. The River Don originally flowed further East into the River Trent. Warping of my uncle’s land must have used water from the diverted river Don. 

More extensive warping schemes were carried out in the Nineteenth Century along the original course of the Don, as far East as Adlingfleet on the Trent, and as far South as Crowle. One large area is served by the enormous Swinefleet Warping Drain (centre bottom of map) which runs for 5.6 miles (9 km) and has a permanent sluice into the River Ouse. The drain and much of the network of drainage ditches are deep and wide. Some are stocked with fish for anglers, and all provide habitats for frogs, sticklebacks, water voles, and other wildlife. It is astonishing to think it was all dug out by hand. But, we do not only alter our landscape. Families with Dutch names still live in the area, and the local name for drainage ditches is dykes. 

Swinefleet Warping Drain

Swinefleet Sluice where the warping drain enters the Ouse

Two areas of unreclaimed land remain just to the South: Thorne and Hatfield Moors, which together form the largest expanse of lowland peat bog in the country. Even the intrepid Yorkshire Pudding’s Geograph project has not much ventured there.  

One last piece of trivia. In the film “The Dam Busters” (1955), the aeroplanes are shown flying along a Dutch canal. It was actually filmed flying East along the Dutch River. The Goole shipyard cranes can be seen as the planes approach the River Ouse and then bank left over the town. Please don’t tell the East Riding Council. It will give them ideas about what to do with the place. 

Dave Northsider is now trying to work out how he can divert river water into his polytunnel. 

Wainwright’s Mardale Green

Rosemary (Share My Garden) wrote about her visit to Tyneham, a village in Dorset abandoned in the Second World War because it was in an area needed for military training. The residents never returned.

She also remembered, as a child, picking gooseberries in the garden of a house in a village abandoned to the rising waters of a new reservoir.

Mardale Green

It reminded me of a passage in ‘Fellwalking With Wainwright’, which has haunted me since I bought the book in 1985. I think of it often. Oh to be able to write like Wainwright. 

I will never go to Mardale Head now without thinking of a summer’s day more than forty years ago when I walked over Gatescarth Pass and saw the valley of Mardale for the first time. It was a lovely vista. The floor of the dale was a fresh green strath shadowed by fine trees and deeply inurned between shaggy heights; beyond, receding in the distance, was Haweswater, then a natural lake. It was a peaceful scene, the seclusion of the valley being emphasised by its surround of rough mountains. Mardale was a bright jewel in the dark crown .... I remember that day so well. Many early memories have faded, but not that one. Down in the valley, I went along the lane to the Dun Bull between walls splashed with lichens and draped with ivy. There was no welcome for me at the inn, which for centuries had been a meeting place for farmers and shepherds and the scene of many festive gatherings. It was empty, unoccupied. Around the corner was the small church amongst fine yews: it was a ghostly shell, the interior having been dismantled and the bodies in the graveyard exhumed and reburied elsewhere. The nearby vicarage and a few cottages were deserted and abandoned. This was the hamlet of Mardale Green, delightfully situated in the lee of a wooded hill, but now under sentence of death. Birds trittered in the trees and my footsteps echoed as I walked along the lane but there was no other sound, no sign of life. Even the sheep had gone. There were wild roses in fragrant hedgerows, foxgloves and harebells and wood anemones and primroses in the fields and under the trees, all cheerfully enjoying the warmth and sunshine; but there would be no other summers for them: they were doomed ... Manchester Corporation had taken over the valley and built a great dam. The lake would be submerged beneath a new water level a hundred feet higher. Already the impounded waters were creeping up the valley. Soon the hamlet of Mardale Green would be drowned: the church, the inn, the cottages, and the flowers, would all disappear, sunk without trace, and its history and traditions be forgotten. The flood was coming and it would fill the valley. Nature’s plan for Mardale would be over-rules. Manchester had other plans, to transform Mardale into a great Haweswater Reservoir. And no doubt be very proud of their achievement ... I climbed out of the valley to Kidsty Pike. Looking back at Mardale Green from a distance, its buildings no longer seeming forlorn but cosily encompassed by trees and its silent pastures dappled by sunlight, I thought I had never seen a more beautiful picture. Nor a sadder one.