Nobbut a Lad

by Alan Titchmarsh

  ‘To keep the seed warm, miss?’ offered Peter Earle.

  ‘Stupid boy,’ she muttered under her breath. Then she tapped on her desk to emphasise the words: ‘What …’ tap ‘… is the seed-coat …’ tap ‘… for?’

  He should have noticed the warning signs. The nostrils were flaring already. But Peter Earle was always a risk-taker.

  ‘Miss, it’s because you keep pouring all that cold water on it. It’s reet nithered.’

  ‘You big blockhead …’ She was marching towards him already. Those sitting on either side of the aisle ducked to avoid the spit. Peter Earle tried to back away, but he had made a tactical error. His chair was up against the wall. Being good at asserting himself, he had made sure of that when we first came into the classroom back in September. He knew winter was coming and spotted the thick iron central-heating pipes that emerged from the wall at that point. If he got a desk by them, he’d never be cold – the caretaker was short on generosity when it came to coke. But now he had discovered the disadvantages of his placement. He put one foot up on the pipes with the intention of teetering along them and out of reach, but he failed in his attempt and one leg slid behind the pipes, effectively anchoring him to the spot.

  In the blinking of one of her beady eyes, Mrs Richardson had brought the pincer movement to bear on the back of his neck and Peter’s ginger hair was already being twisted into an agonising plait.

  ‘Aw, no, miss … No!’

  ‘Mechanical damage! The seed-coat is there to prevent mechanical damage.’

  Peter screwed up his eyes. ‘Miss … yer damaging me!’ he wailed.

  ‘And to absorb water to allow germination.’ She paused to let the words sink in. ‘What is the seed-coat for?’

  Rapidly her victim blurted out the words, ‘To prevent mechanical damage, miss …’

  ‘And …?’

  ‘To ab … to ab …’

  ‘TO ABSORB WATER AND ALLOW …?’

  ‘Extermination, miss.’

  It was the final straw. Mrs Richardson released her grip and for a moment Peter Earle thought he had escaped. A look of relief flashed across his face. But not for long. The flat of the teacher’s hand caught him smartly on the back of the head, flicking it forward and propelling the startled boy clear of the radiator. For a brief moment he seemed airborne, and then he landed with a thud, spread-eagled across his desk like a young bird attempting its first flight.

  ‘Aw … that’s not fair, miss! I couldn’t hear ’cos you were twistin’ me ’air.’

  ‘Silly little boy. Pay attention in future.’

  Peter Earle looked suitably humiliated and sat down meekly behind his desk. Mrs Richardson’s fury subsided as swiftly as it had erupted and now she was beaming at us and asking, ‘And what is the first seed-leaf called?’

  I knew. But I didn’t want to risk it.

  Peter Earle was the daredevil of junior school. Ginger and freckled, he was born reckless and was always the first to do anything that could be described as risky. He had a sidekick, a burly lad with dark hair and glasses called Ian Gledhill. Ian never seemed to actually do anything, or even speak, but he was always there. He was a sort of conjuror’s assistant – his presence made whatever stunt was being perpetrated seem more official. He would gaze at Peter Earle in silent and admiring wonder, but then his mentor did have certain capabilities lacking in the rest of us.

  Peter Earle was far and away the loudest belcher in the school. And he could do it to order. He found enormous pleasure in letting fly a particularly loud one – the sort that if well aimed would echo off the stone wall of the boys’ toilets – when any female teacher went by, first taking great care to make sure that he was masked by other bodies, any one of which could, strategically, have been responsible for the sound. But they knew it was him and, in spite of his protestations, would haul him out for a clip round the ear. He stopped after a while, seeing little point in not getting away with it, and instead perfected the SBD – the fart that was silent but deadly.

  His diet was the subject of much conjecture, and his timing was unerringly theatrical. He could release his particular brand of poison gas seemingly at will in the most sensitive part of the lesson – just when the story was being told at the end of the day and we were about to reach the bit where Umslopogaas rescued Alan Quatermain. Mr Swann, the teacher, would adopt an attitude in keeping with his name and remain serene, pretending that nothing had happened. He would plod along determinedly with the story, although the observant may have noticed a very slight watering of the eyes.

