Disturbingly Different Outcomes

It was a music friend’s funeral recently. He died of lung cancer. There was much in common with my own situation. 

He was very fit, and in early autumn was walking in mountains in Scotland. He retired a year ago from his job as head of English in a secondary school in the Sheffield area, and had just started the second year of a Masters course in Creative Writing. But there the similarities end. 

In October, he noticed a slight shortness of breath when walking up hill and playing his flute. The doctor sent him for an urgent scan (unavailable to me during covid lockdown), and he was diagnosed with lung cancer. An early thought was to offer help with questions from our own personal experiences, seeing that is what I also have, and have had a wide range of tests and treatments. However, a day or two later, we heard he was in hospital after a stroke, and may then have had more. He died fifteen days after diagnosis. Fifteen days! He was 64. 

And I’m still here after three and a half years, struggling, but still here and hoping, with luck, to see 2026.

His cancer was in the plural membrane, not one of the lobes. 

The Restless Friend

New Month Old Post: first posted 22nd January, 2017

From Great Heck and the Norfolk Broads to Southern Rhodesia: the contrasting lives of childhood friends.

High on the mantelpiece in the back room of the house where I grew up, were photographs of my mother and father taking turns to wear a ships’ officer’s hat at the wheel of a houseboat on the Norfolk Broads. My dad’s pipe is jauntily raked at an angle that would not have been out of place in someone commanding a much larger vessel. He puts on a show of self-importance while my mum looks relaxed and happy. How young and carefree they seem; from a time before I was born. 

My dad remembered this post-war holiday fifty years later. They went with his school friend Freddy and wife Sylvia. My mum, Freddy and Sylvia went on ahead because Dad had to work the first Saturday. He took his suitcase in the firm’s van and was dropped off at Heck railway station, between Selby and Doncaster, where he took a direct train to Norwich. He remembered the splendid sight of Ely Cathedral in the evening sun. He was young, the war was over and he was off on holiday with his new wife and friends: for all of them the future was rosy. 

You might be surprised to learn there was ever a direct train from Heck to Norwich, but during the war the tiny station at Great Heck gained unusual importance due to its proximity to No. 51 Heavy Bomber Squadron, R.A.F. Snaith, a short distance along a country lane between Heck and nearby Pollington. Also at Pollington were army barracks and one of the largest Women’s Land Army quarters in the country. Some 3,200 extra personnel were drafted into a village of 650. My dad’s train was a residual wartime service. He actually caught it on the very last Saturday it ran.

Great Heck has no railway station at all now. It disappeared around nineteen-sixty along with its neighbours at Temple Hirst, Balne and Moss. My dad once took me there in the nineteen-fifties to watch powerful Atlantic and Pacific locomotives race through non-stop on the East Coast Main Line between York and Doncaster. By then the station had already declined into obscurity and might never have been heard of again had it not been the site of the terrible Great Heck rail crash in February, 2001. Even that is often referred to as the Selby rail crash.

Pollington Airfield has also gone. A few derelict hangars remain but the runways and taxiways have all but crumbled and the site is used now by haulage and storage companies. For much of the nineteen-sixties and -seventies it was a popular off-road spot for learner drivers to make their first juddering attempts at starting, steering, stopping and changing gear.

Back in the photographs, it is Freddy’s cap they are wearing. On leaving school he had initially begun to train as a ship’s officer, but wartime on the ominous North Atlantic convoys had left him restless. He exchanged his sextant for the cricket team and a job in a railway office. The drudgery was too much. While my dad remained in his small Yorkshire town, Freddy left for the champagne air of colonial Southern Rhodesia, seeking excitement and adventure over caution and insularity. Sylvia followed soon after with their two young children. That is what wives did in those days whether or not they really wanted to. 

They left in 1952 and lived very comfortably for a time. Whites in Rhodesia had servants, sizeable houses with pleasant gardens and swimming pools, and good health care and education. The climate was wonderful and it was one of the richest communities in the world. I don’t know whether Freddy ever came back. Online ships’ manifests only show Sylvia and the children spending five months in Yorkshire without Freddy in 1955, but the records are incomplete.

What I do remember is that each Christmas Freddy sent my dad a subscription to the Reader’s Digest. My dad thought it the affected urbanity of a smug high-flier and was irritated by the complacent, patronising content. But children have time to read such things: the features such as ‘Laughter the Best Medicine’, ‘Humour in Uniform’, ‘Life’s Like That’ and ‘Test Your Word Power’, the biographies and articles on technology and medicine, the condensed books. I still, for old time’s sake, go straight to the piles of back-issues in holiday cottages and waiting rooms. Thankfully my word power fairs better now. It is easy to see why it was once one of the highest-circulation periodicals in the world, despite all the junk mail that comes with it.

The gift subscription continued into the nineteen-sixties despite nothing ever being sent back in return, not even a Christmas card, as we did not know Freddy’s address. It may have been in Bulawayo. One year the subscription stopped. Perhaps he had decided not to bother any more. We gradually forgot about it. It was a long time before we heard what had happened.

Two decades later, Sylvia unexpectedly returned to England, alone and penniless. It transpired that Freddy, clever with money, had made a small fortune on the stock market, but had also developed an alcohol problem. Eventually, he left and moved to Hong-Kong where he later died. Sylvia had remained in Rhodesia (by then Zimbabwe) until, forced by the economic and political situation there, she returned to Yorkshire. She had not been allowed to bring any money out of the country. She came back to be near her daughter, but her daughter died fairly soon afterwards. Sylvia spent the rest of her days in our small Yorkshire town on benefits in a bedsit, surrounded by second-hand furniture. She was too proud to accept offers of help, even though my parents, who had not moved away, had become fairly comfortably off. 

