Road to the Dales

by Gervase Phinn

  ‘I’m sure you have. You’re good with the young ones. I think you’ll make a fine teacher. You have the personality for it. You study for your degree and your teaching certificate, be determined, single-minded, don’t let anything or anyone distract you from that course. At college you’ll find many temptations and people a lot cleverer than you are and maybe sometimes you will feel like giving up, Well, don’t.’ He looked at me for a moment. ‘And what do you think makes a good teacher?’

  ‘Someone who believes that all children matter, whatever their background and ability,’ I told him. ‘Someone who builds up their self-esteem and expectation. I guess someone who likes the company of children and tries his best to make the lessons interesting. And someone who keeps an orderly classroom. A teacher like you, sir.’

  Theo nodded but said nothing.

  ‘Well, I had better be getting back,’ I said. ‘I’ll not finish the Guinness if you don’t mind. It’s not really my cup of tea.’

  Theo nodded.

  ‘And thank you, sir,’ I said.

  ‘My pleasure.’ He smiled. ‘It’s your round next time.’

  ‘I meant thank you, sir, for all you have done for me. I always enjoyed your lessons and wouldn’t have done as well in my exams without you. You know, I should never have gone in for teaching had you not persuaded me to stay on – ordered me to stay on, rather. I owe you a lot.’

  He rubbed his chin. I could see he was moved by what I had said. This tough, frightening, eccentric figure was on the verge of tears. ‘Well, you had better get back,’ he said. ‘Good luck with your results.’

  That was the last time I saw Theodore Firth, sitting alone in the sunshine with a glass of Guinness in his hand.

  I couldn’t go into school to get my A level results and I had arranged that my friend Philip would send them on to me. I had never really felt a part of Oakwood. I was glad to leave and really didn’t wish to return. I guess I always felt something of an outsider in the school, and saw my studying there as a stepping-stone to college to get a degree and train as a teacher. If I stayed the course in higher education, and I knew I had the determination and the perseverance to succeed, I would model myself on teachers like those at South Grove who worked tirelessly to restore self-esteem in those who considered themselves failures. They were men and women of vision and humanity dedicated to learning, ones who had made such a powerful impact in my life.

  In the sixth form I had taken no part in the sports, attended none of the social activities, nor had I made much of an effort to mix with the other students. I had kept my head down and worked hard. I must have appeared a retiring, uninteresting and rather lonely figure. I was, of course, immensely fortunate to have had outstanding teachers like Mary Wainwright and Alan Taylor and shall be forever in their debt.

  The A level results came as a great surprise. I got the highest grade in the group for English (a coveted grade A) and was awarded the English prize, and I achieved a grade B in geography, with a distinction in the project. Many years later I received a letter from my former geography teacher. In it Alan Taylor wrote:

  I only allowed the most talented pupils to attempt historical geography pieces of work since having studied the reconstruction of place in time at university I knew the techniques and knew how difficult the study was. You succeeded beyond all expectations and set a standard that I expected other students to follow in any project that they attempted. Suffice it to say that I ultimately became the Chief Examiner in Geography for the JMB. You taught me, and set me standards for which I am eternally grateful.

  It is difficult to describe my elation on hearing what I had achieved, and I felt that Mr Williams and the staff at South Grove Secondary Modern had been fully vindicated in having faith in youngsters like me who at eleven had been considered to be non-academic.

  Once back from the Isle of Man, there followed a week of gentle teasing at home. I just could not take the smile off my face. Michael started referring to me as ‘the prof ’ or ‘brainbox’ and Alec, on a visit home from Ireland, talked to me in a mock affected accent, telling me I was now far too important to share the time of day with him. My father said little, but I could see in his eyes and expression how very pleased and proud he was of me. He had saved a cutting from a national paper which I still have today. It was written by the journalist Peter Laurie, who wrote in 1965 that ‘to have been consigned to the limbo of the secondary modern is to have failed disastrously and very early on in life’. I, like many other youngsters who failed the Eleven Plus, some of whom I have met over the forty years I have been involved in education, proved him wrong.

