Road to the Dales, The Story of a Yorkshire Lad

by Phinn, Gervase

  Thankfully George's mother did not live in this day and age or she would be prosecuted for child neglect, allowing the children (minus life-jackets) to take a leaky rowing boat out to a wreck. They can say what they like about Enid Blyton - that her stories are inane, simplistic and unrealistic - but she managed to get me hooked on books.

  My father captured my imagination with his stories. He would bring back books from Rotherham Library or buy a couple of old tattered versions of the classics from the market, taking out his finds from the brown paper carrier bag where they had been hiding between the vegetables and fruit. Once he arrived from the market with a large hard-backed tome called King of the Fighting Scouts, which depicted on the front cover a garish illustration of a soldier on a rearing horse hacking his way through a horde of savages. For several nights my father read a couple of chapters, only to arrive at the denouement to discover that the last few pages of the book were missing. Undeterred, he made the end up.

  My father took over from my mother this nightly ritual of reading to me when I was eight or nine. He would read a chapter or two at a time, ending on a high note and thus whetting my imagination for more. I would be keen for the next instalment the following night and be up those stairs in my pyjamas, face washed, teeth brushed, ready and waiting. It was a really clever way of making me go to bed at night. Boys who have had this sort of upbringing, where fathers tell them stories, read to them and associate reading with great pleasure and affection, learn to love books. A magical world is opened up to them.

  Books and reading 'habituated me to the Vast', for as a youngster I would disappear up the garden and sit on the old bench behind the greenhouse or in the garden shed, or lie on my stomach on the lawn in the sunshine or hide in the branches of the cherry tree to read. I read even when I was supposed to be working, and in those childhood days I had my heroes and dreamed of how I could imitate their courage and prowess. At night, under the sheets with my torch, I would continue reading despite nudges and grunts from my brother Alec, with whom I shared the old double bed. I would disappear under the covers and enter a world of pirates and smugglers, adventurers and explorers, knights and war heroes. I would go to sleep dreaming of those wonderful adventures. I used to consume authors; when there was one book I really enjoyed, I would go all through his or her works (it was usually a 'he') one after the other. At first it would be Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland or Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies, Edith Nesbitt, J. M. Barrie, A. A. Milne and Kenneth Grahame, and then, as I grew older, it would be The Last of the Mohicans, The Children of the New Forest, Robinson Crusoe, Moonfleet, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Rob Roy, Black Beauty, Lorna Doone, Biggles, Kidnapped, The Red Badge of Courage, The Secret Garden, Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Count of Monte Cristo, Moby Dick, The Man in the Iron Mask, Around the World in Eighty Days. I devoured Richmal Crompton, John Buchan, Stephen Crane, Conan Doyle, Georgette Heyer, Rider Haggard, J. Meade Faulkner and Alexandre Dumas.

  The adventures of The Three Musketeers fired my imagination. What daring exploits and what colourful characters: the wicked Milady (with the tell-tale brand on her shoulder), poor Louise de Valliere, the beautiful and romantic Queen Anne, the Machiavellian goatee-bearded Cardinal Richelieu and, of course, the gallant band of musketeers.

  Years later I still read the books of a vastly underrated novelist: H. G. Wells. Few authors can match his brilliance for narrative pacing and suspense, his command of gripping dialogue and his skill at creating that eerie, captivating atmosphere which keeps the reader glued to the page. I read The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, The Invisible Man and The Island of Dr Moreau, in quick succession. These great classics should be on every English curriculum. It was The War of the Worlds that for me towered above the rest. In 1938 Orson Welles turned the novel into a radio show broadcast in the style of a real news report, and so convincing was he that thousands of panic-stricken Americans on the Eastern seaboard deserted their homes in the belief that the Martians had actually landed.

  But my very favourite author is the great R. L. Stevenson. I read Treasure Island over and over again, until the spine fell apart and the pages fell out. It was in my capacity as a school inspector that I was asked to accompany a politician around an infant school. He was a pompous, self-opinionated man who bemoaned the decline in standards of reading. In the lower junior classroom he asked the eight-year-olds if they had read Treasure Island and was greeted with shakes of the head from the children and incredulous stares from the teacher.