I guess, as these events are long past and the people long gone, it is all right to post these pictures of Freddy and Sylvia (one with my dad). 

Class Journey

When I describe myself as working class, it irritates my wife and family no end. 

“Don’t be ridiculous,” they say. “You had professional jobs in accountancy, computing, and universities. Your father employed fifteen people, and owned a four-bedroomed detached house with a double garage and garden in a nice part of town. He had a good car. You had books and music at home. How can that be working class?” 

I protest that much of that came later, but they won’t have it and excited voices are raised. They don’t like the idea that if I am working class, it might make them working class too. 

“I would not have married you if you had been working class,” my wife once said. 

No, we are not working class now. The kids were embarrassed at school to be called “posh” because they did not have particularly strong local accents. But I grew up working class. 

Like many of my age and background, especially from the North of England, I have been on a kind of class journey, and changed. It was not a deliberate or conscious change, but without it, I would not have been able to do the things I did. Class was, and to a large extent remains, a big influence on opportunity in England today. We make scores of micro-judgements about each other’s backgrounds all the time, and treat each other accordingly. It influences whether or not we are offered a particular job or promotion, or who we select as friends or partners. 

The street where we lived until I was 6, although it seemed shabbier then

It is largely the circumstances of your childhood that define you: how you lived and the friends you had. We lived in a rented two-bedroomed terraced house until I was six, and then moved up in the world to a three-bedroomed semi. My dad worked as part shot assistant, and part salesman travelling around the local villages three days a week. Some days he was not home until seven or eight. On Thursday mornings (half-day closing) he went to work in a boiler suit to clean and maintain the firm’s four vehicles, which took a lot of time in the forties and fifties. He worked on Saturdays and had only two week’s holiday a year. 

Like many ‘housewives’, my mother did not work. Ordinary jobs paid enough to bring up a family quite comfortably on one income in those days. Work was social, without the intensity it can now have. 

We then lived in one of the semi-detached houses on the left until I was 18

It might be more accurate to say we were well-brought-up working class. We did not rent a council house, and my dad was not a manual worker. He took over the business when I was 12, but we did not move to the larger house until a few months before I left school. I never really lived there. I moved on to shared houses in Leeds with ordinary lads from ordinary parts of Wakefield and Manchester. 

Let me list how the fathers of my schoolday friends earned their livings: dock worker, railway labourer, engine driver, joiner, council lorry driver, gas meter reader, clothing factory worker, scaffolder, stone mason. They were the children I mixed and played with, and was influenced by. Many lived in council or rented housing. A little above were a butcher with his own shop, a chiropodist, an electricity board clerk, and a man who selected ships’ crew, but it was a working class area in a northern working class town. We used local pronunciations such as “watter” (water), “owt” and “mowt” (anything and nothing), “whee-ere” and “thee-ere” (where and there), and “moo-ere” (more). I knew the difference, but did not mix with any children from professional families except, in my late teens, one whose parents were teachers. Some years later, I felt perfectly at home working in a canning factory. 

A few years ago, I came across an old cassette tape recorded at a friend’s house when I was around 17. We switched on the recorder and let it run: five of us I think. The accents, the bad language, how we spoke about girls at school: you would be in no doubt that we were uncouth working class. It made me so uncomfortable I threw the tape away. 

We moved to a large house in this (then) leafy part of town when I was 18

Although I soon moved to shared houses in Leeds.
The first was a wrong-way-round house, with entrance at what was built as the rear.
The front entrance was only on foot.

But I am speaking about the economic working class. There are other indicators. Culturally, we were not typical. My dad had educated interests. He read a lot, listened to the BBC Home Service (now Radio 4), and liked poetry. He was a churchgoer, and followed up the monthly Bible Readings they sent. We had encyclopaedias and books, and my dad talked to me about them, and I read them. He involved me in his Thursday jobs around the house, such as maintaining bicycles and cleaning boots, and interested me in things around town such as ships in the docks, the railways, and the shipyard. I had hobbies and used the public library a lot. I had good general knowledge. 

Mum also read a lot, and was in a drama group. Although she was clever, and could have gone to the Grammar School, she chose to stay at her village school and left at fourteen. She helped in her mother’s grocery shop until she married, where they provided tea (i.e. an evening meal) for my father’s travellers out late on their rounds. 

I think this background helped get me into the Grammar School where I had a good education and intelligent friends. The Grammar Schools were created to supply the country’s need for educated professionals: social engineering on a grand scale. It took me into the accountancy profession, and contact with privately educated colleagues and business owners. We had to get on with everyone from office and factory workers to the rich. My accent began to shift, my language became more elaborate, and I began to understand how the world worked. 

Going late to university and working in higher education around the country brought further sophistications. My accent still reveals my Yorkshire roots, and some even detect which part of Yorkshire, but it is unsettling to encounter those who never moved away, and realise just how different I am now. They often sound uneducated. 

Do genetics influence class? How did my great-grandfather lift himself from a background of agricultural labourers to become a ship’s master after running away to sea? And my grandfather successfully started his own business, and employed others. Another great-grandfather was active in the Methodist church, with wide religious knowledge. My mother’s father worked in a paper mill, but his family had (and still has) an almost innate understanding of all things mechanicals. They can mend almost anything. These things run through families for generations, although the genetic elements no doubt interact with other factors in complex ways. 

Perhaps class differences are no longer what they were, but they are still there in the background. It shows in what you do, your interests, how you spend your time, your friends, the language you use, how much wealth you have, and many other things. The private education sector perpetuates class differences by handing more opportunities to those whose families have paid the enormous fees. I don’t want to make “chip-on-the-shoulder” excuses, but my culturally rich family background is nothing compared to the advantages some have. 

