Road to the Dales, The Story of a Yorkshire Lad

by Phinn, Gervase

  Miss Platt was a small, cheerful woman with a lilting birdlike trill in her voice. As I banged away on the keys she would occasionally nod in the manner of a dowager at a soiree, craning an ear and keeping a fixed smile on her round face. If I managed to play the piece through without a mistake she would smile beatifically and raise her small hands like Jesus sermonizing. Miss Platt had a small stock of comments: 'Delightful, dear,' 'A little more practice I think, dear,' 'Very nice, dear,' 'Careful with the crotchets, dear,' 'Coming along nicely, dear.' She wasn't one of those piano teachers who rapped your knuckles if you made a mistake or shouted at you if you hadn't practised. She was a paragon of patience, particularly with a small heavy-handed boy who had little aptitude at the piano. While other students rose through the ranks of the pianoforte examinations, I, much to my chagrin, didn't. 'I want him to play the piano for enjoyment,' my mother told her, 'not pass examinations.' I had no natural talent for playing the piano but I persevered for a time, until O levels reared their heads and then I stopped. Today I play haltingly but with enthusiasm any tune which happens to be in the key of D.

  18

  Uncle Alec was Dad's elder brother. His dream was to become a pilot, and he passed all the ingenious tests by which potential air crews were selected but trained for the secondary role as a navigator and flew with the bombers during the war. I have his eight medals, which include the MBE, on my wall. Uncle Alec looked and spoke like a character out of my Biggles books. He was tall and lithe, with a great ginger handlebar moustache and hands like spades. He would appear at the door unannounced, with his brown canvas kitbag, stay for a few days and then depart. Once he arrived in the early morning and climbed through a window to gain entry. He settled down on the settee in the front room, only to be confronted later by my father brandishing a poker, assuming we had burglars.

  On leaving the RAF Alec became a civil servant in London and travelled by train daily to his office with brolly and briefcase. When he retired he spent most of his time tending his garden and making wooden boxes for the blue-tits. It was such a different life from the RAF. I still have on the desk in my study a beautiful polished trinket box he made from the propeller of a crashed Blenheim bomber in which he had flown. I guess he must have had some close shaves, but, like many who had gone through the war, he would never talk about it.

  Aunt Nora was my Mum's elder sister and she, like my mother, had trained as a nurse. A striking-looking woman with large dark eyes and a winning smile, she was extremely witty, with a dry sense of humour and an amusing turn of phrase. For many years she worked in Rotherham as a school nurse, accompanying the doctor around schools to assist with the TB injections, the polio inoculations, the hair inspections for head lice and to undertake the regular medical assessments of the children. On one occasion, when visiting a school in Kimberworth, she discovered that a child, rather than having gained height since his last assessment, had in fact shrunk. The doctor was rather bemused, for the child was clearly not under-nourished. He expressed his anxiety to the headteacher, who was not at all concerned and quipped, 'The lad seems to be settling down nicely, then.' The doctor was not amused.

  One of Aunt Nora's main jobs as she toured the schools was the relentless search for nits. The 'nit nurse' featured large in school folklore, and every child dreaded the humiliation of being singled out as a carrier of these unwelcome little visitors. We lined up to have our scalps examined and when one child started to scratch his scalp we were all at it. Should any verminous creatures be discovered in a child's hair, a letter would be sent home with the instruction that he should be deloused before being sent back. Headteachers would show her notes from parents, which included:

  Ethel's off with nits which are all down our street. I'll send her back when she's been fumigated.

  Our Maggie came home with nits last night and they're not hers.

  Nurse says she's found nits in her head, well I've looked in her head and can't see any because I don't know what they look like.

  In one school a new and rather naive young teacher was told by my aunt that it was not really a sensible idea to let her long hair cascade over her shoulders.

  'But I'm very proud of my hair,' she told my aunt, clearly stung by the comment.

  'Well, I suggest you tie it back,' suggested my aunt, 'unless, of course, you wish to be infested with head lice.'

  The young woman very nearly fainted.

  Some children would present themselves to Nurse Lloyd smelling to high heaven. They had been sewn into their vests for the winter and emanated a most unpleasant smell, of which they had become oblivious. One child's chest had been rubbed liberally with fatty, evil-smelling goose grease by his grandmother, who believed that it would ward off all known germs. My aunt was less tactful than my mother in these circumstances. She removed the vests and made no bones about telling the youngster that he smelt and needed a good wash, and should tell his mother to put him in a bath and get out the carbolic soap.