  My mother baked a date and walnut cake to celebrate and invited Mrs Rogers to join us for tea.

  ‘I always knew he was artificated,’ she said, raising the cup of tea to her lips.

  45

  Like many students wanting to earn some extra money, I worked on the post during the Christmas holidays. This was my first experience of the world of work. The Post Office employed casual labour at this time of year to help deliver the vast quantity of cards, posters, calendars and parcels and, along with many other students, I arrived early at the Central Post Office in Rotherham to be assigned a patch.

  On the first day I accompanied the postman, a small, redhaired, jolly little Irishman with a pale moon face, around the area I was to take over from him for a couple of weeks. Paddy had an untipped cigarette almost permanently lodged between his lips, so when he spoke he hardly opened his mouth. He was good company, although I sometimes found it difficult to decipher what he said what with the Irish accent and the limited movement of the lips. Paddy showed me how to carry the heaving postbag without ‘putting my back out’, what buses to catch, the short cuts to take, about the difficult residents I would encounter and the dogs of which I should be wary. I was fortunate with my ‘postman’. Other students were not so lucky with their mentors; some were very grumpy and unpredictable individuals and one, a ‘joker’ who liked to play tricks on the green students, was reputed to have put a couple of house bricks in the bottom of the postbag of his student replacement and the poor lad carried them all around the area until he discovered them underneath all the letters. Rumour had it that the boy in question had, the following day, after the prank and in a fit of pique, posted all the letters down a grate and spent the morning in the Ring o’ Bells café in Rotherham.

  My area was Brinsworth, a part of Rotherham I came to know very well, as four years later I was to secure my first teaching position when I qualified as an Assistant Teacher of English at the purpose-built Brinsworth High School. Brinsworth was one of the most desirable rounds, a short bus ride away from the town centre and blessedly free of hills and isolated dwellings. It was a densely populated area of well-kept semi-detached houses, older more modest terraces and council-owned prefabricated structures, so I didn’t have a long trek. There was a small arcade of shops and the one public house: the Three Magpies.

  On the second morning delivering letters I suffered my first injury. While posting a card through a letterbox the dog, no doubt crouching in wait, grabbed the envelope as I fed it through, pulling my hand with it. The sharp spring on the letterbox snapped on my fingers like the teeth of a shark. The following day I had a cunning plan. I selected the biggest and most impressive card, slowly fed it through the letterbox, waited until the dog got a grip, then yanked it back, smacking the beast’s head on the door. Inside I could hear the creature going wild and ripping up the cards, followed by the shouts of the irate owner.

  At one house where I was to deliver a calendar, the door was answered by a small boy in vest and underpants.

  ‘Is your mummy in?’ I asked him. He shook his head.

  ‘Is your daddy in?’ There was another shake of the head.

  ‘Is there anyone else in beside you?’ I asked.

  ‘There’s our Joan,’ he told me.

  ‘Could you go and get her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why?’


  ‘I can’t lift her out of the cot.’

  There was a crescent of sheltered bungalows on my round. Each morning an elderly woman (I can’t recall her name after so many years so I shall call her Mrs Smith) would be waiting at the door of her house to ask if there was anything for her. There never was. She was a friendly old lady, clearly very lonely, who just wanted to pass the time of day and have contact with another human being. I would be offered a drink but would politely refuse, explaining that I had a lot of cards to deliver. One very cold morning I had a smaller postbag than usual, had made good progress and could have just done with a warm drink, so I accepted Mrs Smith’s offer. I was shown into a cluttered room with a stale and mouldy smell. There was a small artificial Christmas tree in the corner and on the mantelpiece was a line of Christmas cards. I knew, of course, that none of these had been sent that year.

  Listening to this elderly lady talk, and hearing about her memories of the war, I realized that it is a truism that every one of us has a story to tell. They might not be massively exciting stories, dramatic, full of incident and intrigue, but nevertheless they give fascinating insights into the lives of ordinary people and should be preserved. Sadly many are not.

