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?
New Month Old Post (revised): first posted 10th March 2019.
The British-Irish Dialect Quiz
Not such an old post, but most followers came after this date. Recent discussion of accents and language on this and other blogs reminded me of it. Yorkshire Pudding wrote about it around the same time. The results show me to be more East Yorkshire than he is.
I can no longer access the quiz directly without hitting the New York Times paywall, but if I search for “The British-Irish Dialect Quiz” and go in from Google or Bing then it works. There is also an American version, “The U.S. Dialect Quiz”, but that always hits the paywall however I try to enter.
Growing up in a unicultural Yorkshire town (as they nearly all were in the nineteen-fifties), I’m not sure when I first realised there were variations in the way people spoke. I remember a boy climbing around on Filey Brigg with a hammer who said he was “Luckin’ fer forwssls”, and the pen-friends from Bingley, organized by one of the teachers at junior school, who, when we met them, sounded different and used strange words. To my childhood eyes, they even looked different. Goodness, even people from across the river looked and spoke differently, even though they lived only a few miles away.
Later, meeting different people and living around the country, accents fascinated me. I love hearing Buchan Scots and Yorkshire Asian, and used to have great fun winding-up my South London mother-in-law. She could give as good as she got.
So, when I heard about the British-Irish Dialect Quiz, it was irresistible. I was bound to try it out and join the thousands of other bloggers writing about it.
It asks 25 questions about how you pronounce various words, such as “scone” or “last”, and what words you use for certain things, such as for feeling cold or for the playground game in which one child chases the rest and the first person touched becomes the pursuer. It then gives you a map of Great Britain with your area of origin shaded in. If you want, you can continue with a further 71 questions to refine the results further.
It got me pretty much spot-on. Words like “breadcake” and “twagging”, and the way I say ‘a’ and ‘u’, give me away most.
The explanation of the results is interesting too. It mentions that in Britain and Ireland, unlike North America, local dialect sometimes changed wildly within ten or twenty miles. Village-by-village distinctions have now eroded, but the article suggests there is no evidence that regional differences are disappearing, even in the face of technological influences. I find that reassuring.
My wife’s results were interesting. She answered the questions twice, once using her words and speech growing up in Hertfordshire, and then again how she is now. It got her pretty much right on both counts. Living in the north and working as an occupational therapist, she soon realised it did not go down well to go into peoples’ homes and ask how well they could manage in the “baarthrums”.
New Month Old Post: first posted 2nd January, 2016.
Apologies that this is a little long and contains Scots words and religious references, but it is one of my favourite pieces. I was reminded of it by Haggerty’s comments on my last post.
“A canna mind fit tae dee,” (I can’t remember what to do) Iona had said,
puzzling over some detail of the voluntary work we were doing.
Attracted by her soft Banffshire accent, I dared suggest we might go see
a film together, and we became friends.
Iona was studying theology with a view to becoming a Church of Scotland
Minister. I tried to impress her by casually mentioning I had been
brought up in the Church of England but was instantly written off as
“just a jumped-down Catholic”. I had to creep off to the library to find
out what she meant (there being no Google in those days). It was a
reference to Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII’s secession
of the English Church from Rome in 1534. Jumped-down Catholic indeed!
If that seems dismissive, you should have heard what she had to say
about the Roman Catholic Church and its attitude towards women’s
ordination.
“Fit wye dae they insist ye hiv tae hae a penis tae be a Minister, and
then nae allow ye tae use it? Except for peeing that is, and they wadnae
een allow ye that if there wasna nae alternative.” She said this with a
kind of forceful but gentle determination that told you she was going
to be a brilliant Church of Scotland Minister.
One Sunday, Iona came with me on a visit home. She and my dad talked
non-stop about Scottish history, Aberdeen, and all kinds of other
things. My dad was a regular churchgoer, and as Iona had not been to
Church that day she decided to go along with him to the evening service.
I went too so as not to miss anything. So did my dad’s sister Dorothy
and her husband Fred. They wondered why I was going to Church with the
young lady I had brought home. They did not want to miss anything
either.
It was a long time since I had been to a regular service at the Parish
Church. In those days it was always well-attended. More recently, I had
seen decent congregations at weddings, Christenings and funerals. But
this evening when we arrived, we were the only five there. The vast
building looked gloomy and uncared for.
Dorothy and Fred took one pew, and my dad, Iona and myself sat
immediately behind. We waited for things to begin. I won’t say “waited
patiently” because Fred never waited patiently for anything. He rarely
sat still. He did everything at a frantic pace. Even so, I was still
surprised when he jumped up, disappeared through a side door and
re-emerged with a stepladder. Ignoring Dorothy’s exasperated protests,
he rushed into the most sacred, chancel part of the church, set up the
stepladder, moved the golden cross and candlestick holders out of the
way, and climbed up and stood on the altar. Dorothy sighed and turned to
Iona with her usual resigned apology: “My husband’s hyperactive.”
Fred then lifted his arms and reached up to the heavens. I thought for a
moment he must have been overcome by revelations of everlasting
splendour until he began to change the light bulbs hanging from above.
Only one bulb was out but he explained it was good maintenance practice
to replace them all at the same time. Not even God Himself would dare
disagree with a qualified electrical engineer and safety consultant.
I have to admit to being somewhat relieved to realise that the only
brilliance shining down from upon high that bothered him was the number
of lumens illuminating the proceedings. I had wondered for a moment
whether he might have been engaged in some newly-instigated aspect of
worship, in which we now all went up in turn to stand on the altar to
declare ourselves, only metaphorically I hoped, sacrificial lambs. I
felt sure that when it was my turn I would be bound to get it all wrong
and make a fool of myself in front of everyone. It is not easy to let go
of your inhibitions in public.
Fred had just put the stepladder away when two further members of the
congregation joined us. The first, a serious, shiny-faced man with a
brylcreemed comb-over, checked jacket and non-matching striped tie, bid a
curt “Good Evening”, went into the pew behind us, knelt down, closed
his eyes tightly and began to pray. Then came an old lady dressed up in
black hat, gloves and overcoat, with silver brooch and hat pin. She
shuffled slowly up the aisle on a walking stick. Dorothy addressed her
as Mrs. Fisher and pointed to the seat beside her. She sat down and
observed loudly what a wonderfully large turn out we had this evening.
Evidently some weeks it was just my dad and Mrs. Fisher.
The Minister entered through the transept from the front and began to
light the candles. Fred put his hand to the side of his mouth and turned
to Iona conspiratorially.
“This bloke’s a complete idiot,” he whispered none too quietly, disturbing the shiny-faced man from his communion with God.
The Minister, the Reverend Mundy, was a Church Army Evangelist who
helped in the Parish by taking the Sunday evening service once a month.
He was short, bald and round, but held himself stiffly upright in his
surplice, like a little white budgerigar, in an effort to look more
imposing than he actually did. Perhaps he imagined he was leading the
grand and moving ceremony of Choral Evensong, but this was not Choral
Evensong, it was Evening Prayer. There was no choir. In fact, there was
no organist either: only the Minister and the seven members of the
Congregation. We had to sing the hymns and psalms unaccompanied.
