by John Wright
He now knew the horror and pity of seeing friends killed in combat, and had gazed repeatedly on the repulsive face of death. He had left home little more than a boy but had returned a man. On leave he refused to talk about it saying only that it was too close and too painful to think about. He just wanted to blot out of his mind the dull, stupid expression he had seen on the faces of the dead, and it would be some time before he laughed out loud again.
The ranks of Uncle John’s battalion had been sorely depleted by the debacle in France, and John was promoted to Corporal. The Green Howards were based at Richmond in North Yorkshire, but he, and hundreds of other men from the defeated army, were retrained and soon afterwards posted to Blandford in Dorset, becoming part of the 50th Northumbrian Division. They had learned some harsh lessons in France and here they continued to hone their new skills. The battalion was made to work hard and the men were brought to a high state of fitness. The locals became accustomed to the sound of their heavy, steel-shod boots crashing down onto the metalled roads. Carrying heavy packs they manoeuvred and streamed over tough assault courses; they dug trenches, hacking into the hard earth with their heart-shaped trenching tools.
We saw troop trains passing through Levisham station crammed with grim-faced soldiers, hollow-eyed from lack of sleep, many of them with bandaged heads or their arms in slings. These, like our Uncle John, were the lucky ones and they waved to us from the carriage. The humiliating retreat to and from Dunkirk had been an unmitigated disaster. England had not been so vulnerable since the Napoleonic Wars and the government came perilously close to caving in with many people feeling that the war was all but lost. The country was at rock bottom and now stood alone against the might of the all-conquering Germans. In mid-June German troops marched up the Champs Élysées, and a bloody battle on English soil could quite easily have been next as England was now within easy striking distance of the Luftwaffe. In a stirring speech Winston Churchill said, ‘Let us brace ourselves to our duty …’
At Grove House time passed peacefully and the long hot, blazing summer days were followed by short sweaty nights. We always seemed to have long, hot summers in those early war years and we played in the sunshine blissfully unaware of what was taking place across the English Channel. One day, as we were playing out on the daisy-covered lawn vainly attempting to catch grasshoppers, a German Dornier bomber roared by very low overhead. It was black and huge and seemed to be following the railway line northwards. The sudden ear-splitting roar shocked and frightened us; it was there and gone in no time, leaving the air pulsating, before we had time to realise what had happened. We were terrified and in a panic and crying our eyes out as Kitty hurried us – a little too late – into the dubious safety of the day-room.
6
Salad Days
Balmy, sunlit days followed one upon the other and we made chains from the daisies scattered across the neatly trimmed lawns. Bees buzzed busily working tirelessly as they went from flower to flower to make sweet golden honey. Kitty told us, ‘a bee has to visit thousands of flowers to make just one spoonful of honey.’ Colourful butterflies fluttered by or basked in the sun as pale-blue damselflies with long thin bodies whizzed about on shimmering translucent wings. On the horse chestnut tree, the green, spiky seedcases were starting to fill out and bunches of tiny green berries had succeeded the great white curds of the elder-blossom. In the verdant tranquillity of that sequestered, sylvan setting it was hard to believe there was a war on.
On certain mornings our grey-haired gardener-handyman, who wore a flat cap, waistcoat, green corduroy trousers held up by a brass-buckled leather belt and heavy boots, was fuming after finding the lawns covered in freshly excavated molehills. He called the moles nasty mouldiwarps; the Artley’s cows were kine, neats or oxen; rabbits were coneys and wood pigeons were cushats. The speech patterns of more than a hundred years back were alive and well in him; he was a throwback to an earlier way of life that was fast disappearing.
We would often glimpse colourful birds and sometimes hear the faint hollow knockings of woodpeckers in the woods. In the meadow we picked the wild flowers that grew in abundance and enjoyed the summer scents of newly mown rye grass and foxtails. We held buttercups under each other’s chins believing that if they reflected the yellow of the petals it indicated that that person liked butter. We were delighted when we saw baby rabbits with their bobbing white scuts from the play room windows. They hopped and bounced contentedly across the grass on their soft padded feet, but made a dash for cover if anyone approached.