  The pupils were less reserved. They daren’t make a noise while the story unfolded, but one by one they would clamp their fingers and thumbs to their noses until they looked like a phalanx of swimmers about to jump into deep water. A daring few would fan the air with their hands, and Peter Earle would smile serenely, pretending that he didn’t know what was the matter, before clamping his own finger and thumb to his nose when Mr Swann looked up from Allan Quatermain’s adventures, lest it should be obvious that he was the perpetrator.

  His other tricks varied with the seasons. Autumn was his favourite. There was a row of chestnut trees at the back of the church. He joined the choir for the first crack at getting the conkers down with a stick, as much as for the money you got for singing at weddings. His stick was always bigger and heavier than anybody else’s, and when he lobbed it high into the branches, you kept out of the way if you had any sense.

  Why he bothered to search for the largest of the conkers was beyond me, because when he’d found them, and threaded them on to the end of a piece of string, he threaded a steel nut on to the other. Having lulled you into a false state of security, with your own conker soaked in vinegar and cooked in the oven to make it harder, he would wait until a few hits had been accomplished and then, with deft sleight of hand, turn round the piece of string and assail yours with the lump of steel.

  We knew that he cheated. Every time. But for some reason it was accepted as being his normal standard of behaviour, and when you got used to being duped yet again, it somehow added a bit of spice to school life.

  Bonfire Night was his other high spot. Well, not so much the night as the season that brought fireworks into the shops. Not for him the gentle delights of golden rain and Roman candle, Catherine wheel and mine of serpents. No. He was interested only in bangers – the louder the better.

  The penny bangers were OK, but they went off with a ‘phutt’ rather than a bang.

  ‘Yer don’t want them,’ he boasted. ‘Yer want these big buggers.’

  He pulled his hand out of his pocket to reveal a fistful of threepenny cannons. The threepenny cannons had sides of thick cardboard and they made a proper bang. The sort that could frighten a girl out of her skin. But he tired of lobbing them at girls after a while, and looked for a modus operandi that would involve more risk.

  His bike – unlike those of the rest of us, which had ordinary handlebars or, at best, straight ones – had cow-horn handlebars and no mudguards. Our mums wouldn’t let us go for either of these options. If you had no mudguards, your school uniform got splashed with mud from the back wheel, and cow-horn handlebars were unsafe. (Quite how, I never had the nerve to enquire.)

  But Peter had somehow got away with both. Maybe his mother had bigger things to worry about. With Ian Gledhill looking on and holding the box of matches, Peter took a roll of Sellotape and strapped two of the threepenny cannons to each of the back forks of his bike.

  On a muddy knoll on the edge of the moor, he’d brief us on what he was about to attempt. Ian would light the fuses on the fireworks, and Peter would then pedal off down the hill. At a strategic point on the track – just where there was a deep and muddy puddle – the bangers would go off.

  We listened in silence, and watched intently as Peter mounted the bike, grasped the handlebars and nodded to his assistant, who struck a match and quickly lit the bangers on either side of the bike before retiring.

  With no backward glance
, Peter pushed off from the top of the hill and hurtled downwards towards the muddy swamp at the bottom. As his front wheel ploughed into the mud, so the back one was lifted three feet into the air by the explosion of the four threepenny cannons. The whole bike twisted, hung in the air for the briefest of moments, and then plunged downwards into the quagmire below.

  A deft twist of his body was all it took for Peter to remain upright and to avoid following his bike into the swamp. All that could be seen of it now was the end of one of the handlebars. He hauled it out, and came back up the hill with the mud-covered machine and a beaming grin. ‘Good, eh?’ he asked.

  We nodded and smiled admiringly. The spectacle had been well worth watching, and the skill with which he had dismounted the bike in mid-air had been quite breathtaking. But what we were more curious about was what his mother would say when he got home. By cleverly swivelling his bike in mid-air he’d avoided landing in the quagmire, but the lack of a back mudguard and the force of the four threepenny cannons had combined to produce an unfortunate effect. We didn’t like to tell him, but as he pushed his machine back down Cowpasture Road with a beaming Ian Gledhill in tow, he looked for all the world as though he’d shit himself.

