Road to the Dales

by Gervase Phinn

  As soon as Miss Wainwright opened the book and started to read I was in a world I loved and in which I felt familiar. Occasionally she would stop, make a comment and smile with a curious wistfulness, as if there was something she recalled fondly from a distant past.

  The first essay I handed in to Miss Wainwright concerned our initial impressions of Henchard, the main character in the novel, and I spent long hours in the central library in town writing, rewriting and referring to various reference books. When the essays were handed back my heart leapt. Following a long and detailed assessment of my effort written at the bottom of the page in small neat handwriting, I had been awarded a B+.

  Miss Wainwright took me aside after the lesson. ‘That was extremely promising,’ she told me, smiling. ‘It’s a very good start. I am sure you will do well.’ From then onwards I gained in confidence, contributed in the lessons and achieved good marks.

  What incredible good fortune it was for me to have had this remarkable woman for my teacher. Miss Wainwright, a woman of great learning and infinite patience, was passionate about her subject and had the ability to bring the works of Shakespeare to life.

  ‘Shakespeare is not a novelist,’ she once told us. ‘He is a poet and a dramatist and the greatest writer that has ever lived.’ What was so memorable about this remarkable teacher were her eyes. They shone with intensity, especially when she was discussing her favourite subject, the bard himself.

  Miss Wainwright regularly organized coach trips to the neighbouring theatres to see performances. In one production of Richard II in Sheffield, the actor playing the lead of ‘the sun king’ was a small man with an enormous yellow codpiece in the shape of a risen sun. In the opening scene, when all the nobles assembled in their finery on stage, the King entered sporting this remarkable appendage, which caused a great deal of mirth in the audience of largely schoolchildren and students. Even greater amusement was caused when the king sat down, for the codpiece would rise up in an extremely vulgar manner. It soon became too much for the audience to bear and great guffaws emanated from different parts of the theatre. When the King arrived in successive scenes he was greeted by loud cheers and comments such as, ‘Ey up, it’s thundercrutch again.’ The production was temporarily halted and the manager, over the microphone, informed the audience that if it did not remain quiet and cease interrupting then the production would cease. When the King made his next entrance it was noticeable that he was wearing a rather tasteful and considerably smaller codpiece in a discreet black.

  Miss Wainwright took us to see a production of King Lear at the Rotherham Civic Theatre. The acting was wooden and the costumes bizarre, but the beauty and poignancy of the language came through. King Lear, confused and deranged, entered with his dead daughter draped in his arms and crying to the heavens:

  Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones:

  Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them

  That heaven’s vault should crack. She’s gone for ever.

  I know when one is dead and when one lives:

  She is dead as earth.

  Miss Wainwright – sitting one away from me in the row, began to dab her eyes with the lace handkerchief.

  44

  My geography master at A level was another inspirational teacher called J. A. Taylor (JAT). I very nearly gave the subject up after the first couple of weeks but was persuaded otherwise by Mr Taylor. JAT taught the regional geography part of the course and supervised the local study, the other teacher taught the meteorology and physical geography components. When I arrived for the first lesson of physical geography, copies of the textbook we would be using, this maroon-covered tome called Physical Geography by Horrocks, were distributed but there was one textbook short.

  ‘I wasn’t aware that you were joining this group,’ the teacher announced, and I was told to share with another student. The boy next to me, understandably, was not that pleased, for it meant we had to take it in turns to take the book home to do our homework. Looking back I feel it would have been more considerate of the teacher to have asked two other boys who knew each other to share, not the new addition to his class, who didn’t know anyone and felt nervous enough. I cannot say I felt that comfortable in this teacher’s lessons. He never welcomed me when I first arrived or asked about me or took any real interest in me as the course progressed. When I did on occasions see him about something he would reply stiffly and hurriedly, like a man who had more important things to do.