  Mrs Smith had lived in that part of Sheffield which had suffered the greatest at the time of the Blitz of 1940 and 1941. She had vivid memories of when the Luftwaffe bombed the steelworks in Sheffield. Her street had been largely demolished and her house and all her possessions with it. She was able to describe accurately the scene of destruction, the terrible loss of life, the panic and terrible sense of loss, but there were moments of rare humour. For example, in a hurried effort to get dressed and into the air-raid shelter at the sound of the sirens she had put both legs through one opening in her bloomers and fell helplessly on the floor, totally incapacitated, until her calls for help attracted a neighbour who came to her rescue.

  ‘I couldn’t go in the shelter without my bloomers on,’ she told her rescuer. ‘What would people think?’

  ‘I should think those in the shelter have enough to think about, Doris,’ said the neighbour, ‘without being interested or bothered whether you’re wearing your knickers or not.’ Another neighbour arrived at the air-raid shelter to discover that she had forgotten something. Hurrying back to her house, she was stopped by the ARP warden.

  ‘And where are you going, Maggie?’ he asked. ‘Don’t you know there’s an air raid on?’

  ‘I’ve left my teeth on the kitchen table,’ she told him.

  ‘Get back in the shelter,’ he said. ‘Germans are dropping bombs, not bloody sandwiches.’

  During the war, she told me, bananas were in very short supply. Only pregnant women were able to get them. Mrs Smith’s sailor boyfriend at the time knew she had a real liking for this particular fruit and managed to get her one. On a date to the local cinema, as they sat cuddled up together in the darkness on the back row, he told her he had a little surprise for her and thrust a banana into her hand. ‘My father’s warned me about sailors,’ she told him, and slapped the poor man’s face before promptly leaving the building. The following day he called at the house to explain, bringing the said banana as proof.

  On the very last day I delivered a card to Mrs Smith. It was from the post boy.

  Just after the sixth form and during the weeks before departing for college, I secured a part-time job in a large bread factory on Greasborough Street, on the outskirts of Rotherham. On the first morning, the other three students and I met the foreman, a loud, bald-headed, rotund little man called Chuck.

  ‘What’s thy name?’ he fired at the first student.

  ‘Edward,’ came the faint reply.

  ‘Reight, Ted, get thee sen down theer, thar on t’Farmhouse Crusties.’ He turned to the next. ‘And what’s thy name?’ he snapped again.

  ‘Robert,’ the nervous student replied.

  ‘Reight, Bob, get thee sen down theer,’ he said, pointing in the opposite direction, ‘tha’r on t’slicers. And watch weer tha’ put thee hands. We don’t want fingers in t’bread.’ He held up a hand, showing two missing fingers. Poor Bob gulped. Then he turned his attention to the third student, a tall, blond-haired nervous-looking youth with a face erupting with acne. ‘And what’s thy name?’

  ‘Julian,’ came the reply.

  Chuck looked as if he had been smacked in the face. ‘Julian?’ he exclaimed. ‘Thy name’s Julian?’

  ‘Yes,’ the student whispered.

  Chuck’s voice roared the full length of the factory. ‘Hey lads, we have a Julian in!’ This was followed by wild guffaws from the twenty or so men, and by Chuck mincing along with his hand on his hip. Then he turned to me. ‘And thee at t’back, what’s thy name, pal?’ he asked, wiping the tears of laughter from his eyes.

  ‘Dick!’ I shouted.

  I learnt a great deal about life, work and human nature in that bread factory.

  Chuck, aided and abetted by some old hands, took delight in playing tricks on the students. I guess it was because a life baking bread, after the initial fascination, became incredibly boring and predictable and these clever ruses lightened the monotony. But there may have been more to it than that. It may have been born out of resentment – the fact that these bright young things would earn a bit of pocket money over the holidays and then swan off to university and end up with fat salaries and company cars. If they ever did return to the bread factory it would be as pen-pushing managers and company accountants, engineers or directors. They needed bringing down a peg or two, showing everyone they were not that clever.