  'It seems to me that it is a great pity,' he observed later, when he bored us in the staffroom, 'that the children are not aware of one of the greatest works of children's literature.'

  I agreed that Treasure Island was indeed a classic but I did point out that a story about treacherous cut-throat mutineers, murderous pirates and a character who kills with a crutch is not the most edifying diet for children aged eight. I guess he was thinking of a simplified version. I well remember the fear I felt inside when, at the age of eleven, I first heard my father read those episodes in the novel and I came across Long John Silver and felt something of Jim Hawkins's terror of 'the seafaring man with one leg':

  How that personage haunted my dreams, I need scarcely tell you. On stormy nights, when the wind shook the four corners of the house, and the surf roared along the cove and up the cliffs, I would see him in a thousand forms, and with a thousand diabolical expressions. Now the leg would be cut off at the knee, now the hip: now he was a monstrous kind of creature who had never had but the one leg, and that in the middle of his body. To see him leap and run and pursue me over the hedge and ditch was the worst of nightmares.

  - R. L. Stevenson, Treasure Island (1883)

  As I listened to my father I was there with Jim, hiding from Long John Silver in the barrel of apples and overhearing his murderous plans. I was with Jim in the sweet-smelling darkness, trembling with fear in case I was discovered. I was there in the stockade, shoulder-to-shoulder with Squire Trelawney fighting off the mutineers. Stevenson as a storyteller is unsurpassed. It isn't only his powerful command of narrative, description, character and dialogue, it is the way he creates suspense, which is so vital to keep the reader entranced.

  The children of my childhood were exclusively white and working-class. All my friends, Terry, Jimmy, Michael, Peter, Greg, Martin, Billy, were from homes similar to my own. Some were a bit better off, others a bit worse off, but we all lived in the same kind of house, ate the same sort of food, dressed the same, had the same interests and went to the same school. Only one boy on our street went to Rudston, the small private preparatory school on Broom Lane, and he had his own friends and never came out to play with us. I would sometimes see him getting off the bus with his bright blazer and cap, loaded down with heavy satchel and P.E. bag, but I never spoke to him.

  As a child I had no experience of people from other cultures or races and, as far as I can recall, there were no black people around in the Rotherham of the 1950s. My cherished book as a small child, which my grandmother Mullarkey read to me, was Little Black Sambo. It never occurred to anyone at home or at school that this could be considered offensive. I loved the eponymous hero who outwitted the tiger. My treasured books when I became a 'free reader' were the Biggles series and the Bulldog Drummond stories, and it would have been considered absurd at the time to call such British institutions racist. I loved the rip-roaring action in Biggles Defies the Swastika, and the exploits of his chums Algy, Ginger and Bertie. I still have those Biggles books lined up on a shelf in my study, all with little inscriptions from my parents. I cannot bear to part with them. How I loved my Biggles books, though when I re-read them now, I do feel some unease about parts of the writing.

  So, as a child, books were as common in my life as knives and forks and I swam in an ocean of language.

  34

  There is a picture of me that my mother kept on the sideboard (which we called the 'buffet' for some odd reason), tak
en at the age of eleven, posing awkwardly in the back garden in my new black blazer (a good size too big) with a large shield-shaped badge on the breast pocket, long grey shorts (obligatory for first and second year pupils), held in place with a striped elastic belt with a snake clasp, knee-length grey socks pulled up tight to the bottom of the knees and anchored there with elastic garters, grey jumper, white shirt, striped tie and polished black shoes. My ears stick out like jug handles because I have had a particu larly vicious 'short back and sides' haircut the Saturday before at 'Slasher' Simcox, the demon barber of Rotherham. A new satchel is over my shoulder. I don't look all that excited on my first day at secondary school. I was terrified, to be honest. I had heard all the rumours at my junior school about what happens to new boys and had spent a fitful night thinking about them. The older boys would wait at the gates shouting and jeering and getting ready to pull your hair, punch you in the stomach, clip you round the ear, steal your dinner money and flush your head down the toilet bowl - lambs to the slaughter. It was a tradition to get the 'first years'. My mother told me such stories were nonsense, and that if anyone did start to pick on me I should tell her and she would be up to school like lightning. I am afraid I was not altogether reassured.