  The first assignment was on a topic that I just could not get my head around – ‘Isostatic Equilibrium’. The grade I received was poor and the comment indifferent. So, one breaktime, I saw Mr Taylor, who was the head of the department, and told him I was thinking of giving up the course, that I really didn’t feel up to it. He persuaded me to continue, telling me my grade at O level, a few marks off a distinction and better than many in the group, was a good indication that I could cope with the course.

  The following week he discovered that I did not have a physical geography textbook and was sharing. He sighed and shook his head and asked why the other teacher had not provided one for me. I explained that I had been told to share and that’s what I had been doing. The following lesson Mr Taylor presented me with a brand new and updated edition of Horrocks.

  JAT clearly loved his subject and taught us with such enthusiasm and rigour, believing that geography was best studied in the field – ‘first-hand experience’ was his favourite catchphrase. I remember once, on one of his trips, we scanned the landscape looking for drumlins, described in our textbook as ‘basket of eggs scenery’. I imagined them to be small hummocks, but when I enquired of Mr Taylor where these ‘drumlins’ were he threw back his head and laughed and then informed me that I was standing on one – this huge rounded hill. ‘First-hand experience,’ he said. I learnt then that fact can sometimes be as fanciful as fiction, for the descriptions in Horrocks seemed to me to bear little relation to the real world.

  JAT organized many a field trip at weekends, during the school holidays and for a week out of school at the end of each term. These were eagerly anticipated, especially since we joined up with the girls from the girls’ high school, under the watchful eye of JAT’s wife, the formidable Mrs Taylor, who was head of the geography department there.

  One memorable field trip was to Malham Cove. We had read about ‘clints’ and ‘grykes’, limestone pavements and caverns, potholes and subterranean rivers in our physical geography textbook. I was not prepared, however, for what I was to see. We approached by a footpath from the south, and this immense bow-shaped cove came into view like some great walled cathedral. It was breathtaking. I had never seen anything quite as bleak and rugged. Mr Taylor had us stand beneath the towering cove and not say anything at all – just take it in for a moment. Then he explained that it had been formed millions of years ago when the earth’s crust had cracked, fracturing the rock so that it dropped vertically. ‘It’s over two hundred feet high,’ he told us, ‘a thousand feet wide and once a crashing waterfall cascaded over the vertical cliff, creating a fall higher than the Niagara Falls. Now can your small minds take that in?’

  We spent that week at the youth hostel in the ancient village of Malham and saw bubbling springs and crashing cataracts, crags and scars, ravines and overhanging cliffs, and the spectacular Malham Tarn, one of the two natural lakes in the Yorkshire Dales.

  Mr Taylor asked if anyone had come across the novel The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley. I was the only one who had read the story of Tom, the little chimney-sweep who meets the babies in the cool clear water. Mr Taylor related the story of how Charles Kingsley, having passed through Bradford and witnessed the squalor and filth, visited Tarn House in Malham in 1858 as a guest of the millionaire philanthropist Walter Morris. Kingsley was struck by the stark contrast of the dark industrial city and the stunning limestone scenery, as I was on that first visit. He was a skilled botanist and was asked by the children of the house to explain the streaks of black o
n the face of the cove. He explained that they were made by a little chimney sweep called Tom slipping over the clifftop and sliding down into the stream. Here was his inspiration for the classic fantasy story.

  I discovered the North York Moors in the sixth form on another of Mr Taylor’s expeditions. This silent and bleak world with its great tracts of heather and bracken fascinated me. We stayed in youth hostels and explored the incredible landscape, visited great abbeys like Byland and Rievaulx, ate our sandwiches in the shadow of lofty castles at Helmsley and Pickering, and sat in the sunshine outside local inns in villages untouched by modern life. One weekend Mr Taylor led us deep within the North York Moors towards the coast at Ravenscar. The journey followed the old Viking route known as the ‘Lyke Wake’. Legend has it that the Vikings carried the ‘lyke’ or corpse across the forty boggy miles to the sea, where the body was given up to the waves. With the coming of Christianity the practice was continued but it took on a deeper meaning, and the walk came to symbolize the journey of the soul towards heaven. I had never seen such magnificent scenery in my life. Beneath a shining blue sky there stretched a landscape of every conceivable colour: brilliant greens, swaths of red and yellow gorse that blazed like a bonfire, dark hedge-rows speckled in pinks and whites, twisted black stumps, striding walls and the grey snake of the road curling upwards to the hills in the far distance. Light the colour of melted butter danced among the new leaves of early summer.