It was a total shambles. Our feeble voices evaporated self-consciously
into the roof beams. As we mumbled our way through ‘The day Thou gavest,
Lord, is ended’ all in different keys, Mrs. Fisher rustled
ineffectually through her hymn book trying to find the right page. She
might have managed better if she had taken off her gloves. By the time
Dorothy had helped her find the page, the hymn Thou gavest, Lord, had
ended, and the rustling began all over again as Mrs. Fisher tried to
find the Order of Service in her prayer book.
The next hymn was even worse. It was one of those excessively cheerful,
suspiciously Methodist hymns, known only to the Reverend and the
shiny-faced man. They sang to completely different tunes, each trying to
drown out the other as if to ensure God heard them first. Shiny-face
was easily the loudest, but in any formal competition I would have
called for him to be disqualified on the ground that his checked jacket
and striped tie gave unfair advantage.
The psalms, prayers, responses, confession, absolution, creed, canticles
and other spoken words of Evening Prayer are set out in the Book of
Common Prayer. They go on forever, and the longer they go on, the more
you could be forgiven for allowing your mind to wander. Fred’s mind
clearly started to wander early on, but was snapped back into focus by
the short prayer: “Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord;”prompting
him to examine the ceiling for further areas of darkness in need of
lightening. He even stood up to survey the rear of the church, but the
Reverend Mundy droned on without noticing.
I should have anticipated what happened next and prevented it. I failed
to spot that my dad had been dying to tell Mundy that Iona was going to
be a Church of Scotland Minister. The opportunity came as Mundy waited
to shake our hands after the service. It was never going to work out
well.
Mundy brightened up like one of Fred’s new bulbs and began to emit a
long, one-sided homily about recognising one’s calling, changes to the
liturgy and who should be the new Archbishop of Canterbury. Meanwhile,
Fred re-appeared with a heavy wooden extendable ladder and began
changing light bulbs high up the walls. Despite being a safety
consultant, he did not look very safe to me. He rushed from bulb to bulb
swinging the ends of his ladder so lethally he nearly knocked over the
still-burning candles and set fire to the altar cloth.
And then, you knew it was coming, the topic Mundy had been wanting to
talk about all along. Ingenuousness finally got the better of discretion
and he homed in on the incendiary subject of women’s ordination. Iona
listened solemnly as he declared it would be a mistake to admit women
into the clergy, not, he forcibly emphasised, that he was personally against
the idea, but because there would be a schism of two thousand Ministers
leaving the Church, and he would not want that to happen. In any case,
he continued, he thought a lot of women who wanted to be priests had
been born with the wrong anatomy. He thought women should look like
women.
Just when it seemed inevitable that Mundy would be obliterated by the
“so ye hiv tae hae a penis” put down, the end of Uncle Fred’s ladder
whizzed past, missing the side of his head by inches. It was like a
portent of Divine Providence. Had he not just told us in one of the
readings “... every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn
down, and cast into the fire”?
“He’s jist a bletherin’ fool,” Iona said afterwards echoing Uncle Fred. “He disna ken fit he’s spikkin’ aboot.”
***
In an odd sort of way, Iona’s speech reminded me of my grandparents’
Yorkshire dialect. You wondered about their common Anglo-Saxon roots.
Even some of the words were the same. They talked about “bairns” and
“be-asts” and t’ “watter”, and were amused when my brother had birthday
cards “fra lasses”. They were words you wanted to use yourself because
they felt like they meant; not clinical, educated English words that “slid so smooth from your throat you knew they could never say anything that was worth the saying at all.”
(Lewis Grassic Gibbon: Sunset Song, 1932). For more about Buchan Doric
as it is usually called, its origins and how it sounds, and to attempt
to spik lik a teuchtar, you can do little better than to look on Google
books at (or buy): Doric: The Dialect of North-East Scotland by J. Derrick McClure (2002). I especially like Chapter 4: Examples of Recorded Speech.
When my mother-in-law used to travel up from the South to visit us, and
passed through Barnsley on the train, one of her worst fears was that
her grandchildren would grow up to have accents like those she heard
around her. The broad Barnsley accent can be quite difficult to follow, and unintelligible to many from the South.
Some of our children’s contemporaries did indeed speak like that, but not them. As I mentioned in the last two posts, our daughter was teased at school for sounding ‘posh’, and was embarrassed by her voice in the two stop-motion video stories we made when she was little. It was quite a surprise when she said recently it is now her Yorkshire accent that bothers her.
The rather impressive subtitling on YouTube has no problem with it. It
transcribes almost all of it correctly. In fact, I wasn’t quite sure of
the word “daydreaming” until I switched them on.
I doubt it would have so little trouble with unmodified Barnsley. I also wonder what it would have made of my mother-in-law’s mixture of South London and “Snolbans”. I endlessly mimicked her pronunciation of “strawbrizz, raarzbrizz and guzzbrizz”? “They are raarzbrizz, not rasp
berries,” she would strike back.
And what of my own unbroken childhood accent? It can be heard in an exchange
45 seconds into the compilation I made from the old take of my dad singing and reading
poetry (Days of Wine and Roses, May 1st). It includes the following exchange:
(laughter)
Dad: Right. I am now about to begin.
Me: You’ll’ave all the laughing in.
Brother: Yes, you will, won’t you.
(more laughter)
Me: Hey! When you think about it what we’re all laughin’ at? It's a waste of tape.
Dad: My tape.
Embarrassing as I now find it (and there is a good deal more on the full tape), the YouTube subtitling copes with it surprisingly well. And although it struggles in places, it even follows most of my then sixty-five year-old Grandma’s village accent, fashioned before the First World War, as heard playing with my baby cousin later in the extract.
I also had a cassette tape of chatting with
friends as teenagers. Listening again recently, I was appalled, not only by the accents, but also by the language
used and what was being said. I rapidly abandoned my first idea of
sending it to them and threw it away. Now, I wonder what the subtitling would of made of it. I can’t imagine. We don’t always like what we see
or hear when we look back.
There is one further aspect of YouTube subtitling I find astonishing. It can automatically
translate into any one of over a hundred and twenty other languages. For
example, if you want it in French:
Not always perfect, but it can only get better. It can even do Welsh, Irish, and Scottish Gaelic. Who knows, one day it might be able to do Manx and the Yorkshire dialect?
The last post told how our then eight year-old daughter was able to make a stop-motion animation story, Molly’s Family, using her wooden dolls house and a video camera I’d borrowed from work. Our next attempt was more sophisticated, with sound effects and a few facial movements. It was also a better story.
For now forgotten reasons, she had two almost identical sets of figures for her dolls house. The story came from that.
For so many years, she did not want these videos to be seen. She was embarrassed by her voice. At school she was called ‘posh’ because her accent was not as strongly Yorkshire as most of the others’. Now, her Yorkshire accent is all she hears.
Here is the second video, Molly’s Twin, with mums resting and drinking tea, and dads spending all their time playing on the computer.
New Month Old Post: first posted 12th November, 2016.
He was to be President of the United States, but across the North of England the word ‘trump’ remained an acceptable, almost polite substitute for the four letter word beginning with ‘f’ and ending with ‘t’ which to my mind is so coarse and common I can hardly bring myself to write it.