  Uncle Ted was Aunt Nora's husband. He was a quiet, rather shy man with a pronounced stutter and was firmly under his wife's thumb. Aunt Nora called the shots in their home and no mistake. Ted had a rather mysterious past. Mum and Dad never talked about it and I can't recall Ted ever saying anything about his childhood. I formed the impression, probably quite wrongly, that he was the illegitimate son of a wealthy man who had had an illicit liaison with one of his servants. I was reading Catherine Cookson when I came to this conclusion. It was very probably a fanciful notion, but on my twenty-first birthday I was presented by Aunt Nora with a set of the most beautiful inlaid gold cufflinks in a red-leather-covered box. 'These were Ted's father's,' she told me. 'Ted never wears them and we would like you to have them.' When I asked about his father Aunt Nora evaded the question. Then there was the silver-topped Malacca walking cane, which was kept in the umbrella stand in their hall. I asked about it once. 'Ted's father used to walk out with that,' said Aunt Nora. Then she added, 'Apart from the cufflinks and the china bowl, it's the only thing that he got.' She left it at that. Just before his death a half-brother appeared to claim the stick.

  My father was a very generous man and he found Ted's meanness irksome. When he joined my father in the Masons Arms, Ted was invariably last at the bar to buy his round, and on other occasions he evaded paying for any of the drinks. When his nephews and nieces visited he had to be prompted by Aunt Nora to dig into his pocket and give us a shilling. Mum put a charitable gloss on this tight-fistedness and told us it was down to his childhood, when money had been in short supply. 'I guess he had very little when he was young and therefore is careful with his money.'

  After coming out of the army, Ted set himself up as a plasterer working for a number of building firms. He drove a small white van which came in very useful when I started college and needed to transport all my things to Leeds. Aunt Nora and Uncle Ted did look rather incongruous when they went out for the evening, all dressed up, climbing from the small white van.

  Grandma Mullarkey clearly thought Nora could have done better for herself. When she was a ward sister and stunningly pretty, doctors had queued up to take Nora out. Mum used to tell me how distraught her well-connected suitors were when Nora grew bored with them and moved on. She settled eventually for Ted, who was hard-working, reliable, even-tempered and adored her. There's no doubt he was a handsome man in his youth, and a picture of him in his army uniform shows a dashing, dark-haired young man with a generous smile. I recall him once telling me he 'fell on his feet' when he met Nora and couldn't believe his luck that she had fallen for him.

  The only lengthy conversation I had with Uncle Ted that I recall was when I was in the sixth form and we walked from Bridlington to Flamborough village across Bempton Cliffs. He told me that as soon as he was able he joined the army and rose through the ranks to sergeant in the Royal Army Medical Corps. After a drunken night out and being late reporting back at the barracks, he was stripped of his stripes, so his time in authority was short.

&nb
sp; When he went with the British Expeditionary Force to France he was angry that priority was given to constructing the officers' toilets. Of course, it was inconceivable that officers and other ranks should share the same facilities. Ted told me that the French thought it laughable that the British officers had to have their own private little lavatory when everyone else performed under the trees or in a large smelly hole in the ground.

  The experience of Dunkirk stayed with my Uncle Ted all his life. That dramatic escape from the clutches of the ravaging German army, when more than 300,000 British and French troops were rescued by a ragtag flotilla of naval vessels, fishing boats and paddle steamers, was a vivid memory for him, but one that was rarely spoken of. Winston Churchill had called that retreat a 'miracle of deliverance', and to rally the troops said the spirit of Dunkirk would endure as 'an example of triumph in the face of adversity'. Ted didn't quite see it like that. For all the heroism involved, he viewed the conflict as a colossal military defeat and it brought back painful memories. What he witnessed on those French beaches I never discovered, but it must have been traumatic because his stutter started from the day he left Dunkirk.