  On one expedition in the heat of midsummer the party of sixth-formers, led by Mr Taylor and his wife, trekked up a lonely moorland hill on the North York Moors, through the soft couch grass and sweet-smelling heather. Arriving at the brow, we peered down at the panorama before us and there on a soft grassy bed was a pair of lovers in a passionate embrace, the sun beating down on their naked limbs.

  As we were ushered away from the summit by a red-faced Mrs Taylor, one cheeky student asked her husband, ‘Is that what is meant by first-hand experience, sir?’

  For my local study I chose the relatively affluent area of Sheffield called Broomhill. As the date for the deadline for handing in the project approached, I spent most Saturday mornings in the Sheffield public library researching, poring over old maps and newspapers and making notes. In the afternoon I would take a bus up to Broomhill and walk around the area taking photographs, visiting factories, parks and shops, undertaking residential and industrial surveys and interviewing people who lived and worked in the area. This was the part of the course that I really enjoyed.

  I remember interviewing the manager of the Snuff Mill, a large prepossessing figure in a tweed suit who punctuated his answers by taking a pinch of the toxic powder between finger and thumb from a small silver box and sniffing it up his nose, below which was a small brown stain where the snuff had lingered. He then produced a large coloured handkerchief and sneezed into it loudly.

  ‘You seem like a likely lad,’ he told me when I had finished asking my questions. Then after a heavy clearing of his throat he asked me, ‘Do you fancy a career in snuff?’

  I replied that it had never occurred to me. ‘You could do worse,’ he told me. And I thought, yes, and I could do better.

  On another occasion I was taking a photograph of a large imposing villa when the owner, an elderly man in a threadbare cardigan and old trousers, approached me and asked me what I was doing. When I said I was working on a geography project for school, he insisted on explaining to me the geological features of the area before disappearing into his house and returning with a booklet about Sheffield and its environs.

  ‘You can have this,’ he told me. ‘It might be useful.’ Then he added, ‘I wrote it.’

  I discovered later that the man in question was a former lecturer in geography at Sheffield University.

  Mr Taylor was waiting outside the examination room to see how we had all found the A level paper when the big day arrived. I had revised pretty thoroughly and felt I had performed reasonably well, but I was disappointed that the one question Mr Taylor had predicted was very likely to come up – to ‘discuss the reasons for the decline in the cotton industry in the southern states of the USA’ – had not appeared in the paper.

  ‘But it did,’ he told me when I mentioned this to him later.

  He opened the paper. The question read: ‘King Cotton is dead! Discuss.’ I learnt then just how tricky language can be in examinations and how the wording of a question can cause problems for the candidate in a totally unexpected way. I had never come across the expression before. I remember thinking it must be a famous American industrialist I had never heard of and went on to the next question.

  It has been my unquestionable good fortune to have been taught by Miss Wainwright and Mr Taylor, to have had my mind stretched, my aspirations raised and my love of literature and the world around me developed. Whenever, as a schools inspector, I observed an outstanding sixth-form lesson, I often thought of those two teachers; I shall be forever grateful and remember their warmth, encouragement and commitment.

  I returned to my past through an unexpected door. When my first Penguin book had been published and appeared in the best-seller list, I was invited back to present prizes and speak at my alma mater. It was strange walking down the echoing corridor at Oakwood with the headteacher, the familiar school smell of floor polish and disinfectant still lingering on the air, and up on to the stage. It was even stranger to be introduced as one of the school’s most distinguished and successful former pupils.