Above a thickly wooded area beside the lane up to Levisham there was a south-facing grassy bank that was warmed by the sun in the afternoon and well into the long summer evenings. On the other side of the road was a gulley, known locally as a ‘griff’. The stunted silver birch and scrub oaks struggled to grow on it and did not cast much shade, making it ideal for the adders that thrived there. The old gardener called them northern vipers, adding, ‘Snakes won’t rest under an ash tree or on its leaves. It ’as magical properties and an adder can be killed by a single blow from an ash stick.’ He always kept an ash walking stick with him and he told us that, ‘Snakes are cold-blooded reptiles and can only raise their body temperature by getting ’eat directly from t’sun or by absorbing it from sun-warmed surfaces.’
The area was known locally as Adder Bank and Miss Thorne had sternly warned us never to go up there. However, if no one was watching we would sometimes skip up the lane and across to a small tree by the side of the road that was easy to climb. From our perch we would watch the snakes basking in the hot afternoon sunshine. One day, when Kitty wasn’t looking, we sneaked out through the small wicket gate near the goods yard as we had seen some adders – now in their bright summer colours – near the railway crossing. They lay on the warm stones between the railway sleepers and we dared one another to jump from one heavy wooden sleeper to the next. In our ignorance and innocence we did not see the danger. Jack Pickering, on spotting us from the high window of the signal cabin, shouted, ‘Hey, you kids, get off that line!’ and Kitty came running out to us. We shouted and yelped in sudden fear when a snake, that had horrible reddish-brown eyes with a thin vertical slit for a pupil, reared up baring its fangs as we leapt over it.
Miss Thorne told us later, ‘They are the only snakes in Britain that have a poisonous bite, but fortunately this is rarely fatal to humans.’ Whenever we found one of their colourless, discarded skins we put it in our smock pockets along with our other ‘treasures’. One day, on hearing a tiny piercing scream and seeing the back legs of a frog hanging from the wide mouth of one of the flat-headed adders, I hit it with a stick and the frog made its escape. Although they are reptiles, we knew that they gave birth to live young in the autumn. We had seen the young ones from our perch up in the tree. In the cooler days of cloud and rain they became sluggish and slow moving, which made them easy meat for foxes, hawks and other birds of prey.
The local farmhands, in their thick corduroy trousers, sweated in the enervating heat as they led their horse and wagon down the steep 1 in 5 gradient to the station. They had their shirtsleeves rolled up showing their bulging biceps. The heavy, wooden wagon was filled to the top with rolled-up fleeces. We had watched the Artley’s black-faced Masham sheep being dipped. Gangs of men travelled from farm to farm to carry out the shearing. Grabbing and unceremoniously upending the sheep, they used metal-bladed hand clippers to remove the greasy, matted fleeces in no time. ‘It’s a soap-like substance called lanolin that makes their wool so greasy,’ Kitty told us. Afterwards they looked more like skinny goats than sheep and we laughed at them; they seemed so small and funny without their woolly coats. Their thin necks and near-naked pink skin was nicked and bleeding in places.
Soon afterwards we were taken to a local farm to see a Large White Yorkshire sow that had recently farrowed. She had to lie down very carefully as there were eleven tiny pink piglets climbing over each other to nuzzle at the double row of teats on her fat underbelly. After
weaning, ten of them were taken away by the men from the Ministry.