“Poo! Who’s trumped?” my mother would exclaim on walking into the room where my brother and I were playing. We might say that too, but if either of us had used the f-synonym we would have had our faces slapped as hard as if we had used that other f-word; not that we had ever heard either in those innocent times.
I was around eleven when I first heard the more common term for trumping. It came from an adult. We were on holiday near Southampton and had driven to London airport (not yet called Heathrow) to wave my aunt and cousins off to Aden. We waited inside a high glass-walled enclosure for their BOAC Britannia to take to the air, sheltered from the roar of the engines but not from the acrid smell of the fuel. It was close and stuffy, and the kerosene hung around us mixing with the pong from the clothes of a family friend who had been sick on the train travelling down with my aunt. To make matters worse my brother periodically kept discharging his own contribution into the atmosphere. We used to eat meat in those days.
I was mortified when another aero-watcher, a middle aged man, turned and forcefully told me to stop farting. I had no idea what he meant. The embarrassment stemmed not from what I had been wrongly accused of but from the fact that a complete stranger had spoken to me.
On another early nineteen-sixties holiday we drove to Devon in a hired Hillman Minx. It was a long journey from Yorkshire in those pre-motorway days, and as dusk fell we were still miles from our lodgings. My brother and I lay on the back seat comatose with headaches, trumping.
“Good God! It smells as if somebody’s babbered themselves,” complained Mum. I knew it was bad because she rarely blasphemed.
“Can we have a drink of water?”
“No. You’ll be widdling and piddling all the way. You’ll have pickled yersel’s before we get there.”
“I could do with a jimmy riddle myself,” said Dad from the driving seat.
Like most people from the South, my wife had never come across this usage of the word ‘trump’, but she soon picked it up, as of course have our children. It seems more humorous than offensive.
I am convinced it used to appear in a dictionary we had at Junior School. We used to look it up and giggle. “Trump”, it read, “a small explosion between the legs.” Perhaps I am mistaken because I cannot find it anywhere now. I am told, however, that the Oxford English has the definition: “to break wind audibly (slang or vulgar).”
But as for “President Trump”, to me it sounds more of a command than a title of high status.
I am not all that keen to post this, and not everyone will want to read it, but if it helps anyone then it’s worthwhile. These things need to be talked about. We can find interest and enrichment in the most unlikely situations.
Until this year I thought I was a healthy and active seventy-something year-old enjoying jobs around the home, gardening, walking, music, and so on. Here I am along one of our local lanes. As you can see, we are not serious cyclists.
Old git with bike (or git with old bike)
Then J found me unconscious and having a fit. I eventually recovered enough to walk out to the emergency ambulance and two nights in hospital. The only warning was swirling black and white patterns in my upper right visual field. An MRI scan found a small tumour in the occipital lobe at the back of my brain. This was causing swelling which led to the seizure. The occipital handles some aspects of vision and reading, hence the odd errors I’ve been making.
The tumour was successfully treated by ‘gamma knife’ radiotherapy in a single hour-long session. This focuses two-hundred low-intensity X-ray beams upon precise high-intensity spots. It involves the discomfort of having an aluminium frame screwed (literally) to your skull to keep your head still in the treatment chamber, and to plot the 3D coordinates for the treatment sequence. Otherwise it is entirely painless. It can treat objects as small as two millimeters across.
Unfortunately, the brain tumour was a ‘met’ (a secondary) from a small lung tumour. This gave me no symptoms. Without the seizure I would have had no idea that anything was wrong. Last autumn, we were walking up mountains in North Wales.
Things looked bleak. At one point the word “palliative” was spoken. However, a positron (PET) scan revealed no other unusual activity except in the brain and lung. Some patients light up all over like a Christmas tree. Things began to look more hopeful.
I went through three months of chemotherapy. It was awful. Some days I was so sick as to wonder whether it was worth it. At one point I ended up back in hospital for two nights on a drip.
Then I had a month’s lung radiotherapy (although side-effects last longer). It was considered preferable to surgery in my case.
For me, radiotherapy was far more tolerable than chemo; just tiredness and mild discomfort. This was fortunate as some find it too painful to swallow without anaesthetic suspensions, and can even have to have feeding tubes taped up their noses. They put the fear of God into you in warning what could go wrong.
The worst part was having to travel Monday to Friday to Leeds and back every day for four weeks, where, with twelve linear accelerators, St. James’s Hospital zap around 450 patients a day. Their record is 750. People travel from all over Yorkshire.
As I was not allowed to drive, I was eligible for free Patient Transport. If you asked for early appointments, you usually get a private taxi. The return journey could be taxi, volunteer driver or a small ambulance, sometimes shared. With travel time, the 10-minute treatment including its 25 seconds of irradiation took at least three hours. Most days it was more: nearly six on the worst occasion. With Patient Transport you have to be patient.
Some drivers became regulars. I spent over ten hours sitting with one friendly chap in the Leeds traffic, talking about all kinds of things and learning Urdu phrases. He came from Kashmir in the nineteen-eighties without a word of English and is proud that his children have had the education he never had.
I have clearly had several tens of thousands of pounds worth of NHS treatment and may well need more. I could say so much more about it: the endless appointments and tests, the CT-guided lung biopsy which gave me a pneumothorax air pocket and another night in hospital, the radioactive dye squirted into my bloodstream from a lead canister by a nurse in an anti-radiation suit, the wholesale consumption of pills, how the challenge is as much psychological as physical, and the effects upon family, but I’ll leave things there.
I’m well again now. I have even been out on my bike. It is now a matter of monitoring scans. How long can any of us say we have: 2023? 2027? 2032? I might be lucky, but no delusions.
These things happen. As my Yorkshire grandparents would have said: “It’s a bugger in’t it!”
In the small collection of items I put aside to blog about at some future time, is an obituary of Iona Opie, children’s folklorist, who died in 2017 aged 94. If this post interests you, you will enjoy her life story.
Her delightful book ‘My Very First Mother Goose’, an illustrated collection of nursery rhymes, gave us hours of fun when the children were little. Bedtime after bedtime, we would turn through the pages, pointing at the pictures, singing the rhymes we knew the tunes to, and reciting those we didn’t. Now in a box of books in the loft, it is definitely not one to be disposed of.
Amongst my favourites to sing were:
Polly put the kettle on
Half a pound of tuppenny rice
I had a little nut tree
Pussy-cat, pussy-cat, where have you been
Elsie Marley’s grown so fine, she won’t get up to feed the swine
Dickory, dickery, dock
Sing a song of sixpence
Hey diddle, diddle, the cat and the fiddle
Ride a cock ‘oss to Banbury Cross (we are certainly not going to sing ‘cross’ to rhyme with ‘horse’ in Yorkshire)
Horsie, horsie, don’t you stop
Boys and girls come out to play
Jack and Jill
Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake
Down at the station early in the morning
Wee Willie Winkie
We probably enjoyed it more than the children.
“I don’t like that Wink Willie Wee-Wee,” son J said one day.