  On that first dread-filled morning I arrived nervously with my friends at the tall wrought-iron gates of a huge redbrick building with greasy grey slate roof and high square windows. To a small eleven-year-old it was a massive, towering, frightening edifice resembling a prison, or the workhouse I had seen in the film Oliver Twist. Of course, there were no gangs of vicious-looking youths lying in wait to pounce on us, just groups of boys dressed identically in black blazers with the red badge, some clearly new like myself and looking lost and anxious. The older pupils talked in groups and ignored the younger ones. In the midst of the crowd stood a teacher - a small, barrel-bodied, balding man with little fluffy outcrops around his ears. With hands on hips he stood in the middle of the playground, watching as we trooped through the gates. He was wearing plimsolls, and instead of a belt he had a piece of string fastened around the top of his trousers. He looked like a character from Dickens. I learnt later that this was the much-feared Mr Theodore Firth.

  So here I was at South Grove Secondary Modern School for Boys, where 500 pupils and twenty-five staff occupied the top floor of the building. Below was the girls' secondary modern, which was, of course, out of bounds.

  The headmaster was Mr Williams (T.W.), a silver-haired Welshman with a pronounced accent and that deep sonorous tone of voice deeper than a Welsh coalmine. Several of the other masters were from Wales: Mr Reece (Dai), Mr Davies (Cliff), Mr Griffith (Griff), Mr Price (Van) and Mr Jones (Bobbin' John). They were known as 'the Taffia', and, in common with the headmaster, they all had a genuine and bubbly enthusiasm for their subjects and for teaching. The Welsh call this passion 'hwyl', and it was not in short supply at South Grove. To this day I have a real affection for the Welsh people who sent their missionary teachers to educate the likes of me in Rotherham. I owe a great deal of any success I have had to those Welshmen. The other masters were equally good-humoured and supportive: Norman Hill, Les Wales, Eddie Dyeball, Alan Schofield, Ted Duffield, Wilf Badger, Ken Pike, Bert Gravill, Chipper Payne, Gerry Blowfield, Harry Cooper, Nobby Clark and the one woman teacher I recall, the sylph-like Sybil Cartwright, who taught biology. I still remember them with affection.

  Secondary school was very different from the Juniors. Not only were there more pupils and bigger buildings, no girls and a uniform, but we studied subjects rather than topics and had homework. All the boys were addressed by their surname and in the morning the form master would mark the register by shouting out our names, to which we would answer, 'Here, sir.' There was only one boy in the school who was referred to by his first name and that was John Balls.

  Some writers, describing their schooldays, dwell on their unhappiness at the hands of bullies and the cruelty at the hands of teachers. They speak of board rubbers thrown across the classroom, trouser bottoms smoking after a vicious caning, sarcastic, incompetent and sometimes sadistic teachers. Well, my schooldays were very different.

  Of course, being the only Roman Catholic in the entire school taught me what it felt like to be a member of a minority. My faith (and my name) certainly gave me a sense of being different. I found myself excluded from both R.E. lessons and daily morning prayers. Father Hammond was quite clear when speaking to my mother that I should not attend Protestant services. I laughed a little more heartily than other listeners when I heard a joke many years later, for there was a tad of truth in it.

  SISTER MARIE-CLARE: Now, my child, what do you hope to become when you leave the convent?

  SCHOOLGIRL: A prostitute, sister.

  SISTER MARIE-CLARE (shocked): Good gracious, my child, you can't aspire to that.

  SCHOOLGIRL: I've always wanted to be a prostitute, sister.

  SISTER MARIE-CLARE (relieved): Thank the Lord. I thought for a moment you said Protestant.