I did all right in the end, and it has been mainly down to merit. Some academic achievements cannot be bought. I hope that is not being smug. Although selection was not entirely unbiased, I regret the abolition of the state Grammar Schools and the social mobility they gave to so many from ordinary backgrounds like mine. 

Switzerland 1975

What we were supposed to be able to see was this: 

The 8,000 foot (2,400m) Bunderchrinde Pass between Adelboden and Kandersteg was one of the highlights, but not as we expected. We should have been able to look back to the sunny Adelboden valley and its surrounding peaks, and ahead to the main chain of the Bernese Alps and mountains. 

What we actually got was this; it was the 23rd August. 

The idea was pretty audacious, arrogant even. Having backpacked across Rannoch Moor in Scotland, following a line on a map, carrying our tents and equipment, we thought we would do the same across the Swiss Alps. Five of us caught the train to Gstaad to walk the fifty or so miles to Grindelwald. 

No one had heard of the Via Alpina then, or any other long distance trails; or at least we hadn’t. And except near the Eiger and Jungfrau, there were no signposts or footpaths as now. It was map and compass, following our own route. We had a real sense of adventure. I remember spending days poring over maps to work out start and end points accessible by train. There were no other walkers in the wilder parts. It would be very different now. Despite the awful weather, we think it was one of the best trips we did. We still talk about it. 

We especially remember the humour. I could recount so many things: such as how we were plagued by the mountain pigs and cattle. We collected wood to build fires, but it did not keep them away. The pigs kept trying to get in the tent, and a cow ran off with Neville’s special private bad of Gold Blend instant coffee. He had to make to with Maxwell House like the rest of us. Dudule, who takes great delight in teasing Neville mercilessly, got the blame for years. He says that by now there must be a whole herd of Alpine cows that will eat only Gold Blend and nothing less. At Lenk, we escaped to an isolated hay loft for the night. 

The weather for the first few days was not too bad, but then it changed. When we reached Adelboden, we spent a planned rest day on the mountain, and walked behind the ice. Gavin, later a vet, and Kev, about to become a geography and geology teacher, kept us informed about the plants, insects, and geology. As Neville waved his pipe in response, the stem flew off and fell into a crevasse. But he is nothing if not well organised, and had thought to bring spare bits. He had been smoking that same pipe for years. It had had four new bowls and three new stems, but it was still the same pipe he had been smoking for years.  

Then the heavens opened. We sheltered from heavy rain all day behind a hut. My unusual capacity to do absolutely nothing for hours came in useful that day. Soaked through, we gave up and booked into a hostel, and dried out in front of a roaring fire. Kev was not happy that some cooked meat in his rucksack began to smell awful and turn green. It pervaded all else in there for several days.  

We set off for Kandersteg over the Bunderchrinde pass. “For expert hikers only”, guides now say, but Kev, who is pretty good at mountaincraft, kept us safe. As we climbed it began to snow heavily, but we reasoned that snow is not as wet as rain. We reached Kandersteg and booked into another hostel for two nights. It is untrue that snow is not as wet as rain. 

Kleine Scheideg: the man with the stick demonstrates how
to move pigs, cows and Neville (just out of the picture).

Hopelessly behind schedule, we took the train to Lauterbrunnen, walked up to Wengen, and camped. The Swiss mountain railways are incredible. After another train to Kleine Scheideg we made our way to the Eiger foothills where we camped again. I doubt you could put your tent anywhere you wanted now as we could then. 

Like Chris Bonington, whose mountaineering books I soaked up, I have climbed on the North Face of the Eiger - well, the first 100 feet (30m) of it. 

Our time up, we made our way to Grindelwald and a series of trains home. The train north along the French border was interminable, about ten hours, but I can still list most of the places where it stopped: Basel, Mulhouse, Metz, Lille, ...

Some more pictures:

Haunted Houses

New Month Old Post: first posted 1st March, 2016
It could do with being shorter. Since originally posted, the 1921 Census has become available

The 1939 Register
 
Somewhat obsessively, I have been an active researcher of my family history for over twenty years now, buying countless genealogical resources and subscriptions. Along the way have been some surprising and even astonishing findings, as well as many mundane, but in February when the findmypast site released a new resource, The 1939 Register, I experienced an entirely new reaction.

Rather like a census, The 1939 Register records the names and addresses of everyone living in England and Wales on the 29th September, 1939, just after the outbreak of the Second World War. It did not go into as much detail as a normal census, but was carried out in a similar way for wartime purposes: to issue national identification and ration cards, to administer conscription, and to plan population movements in the event of mass evacuation. It was later used by the National Health Service at its inception in 1948. As no census was taken in 1941, and as the records for the 1931 census were destroyed by fire during the war, the Register is the most complete survey of the population between the as yet unreleased censuses of 1921 and 1951.

What makes it different for me is that, as a snapshot taken just over a decade before I was born, The 1939 Register is almost contemporary. Other population surveys such as the 1911 census were from so long ago that just about everything has since changed, which will also be true of the 1921 census when they finally let us see it, but much of the information recorded in The 1939 Register remained unchanged into the nineteen-fifties. Many of the same people were at the same addresses as I remember them. If my parents were still around they would be fascinated.

I can see the two-bedroom terraced house my parents rented from 1946, where I first lived. It is occupied by a canal tugman and his family. They had brought up six children there. Wherever did they put them all? 