Iona Opie, with her husband Peter, began collecting nursery rhymes during the war when, one day out walking in the countryside, the rhyme “Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home / Your house is on fire, your children all gone,” came into her head. She wondered what it meant and where it had come from. Nursery rhymes had never been codified before. From scratch, they unearthed a rich vein of children’s rhymes, traditions and folklore that had been passed down through generations, which they sought to record before it was erased by the commodification of childhood.
As in “Ladybird, ladybird”, many hint at untold horrors. The Opies suggested this was uniquely British, “All part of being frightfully tough and not minding the weather; we’re nourished with this nonsense and it does us a lot of good.”
With us, the rhymes took on a life of their own, with changed words and new verses. “Down at the station” acquired a second verse in a minor key:
Grandson and -daughter1 wave goodbye to Grandma,
She’s on the train, she’s on her way home,
Ten minutes later a face at the window,
“Hello, it’s me, I’m baaack2 again.
1 their actual names were used here 2 exaggerated southern accent
The odd thing about this is that it is not entirely true. Our extra verse refers to an incident that occurred before either of the children was born.
Grandma used to travel up from the South on the main line to Sheffield and then take a local train through Barnsley. She was appalled by the thought that any future grandchildren might grow up with Barnsley accents.
On this particular day, we saw her off home on the local train, but she returned an hour or so later and knocked on the window. What had happened is that, just outside our station where the line becomes single-track, the driver of the train coming in the opposite direction stopped to inform Grandma’s driver about a broken joint in the track which had allowed him to pass but would have derailed Grandma’s train. Grandma’s driver then had to wait for permission to reverse back to our station.
How many of our traditional rhymes are similarly muddled?
Iona
and Peter Opie (rhymes with ‘soapy’) published several other books,
including ‘The Oxford Dictionary Of Nursery Rhymes’. We also bought
‘Here Comes Mother Goose’ which is in the same Walker Books series as
‘My Very First Mother Goose’, but most of the rhymes are unfamiliar to
us.
New Month Old Post (from original post of 1st October 2014)
Tasker Dunham gets beaten up
“You two lookin’ fe’r a feet?” said a coarse voice behind.* We pretended not to hear and kept walking.
We were making our way home by way of the back lanes so we could take off our school caps. The uniform was compulsory to and from school at all times: the striped tie, the blazer with the Viking badge, and the hideous cap – navy blue with four bright yellow triangles joined on top. Get caught without and it was an automatic Saturday morning detention. This applied just as much to sixth formers as to younger pupils, even those who stayed on an extra year to try for Oxbridge, and they could be nearly twenty! School caps looked even sillier on sixth formers than on us because nobody ever bought a new one, so they walked to and from school with tiny first-form caps perched on huge sixth-form heads.
But once out of sight beneath the high walls of the back lanes and cross streets, it was safe to put your cap in your pocket. The only danger was that the lanes were the haunt of Secondary Modern School boys who flaunted their toughness and maturity by smoking. They detested Grammar School boys in their showy uniforms, thinking them anything but tough and mature.
The voice behind was quiet for a time, so my friend Burling resumed talking about school. He was top of the ‘A’ stream and thought about little else. He was prattling on about surds and nineteenth century history: the square root of fifty and politicians William Pitt the Younger and George Canning. He could convince you it was fascinating, but from the way the disagreeable voice behind had pronounced fight as “feet”, I knew we were being followed by someone who thought surds were absurd, a pit was where you might get a job, and canning was what they did with peas and carrots in the factory down the Pontefract Road.
“You two lookin’ fe’r a feet?”
There were two modern school boys behind, smoking. One was the notorious Pete Jibson, who, despite being only a couple of years older than us, was one of those lads who by the age of fourteen could pass for twenty. He was heavily built, with thick greasy hair, dark stubble, a lined forehead and a perpetually malicious scowl. I had once seen him buying three Woodbines in the sweet shop where they split up packets to sell singly. He was definitely not someone you would want to fight. Better to lose face than teeth. But Burling lacked any sense of self-preservation. He never went out enough.
“I said you two lookin’ fe’r a feet?” repeated Jibson.
“Why?” asked Burling, brightly. “Have you lost one?”
It was not at all a sensible thing say. Jibson pushed forward, picked up Burling by the lapels of his blazer and rammed him backwards, hard against the wall.
“Four-eyed grammar school twat,” he growled, Woodbine still in mouth. He let Burling go and turned to walk away with his accomplice, smirking.
“Charming!” I whispered as they left, but a bit too loudly, and Jibson turned back to give me the treatment.
“What was that, you bastard? What did you say?”
“I didn’t say owt,” I protested in anxious, conciliatory, wide-eyed innocence. “I didn’t say owt.” I didn’t want to sound too posh.
Jibson let me go and turned again to leave. I was just about to give a sigh of relief when Burling, like the idiot he was, piped up, “He said you two were charming.”
“Right!” said Jibson menacingly. There was a sudden flash, a heavy thump under my chin, and I staggered backwards to the ground. As I struggled to get up I could see Burling being smashed against the wall again. When Jibson had made his point he flicked the smouldering stub of his Woodbine at my head, and swaggered off.
We waited until they were well ahead before continuing home. Burling had a few scrapes and scratches, and I suffered no worse than damaged pride and a bruised chin. We took the main roads home for the next few weeks, and kept our caps on.
Jibson left school soon afterwards and gave us no more bother. I heard he went to work at the local concrete factory making reinforced panels: dangerous, corrosive and life-shortening work. His mate did a bit better. I saw him again about a year later – at our house! He was with the local firm of decorators whistling and joking as they painted our outside woodwork. I don’t think he noticed me. I crept in quietly from school each day and made myself scarce until they had gone home. I imagined him laughing as he told the others about roughing us up.
As for Burling, he went to Oxford University to read politics, philosophy and economics, and became an economist at the Bank of England.
*In Northern England, you sometimes hear “fight” pronounced “feet” (cf “Y’aw’reet?” meaning “Are you all right?”). Also, “for” is often pronounced “fe’ ” with a short ‘e’ and an added ‘r’ when followed by a vowel, and “aught” (anything) as “owt”.
In a quiet southern corner of Yorkshire where the tributaries of the River Humber lock fingers with the Vale of York, there lies an expanse of pancake-flat country that geographers call the Humberhead Levels. It was once the bed of a glacial lake. Stand on the slightest rise and to the East you see the welcoming, chalky yellow-green hills of the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire Wolds. Look to the West and you can just make out the menacing, inky-brown smudge of the Yorkshire Pennines.
In winter, there is little protection from the North and East winds that blow up and down the Vale or in along the estuary. In autumn, thick fogs rise up from the fields and drift in from the rivers. In summer, the baking sun cracks the earth into deep fissures. Spring reveals the richness of the soil. Parts of it are warp land, where turbid river waters were once diverted into the fields to leave layers of fine, fertile silt.
The region is dotted with remote villages and isolated farms. Aunty Bina lived at the end of a long lane that stretched straight and level from my grandma’s village, past silent fields of sugar beet, wheat, potatoes and fallow grass. Hardly anyone goes down that lane now if not in a motor vehicle or dressed in lycra, but in days gone by we walked from the village, a good two miles, me and my brother running happily ahead of grandma wheeling baby cousin Anna in her pram. It lives in my imagination as an expedition through an extraordinary landscape.
