Road to the Dales

by Gervase Phinn

  He made his way from Dun Laoghaire and across Ireland to Galway, arrived at Auntie Maggie’s cottage and stood at the door as large as life, telling her that his mother knew where he was and had sent him over for a holiday. My Grandma, of course, had no idea where he was and got in a state of great panic. The police were called and then a telegram arrived from her cousin telling her that: ‘Jimmy is with us. All is well. We’ll get him home.’

  Jimmy had only been found out when Aunt Maggie asked him to write a postcard telling his mother he was safe and well. The postmistress read the postcard and promptly informed Aunt Maggie. Jimmy’s postcard home read: ‘Dear Mother, don’t worry about me. I am in London. Love Jimmy.’

  One Sunday young Jimmy set off to Mass but never arrived at St Bede’s. He was spotted by a neighbour of my grandmother’s swimming in the canal. In the dirty brown stretch of polluted water Jimmy was seen diving and splashing away merrily. His parents never mentioned it, but the following Sunday his father followed him at a discreet distance. When Jimmy plunged under the water, the neatly stacked clothes on the bank were snatched by his father, who then waited until the truant emerged. If he expected his son to panic, Grandfather was greatly mistaken. Jimmy searched for a while and then, unable to find his clothes, set off for home attired only in a dripping pair of cotton underpants. He was intercepted near the Chapel on the Bridge and made to get dressed, much to the amusement of passers-by. Unfortunately for Jimmy his father did not see the funny side of things and gave his son a good hiding when he got him back home.

  As a young man Jimmy went to India with my grandfather and astounded the other passengers and the crew when, on sight of land, he dived off the ship and swam ashore. He was entirely fearless and worked for a while as a steeplejack, always relied upon to climb to the very top of a building without turning a hair.

  The story of Grandfather’s stolen silver and china became well known in the family. Certain valuable items had gone missing and the Indian servants were lined up so that the culprit could be found. Jimmy finally came clean and admitted selling the things to buy presents for various lady friends he had in the nearby village. Grandma often wondered if she had mixed-race grandchildren somewhere in India. He got in with the army set in India and on returning home joined the Irish Guards, where he distinguished himself before being invalided out with damage to his ears caused by the loud guns. For most of his life he had impaired hearing, but never complained.

  I always hoped Uncle Jimmy’s visits would coincide with the arrival of the fair, for he would take me there. Great coloured wagons and huge lorries would trundle through Rotherham, and tents and stalls, roundabouts and rides would set up at the stretch of spare ground just outside the town. I loved the noises, the smells, the bustling crowds, the bright lights and the excitement of the fair. I can still see the stallholders with their red noses and hear their loud voices, grown raucous over the years through constant shouting.

  The whole area was a noisy, wildly colourful experience, full of stalls where you could throw balls or darts or hoops in the hope of winning a garishly pink cuddly rabbit or shoot popguns to win a goldfish trying to swim in a little see-through plastic bag with an inch of water in the bottom.

  Such was my uncle’s generous nature that he insisted I went on nearly every ride – rollercoaster, carousel, Big Dipper, Mighty Slide and merry-go-round. The one exception was the Tunnel of Love. The Ghost Train was pretty tame compared with the modern-day equivalent. It wouldn’t frighten a toddler today. A small train with hard wooden seats rattled around a single track in a darkened tent, accompanied by taped screams and ghostly noises. On the walls were a few plastic skulls and pictures of headless corpses, and occasionally an iridescent skeleton or a giant spider would drop from the roof. The rollercoaster was seriously scary. Those daring enough to go on it would sit in an open cabin with a crossbar across the centre to stop them falling out. It rattled and trembled slowly upwards on wavy tracks to a point high in the sky and then plummeted downwards at incredible speed. Ear-piercing screams of terror would come from the occupants of the cabins, occasionally supplemented by ‘uurrghhhs’ and ‘ahhhhs’ when a waterfall of vomit covered those unfortunate enough to be in the car in front of the perpetrator.