In the heat and glare of late June the earthen paths became hard, dry and dusty and the new mown hay lay in thick, yellowish-green swathes that slowly faded in colour as it dried out on the shorn and baking fields. The waist-high hay had been mown down in long, rhythmic sweeps of the scythes, held in the strong hands of the sweating and cheerfully singing farmhands. In their occasional breaks they would whet (sharpen) the long, curving, cutting edges using a coarse stone. From time to time, wielding two-pronged pitchforks, they tossed and turned it and left it to dry. This ancient, tried-and-tested method was known as tedding. Soon afterwards, to our delight, the clover, vetch and trefoil scented hay was gathered up into ridges (known as windrows) by men using light and beautifully crafted wooden hay-rakes. The windrows that covered the hillside slowly changed from green to golden brown in the unrelenting sunshine that burned down day after day. We thought that the ridges of soft, sweet-scented hay had been put there especially for us to roll around and play in.
Shortly afterwards, in the sultry heat, the summer-scented ridges were raked in and piled up to form haycocks in which we made dens until they were carted away by the farmhands. The aroma of rowans, sometimes called mountain ash, scented the air as they were in full blossom at that time of year. The great, placid cart-horses sweated in the shafts of the wagons as they plodded back and forth between the hayfields and the stackyards with their mighty haunches rippling and shining in the summer sun. Sweating, pitchfork-wielding farmhands tossed the hay onto large open wagons. The great, wooden-spoked wheels, with their iron-rimmed tyres, rumbled and crunched over the stones embedded in the hard-packed earth as they wended their way up to Levisham village between high earthen banks that were topped by dry-stone walls or quickthorn hedges. These ancient sunken lanes were known locally as holloways. The men and the horses were glad to get out of the blazing sun into the welcome shade of the tree-embowered lane, where shafts of sunlight struck through breaks in the luxuriant canopies to turn the fern fronds a brighter green.
The hay gradually filled up the barns and was used as fodder over the winter months with the excess being made into large gable-ended hayricks in the stackyard. These were built and thatched with great care and pride to be looked at and enjoyed; an art passed down through generations of fine craftsmen. This protected them from future onslaughts of wind and rain. We found hay everywhere; bits of it littered the lanes and the verges and it was tangled in the hedgerows for weeks.
In midsummer, when the sun shone on both sides of the hedge, we cast short shadows and this now occurred at around two o’clock due to the double summertime that was now in force. I thought that the shadows were inside us and that the sun made them fall onto the ground. Occasionally I was allowed to play with the Artley children on the swing that they had set up in their field, and I enjoyed being taken up onto the high, almost treeless moors well away from the army’s training areas. We would help Mrs Artley to pick the small wild strawberries, and at a later date, the ripe and juicy bilberries. The latter were covered in a grey powdering of yeast and, after they had grown to purple ripeness on the low, ground-hugging plants, they turned our tongues and fingers blue. Later, we picked the wild, hairy ‘goosegogs’ (gooseberries), with which Dinner Lady used to bake delicious steaming hot pies.
The airy vastness of the high moors could be beautiful or utterly bleak. Up there in the bracing air, the great enveloping silence was occasionally broken by the plaintive bleating of the hardy Swaledale sheep. At other times it was the haunting, pitiful call of the shy and wary curlew, with its long downward-curving beak, that we heard. It was hard to see them in their camouflaged plumage, even when they were close by, as they were barely visible against the russet-brown of last year’s dried-up bracken. They seemed to prefer the marshy areas of the moors. The ling was springy beneath our feet and the twisted woody stems of the old heather had a dry, dusty smell. I chased after the green, chirruping grasshoppers that were easily alarmed and leapt away in a long curving flight. Occasionally, the sudden clattering explosion of a red grouse would startle us as it sprang up with whirring wings from right under our feet. The male bird, about the size of a small chicken, had dark reddish plumage with a bright red wattle over its eyes and white leg feathers. To me its call sounded like ‘Go back! Go back.’ Scattered over the moors we saw large ancient standing stones and cairns that were composed of heaped-up stones. There were heaps of piled-up peat turfs, some as tall as six feet, that the diggers had left to dry out as the use of peat as a winter fuel was quite common. There were tangled patches of dead bracken everywhere and amongst it the newly emerging shoots were just starting to unfurl looking like small, brilliant green question marks.