The people next door are the same as I remember, as are those at the corner shop next-door-but-one. Across the road is the same gentlemen’s hairdresser, then newly married. He would remain there with his wife, childless, for the next thirty years. It was where I used to be sent for my hair cut – short back and sides the only style on offer – every three or four weeks throughout the nineteen-fifties and nineteen-sixties. Once old enough to go unaccompanied, I would wait my turn in the smoky den of his barber’s shop (it would never have been called anything so epicene as a salon) trying to make sense of the swaggering conceits of the older customers. From time to time the hairdresser’s timid wife would materialise at the through-door from the house to leave a cup of tea, and then dematerialise as silently as she had arrived. 

In the mid nineteen-fifties we moved to a new address, up in the world to a small semi-detached house. The 1939 Register shows it occupied by the shipwright’s family we bought it from. The adjoining neighbours were still there when we moved in, father, mother and grown-up children. The mother and father would die in the nineteen-sixties but one of their daughters would remain in the house, unmarried, for the next sixty years. The neighbours at the other side are a young widow still in her thirties and her elderly mother. They too were still there when we moved in. The mother died soon afterwards, but the widow remained long after we had left until she died at an advanced age in the nineteen-nineties. She became a close family friend. Up and down the street are so many other familiar names: the master mariner; the butcher; the mother and her daughter who in turn became the mother of the boys we played with when they visited their grandma. 

The Register is more flexibly searchable than almost any previous resource. Whereas the censuses, for example, can be trawled only in limited ways, The 1939 Register search is so powerful you can find almost anyone, even when they are partially mistranscribed in the index. The main limitation is that you are not supposed to be able to see anyone born less than a hundred years ago, although often you can. In most households, such as my father’s parents’, the children are blacked out, and only the names of the adults are shown. But despite being born in the nineteen-twenties, my mother can be seen with her parents, her name amended after marriage, a result of parts of the Register continuing in use with the National Health Service until 1991, after she had died.

You can find just about any house built before 1939. In Leeds, I can see the elderly couple I lodged with in 1970 at the same Kirkstall address in 1939, although then they are not elderly. The husband is a railway clerk. The address also has one ‘closed’ line for their daughter who would later marry a corporation surveyor and have one son. At other places I lived, much later in some cases, the 1939 residents had moved on long before my time. One through-terrace is occupied by an engineer’s turner and his wife, both born in the eighteen-seventies. Another is occupied by a wool foreman with his wife and four children. The only back-to-back I lived in is the home of a shoe repairer and his wife, both in their mid-twenties. At yet another mid-terrace there are nine residents: a couple born in the eighteen-seventies and seven grown-up children. The father and one of the sons are asphalters. Again, how did they fit them all in?

Some houses I have known were larger. In the Levenshulme area of Manchester, in the early nineteen-eighties, I lived in a three-bedroom, bay-windowed terrace with front and back gardens. Next door lived a widow who in 1939 is there with her husband and mother-in-law. The husband, the neighbours and the occupants of my address have mainly clerical occupations. I still have some of the next door neighbour’s late husband’s drill bits and an ancient tobacco tin full of wire staples which she gave me when clearing out her shed. The hardware was probably there in 1939 but the Register lists only people. I lived in yet grander surroundings in the Avenues area of Hull. In my day they were already what are now called HMOs (Houses in Multiple Occupation) but in 1939 they were occupied by the likes of Ministers of Religion, newspaper reporters, merchants, lecturers, collectors of taxes and people of private means. 

Like having the gift of premonition, if you are near my age or older, you look through The 1939 Register and find you knew or can remember so many of those named in it. You know what happened to them, who they married, who their children were, and when they died, or at the very least, what became of their houses. Do they return as ghosts to light their coal fires in the mornings, the husbands going off to work and the children to school as they must have done so many times? Do the wives cook and clean for their return? Do they relive their happy days, sad days, sunny days, rainy days, Easters, Christmases, an holidays? Will we?

Trainspotting

My first trainspotting book: Ian Allan ABC of British Railways Locomotives, Part 4 Eastern, North Eastern and Scottish Regions, Nos. 60000-99999, Summer 1959 Edition. 

It was my dad who first showed me the excitement of trains: they were all steam then; all that living and breathing weight and size. We went to the end of the platform, and he walked down the ramp and put a halfpenny on the track. The first train that came past squashed it smooth and flat, as big as a half-crown. It was one of the ways he entertained me on his Thursday half-days off. I would be about 5 or 6. 

There were smelly, express fish trains from Hull to London. You learned to stand well clear as they hurtled through, splashing fishy-smelling water all around. There were dirty goods vans and coal wagons, and sometimes a guards van of racing pigeons would arrive for release on the platform. In contrast, the Hull arm of the Yorkshire Pullman was luxurious in its umber and cream livery, shaded tables, and named coaches. It allowed businessmen two hours in London before returning, dining on the train both ways. It was bound initially for Doncaster where it joined with the Leeds arm. What a slick operation that must have been. 

   

Goole c1960 (from FBCCine on YouTube) (no sound)

A bit older, I would go to the station with friends. I showed them the coin trick. Nobody bothered you. You could stay all afternoon. 

About two hundred yards south of the station was another great place, the “Monkey Bridge”. No one seems to remember why it is so named, but possibly it was because originally the sides were made of strips of metal, which made people walking across look like monkeys climbing through trees.  

Three pairs of tracks ran beneath, the main lines to Doncaster and Wakefield, and the branch to the docks. Standing on the Monkey Bridge, you would see the railway gates open for a train in the station, see the smoke of the locomotive as it started to move, and then stand in the smoke as it passed beneath you, hair and clothes full of smuts. 

At the end of the platform. "Nottinghamshire" bound for Hull.

I liked to see the 4-4-0 D49 County or Hunt Class locomotives from Hull shed, named after counties and famous fox hunts: e.g. Nottinghamshire, The Derwent. They were shorter and more suited to the bends on the line than the more impressive 4-6-2 engines. We felt deprived not to have those, but we were better off than many. We did not realise how fortunate we were. 