  My favourite ride was the dodgems. In a small car Uncle Jimmy was adept at weaving and dodging; he would slam his foot on the pedal and we would speed wildly around the small metal floor, sparks raining down on us. He would wait for his opportunity to crash into another vehicle and send it careering into the side. Collisions and head-on crashes were permitted, indeed actively encouraged, by the two fairground youths who dodged between the cars to keep them moving. They can’t have been much older than fifteen, those youths with greasy black slicked-back hair and dark complexions, and they always seemed to give the girls more attention than anyone else. Slow cars and those driven by the inexperienced were obvious targets and were soon identified, and the poor occupants had the stuffing knocked out of them by six or seven aggressors who descended upon them at high speed. I guess many tottered on home after the experience with severe whiplash.

  Feeling (or being) sick at the fair was part of the ritual. It came as no surprise that at the end of the evening I, like most of the children, had consumed a sickly concoction. Attracted by the savoury intoxicating aroma of the food stalls, I had eaten hot dogs smothered in ketchup and drizzled in greasy onions, toffee apples, candy floss, ice cream, syrupy waffles and all washed down with sickly sweet lemonade. On my way home, holding my Uncle Jimmy’s hand, white-faced and wet with perspiration, I felt the sheer happiness of youth.

  Uncle Jimmy ended his days in Ireland with his two daughters Audrey and Monica, who adored him, by his bedside.

  My mother’s cousin, Auntie Mary as we called her, lived on a small farm in Ireland. Mum was a great letter writer; most Sundays she would write to Mary with all the news and on occasions she would send a parcel of clothes. Once, when my brother Michael went to stay with Aunt Mary, he came downstairs ready to set off for the long walk to Mass as our Irish cousins appeared attired in their Sunday best. Michael recognized the jackets, ties, shirts, jumpers and jackets but didn’t say anything. Each St Patrick’s Day a parcel would arrive for Mum from Ireland from Aunt Mary with a large clump of shamrock and a holy picture of St Patrick, dressed in green vestments as a bishop and standing on a snake. On the reverse of the card would be one of Mum’s favourite prayers, the Irish Blessing:

  May the road rise up to meet you,

  And the wind be ever at your back.

  May the rain fall soft upon your fields,

  And the sun shine warm upon your face.

  May the roof above you never fall in,

  And those of us beneath it never fall out.

  And until we meet again

  May God hold you in the hollow of His hand.

  March 17th was a special St Patrick’s Day because it was my mother’s birthday, and she always insisted on the saint’s card (which invariably contained the prayer) rather than a birthday card.

  A week before Christmas the turkey would arrive from Aunt Mary. One Christmas there was no sign of the bird. The man behind the parcels counter at the railway station told us, as if we didn’t know, that it was Christmas and there were lots of parcels in the post. The turkey, much to our relief, finally arrived on Christmas Eve. On getting it home we discovered that it was complete – head, neck, feathers, legs and claws. It had been killed, boxed and posted as it was. Christmas dinner was served at eight o’clock the following evening.

  Auntie Noreen was a second cousin of my mother’s and lived in Gainsborough, where she ran a corner shop and off-licence. I loved the Sunday afternoon visits, because Auntie Noreen was a larger-than-life, massively good-humoured woman with an infectious laugh and she kept us royally entertained with the exploits and the observations of her customers. She always prepared a banquet of a tea – triangular egg and ham sandwiches, cheese straws, buns with white icing and glazed cherr
ies on the top, chocolate cake, scones and tea cakes, crumpets and almond slices, jelly and ice cream. She would ask customers to save up the cards in the tea and cigarette packets for me and I would come home with a good wodge to trade in the playground the following Monday.

  Auntie Noreen had a parrot. It was an African grey called Percy and it had a vicious temper and a wide and colourful vocabulary. It lived in a large brass cage in the corner of the shop and would grip its perch with great yellow talons, noisily cracking walnuts with its shiny black beak. Walnuts were always the ones left after Christmas because they were impossible to get into even with a nutcracker, but the bird split them with ease, dropping the shells into the tray beneath it.