  For a lad who liked ‘playing out’, Ilkley was a pretty good place to grow up, all things considered. It’s a predominantly Victorian town, built of local sandstone (long since blackened by soot) to house the wool merchants of Leeds and Bradford when there were enough of them to make it worthwhile. It was famous for its waters, too, back in the days when the maxim ‘If it tastes bad, it must be good for you’ carried some clout, and there were Gothic-towered ‘hydropathic establishments’ on the edge of the moor where posh people would pay to be treated badly. It was called a health cure.

  The tatty red guidebook to the town that sat on our bookshelf listed eight different hydros. By the time I came along, they had all been converted into hotels or flats or, in one case, the College of Housecraft, where I presumed that nice girls learned about cooking and knitting.

  Craiglands Hotel, where my dad did the plumbing, had become Ilkley’s poshest hotel by the 1950s, but a century earlier it was described in the guidebook as ‘the largest hydro in Yorkshire’, and in addition to its mission to cure, it boasted ‘a constant round of varied entertainments every night throughout the year’.

  When the residents had recovered from this nightly hilarity, they could look forward to the fact that ‘Allopathic remedies are used wherever deemed advisable. Under the watchful superintendence of Dr Dobson, the resident medical superintendent, modern hydropathy is applied in every form that science, experience and observation can suggest. To modern hydropathy may be added mustard pads, massage, electricity, etc. Crises are avoided.’ Which must have reassured potential inmates. It cost them between £1 18s 6d and £2 12s 6d per week to avail themselves of these irresistible amenities. Fifty years later my dad made sure they all still worked.

  Its Gothic torture chambers apart, Ilkley is a picturesque town, especially from a distance. Snuggled down in the bottom of the dale, it looks as though it would rather you didn’t notice it. If you climb on to the edge of Rombald’s Moor and haul yourself up on to the big lumps of millstone grit that are known as the Cow and Calf, you’ll see the town spread out below you, running from left to right along the silvery ribbon of the River Wharfe. Silvery when the sun shines on it, anyway. Dark brown when it doesn’t. The colour of strong beer.

  Down By the River

  Of the three options that my mother would offer of a Sunday – moors, woods or river – the river was the one that would most frequently get my vote. The moors are rugged and majestic with far-reaching views, Middleton Woods dark and mysterious except when carpeted by bluebells in May, but the River Wharfe is a romantic watercourse at any time of year. It is moody, and changeable, a raging and destructive torrent in times of high rainfall, but in its calmer moments it has a friendliness that the other two cannot match. It starts its life springing like burst veins of milk from the slopes of Oughtershaw Side and Cam Rakes at the top of the dale and finally pours itself into the Yorkshire Ouse at Cawood near Selby, submerging its delicate character in its more muscular partner without a backward glance. That’s the sort of prose that would have sent Miss Weatherall, my English teacher, reaching for her red Biro and penning, in her annoyingly neat hand, at the bottom of my essay ‘Too much imagination, Titchmarsh; straight from Chick’s Own,’ whatever that was.

  But the Wharfe is a river that induces flights of fancy and affection. John Ruskin wrote that ‘If ever one was metamorphosed into a river, and could choose one’s own size, it would be out of all doubt more prudent and delightful to be Wharfe than Rhône.’ The difference is that the Wharfe gives rise to beer rather than wine where it runs over limestone at Tadcaster. There, over the years, the two Smiths – John and Samuel – and Mrs Tetley’s lad, Joshua, have produced their ‘clear beer’ for the enjoyment of the locals and those wistful Yorkshiremen far from home who look upon the county of their birth as a kind of Shangri-La, and its beer as a tangible way of keeping at least a bit of their homeland quite literally flowing through their veins.

  Oughtershaw and Cam Fell were just names in a guidebook when I was little. The farthest upstream we got was to the Strid at Bolton Abbey. It’s a narrowing of the waters that boils in a turbulent current through the gap between two large boulders and where in the Middle Ages, as we had been told in hushed tones at school, the boy Egremond, son of Alice Romilly, had drowned, thanks to hanging on to the lead of his reluctant greyhound when out walking one morning. His mother never recovered from her grief and so we felt it only fair not to put our own mothers to the same trouble. We kept well away from the edge.