For the bigger engines, you had to go to Selby station. Again, my dad took me there first, but later I rode the twelve miles there with friends by bicycle. You would not allow 12-year-olds to ride that busy road on bicycles now. 

Freight train entering Selby Station across the swing bridge.
Ben Brooksbank, Geograph.

Selby was then on the East Coast Main Line between Doncaster and York. Because of a swing bridge over the river at the end of the station, trains had to slow down to forty miles an hour, which gave you a good view of even the straight-through expresses. The ultimate was to see one of the streamlined ‘Streaks’, like Mallard. I think Bittern was the first I saw. 

The “Mess” (short for LMS), around a quarter of a mile south of the Monkey Bridge, was another good place. We named it so because of an ancient metal London Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) noticeboard warning about the dangers. So many summer afternoons we spent there waiting in the hot sun. The fence smelled of creosote. It was where trains from Leeds and the engine sheds were held to give priority to the London to Hull trains. Sometimes they would be held for more than ten minutes. I know because on Fridays in later years I would be on it, and my uncle would be on the London train. If he saw me he would thumb his nose through the window as he went through first. 

Through the 1960s we began to see more and more diesels, and I had to buy a book for those. At first it was mainly multiple units, and then locomotives. But, again, for the big ones, the ‘Deltics’, you needed to be at Selby. The first I saw was named Pinza. 

Sadly, the platform where my dad took me has been shortened and there is no direct London service. The carriage sidings are filled with houses, and the goods yard once piled with coal, with cars. Selby is a shadow of its former self, no longer on the East Coast Main Line which was diverted in the 1980s. Only trains to Hull now cross the swing bridge. Trainspotting is not what it was. 

Goole Station c1960, with the Monkey Bridge in the distance

Jokes

Some have very good memories for jokes. They can reel them off one after another seemingly for hours. Professional comedians such as Ken Dodd and Bob Monkhouse could keep going all day. 

On the other hand, I have always struggled to remember jokes. But just as with memorable things people have said, as I wrote in the last but one post, I can remember quite clearly when and where I heard the few I do remember, and who told them. Again, I suspect this short list (which contains mild bad language but nothing too unseemly) reveals a lot about me. 

This came from Brenden in the shared house in Leeds, about 1973. 
A man walked into a public lavatory and slipped on a large slick of urine on the floor, and landed on his back in it. 
He stood up soaking wet. 
A second man then came in, slipped in the same way, and also ended up on his back in the pool of urine. 
“I just did that,” the first man said. 
“You dirty bugger,” said the second man. “You should get it cleaned up.”

I like these wordplay transposition jokes. This was from PC, another in the shared house around the same time. 
What is the difference between a prostitute and a bumpy road? 
One knackers your tyres. The other tires your knackers. 
A similar one, from my brother while he was at university, involves a bad marksman and a constipated owl. The bad marksman shoots but can’t hit. 

Here is one from the radio while I was waiting in the car for my wife about 20 years ago. It was told by Clement Freud on the programme ‘Just A Minute’. I consider it a perfect joke, with a surprise punch line, and an inbuilt logic that creates a wonderful image. I never tire of this one. 
How does a blind parachutist know when he is near the ground? 
The dog’s lead goes slack. 

My wife does not have a good memory for jokes, either. I suppose we place more value on our own humour. But here is one she does remember. 
What do you call someone who used to like tractors? 
An extractor fan. 

That, sadly, is the paltry sum total of what I can dredge out of my head at this moment. I won’t be applying to go on Jokers Wild. 

Wise Words

Words echo through the years. I hear and remember them as if it were today. The written word can be as memorable. Here are some that stayed with me, the ones that come first to mind, which probably say as much about me as their speakers or writers. Do any resonate with you, or do you remember others?   

You know very well John that men are afraid of living alone. 

(JB, English Literature Teacher on the evening class I took when retaking Advanced Level exams in my mid-twenties. After the course ended, John (another student) and I went with him for a drink, and he was complaining that creative output declines or ends after marriage, as had happened to him. John asked him why he had got married then.) 

It takes you ten years before you realise how crap you are. 

(Tim Keech, Hull guitar teacher. It applies to other skills as well, from computer programming to blogging. My own variation is: No matter how good you think you are, there is always someone better. I used to say this to the computing students. Another variation is: The more you know, the more you realise you don’t know. Or as the friend I call Gilbert in this blog put it: You know fuck all Tasker. He was very astute.)

The motorcycle you are maintaining is yourself. 

(Slightly misquoted from Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Again, it applies to almost anything in which you are so deeply immersed it becomes therapeutic and cuts out all other concerns. This was something else I used to tell computing students.)

If those countless millions began to see the possibilities he saw and were then frustrated, there might be hell to pay. And they have been frustrated. 

(Ted Simon in Jupiter’s Travels, an account of his journey round the world 1973-1977 on a motorbike, observing the different living standards between rich and poor countries. He was right.) 

You always fall on your feet, don’t you. 

(My mother after I scraped six Ordinary Level exam passes at school, allowing me to progress post-16 into the Sixth Form. She knew how little work I had done.)  

I’ve got more common sense in my little finger than you have in your whole body. 

(My mother during her final illness, as my impractical dad struggled to erect bean poles, a job she had always done but no longer could. He usually responded with Aren’t I lucky to have married such a practical wife! But I could have strangled him when he visited one day to find me with the floorboards up, channels cut in the walls, wiring neatly laid out, as I was installing some new spur sockets in the bedroom. Aren’t you lucky to have married such a practical wife! he said.)

Always make sure your driving wheels are on firm ground.