  The day I left the sixth form I accompanied my mother for the Stations of the Cross followed by Mass at St Bede’s. Father Hammond, moving from one plaster tablet to another, each depicting Christ’s journey to the Cross, genuflected and intoned:

  Jesus who for love of me

  Didst bear Thy cross to Calvary,

  In Thy sweet mercy grant to me

  To suffer and to die with thee.

  It was a weekday and there was a sparse congregation largely composed of elderly women telling their rosary beads and muttering. Mum strode purposefully down the central aisle and sat in the very front pew, just as Mr Ryves had done years before. Her presence was unmistakable to Father Hammond, when he emerged from the presbytery and ascended the altar steps and began Mass. At each response my mother answered loudly and clearly. We went to communion together as the organist played the hymn, ‘O, Bread of Heaven’. Father Hammond held up the host, paused, and placed it gently on my mother’s tongue. She said later it was like coming home.

  At the end of Mass we went together to the small Lady Chapel at the side of the altar and lit a penny candle. We lit it together and fixed it on a spike on the brass candleholder and made our silent prayer – for me it was to be successful in my exams. I guess my mother knew that the priest would send for her and he did. An altar boy approached us and told her that Father Hammond would like to speak to her. My mother walked with a determined step into the presbytery, and before the priest could utter a word she told him that I had now left school and she would be receiving communion once again. He could no longer forbid her to take the Eucharist.

  The priest looked nonplussed.

  ‘I was just going to ask you, Mrs Phinn,’ he said quietly, ‘if I might prevail upon you to play the piano at a Union of Catholic Mothers meeting next week.’

  My mother and I laughed all the way home.

  The following week there was another chance encounter with Mr Firth in All Saints’ Square.

  ‘Fancy coming to the Isle of Man again?’ he asked. ‘You could help supervise the lads and get a bit of practice in at being a teacher.’

  I jumped at the chance. So, along with two friends from the sixth form, I joined the South Grove School party. I shared a small room with the other two sixth-formers and we were allowed infinitely more freedom, treated very differently by the teachers and given more responsibility. By this time, pending the necessary A level results, I was about to study for my degree and certificate in education and make teaching my career. Mr Firth was right. The
experience of supervising the younger boys, checking the rooms, lending a sympathetic ear to the homesick, reading stories to the first years, refereeing the football and rugby matches, organizing board games and running the tuck shop was invaluable.

  One meeting I shall never forget. I was on my way back from Port St Mary one early evening and passing the Station Hotel, when I saw Mr Firth, sitting by himself, his arms comfortably crossed on his chest, his head tilted towards the sun and with a pint of Guinness before him.

  ‘Gervase!’ he called out. ‘Come and join me.’

  I was no longer Phinny. I felt very grown-up.

  I sat next to this incongruous figure in his baggy brown shorts, old walking boots, shapeless shirt and jungle hat. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘the unadmitted pleasure of solitary contemplation.’ He took a gulp of beer. ‘Results out soon then,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Nervous?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘You’ll be all right,’ he said, then asked, ‘Are you eighteen?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Then I’ll treat you to a drop of the black stuff – an early celebration.’

  It was my first half pint of Guinness and I didn’t like it at all. It tasted bitter and unpleasant, but I sipped slowly and we sat there in silence for while. I wanted to say something but the words got caught in my throat.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘you are going to be a teacher?’

  ‘Yes, sir, if I get the grades.’

  ‘You’ll get the grades.’

  ‘Hope so.’

  He took another huge gulp of his Guinness and leaned back in the chair, the sun on his face.

  ‘I’m glad you decided against becoming a bloody accountant. There’s too many of those buggers about.’

  I smiled. ‘I think I maybe have something to offer as a teacher,’ I said.