Anna had been staying with us while Aunty Bina was in hospital for an operation. It was supposed to take a couple of weeks but things went wrong and it was four months before she got out. Even then, she was still too ill to cope with a one-year old, so Anna stayed with us a lot longer. We loved it. It was like having a new baby sister. She learned to walk and talk before she went home. Neighbours thought my mother had had another baby.
We visited regularly for Bina to see Anna. It meant we could play on the farm with cousin Brian. It never failed to bring new adventures. Some of the buildings were two hundred years old. There were sweet smelling hay stacks to climb and burrow in, quiet shady barns to explore, nests of semi-wild, warm, furry kittens to stroke and befriend, and, away across a field, a mysterious, dark wood with fallen trees to scramble over.
In summer you could channel mazes and crawl through the long wheat, provided Brian’s dad, Uncle Ben, didn’t spot you. The one time he caught us flattening his corn just before harvest there was hell to pay, especially by Brian after we had gone home.
Uncle Ben worked hard lonely hours on the farm, and had the farmers’ pragmatic acceptance of life and death. Once, making our way along the lane, we spotted him across a field, standing motionless with his gun, “shuttin’ t’crows an’ t’rabbits” [shooting crows and rabbits]. He had sheds of egg-laying hens, but, for farmers, there is no room for sentiment when a hen’s egg-laying begins to decline. He had a series of farm dogs, loud, ferocious, vicious things that sprang up at your face on chains, snarling as you edged past against the wall. I never thought to ask what happened when they got old, or what became of the litters of kittens produced by the semi-wild farm cats. In later years, he bought white Charolais calves and raised them like his own family, but in the end they were always sold on for slaughter and replaced by younger ones. He called them “be-asts”, splitting the word into two syllables.
I once sat behind him at a wedding and marvelled at the breadth of his back, like one of his ‘be-asts’. He thoroughly knew his job, the diverse skills involved, how to operate complicated machinery, how to calculate quantities of feeds and fertilisers, how to fill in government forms, how to buy calves, when to sow and harvest crops, when the weather said to wait a little longer, and when the weather said it was all right to hide indoors out of harm’s way and play pool with Brian, or watch cricket on television. Aunty Bina would have been quite happy to retire to a little cottage in the village, but Ben would not entertain the idea, and continued to raise Charolais, even when he was “pushin’ eighty”, as Bina put it.
His rural toughness applied to his dealings with people too. He could seem rude and aggressive, and more than one relative refused to have anything to do with him. We used to tell ourselves we visited the farm to be insulted. As I got older he always looked me critically in the beard and said, “You scruffy bugger! Can’t th’afford a razor?” And when it started to go white it was, “Well! Bloody ‘ell! Look who it is! It’s bloody Father Christmas.”
I once drove my dad there and Ben came in saying, “Ah cou’n’t see who it wa’ from ove’ thee-’re across o’t’ field, except it were a rich bugger wi’ a new car an’ a scruffy bugger wi’ whiskers.” [I couldn’t see who it was from over there across the field, except it was a rich b- with a new car and a scruffy b- with whiskers]. I wish I’d been brave enough to tell him the new car was mine.
This confrontational humour came straight out of pre-war village life, from the days of communal field work, laughing, joking and exchanging banter as they forked hay or straw on to horse-drawn wagons. But by the nineteen sixties things had changed. Farmers worked long hours on their own, driving up and down, up and down on their tractors. So Ben saved his acerbic wit for visitors. If you were in tune, he was one of the most amusing people you could ever hope to meet.
“What! y’don’t ‘ave sugar in y’tea? Bloody ‘ell! What d’y’think we grow it fo’?” [You don’t take sugar? Why do you think we grow it?]
“Vegetarian? Y’r a vegetarian? We wo’k our bloody guts out raisin’ t’be-asts fo’t’market, and y’come in ‘ere sayin’ y’r a vegetarian!” [We work hard raising be-asts for market and you dare to say you are a vegetarian!]
Ben had been born in another village, some distance across the river, and implied he married Aunty Bina only to improve the local bloodstock.
“If t’Blue Line bus ‘adn’t started comin’ thro’ t’village, th’d ‘ave all bin imbecil’s ‘cos o’ t’inbreedin’.” [If the Blue Line bus hadn’t started coming through the village they would have all been imbeciles because of inbreeding]
If ever I had an accent like that, I’m sorry to have lost it in pretentious jobs and places. One day over the phone, I was dismayed to hear Ben telling Bina “th’s some posh bugger askin’ fo’ y’r on t’phone.” Bina defended me. “Why, it’s not anybody posh,” she said, “it’s on’y our Tasker,” and then to me said “I suppose y‘ave to talk like that when y’r at work.”
One way to handle Ben’s prickly comments was to ignore him. That’s what Bina did, but there were others who returned as good as they got. One day, they were visited by ‘our Mary’, an overweight elderly relative, and an equally overweight friend, who arrived side by side on bicycles, gliding slowly along the lane, tyres bulging to bursting point, saddles submerged in the overhanging folds of their abundant bottoms, skirts gathered under to reveal thighs wobbling like jelly as they pumped against the pedals.
“Look who it is!” shouted Ben from his stackyard. “It’s t’Rolly Pollies.”
“Bugger off Ben Smith, y’mucky farmer blattered up in cow clap,” came the reply. “Get back on t’land whe-‘re y’belong!” [Go away you dirty farmer covered in cow muck. Get back on the land where you belong]
When you think what else they spread on t’land, that’s a pretty good put down.
“That’s wrong” said Geoffrey Bullard, with his thick ape-neck and menacing stare. “It should be M Dunham is crap”. His fat finger stabbed at the offending word.
He thought he knew everything, and everyone else was stupid. It was too risky to explain. Football teams are plural: Rawcliffe United are great this year; Howden Town are terrible; M Dunham are crap. You can chant it:
M Dunham are crap, M Dunham are crap, Ee aye addio, M Dunham are crap.
A league match between M Dunham and T Dunham c1960
It was my dad who first pretended we were football teams
in a league. He was B Dunham, I was T
Dunham, my brother Martin was M Dunham, and M Dunham were crap. It said so in red wax crayon on the back of the asbestos garage where Geoffrey Bullard had spotted it.
I didn’t realise that wax crayon on asbestos panelling is like permanent marker: waterproof, indelible, not-fade-away. There it was, and there it must have stayed for decades. Imagine the disapproving faces that pitied the ignorant child responsible, and wondered who was M Dunham, and why was he crap.
So, Geoffrey Bullard remained oblivious of the imaginary football teams, and, when he wasn’t round at our house bullying me, I could play imaginary football games in the garden. I had a full league of teams and fixtures, and played out each match on my own on the pitch of dried mud we optimistically called “the back grass”. This differed from “the front grass” only by being slightly bigger and by not actually having any grass, except that is for a few odd blades that struggled out of the earth before being unceremoniously stamped back in again by the boots of make-believe footballers.
I ran up and down with the ball, puffing and panting between one goal defined by chalk marks on the wall of the house and the other by the clothes posts near the back hedge, while providing the roars and boos of the crowd, and an excitable commentary. In my head they were all there: two complete teams of players, spectators, a commentator, the referee, the linesmen and the trainer with his ‘magic sponge’.