  But further downstream, at Burnsall and Bolton Abbey, where the beer-brown waters – rich in minerals from their journey over a billion boulders – danced by more slowly, we were allowed to paddle and to skim an endless supply of smooth and shallow stones across the deeper water.

  On the stretch of river at Ilkley between the Old Bridge, an elegant stone construction built in 1675, and the metal footbridge known as the swing bridge (even though it did not), I was allowed to go and play on my own. Happily. Allowed for a day to disappear with my imagination into another world.

  But first I’d need the fishing net. It would be bought from Mr Marshall’s sweet shop at the bottom of Brook Street on the first fine Sunday of the year. A clutch of nets – some blue, some pink – each attached to a five-foot bamboo pole, would be stuffed into an umbrella stand on the pavement, along with twittering birds that you could swirl round your head on a string. I’d pick out the net I wanted – always blue – and go in to hand over the shilling to Mr Marshall, who would be standing on a raised walkway behind his counter, towering over the steep slope of glass-lidded boxes of wafer biscuits and Wagon Wheels, giant jars of humbugs and chocolate eclairs, sherbet-filled flying saucers and penny chews. Mr Marshall would always be chewing something himself. Free samples probably. He had the best job in the world. It must have been. At the back of the shop, he sold electric trains. Sweets at the front and electric trains at the back – his wasn’t a job; it was a dream.

  Early on a summer’s morning during the school holidays, I would fetch a jam jar from the cellar. Dad would have a piece of rough and hairy string in his plumber’s tool bag. I’d make a handle out of it. Along with the bamboo pole with the fishing net, it would be all I needed for a day out. That and a jam sandwich and a bottle of pop.

  But there were rules. I was allowed to go off on my own all day with a simple ‘Be careful’, but I was not allowed any old pop. Tizer was out. So, too, were cream soda and dandelion and burdock. They rotted your teeth, along with cherryade. I could have lemonade, or lemon and lime, or grapefruit. They were allowed. And so that’s what I had. In a moment of rebellion, I might take a furtive swig of Mickey Hudson’s dandelion and burdock, but I didn’t like it much, not when it was warm and full of someone else’s spit, and cream soda was
sickly sweet; you could actually feel it eating into your teeth. There seemed little point in making a stand when I quite liked the limited range of fizzy drinks that had the maternal seal of approval, and especially if I didn’t want to be like Angela Butterfield, who’d lost all her teeth from eating too many sweets by the age of twelve. Or so they said. She did have three left, but they weren’t a pretty sight.

  With the net over my shoulder and the jam jar dangling at my side, I could set off in my shorts, T-shirt and sandals – these would be last year’s model with the fronts cut out to accommodate the toes that were now right up against the leather. I’d have a new pair every summer – watching the crêpe soles turning from their pristine creamy white to dark grey as the year wore on was one way of marking the passage of time. With the buckled straps now short enough to begin cutting into my bare ankles, I’d walk down past the gasworks, across the allotments between forests of rhubarb and blackberries and then along the riverbank to a suitable spot. Underneath the overhanging branches of a weeping willow that trailed its lower leaves into the water, I could take off the painful sandals and leave them with my picnic while I ventured out, tentatively, into the orange-coloured water, pulling up the legs of my shorts when I hit an unexpectedly deep spot, teetering when my sensitive feet hit a sharp stone, and all the while peering through the water for any fish that I could scoop up with the net.

  Bullheads were the best bet – sluggish and easy to catch, with their wide heads and sulky expressions. Minnows lasted only an hour in the jar; as soon as the sun heated up the water, they lost the will to live and lay on the surface, their silver sides flashing accusingly in the sun. Catfish presented the greatest challenge. Only the most skilful fisherman could catch these sleek and whiskered beauties. They would nose upwards into the current, perfectly camouflaged in their infantry khaki against the mossy rocks. You would spot one, line up your net steadily behind it and then … pounce! Too late. The net would spring clear of the water empty except for a wisp of greeny-brown weed.