The Artleys owned two defunct, but clean, furnished railway carriages that were kept in the goods yard sidings, and their paying guests sometimes came with us. We called them the camping carriages and the family had been renting them out since before the war. They also provided bed and breakfast and an upstairs bathroom in the station house at a rate of six shillings a week, and at times the house was so full that the family had to sleep in the wash house at the bottom of their yard. Many guests came back year after year to enjoy their hospitality and wholesome fare and some became family friends. They came here to escape from the anxiety of the war-threatened towns and cities for a little while. Here they could walk and enjoy the soothing peace and tranquillity of the deep forests and could relax in the glory of the open moors and the quietness of the countryside. It was an enchanted place, unspoilt by man. Some got lost when the weather suddenly turned hostile and only the hardy Moor Jocks (sheep) were able to endure the harsh conditions. The Artley children used to come in to the nursery school where they played with us for hours on end. Clifford was closer to our George’s age than the other three.
The Dog Days begin when the Dog Star, Sirius, the brightest star in the heavens, rises and sets. The Romans believed that dogs went mad at that time of the year and the old gardener said to Kitty, ‘tell ’em not to touch t’dog roses in t’edgerows as they’re ’armful. If they were to put their fingers on their eyes or ears afterwards they could go blind or get an earache,’ adding sagely, ‘when t’Dog Days be clear t’will be fine all t’yeer’, and that year they had been and it was.
Eric and I were forever asking questions about the environment around us. We had become watchers of the natural world and we were learning the names of the animals, the trees and the plants by observation. As day succeeded day and week followed week I was becoming more aware of the power and order of nature and the law of kill and be killed. At times I got things mixed up, as children do. In the morning I would watch the sunlight creeping down the hillside and it seemed to me that it was pushing the shadows ahead of it: I thought that it was shoving the darkness into the ground in the valley bottom. Later, as it set in the west, the shadows came up again, stealing away the colours and filling the air with darkness and that made it night. To my childish reasoning that was why it was dark under the ground all the time. Many of these early observations of nature were to stay with me, and the lessons learned were to have a profound influence on the course of my life.
After Kitty moved to Grove House, Alan would cycle over to Newton-on-Rawcliffe, where he left his bike and walked down the steep path. Even when she could not see him she knew he was coming as he whistled loudly everywhere he went. Whenever she was with him she was radiant and her face lit up with pleasure. If the weather was fine and sunny he often took her for long, loitering walks and they would sit in the quiet of sun-drenched glades or linger in the dappled shade of the wild woods. Here they walked arm-in-arm, quietly talking as only lovers can and, with no one there to see them, they would gaze into each other’s eyes and share a kiss or two. Their liking became a fondness that blossomed into full-blown love – a love that was to transform their lives and bring them joy and happiness.
Warm-hearted Kitty tried so hard to make up for the mat
ernal love that she knew was missing from our young lives: she seemed to instinctively sense how important it was that someone should love and care for us. She had experienced the emotional pain on being put into a home as a child; maybe she too had lain awake at night afraid of the dark and its secrets; maybe she had once yearned for a parent to hug and cuddle her and kiss away the dark forebodings. She was so kind-hearted; there was not a malicious thought in her.
Sometimes, if the weather was kind, she took us up the track that started close to a tall railway signal post on the other side of the railway line. After a short, flat stretch of grass-seamed track we crossed the little footbridge that spanned the shallow waters of the boulder-strewn Pickering Beck. Its white-painted handrails reflected the glare of the sun and as we peered into the clear water gurgling over the smooth stones it threw off scintillating and shifting darts of light. Below the surface the fast-flowing stream shook its long, green tresses of waterweed. Ugly flatheads and spiny sticklebacks darted about on the bottom but we left them for another day. The stony path gradually became a narrow hard-packed earthen track that climbed the steep hillside. It became very muddy after rain and near the crest there was a hairpin bend. The path came out on a hedge-lined lane that led into the pretty village of Newton-on-Rawcliffe that stood 300 feet above the railway line.