(My dad on driving on muddy ground, but it seems to have wider meaning. Another useful tip was: In ice and snow, drive in the highest gear possible so as not to spin the wheels.)

This is the life. 

(The friend I call Neville in this blog, sometimes laying on the ground in hot sum out in the countryside with his shirt off, but more often up a mountain sipping a cup of coffee from a thermos flask, hiding from driving rain and sleet behind an inadequate rock, exhausted. He is blessed with the gift of always remaining cheerful.)  

It’s a bugger, i’n’t it. 

(The family friend I call Uncle Jimmy in this blog, on serious illness. At the end, my Aunt said we had better get him into hospital. “All right,” he said, “but we’ll have a cig first. We’ll have one o’ yours.”

Age is like cricket. Some make a century while others are out for a duck. A score in the seventies is a useful innings. 

(Me in a draft too bleak to post.) 

There were many others, but I will stop with those. 

The Clergy House

The Clergy House
Leeds Parish Church
Leeds LS2 7EY

It was the most prestigious address I ever had. In central Leeds, it was a fantastic place to live. The rooms were enormous, and there was a kitchen, a sitting room with a television, and a large, dry, furnished cellar for guitar practice. I was there for nearly a year. Not that I was a member of the clergy, nor a church-goer. It came about by chance and good luck. 

I was tired of the shared house in Headingley. I had been in it and its predecessor for five years, through a succession of house-mates, and we would soon have to find two more. Pete, who owned it, clearly wanted to sell after having married and moved out. 

A chap at work mentioned he was leaving his address, so I asked where it was. “The Clergy House behind Leeds Parish Church”, he said (now known as Leeds Minster), which obviously drew more questions. 

The house was once accommodation for the clergy, but none were there now and rooms were rented out. Murray, the full-time organist and choirmaster had one, along with two choral music students, and a chap called John who had some church connection, although I am not sure what. 

I moved in. I had the attic room right at the top partly hidden by the tree. When Brendan from the shared house saw it, he took the room across the corridor. Then, Gavin, who had previously been with us but more recently in University Halls, took the room below mine. And I had been thinking I was about to escape! Murray, whose duties also included managing the house, was delighted. He had filled all the empty rooms at a stroke. Murray Stewart later went on to a glittering career as an organist and orchestral conductor. 

The main problem with the two attic rooms was that the bathroom and toilet were on the floor below. But we did have washbasins in the rooms, which can be multipurpose for men. Useful in the night if you had been next door to The Palace pub. 

There was ample parking. Here, looking from my window, is my red Mini Van and Gavin’s Vauxhall beside the church. 

We saw little of church activities. A small room next to the front door was set up as a chapel, but it was rarely used. Brendan and I dared each other to swig the communion wine. 

Sometimes I would return from work to find the Vicar, Canon Graham Foley, in the kitchen smoking a cigarette and looking shifty. He was never very communicative. He later went on to the Bishoprics of Reading and Oxford, and was nationally sought after as a witty and entertaining after-dinner speaker. 

To the West side of the church was a row of dilapidated cottages, only one still occupied by an elderly house-bound widow. When John was away I was detailed to call in each day and check that she was all right and if she needed anything. She had been there for years, but now lived in just one room and never went upstairs. I wish I had shown more interest.  

We were served short notice to leave. The Church wanted to increase the income by converting the rooms into self-contained bed-sits. It was supposedly illegal simply to kick people out like that, and Murray had done his job too well by issuing rent books containing terms and conditions, so I tried to resist by citing tenants’ rights. It brought down the full weight of the Church solicitor, Councillor Crotty, who said I was a licensee not a tenant. I had been planning to stay another year until I went to university. I took the easiest option and moved to a vacant room in my cousin’s house, sharing with two nurses. But not before, in a fit of pique, I phreaked the house telephone lock and had a long conversation with my friend Hugo in Belgium. 

On a day out in Leeds a few years ago, I wondered what had become of the place. It was still there behind the church and under renovation. It was now called St. Peter’s House and was being converted into luxury apartments costing a quarter of a million pounds each. This is how it looks now.

I also found the agent’s bullshit.

St Peter’s House ... sensitively converted into 8 one bedroom apartments which incorporate many of the building’s original features. The apartments offer a rare opportunity to live in a refurbished historic building in the heart of Leeds city centre.

No two apartments are exactly the same and most have the individual features which are typically associated with a heritage building. Apartments with a northerly outlook enjoy views of Leeds Minster whilst those with southerly aspects overlook The Calls. All the apartments are single level.

Finished to a high specification throughout, including contemporary kitchens and stylish bathrooms, the apartments offer the chance for discerning home owners the opportunity to enjoy luxury living in the vibrant centre of Leeds.

Here are a couple of pictures of my tip of a room during the long hot drought of 1976, and one of how it looks today (although it might be Brendan’s room at the back which was much the same). You can make up your own mind about sensitive conversion and heritage features. 

Career Analysts

Another self-indulgent piece I have been hesitant to post, but what the heck, it was all so long ago. 

Long-time readers may recall I left accountancy to go to university in my mid-twenties. Nearly everyone said it was stupid, and even my most supportive friends were dubious. “Don’t cock it up this time”, Brendan said, face contorted at the thought. 

My record hardly inspired confidence: weak and failed exams at school, the same in accountancy, and teacher training abandoned after just one term. I couldn’t succeed at anything. Examinations either asked questions I could not answer, or questions I could not remember the answers to. It was destructive and self-defeating, but you keep it to yourself and pretend to the outside world that all is well. What gave me the nerve to try again? 