I drew up team sheets, match day programmes, fixture lists and league tables. I was everyone and did everything. These days, kids do the same with electronic games like ‘Top European Football Manager III’, but my fantasy was played in the back garden, much healthier for all the running around in the fresh air, with better transferrable skills from the manual record keeping, and no less unsociable than games consoles.
T Dunham were of course the best team by far. They always won and hardly ever conceded a goal. They usually beat M Dunham (who really were crap) by several goals to nil, and “The” B Dunham by a similar margin (my dad had once been to watch “The” Arsenal while on holiday in London).
It was not long before T Dunham were promoted out of the league containing the other Dunham teams into the local district league, where they played against proper teams such as the colliery, the dockers and the railwaymen, and teams from pubs and local villages. I picked my players for each match and posted their names on the wall inside our team hut, in other words the yellow shed.
The team was always set out in traditional 1-2-3-5 formation, with a goalkeeper, two full backs, three half-backs and five forwards. In those days we always had a centre forward, inside forwards and wingers; no one had yet heard of modern formations involving sweepers, overlapping midfielders and offensive 4-3-3 game plans.
One day, Geoffrey Bullard noticed a team sheet on the wall of the shed. “What’s that?” he asked, looking carefully. My team was laid out for all to see, ready for the West Riding Cup Final between T Dunham and Norton Woodseats. The captain, ‘Dunham’, in other words me, was on the left wing, my position the only time I had ever been selected for the school team. Some of the other imaginary players were also names from school. ‘Gelder’ was inside-left, ‘Longthwaite’ was centre-forward, and, as I realised to my consternation the same moment he spotted it, ‘Bullard’ was centre-half.
“Why am I only centre-half?” he demanded to know.
I cringed inwardly while he thought about it. He considered himself one of the best footballers in the school and naturally assumed his rightful role was top scorer in the forward line.
“Actually,” he then said weighing it up, “I would make quite a good centre-half,” and let me off the hook by showing no further interest.
But the wax crayon was still on the garage, and in due course my mother saw it.
“It won’t come off,” she sounded annoyed. “And anyway, what does it mean?”
It dawned on me that I didn’t really know what ‘crap’ meant either. I’d heard people say it, and thought it a satisfyingly grown up word to use. It just seemed to mean someone or something wasn’t very good. You could snarl it in real disgust, curling your upper lip, emphasising the ‘r’ and spitting out the final ‘p’. “C-RAP!” I had been saying it as much as I could.
“What’s this word, ‘crap’?” my dad asked. My mother had obviously been talking to him.
It was my dad’s sister, Aunty Dorothy, a hospital nurse, who gently enlightened us as to what it meant. She took me aside and asked in her quiet way: “Was it you who wrote in wax crayon on the back of the garage? You wrote, ‘M Dunham are crap’, didn’t you?”
I nodded.
“Well, you do know what it means, don’t you?”
I shook my head.
“It’s very very rude,” she said looking serious. “It means babba.” *
I wanted to giggle, but tried hard to look horrified and apologetic.
“It’s not a word we should be using at all,” she warned sternly. “And in any case, it’s very wrong to say that. It should be M Dunham is crap.”
* It seems that using the word ‘babba’ to mean poo is not as universal as I once thought. An internet search reveals very few examples. Similarly, ‘trump’ meaning an emission of wind, also seems to be mainly a northern expression. Both were common in the part of Yorkshire where I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. The word ‘crap’, on the other hand, was beyond vulgarity and never heard. It goes to show how much things have changed.
I had been asked (i.e. told) at short notice to give an outline of our business computing system to some new customers whose primary contact had been sent off to an urgent problem abroad. All I knew was that the four guys in front of me were from an outfit called NIPF and that they spoke with those throaty Northern Irish voices you sometimes hear on television. One, a big, confident man in his fifties with a shiny, shaved head and intense stare, was clearly in charge. Another was half his size and looked a bit shifty. I began, predictably, by introducing myself and asking their names.
“Con Cluskey,” answered the one on the left.
“John Stokes,” said the big, confident man.
“Eric Wrixon,” said the third.
“John Stokes,” said the little, shifty guy.
“Oh! That’s interesting.” I exclaimed. “So, you’re John Stokes as well? You’re both called John Stokes?”
John Stokes 2 looked flustered. “Sorry. It’s Morrison... Van… er, George… George Morrison… George Morris.”
“He’s very tired,” said John Stokes 1.
It was unsettling, but it seemed best to let it go and get on with the presentation. I showed them the system: how it could keep track of their computers and printers and other pieces of equipment, and would tell them when they needed updating or maintaining, and could record what things had gone wrong and repairs that had been carried out, and what parts they used, and so on. All went well.
When I got home that evening, I told the future Mrs. D. about the guy who didn’t know his own name.
“As if they weren’t using their real names,” she suggested.
It turned out that was indeed the case. In fact, they possibly did not even know each others’ real names. And it wasn’t just for maintaining computers they had bought the system. They had mobile communications equipment, surveillance kit and other stuff they’d rather not talk about.
Three or four weeks later, the Customer Support Director called me in. He asked me (i.e. told me) to go to Belfast to run a two-day training course for NIPF’s staff.
“It’s extremely confidential,” he warned. “They asked specifically for you. You have been checked out and granted security clearance. I would fully understand if you didn’t want to go. It would not count against you in any way .” Of course he would. Of course it wouldn’t. I started to feel very apprehensive. Not put too fine a point on it, I felt a bit sick.
NIPF was a covert name for the Northern Ireland Police Force, then known as the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). It was the late nineteen-eighties and they were still dealing with the ethno-nationalist “Troubles” between warring paramilitary groups. Three members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) had recently been shot by British security forces in Gibraltar, and at their funeral in Belfast a member of the opposing Ulster Defence Association (UDA) had thrown grenades at the coffin and shot three people dead. At one of the ensuing funerals, two British Army corporals were surrounded in their car, taken away and killed. It was not a place any English person would go for a holiday.
When I told the future Mrs. D. where I was going, not even giving the full details, she almost had a meltdown. It’s the kind of thing that brings home how much you love each other.
Well, I am still here. NIPF gave me strict rules to follow. I would be met at the airport and taken to a hotel. The hotel was safe, but I was not to leave it under any circumstances. I would be collected each morning and taken to NIPF’s HQ, and returned to the hotel again in the evening. They would take me back to the airport at the end of the second day. I should speak as little as possible so as not to reveal my English accent. Everything would be fine, they assured me. The effect was to make me even more queasy and apprehensive.
John Stokes 1 collected me from Belfast International Airport. The windows of his Ford Granada had inch-thick glass. He warned me to mind my hands as he heaved shut the heavy door. It was reinforced with steel plating. The car averaged about seven miles to the gallon. When I asked was it all really necessary he said the route between the airport and hotel passed through bandit country and it would be dangerous if we broke down. Otherwise, it was just like being at any other customers’ except for the armoured Land Rovers parked outside, and the canteen where uniformed squaddies piled their submachine guns and body armour outside in the corridor. I didn’t eat much.