  ‘Be quiet!’ Percy would squawk as we entered the shop. ‘Put t’wood in t’hole! What are you up to? Ee, by gum! Play up your own end!’ The parrot was a clever way of enticing children into the shop, where they would then buy sweets. None went near it, of course; they just stared from the shop doorway or by the counter and marvelled at the creature’s facility with words.

  There was also an old dog called Rusty that sat behind the counter and would sometimes bark at the sound of the shop bell. The parrot, in a perfect imitation of Auntie Noreen, would squawk, ‘Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!’ The dog would immediately stop barking.

  One Sunday Percy was taken out of his cage, brought into the back room on his perch and placed on a long metal stand, but he was soon getting on everyone’s nerves with his constant barrage of noise.

  ‘Be quiet, Percy!’ Auntie Noreen said sharply.

  ‘Be quiet, Percy!’ the parrot mimicked with the exact intonation and accent, and then began to make the most ear-splitting high-pitched squawking.

  Auntie Noreen, taking hold of a small spray that she used to water the plants, squirted the parrot. Percy immediately ceased his noise and began to preen himself. Unfortunately, after a few minutes and when he was dry, he started up again.

  ‘You’ll go out in a minute!’ threatened Auntie Noreen.

  ‘You’ll go out in a minute!’ repeated Percy.

  ‘Silly bird,’ said Auntie Noreen.

  ‘Silly bird,’ echoed the parrot.

  The parrot continued to interrupt the conversation, so Auntie Noreen consigned the bird, perch and all, to the small downstairs toilet, where it could be heard going through its repertoire.

  Some while later, after several large glasses of lemonade and a surfeit of food, I went to pay a visit. As I sat there, the parrot watched my every move with its small shiny blackcurrant eyes, occasionally opening and closing its beak and showing a slug-like tongue.

  ‘What are you doing?’ it asked.

  ‘What does it look like?’ I replied. I was now conversing with a bird.

  ‘What are you doing?’ it asked again.

  ‘Mind your own business.’

  I couldn’t do anything as I sat there with the wretched bird scrutinizing me, so I turned the stand and the perch and the parrot around to face the wall. I then resumed my seat. As I did so the parrot swivelled around to face me again. I repeated this several times but the parrot merely turned around when I was seated. It was unnerving. Eventually I managed, with closed eyes, to complete my ablutions and opened the window to let in some fresh air. The parrot, sensing freedom, flapped its wings madly and headed for the wide blue yonder. I slammed the window shut just in time, but the bird hit the glass with a sickening thud and fell to the floor, where it lay prostrate and completely still. I was mortified and rushed out to tell Auntie Noreen. I just hadn’t the courage to tell the truth.

  ‘I think Percy’s had a heart attack,’ I lied. ‘He’s just fallen off his perch.’ The comatose bird was brought into the living room and brandy was spooned through his beak. The small black button eyes opened a fraction and it gave me an accusatory stare. Then the shiny black beak opened. ‘Well, I’ll go to the bottom of our stairs,’ it squawked.

  20

  Writing in 1928, the author and poet A. R. Wright, in his English Folk Lore, sums up in verse some of the towns and cities of Yorkshire:

  Bradford for cash,

  Halifax for dash,

  Wakefield for pride and for poverty.

  Huddersfield for show,

  Sheffield what’s low,

  Leeds for dirt and vulgarity.

  Barnsley for ale,

  Doncaster for rail,

  And Rotherham for great singularity.