Desperation, you could say. But there was one other factor. In 1976, I sought professional careers advice. This was not the free-of-charge Local Education Authority service I had tried a couple of times and found superficial and low in quality. It was from a leading London firm called Career Analysts. I can’t remember what it cost, possibly around £80. It also involved a day in London. It was not cheap. Career Analysts still operates, and similar advice is nearly £900 now. My employer might have paid, they were good like that with staff development, but having given notice, I had to fund it myself. It was money well spent.  

There was a lengthy morning of pencil-and-paper tests, followed in the afternoon by a searching face-to-face discussion with an Occupational Psychologist. It is interesting, after fifty years, to look back at the report. 

One test, the Connolly Occupational Interest Questionnaire, identified preferences for different kinds of activities. I scored highest on the Welfare and Literary scales, but below average on Persuasive, Artistic, Computational, Scientific, and Practical activities.  

Another test looked at values. I had above or well-above-average Altruistic, Intellectual, and Aesthetic values, but much lower Power, Material, and Religious. This was said to indicate someone “rather emotional, sensitive and imaginative”, making me “fairly quiet, reserved and introverted”.  

But it was the longest and most extensive set of tests, the Morrisby Differential Test Battery, that surprised the psychologist. This was an intelligence test of seven different aptitudes. It was very difficult. I was above average in everything, scoring exceptionally high in problem-solving and numerical skills, and in the top 10% for Verbal items and handling detail. Perceptual, shape, and mechanical aptitudes were also high. The report said it showed a “very high level of ability”, and I was “certainly capable of passing an Honours degree or professional exams”. And I had thought I was no good at anything! 

It was flattering, but before being accused of showing off it is no big deal. The tests simply say that I am good with numbers and can concentrate on detail. As regards the CST (Compound Series Test) of problem-solving, it is only like Sudoku with shapes instead of numbers. The other things are not unusual; for example, lots of bloggers are better writers, blessed with wit, wisdom, and powers of expression the likes of which I could never hope to have. And whatever intelligence may be, the tests show but a part of it. They say nothing about important qualities such as memory, motivation, social skills, emotional intelligence, plain common sense, and so on, in many of which I am sadly deficient.  

However, it did raise the question of why my exam results had not been what they should have been. From our discussion, the psychologist thought I had been scraping through without proper study and exam techniques, and that emotionality had held me back. It explained the inability to do exams. He was not surprised I was unhappy. I was not occupied in ways best suited to my interests, aptitudes, and values, nor at an appropriate level, my succession of accountancy jobs having deteriorated into the compilation of monthly reports. Career-wise, it left the difficulty of obtaining the basic qualifications to change or progress. 

One of several suggestions was to take two Advanced Level subjects at evening classes, with a view to university the following year. I could work full-time until Christmas and save enough then to concentrate on studies through to the exams. They would be happy to act as referees for my university application. It was only what I wanted to hear, but to be told it was not unrealistic by an unbiased, objective, third party, helped repair confidence and sense of direction. 

Regarding subjects, the aptitude tests rules nothing out, but interests and values suggested avoiding the scientific and mathematical in favour of people and ideas, such as Literature and History. Then at university, Literature, History, Psychology, or Sociology would be appropriate, depending on whether I might prefer an administrative or welfare type of career. I took English Literature and Geography at evening classes, and Psychology at university. I worked hard, got the syllabuses, practised answering past questions, followed all the advice, and things began to go well. 

Considering my interests were not “of a scientific, technical or design kind”, it might seem odd I later went on to gain qualifications and work in Computing, but occupational interests give a snapshot in time, which reflected a desperate wish to escape accountancy and work more with people. At other times the results might have been different. Also, my kind of computing involved a large slice of psychology and creativity. Most areas of science and technology are exciting if they catch your imagination. They crush the wonder out of it at school. 

Unlike interests, I doubt personality values change much through life. My dad always said we were too sensitive as a family, and I say the same to my children now. Should I worry about being labelled “emotional, sensitive, quiet, reserved, and introverted”? Does it sound weak and ineffectual? It probably overstates it, I am no pushover, but I would certainly not be much good as a ruthless salesman, or in dominating a class of unruly teenagers. Much as we might wish we were different, it is better to know and be happy in ourselves. I sense that most bloggers have this kind of contemplative nature. 

It makes us easy prey to those who do score highly on the Power and Material scales, especially the shits that seek to control and use others to further their own careers. It has been my misfortune to fall into the jurisdiction of two such individuals. They cannot understand that some of us are cooperative rather than competitive, and work for satisfaction as much as material reward. It helps to understand this. DLTBGYD. 

John Merrill, Alport Castles and the Horbury Cut

In the days when every town had a bookshop, with several in larger towns and cities, you would find shelves full of walking guides written and published by a chap called John Merrill. He produced over 500 titles, initially about Derbyshire and Yorkshire, but later about other parts of the country too, such as The Lake District, The Isle of Wight, and Devon. He also became known as a long-distance walker, and walked the 6,824 miles around the coast of Britain, the 4,260 miles across America, and marathon walks in other parts of the U.K., Europe, and the world. He just wanted to go walking, and found a way to do it full-time. 

One of his first books, possibly the first, was about the Peak District around Kinder Scout and Bleaklow. My friend Neville bought it, and one interesting-looking route was around Alport Castles off the A57 Snake Pass road. Alport Castles is the biggest landslip in the United Kingdom, so called because from the valley below its gritstone mounds look like castles. The largest is known as The Tower. 