One thing I did like was the Belfast accent: the way they say “BelFAAST” with a big, wide “aa”; how words like “now”
and “flower” become “noy” and “floyyer” (“hoy noy broyn coy”); the way they pronounce Rs at the end of words; how “rain” becomes “reey-in’ ”. They gave me elocution lessons, although I was a poor learner. On leaving, they gave me a present, a book on how to speak “Norn Iron” (you sound both Rs in that).
My queasy apprehension did not lift until safely on the plane home. I gazed over Port St. Mary and the little island known as the Calf of Man glowing in the evening sunlight, and giggled on finding the phrase I might have used to buy medicine for an unsettled stomach without giving away my English accent (remember, emphasis on the big wide “aa”s):
I have seen so many clips from Ken Loach’s film Kes, I felt I knew this book well. I didn’t.
I knew the outline well enough: “grubby little lad in Yorkshire … finds and trains a kestrel … bringing hope and meaning to a drab life crushed by bullying schoolmasters and a downbeat home life,” to quote the Daily Mirror (20th March, 1970). I even once co-wrote a parody called ‘Budge’, poking fun at a friend who kept animals, about a boy who found an escaped budgerigar in his coalhouse and trained it to sing rude songs in a Yorkshire accent.
This entirely misses the poetry of the book: the vivid and lyrical descriptions of the streets and countryside around the coal mining community where it is set. It is an astonishing piece of writing. The story absorbs you completely. Every page shines with brilliance. The language mirrors the shifting emotions: the joy of escape from the dirt and poverty of the town into the natural beauty of the hills, woods and fields; the elation on seeing the kestrel wild and free in flight; the constricting terror in hiding from an inescapable beating; the dread when the bird is missing.
I can only give examples. The first has often been quoted before:
A cushion of mist lay over the fields. Dew drenched the grass, and the occasional sparkling of individual drops made Billy glance down as he passed. One tuft was silver fire … and when it caught the sun it exploded, throwing out silver needles and crystal splinters. (p19)
There is despair at the end as Billy wanders the streets bereft through a scene familiar to anyone who has walked alone through an empty northern town at night:
A shadow rippling across a drawn curtain. A light going on. A light going off. A laugh. A shout. A name. A television on too loud, throwing the dialogue out into the garden. A record, a radio playing; occasional sounds on quiet streets. (p157)
There is the language, the Barnsley dialect, such as in Billy’s words as he comes alive in describing the bird’s first free flight to his class during an English lesson:
‘Come on, Kes! Come on then! Nowt happened at first, then, just when I wa’ going’ to walk back to her, she came. You ought to have seen her. Straight as a die, about a yard off t’floor. An’ t’speed! … like lightnin’, head dead still, an’ her wings never made a sound, then wham! Straight up on t’glove, claws out grabbin’ for t’meat,’ (p66)
(clip of this scene from the film)
The accent would in truth be much stronger than rendered in the book (as in the film clip linked above). After the film was premiered at the Doncaster Odeon in March, 1970, some thought it would need sub-titles for audiences south of Sheffield. Like my mother-in-law, whose recurring nightmare, each time she heard the local accents when she travelled up on the train to see us and passed through Barnsley, was that her grandchildren might grow up to speak like that. (They did and they didn’t. Other kids at school said they talked posh but when they went out into the wider world their Yorkshire accents were obvious.)
The book took me back to my own Yorkshire town: the streets of
terraced housing, the industrial grime, the local accent, but none of it
quite as grim and hopeless as here.
Barry Hines grew up near Barnsley at Hoyland Common. He wrote other
novels and also scripts for radio, film and television. Before becoming a
full-time writer he was an inspirational teacher. He was enormously
influential. He died in 2016 and funds are being raised for a bronze
statue to be
erected in Barnsley in his honour, showing young Billy Casper with his kestrel. The bronze has now been cast but funds are still
needed for the plinth.
The film Kes remains
legendary in the area and many of those who were extras as children are
still around. A fundraising screening at the Penistone Paramount a
couple of years ago was a sell out. The folk ensemble I play in put
on a fundraising ceilidh (barn dance) in Barnsley last year.
As Ian McMillan says in the introduction to the Penguin Decades edition I have, “Going back to the book with the film in my head is a revelation.” Indeed it is. I should have read it a long time ago. I’ll definitely read it again.
Key to star ratings: 5*** wonderful and hope to read again, 5* wonderful, 4* enjoyed it a lot and would recommend, 3* enjoyable/interesting, 2* didn't enjoy, 1* gave up.
The Dead Sister and The Used Up Characters (illustrations by D. Murray Smith)
Sabine Baring-Gould:
Yorkshire Oddities, Incidents and Strange Events (3*)
A Book of Ghosts (3*)
Curiosities of Olden Times (2*)
No, Sabine Baring-Gould was not one of the three wise men (with Baring-Frankincense and Baring-Myrrh) but was no less spiritual. And Yorkshire Oddities is not a dig at certain other bloggers despite what some might think; it was one of his books.
The Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould (1834-1924) is often remembered as author of the strident hymn Onward Christian Soldiers, written as young curate at Horbury Bridge, Yorkshire, in the eighteen-sixties, later set to the equally strident tune, St. Gertrude, by Sir Arthur Sullivan. Baring-Gould also collected myths and legends, folk songs and sermons, and wrote enormous amounts of other stuff. In his day he was considered one of England’s best novelists. He found time to father fifteen children as well. I bet he wasn’t much help with the housework.
I was hoping for a free Kindle version of Yorkshire Oddities but the cheapest on the Kindle store was £2.29, so I downloaded his Curiosities of Olden Times and A Book of Ghosts instead. Well, I am from Yorkshire. Later, I did find a free copy of Yorkshire Oddities on that wonderful resource The Open Library. I have therefore spent several weeks with the writings of an out-of-fashion Victorian clergyman.
The ghost stories are readable and entertaining. They bring the occasional shiver from anthropological relics that go bump in the night and a very scary railway compartment. There is a dead finger that inhabits the narrator’s body bit by bit in the hope of taking it over, a dead sister who lives the life of a living one, and a caution for writers not to base characters on real people because it uses up their souls leaving lifeless shells that follow you around. Not too scary, in fact it might better be described as playful, but not bad if you want something free for Kindle and can put up with the odd moralistic rant. David Murray Smith’s illustrations in some editions capture the gentle mood quite well.
Curiosities of Olden Times and Yorkshire Oddities are collections of the weird, strange and eccentric, in both fact and fiction. Among the olden curiosities we find descriptions of gruesome medieval punishments and are warned not to sit in church porches between the hours of 11.00 p.m. and 01.00 a.m. on St. Mark’s Eve (24th April) unless we wish to see the ghosts of those due to die in the coming year passing into the church. However, much of Curiosities... is concerned with religious myths and legends discussed in a lengthy academic way, which can be rather tedious.
But it was Yorkshire Oddities that started this quest. In effect, it is a kind of social history of the county. It offers brief biographies of oddities such as Blind Jack of Knaresborough (1717-1810) who learnt to navigate the entire county alone on a horse and built around 180 miles of turnpike road, and Peter Barker, the blind joiner (1808-1873), who taught himself to make or mend just about anything. There are accounts of heinous murders including the drowning of an unwanted husband by his wife, her lover and an accomplice at Dawney Bridge near Easingwold in 1623 where the bodies of the executed murderers were hung in chains on what later became known as Gibbet Hill.