  It seems bizarre nowadays that such a restriction for Catholics, prohibiting them from attending non-Catholic services, was in place at that time. Was it thought by some priests that by attending a Protestant service Catholics might very well be lured away from Rome or that they would be somehow tainted? If this was the case, it was not in the spirit of the Vatican Council of 1959, which reshaped the face of Catholicism for the better. Pope John XXIII, who instigated this reformation, wished to break through the barriers that divided people, to strengthen the bonds of mutual love and help people to learn to understand one another. He was a remarkable and innovative Pope. Towards the end of my teenage years this began to bear fruit. Some years later, when Robert Runcie was enthroned in Canterbury Cathedral as the archbishop, Cardinal Hume took a formal part in the service and read the Epistle. No one could have envisaged such a thing when I was growing up: a Cardinal taking part in a Protestant service. Cardinal Hume, in his address, made reference to the unprecedented fellowship between the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church and referred to one of the many tombs in the great abbey, the one shared by the Catholic Queen Mary I and her sister, the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I. 'Two sisters,' he said, 'estranged, not on speaking terms, misunderstanding each other.' He continued, 'Should we not learn from the inscription on their joint tomb, which bears the words: "Consorts both in throne and grave, here we rest, two sisters, Elizabeth and Mary, in hope of one resurrection"?' I guess Father Hammond was turning in his grave. Sadly, in the 1950s there were few such inter-Church relations.

  Frequently I had to explain to the other boys why I was not allowed into assembly, and why I spent my time sitting in the English room reading or in the corridor when it was time for R.E. I found it difficult and at times embarrassing to do so, for at that age I wanted to be one of the group, the same as they were, not this boy with the funny name and the strange religion. When I was a school inspector, I felt a deep sympathy with the child whom I would discover in the school library sitting alone, not permitted by his or her religion to attend school services and assemblies.

  There was, as in all secondary schools of the time, a rigid streaming system in operation. Boys were grouped according to their academic records sent from primary school, their Eleven Plus results and the battery of tests that the new boys were given in the first week. Top form boys had to be pretty good at every subject, good all-rounders. There were four streams, and at first I was placed in Form 1B. I settled in well and was quite happy there but my mother was not. Despite my protests, she made an appointment to see Mr Williams, told him I could cope in the top form and asked him to give me a chance. She must have been immensely persuasive, because give me a chance he did, and one Monday morning I arrived at school to be told by my form teacher to take my things into the next classroom and join Mr Schofield and 1A.

  In the corridor later that morning Mr Williams stopped me. 'Now, lad,' he said, his eyes taking on an unmistakable intensity, 'don't you be letting your parents and me down. E
ndeavour, perseverance, industry, that's what's needed. You have to earn that place in the top class.'

  At home that evening my mother explained that I had to prove her right, to work hard, apply myself, do my homework and not let her down. It is interesting to read my school report at the end of each year, which shows my mother's confidence in me was well-placed. I worked hard and flourished under the direction of talented and enthusiastic teachers, remaining in the 'A' stream right through my secondary school career. I invariably came top or near the top in my favourite subjects of English, mathematics, history and geography, and the teachers' comments informed my parents that I was making 'excellent progress', that I 'continued to give 100 per cent effort', and that I 'read widely and intelligently' and 'would do well'. My final school report from Mr Cooper, my form master, indicates how I thrived and was determined to succeed in my studies.

  Gervaise (sic) has worked extremely hard in all the subjects that he takes and has achieved excellent results. He studies with intelligence and common sense and has the ambition necessary to succeed. His examination reports are most praiseworthy. He is a most painstaking and fastidious worker and is never satisfied with anything below his best. He takes a most lively and active part in all form and school activities, takes all his responsibilities as Deputy Head Boy most conscientiously and is a valued asset to the school. His cheerful co-operation is much appreciated.

  I always felt at secondary school that the headmaster took a particular interest in me. On his daily walk around the building he would often stop to talk to the boys and would enquire of me how I was getting on with my work and what I was reading at the moment. He was a lover of poetry and would frequently declaim snatches of verse.

  In the final year at the school the prefects were selected and I was told to report to the headmaster's room. To my surprise I was asked to be Deputy Head Boy.