The Tower, Alport Castles, with Alport Castles Farm in the valley below
Geograph, (c) Neil Theasby 3 February 2012

Alport Castles route (click to enlarge)

I think Neville and I first went in 1974. Merrill suggested parking at the side of the Snake Road where a style in the hedge accesses the lane to Alport Castles Farm. After passing around the farm, the route ascends behind The Tower and up on to Alport Moor. It then crosses the moor via the Alport trig point to the head of the valley, and makes a large high-level anti-clockwise semi-circle across Bleaklow to return to the starting point. We found it pretty tough, and on later occasions returned directly down the valley from the point marked on the map as Grains In The Water. Sometimes we went up the valley first, and on two occasions I remember climbing up from Howden Reservoir. It became a favourite walk which I did with Neville or others, or alone, in all kinds of weather, from warm summer days when you could sit quietly on the peat moor and bask in the sunshine, to cold wet days when there was so much water up there it was almost impossible to find a way across. This, as you may know, is Yorkshire Pudding territory and he has written about it several times. 

Neville and Dudule descending the Alport Valley
with Alport Castles on the hillside above, August 1975

Neville plods up through snow towards The Tower, February 1977

and eventually reaches the moor top, February 1977

The top of the Alport Valley near Grains in the Water, August 1975

Not all of John Merrill’s routes were in such wild and bleak places. When I moved back to Yorkshire with Mrs. D., over 30 years ago now, we bought his “Short Circular” guides to walks in south west Yorkshire. Soon, we had done so many that Mrs. D. was able to send away for a John Merrill walking badge that until recently was stitched to her small rucksack. 

The River Calder near Horbury Bridge

I remember a September morning not so long ago when we did a quiet route east along the banks of the River Calder from Horbury Bridge to Calder Grove, fighting our way back through the rampant vegetation along the Horbury Cut of the Calder and Hebble Navigation. Barges were moored at the lock where the canal joins the river, and hallucinogenic fly agaric mushrooms grew under the trees. The route is also memorable for forbidding footpaths that tunnel under huge railway embankments, and one built into the railway bridge across the River Calder. Of course, Pudding has also been there too. Is it possible to go anywhere he hasn’t?

The footpath built into the railway bridge across the River Calder

The Horbury Cut on the Calder and Hebble Navigation

Hallucinogenic Fly Agaric Mushrooms grew under the trees

Back home, I wondered what had become of John Merrill and looked him up. There was a site for his books to which I sent a short email expressing how much we had enjoyed his guides through the years, and that although we had had the Horbury Bridge book for at least 20 years, we were still able to find our way. He had also found his way. In replying to thank us, he said he had been ordained as an independent multi-faith minister of religion in London. Clearly, all that walking brings you closer to God. Yorkshire Pudding had better watch out. 

Penistone

New Month Old Post: first posted 26th June, 2018.

All books can be indecent books
Though recent books are bolder,
For filth, I'm glad to say, is in
The mind of the beholder.
When correctly viewed,
Everything is lewd
                                  (Tom Lehrer)

I came across a previously undiscovered great-great-great aunt in the family history resources, and have been tracing her descendants. This sounds obsessive, but I find it intriguing because most of my ancestors were from the same area, and so many of us remained there that I keep finding people I know who are not-so-distant relatives. For example, one lad with whom I went all the way through secondary school in the same class turned out to be a third cousin, as was another who stayed with a family near to where I was on the school foreign exchange trips to Belgium, although we had absolutely no idea of the connections. 

One family name I have been investigating is Penistone. You might find this, with its rude connotations, implausible or amusing, but it is very common in parts of Yorkshire. 

I do see the funny side of it myself. My brother had a friend called Penistone, whose wife was appalled when, newly married, she received her new driving licence to discover that in those days the driver number always began with the first five letters of the surname. And a group of us from school had to suppress our sniggers when travelling between Sheffield and Manchester by train on the now-closed Woodhead line in the presence of a teacher, and the train stopped in the small Yorkshire town of Penistone (near where we now live). Two girls were adamant the station sign had a gap between the S and the T. Then there were the tales of people in the early days of the internet, who were unable to enter their names or addresses on internet forms because filters were cruder than the words they were supposed to filter out; those named Penistone from Penistone or Scunthorpe particularly affected. Yes, I’m glad it’s not my name. 

My research, however, has been made unnecessarily difficult by inaccuracies in the data on Ancestry.com – the genealogical resource I use. Time and time again, Penistone has been transcribed at Penestone or Panistone or numerous other variations, with the effect that searching the indexes produces incomplete results. For example, if you look for all the Penistones in the village of Snaith in the 1891 and 1901 censuses, you will find Panistones and Pennistones, even Kenistons, but hardly a Penistone in sight.

There are so many spurious entries in the indexes – literally hundreds and possibly thousands – that it cannot be due to error. A handful, perhaps, but not hundreds. Most of the original sources from which the indexes are drawn are clear as the top line of an optician’s chart, so it is as if some transcribers have deliberately chosen not to write down the name Penistone, but written something else instead. It would also be difficult to mistake Penistone for Penestone when transcribing an index because they appear in alphabetical order, so Penistone would be after Penfold and not before. 

Some of these records came from another resource called FreeBMD where they appear correctly. Thousands of volunteers contributed to its transcription – I was one – which is why it is a free resource on Ancestry. But they have been altered. Has someone carried out a global substitution? Could it be prudery – bowdlerisation on a massive scale? Could it have anything to do with Ancestry’s Mormon origins? Without insider knowledge, one can only speculate about the history of these mistranscriptions. 

The first rule for any genealogical transcriber is that you record what is there, even if obviously wrong. If someone’s name appears in an original source as Taster Dunman, you record it as Taster Dunman, even if you know it should be Tasker Dunham. There is no excuse for recording Penistone as Penestone or Peinistone or Panistone. If it says Penistone you record it as Penistone, and if it says Stiffcock, you write it down as Stiffcock, no matter how offensive you think it is.