  Some of the tricks played were funny, harmless pranks, others were cruel and humiliating. One student discovered a dead mouse underneath his sandwiches in his snap box and spent most of the shift retching in the lavatory. Another had his bike loaded on to a van with the bread and had to walk all the way home. One poor lad, Ray, with his pale eyes and wispy attempt at a beard, was told by Chuck to report to the stores.

  ‘Tha can’t go into factory wi’ that bloody excuse for a beard sproutin’ on tha chin,’ he told the student. ‘There’s such a thing as ’ealth and ’ygiene, tha knaas. All ’air has to be covered. That’s why we all wear net caps and overalls and special shoes. Thy ’as to either shave off that beard o’ yourn or get it covered up. In t’meantime, go down to the stores and ask for a beard cap.’

  ‘A what?’ asked the student.

  ‘A beard cap,’ repeated Chuck. ‘To cover up that bum-fluff.’ The student duly reported to the stores, where the man in charge enquired of him, without a trace of a smile, what size beard he had.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ stuttered the student.

  ‘Is it a four and seven-eighths or a five and one-eighth?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ the student replied.

  The storeman sighed wearily. ‘I reckon it’s a four and seven-eighths.’ He ducked underneath the counter, emerging a moment later shaking his head. ‘We’re clean out of four and seven-eighths.’

  ‘Should I try a five and one-eighth?’ asked the student.

  ‘None of them in either,’ replied the man. ‘There’s been a rush on them.’ Then, producing a large white cloth, the store-man told the perplexed and credulous student, ‘You shall have to wear this round your face for the time being.’

  The poor lad, now probably an eminent doctor or a university professor, spent the whole of the morning with a white cloth wrapped around his head. He only discarded the ‘beard cap’ when the manager, on his daily walk around the factory, asked him if he had a sore tooth.

  I was not immune from the tricks. My first job was to wheel the bread from the factory to the vans for loading. The loaves would be stacked on sliding metal shelves on a tall trolley with heavy rubber wheels. At the very bottom was a locking device, triggered by a push of the foot. Of course, Chuck never mentioned the lock and on my first trip down the long ramp, observed by the foreman with arms folded over his chest, the trolley gathered speed, then careered out of control, collided with a van
and spilt its load. I was devastated and began frantically picking up the bread.

  ‘Bloody marvellous, that!’ shouted Chuck, drawing everyone’s attention to my distress and embarrassment. ‘Bloody students don’t know their arses from their elbows. All that bloody learnin’ and he can’t push a bloody trolley wi’out dropping all t’bread. Comes out of tha wages that, tha knaas.’

  On the next occasion I was let loose with the trolley, Chuck sidled over, surreptitiously activated the locking device with a secretive flick of his foot and then sauntered off with the words, ‘And watch what tha’re doin’ this time.’ I spent the next five minutes pushing and pulling to get the trolley moving.

  It was Francis who helped me out. He was a quietly spoken and thoughtful Polish man who spent most of his breaks reading in the staff canteen. He never swore, never complained and helped me and other students out on many an occasion. He showed me the lock and how best to manoeuvre the unwieldy trolley. He then warned me never, under any circumstances, to go down to where the confectionery was prepared by the women under the supervision of the forewoman, Dora. I would, in due course, be told by Chuck to go and fetch some imaginary tool but I should always make some excuse. He kept this trick back for a couple of weeks later, when the students had dropped their guard. Many an unsuspecting student, Francis told me, had entered the confectionery department, been grabbed and had fruit flans, doughnuts, Eccles cakes and mince pies pushed down his pants. It was rumoured that one poor victim had been stripped by the women and had fresh cream daubed all over his privates.

  One morning Chuck sidled up. ‘Go down the confectionery and ask Dora for a triple screwtop flange extractor,’ he instructed me.

  I set off but spent the next five minutes hiding in a cubicle in the lavatory. I then returned. ‘Dora told me to tell you that she needs a note from you,’ I informed Chuck seriously. ‘She said that the last triple screwtop flange extractor she sent up here has gone missing.’

  ‘Clever bugger,’ mouthed Chuck, ambling off down the factory. After that he left me alone.