  Along with many of his comrades he was stranded without food or water on the Dunkirk beaches at the end of May 1940. In spite of a rearguard action, the British and Allied troops had been practically driven into the sea by the numerically superior and better equipped German forces. Ted had lived in a cellar on puddle water and a pound of sugar for a week, finally escaping on 4 June. Crammed with other soldiers into a French fishing smack, he tried to tend to the wounded as the boat navigated a precarious course out of a harbour littered with the wreckage of half-sunken ships. He told me he had seen sights no man should see, how he looked back and saw thousands of troops still on the beaches, many wounded and dying, and felt helpless. It was chaos. As they were pulling out of the harbour the German planes circled like vultures overhead and then dived, and Ted, looking up at the empty sky, thought his time had come. To his amazement not a bomb was dropped or a machine gun fired. The Stukas dipped their wings and saluted the retreating British army.

  When he died, Ted left me his medals. There was one he never sent for: the Dunkirk Medal.

  Aunt Nora was a devout Roman Catholic and each Sunday morning Ted would drop her off at the church for eleven o'clock Mass. He would then go and have a pint at the British Legion and collect her later. I was the executor for Ted's estate, and his strong desire was to be buried with his wife in the Catholic section of the cemetery in Bridlington and have Nora's priest, Canon Plunkett, say a few prayers. I promised him when he was nearing the end that I would endeavour to carry out his wishes. When he died I made an appointment to see the priest, a large, forceful character with a pronounced Northern Irish accent. I imagined, as I was shown into his study by the housekeeper, that I would have a real job persuading Canon Plunkett to agree to a service for a non-believer, but I was wrong. I remember sitting facing the priest across his large mahogany desk, listening to his monologue.

  'Ted Lloyd was a good man,' the canon told me, 'and he deserves a Requiem Mass. I always had the feeling he wanted to come into the church when he dropped off your aunt. God will look upon him in a kindly light, for he was a devoted husband, a hard worker and a thoroughly nice man.'

  I arranged with Ted's former comrades from the British Legion and the Dunkirk Veterans that they would attend the funeral, and on the day a large group, many in blazers and berets, some with flags, others wearing chestfuls of medals, assembled outside the church. Not unsurprisingly, no one appeared from Ted's side of the family. Just before the coffin was carried into the church the housekeeper could be heard complaining to the priest in the small porch.

  'It's disgusting, Canon, disgusting. You open your porch for the down-and-outs and this is what they do.'

  I asked what the problem was.

  'The vagrants who congregate in the porch of a night have urinated in the holy water font, that's what,' the housekeeper snapped, screwing up her face into a terrible grimace. 'The good canon here leaves the porch open so those who have nowhere to go can shelter from the cold and rain. Many is the time he's been knocked up, haven't you, Canon, by one of these down-and-outs asking for food and money and I don't know what. And this is how they repay his Christian charity - by urinating in his holy water. It's disgusting.'

  More holy water was blessed and the contents of the font replaced. Then the priest appeared resplendent in black cope and biretta.

  After the Mass I had arranged for a reception in the church hall. Sandwiches and sausage rolls, pork pies, salads, cakes and desserts filled the tables, all overseen by the priest's housekeeper. Only five of us stayed. The British Legion contingent departed and the Dunkirk veterans had other appointments to keep. My sister, wife, myself and two others surveyed the vast spread. It was a sorry little group.

  'What are you going to do with all this food?' the housekeeper asked me.

  'Perhaps you might give it to the down-and-outs,' I suggested.

  'Over my dead body,' she replied, 'not after what the dirty devils did in the canon's holy water font!'

  19

  Uncle Jimmy was Mum's younger brother. He was a slim, strikingly good-looking man with pale blue eyes and a captivating smile, so it came as no surprise that he was 'one for the ladies'. He would always arrive at the door with a great smile and a present for me - I guess of all his nephews and nieces he had a bit of a soft spot for the youngest. I still have his presents: the pair of binoculars in the simulated leather case, the pencil box with the sliding lid, the Dinky toys, the picture book of famous British heroes, the Thomas the Tank Engine books. He was a romancer was Uncle Jimmy, an adventurer, a risk-taker and one of the most generous and loving men it has been my good fortune to meet. When only seven he left home, caught a bus to the station in Rotherham and went on to Liverpool, where he boarded a ship for Ireland. How he managed to get all the way from Yorkshire to Galway at that tender age without a penny is quite amazing. I was told that even at the age of seven he had 'a touch of the Blarney', for he convinced a group of friendly soldiers to take him under their wing and that his parents were waiting for him on the quay in Dublin.

  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 with
out 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.