  I knew from an early age that there was something rather different about the town in which I was born. I was vaguely aware that there was something distinct about Rotherham. In the popular mind it was (and I guess still is) the butt of the comedian’s joke (‘Rotherham doesn’t have a twin town, it has a suicide pact with Grimsby’, ‘It’s like a wet weekend in Rotherham’, ‘The town’s like a cemetery with lights’). Rotherham is viewed in the popular mind as a dark, depressing, brooding Northern industrial place with little to commend it. The image is one where steelworks belch out acrid smoke, pit heads ruin the landscape, men in flat caps and mufflers, cigarettes dangling from their mouths, drag whippets behind them, grubby urchins play on narrow cobbled streets, muscular women donkey-stone the steps of their mean terraced houses and running though the centre is the pungent-smelling polluted river the colour of khaki. It’s grim up North.

  In Pies and Prejudice: In Search of the North, Stuart Maconie describes Rotherham as ‘Sheffield’s smaller, sourer, more ingrown neighbour’ and says that ‘when Rotherham looks down on you, some would say you’re in trouble’. He continues:

  An American visitor I knew watched a head-scarved Rotherham woman who could have been anything between thirty and seventy walking home with her shopping, leaning into a gale, carrying cheap plastic bags over a concrete bridge between two of Rotherham’s uglier estates. She said that it was like a bleak vignette from one of those forgotten chemical towns in the former Soviet Union.

  This is not the picture I have of the town of my birth. Rotherham in the 1950s had the real gritty Yorkshire character to it – solid, uncompromising, unostentatious – a vibrant, friendly, hard-bitten place, and there was nowhere in the country where the inhabitants were warmer or more hospitable. I grew up surrounded by people with an unflagging generosity, a sharp humour and a shrewd insight into human nature which I learnt to love.

  The gloomy, depressing image of this dark industrial town in the Don Valley, a place of dust and dirt, of noisy steelworks and ugly pitheads, was not wholly true. There were, of course, the smoky mornings, impenetrable smog and an unpleasant odour that sometimes emanated from the canal and the river, but a bus ride out of the centre of the town took you in minutes into open country. Such beauty so close to heavy industry still comes as a great surprise to visitors to the area. Over the past two or three decades the landscape has undergone massive changes for the better. Heavy industry has declined, fish have returned to the rivers Don and Rother, and along the banks willows grow and shrubs flourish. The steelworks where my father spent most of his working life has been turned into a magnificent museum.

  In the school holidays I would explore the area around the town. I would set off in the morning on my bike with ‘a bottle of pop’ and a sandwich and cycle out of the town and into the country, returning only when it began to get dark. One of my favourite destinations was Roche Abbey. I would cycle out to Wickersley, famous for the grindstones used in the Sheffield cutlery trade, through the mining town of Maltby and into the open country, eventually arriving at the crumbling remains of the magnificent Cistercian abbey. The monks had picked a perfect location, and in 1150 they built this impressively beautiful structure in a verdant, peaceful, rock-bound valley with clear streams. It stood for 400 years, until the Dissolution of the Monasteries during the reign of Henry VIII, when it was pillaged for the stone. Only the east of the abbey remained, but one could sense by the outlines of the stones how huge and imposing this building must have been. I recently returned on a cold winter’s morning, when there was a light dustin
g of snow on the ancient stone and watery sunshine struggled to make its way through the heavy December sky. There was no sound or movement and I was at once again aware of the spirituality and tranquillity of this awesome place. Some things we see in life are soon forgotten, others never leave us. The memory of my first view of Roche Abbey has stayed with me, like an oil painting, an enduring masterpiece.

  My father once told me a story about Roche Abbey. The ruin and grounds became part of the Earl of Scarbrough’s Sandbeck estate. In the eighteenth century the then Earl commissioned the noted landscape gardener Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown to create a beauty spot in the ruined area, which involved the planting of woodland and the setting of lawns. Until the abbey and grounds were presented to the nation in the early twentieth century, the area was not open to the public. The story goes that some time early last century the then Lord Scarbrough, walking his dogs through the woods bordering the abbey, came upon a large hairy individual at the entrance to a shabby tent.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked abruptly.

  ‘Jack,’ the man replied. ‘And who are you?’

  ‘I am Lord Scarbrough and you are on my land.’