I was greatly amused by Baring-Gould’s rendition of the Yorkshire accent. He had plenty of practice because his wife, Grace Taylor, was an ordinary girl from Ripponden, but I doubt he would have spoken of her as he reports an unnamed butcher speaking of his wife:
Shoo’s made a rare good wife. But shoo’s her mawgrums a’ times. But what women ain’t got ‘em ? They’ve all on ‘em maggots i’ their heads or tempers. Tha sees, sir, when a bone were took out o’ t’ side o’ Adam, to mak a wife for ‘m, ‘t were hot weather, an’ a blue-bottle settled on t’ rib. When shoo’s i’ her tantrums ses I to her, ‘Ma dear,’ ses I, ‘I wish thy great-great-grand ancestress hed chanced ta be made i’ winter.’ [p224, fifth edition]
“mawgrums” is one of several words that appear in the book and hardly anywhere else. Another is the name of a hill near Heptonstall called “Tomtitiman”.
But to return to Yorkshire accents, Baring-Gould writes:
[The locals] speak two languages – English and Yorkshire … every village has its own peculiarity of intonation, its own specialities in words. A Horbury man could be distinguished from a man of Dewsbury, and a Thornhill man from one of Batley. The railways have blended these peculiar dialects into one, and taken off the old peculiar edge of provincialism, so that now it is only to be found in its most pronounced and perfect development among the aged. [p110-111, fifth edition]
This was written in 1874 but I always felt you could still detect local differences amongst my grandparents’ generation in my neck of the woods up to a century later. Depending which way you walked, you could hear West Riding tykes, Linkisheere yellowbellies and East Riding woldies all within a ten-mile radius.
I was therefore especially interested in the stories of three ‘Yorkshire Oddities’ from this area:
Nancy Nicholson “the termagant” lived at Drax, Newland and Asselby between 1785 and 1854. She nagged and complained so much as to ruin the lives of her husband, relatives and almost everyone she came into contact with.
Snowden Dunhill (c1766-1838) from Spaldington near Howden, was a notorious thief: the Rob Roy of the East Riding. He was eventually transported to Van Dieman’s Land where he dictated his life story which found its way back to Howden and was printed and published.
Jemmy Hirst of Rawcliffe (1738-1829) became so famous for his eccentricities that King George III invited him to visit his Court in London. He rode a bull and wore eccentric clothing including an outrageously broad hat, although anyone tempted to joke or play a trick at his expense invariably came off worst. He became wealthy dealing in agricultural produce and built himself an enormous wickerwork carriage drawn by Andalusian horses, causing a sensation at Pontefract and Doncaster races. A true Yorkshire oddity but somehow he sounds like Jimmy Savile.
I knew these villages as a child but had never heard of any of these characters until more recently when we all began to take more interest in local history: e.g. there is now a pub at Rawcliffe named after Jemmy Hirst. Among their stories are glimpses of lost landscapes and ways of life: the woods around Rawcliffe, otter hunting in the marshlands, the steam packet that sailed from Langrick (Long Drax) to York, and the emergence of the railways.
There is a lot to fascinate but much to skip over. As in Curiosities..., some chapters are overly long with too much verbatim source material. A good editor would not have been amiss.
Key to star ratings: 5*** wonderful and hope to read again, 5* wonderful, 4* enjoyed it a lot and would recommend, 3* enjoyable/interesting, 2* didn't enjoy, 1* gave up.
Another book from the list of those I should have read in my teens and early twenties, but didn’t because of the television we got when I was around twelve, which cut my reading from two or three books a week down to zero for the next ten years. I’ve never read the 1959 book, or seen either the 1963 film or the 1973 television series.
I could easily have become wrapped up in Billy Liar. He might have been me, or at least the rebellious subversive I wished I could be. You have to remember we were under the anarchic influences of The Who, Jethro Tull and Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Billy Liar would have been another
Billy lives in a dismal Yorkshire town, cares nothing for his job as a clerk, has only contempt for his parents and keeps three girls on the go at the same time. He tells outrageous fibs to suit his shifting impulses, acts out jokey sketches with a chum from work and escapes into fantasy where, among other things, he dreams of being a comedy writer. Almost me, except for the three girls on the go: wouldn’t chance have been a fine thing, even just one?
This was nineteen-fifties, working-class Britain, not quite on the cusp of the youth consumer boom, before the upsurge of opportunity, when people worked long hours and made do: such as with the old raincoat Billy uses as a dressing gown. There isn’t a television set or record player in sight, and an Italian-cut suit is the only mention of fashion. Remnants of this life were still around in the late nineteen-sixties when I left school for office work instead of university, especially in office work, but things were beginning to change. I had more choice and was able to get away. Billy couldn’t. I felt disappointed at the end when he bottles his chance and goes back to his home and job.
Keith Waterhouse is often described as one of Britain’s funniest writers. “I don’t mind dark satanic mills,” says Billy, “but by gum when it comes to dark satanic shops, dark satanic housing estates and dark satanic police stations –”, although Billy has no ending to this pre-prepared sentence (p90). He keeps one girl friend’s postcards from her trips to various places around the country because they are at least literate: “I felt mildly peculiar to be treasuring love-letters for their grammar,” he says (p19).
Some of Waterhouse’s descriptions remind me of his contemporary, Les Dawson:
It was quiet outside the Roxy. The evening was warm, but on the crisp side. The sodium lamps were beginning to flicker on and off, dismally. The old gaffers who manned the Alderman Burrows memorial bench at the abandoned train terminus were beginning to crane themselves stiffly to their feet and adjust their mufflers… (p142)
His mimetic rendering of Yorkshire accents is a joy:
Does ta think ah could climb down yon ashpit? Nay, tha’d break thi neck, Councillor! Aye, well ah’sll have to manage it, whether or no. Ah’m bahn down to t’ police station. What’s ta bahn down theer for, then? We’re pulling t’ bugger down. Tha’s not, is ta? Aye, we are that. All yon cottages anall … It’s all change. All change, nowadays. T’ old buildings is going. T’ old street is going. T’ trams, they’ve gone. Aye … It we’re all horse-drawn trams, and afore that we had to walk. It’s all change. T’ old mills is going. T’ old dialect, that’s going, … (p89)
I think I know where Monty Python got the idea from.
Many accounts of Billy Liar make more of his grand fantasies about the imaginary country of Ambrosia, but I found this merely a contextual element, one of several running through the book, a device now well-used by writers to milk for laughs.
Billy Liar is fun to read. It is one of the great nineteen-fifties novels which, along with others by Alan Sillitoe, Kingsley Amis, John Braine, Stan Barstow and others, paved the way for a new style of fiction. Waterhouse’s later novel, Billy Liar on the Moon, set in the nineteen-seventies, might be a good follow up.
Key to star ratings: 5*** wonderful and hope to read again, 5* wonderful, 4* enjoyed it a lot and would recommend, 3* enjoyable/interesting, 2* didn't enjoy, 1* gave up.
