suspected it eventually might, and the road quickly degenerated into an unpaved track.
It was evidently still used for light traffic, continuing about eight feet wide with quite a good firm surface. On the right was a little stream, and Bob could not resist trying the effect of a few pebbles as a primitive dam; it burst almost immediately. The hedge on the left was tall and straggling, and as he went on, through it he caught glimpses of fields rising more and more steeply to a crest that he hadn’t noticed from the new road, but perhaps the relief of the terrain was less obvious from that height. After perhaps half a mile the hedge ended, and a couple of hundred yards further a rickety fence came down from the left to the edge of the track.
For some reason Bob decided to follow that rather than continue along the level. There was not really a path, just a narrow worn trail where many feet had gone along close by the fence, but at least it showed that there was a destination to be expected. It soon came to the lip of an old quarry where the worked-out surface had been levelled and a cluster of houses built, with an access road leading off to the right apparently to meet the line of the track a little further on. At the top of the field, he found there was a choice of direction: to the right was a broad track between the hedge bounding the quarry site and the back gardens of a row of houses, ahead was a narrow but paved footpath to the road on to which they fronted. He chose the track.
The gardens were generally well kept, with a couple ending in hard standing for a car. He soon came to the drive that allowed access from the road. On the near corner a wire fence was festooned with bindweed and woody nightshade; he stopped to admire the natural conjunction of extravagant white trumpets, probed by butterflies, alongside the much smaller, vivid yellow and purple flowers and waxy red berries of the nightshade.
On the other side his mother finished hanging out washing on the clothes line, and picking up the empty basket noticed that he was there. “Thank goodness. Come along, Bob, wherever have you been? I was getting quite worried.”
“Sorry, Mum, I was watching some men fixing the hedge. I’d never seen that before. Sorry”
“Well, never mind that. Come and get your tea while it’s still worth eating.”
Inside, he dumped his jacket and after the ritual reminder was about to wash his hands when a sudden clamour startled him. The scene was blotted out, he found himself somehow constrained and a kind of panic seized him until he realised that the bed sheet was over his head, trapped beneath his shoulder and making it awkward to reach out and silence the alarm. At last he managed it.
Realising the time he was shocked. Then he remembered something else and groaned “Oh, hell! I’d forgotten.”
Marjorie, entering the bedroom, asked what was the matter. “I forgot it was the kids’ school outing today.”
“Stop fretting, it’s all right. I got everything ready last night, and packed them off in plenty of time.”
“Thank goodness. But why ever didn’t you wake me?”
“You had such a bad night, tossing and turning, that I set the alarm for an hour later and let you sleep on.”
“I wish you hadn’t. I had a dreadful nightmare.”
“Well, I wasn’t to know that. But now we can have a leisurely breakfast by ourselves for once.”
Bob dressed himself quickly and sat at the table, noticing an envelope under his side plate. “What’s this?”
“No idea. But there’s one way to find out. No, not that knife - it’s got marmalade on it.”
Choosing another he slit the envelope and scanned the contents. “Good lord!”
“What is it?”
“It’s from Turnbulls.”
“I could see that. Go on!”
“It’s the damnedest thing – they want me to take on a three-year job in Angola.”
Return to Contents
SKIDDLETHORPE
I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of Skiddlethorpe. It isn’t much of a place, especially since the decline in the wool industry: just a cluster of cottages, a few outlying farms, a pub, and a tiny church alongside the River Skiddle at a point where a rough path from nowhere in particular to somewhere even less distinguished crosses the stream by an ancient hump-backed bridge. It was supposedly built in the fourteenth century by monks from St. Cyrus’s abbey on instructions given in an apparition of the Virgin Mary to one Hannah Goodenough, much to the amusement of neighbours familiar with her way of seeing things that weren’t there, especially on nights of celebration. However, they kept quiet about that; they weren’t going to spoil the chance of being saved from wet feet in the winter spates, and neither were the folks from Nip and Seld who passed that way on their monthly sessions of competitive games in their alternating hostelries.
What those games might have been in the distant past is unknown, although according to a document of 1520 in the British Library a wandering preacher complained bitterly of a devotion to the sport of “tapgroat” that kept men away from Sabbath worship. Its nature is uncertain, although the recent discovery of a polished board ruled with parallel lines and of about that age suggests an obvious possibility. Latterly the contest has been a straightforward darts match between teams of three on the second Sunday, in the afternoon to avoid the hazards of walking in the dark during the winter.
That preacher was a rarity. For most of history, Skiddledale has been almost completely isolated from the outside world. Visitors were practically unknown, although it was rumoured that once in 1804 William Wordsworth wandered in and out again without leaving much impression on either himself or the locality. The Domesday Book makes no mention of it, while the Ordnance Survey got the name of the settlement wrong and the river does not appear at all on most maps. Again, until quite recently it was rare for inhabitants to venture far outside the valley except in times of particular hardship, and those who left for more than a visit to market never returned. A general ignorance of worldly affairs thus remained undisturbed and unlamented.
In the mid-nineteenth century, however, a metalled road was built, ostensibly to bring the benefits of modern civilisation but suspected to be in reality more to do with taxation. That, according to valley opinion, was when the rot set in.
The rot, I regret to say, took the bodily form of my great-great- ... -grandfather Nathaniel, fleeing north after a scandalous affair with the wife of a Nonconformist minister who had a considerable following among the rougher labourers as well as the manufacturing classes. For a time he stayed at the inn of a nearby town, but when the fuss failed to die down as he had hoped, he looked around for somewhere to settle more or less permanently. The isolation of Skiddledale suited him very well; he found an unclaimed plot of rocky land above the flood line beside the river, cleared the bracken and built a house, unremarkable by urban standards but palatial to the locals. Conveniently, a tributary stream fed by a never-failing spring gave a reliable supply of water, soon piped directly from the spring itself. In later years it also powered a succession of electric generators as more and more aids to contemporary living were installed.
Nathaniel brought in his own servants, but few of them could stand the isolation for long and he tried to hire local staff. Unfortunately for him the internal economy of the valley ran largely on a barter system and he had nothing to offer but money, in amounts too great to be accommodated on the slate in the pub that for generations had served as an accounting system for the community. That was a problem he had never met before nor even imagined. Realising however that people did go outside to market, he hit upon the idea of making residence slightly more attractive to his own people by bringing the market, enhanced with a greater variety of stock, to the valley itself.
The Skiddledalers, though deeply reserved with strangers (“’E keeps hisself to hisself” was high praise), were not ill-disposed towards off-comers who had occasionally arrived for reasons into which no one ever inquired, however peculiar their ways might be so long as they caused no trouble and put on no airs. Nathaniel and his small remaining menage se
emed to fit in quite well. Simon Rumbold, an elderly and rather morose widowed groom who liked a modest tipple, had made a habit of visiting the pub and over the first six months earned acceptance by confining his greetings to a simple nod and saying hardly anything to anyone apart from his orders and a general gruff “G’night” on leaving. It was his task to visit the market for supplies, and Nathaniel commissioned him to observe discretely what other people from the valley were buying.
Then there was the matter of premises. In the valley’s climate the idea of a regular open-air market for anything but farm produce would have been ludicrous, and while Nathaniel could well afford to build from scratch, there was no suitable site available. However, Ezekiel Farley had a large dilapidated barn, housing odd bits of broken equipment that he had never got round to fixing but might come in useful some time, close to where the metalled road ran out; to say it terminated would give an altogether too positive impression. It was not a picturesque ruin, just a mess, and Nathaniel had often thought his view down the valley would be greatly improved if it were to collapse altogether. Another possibility now presented itself. He visited Farley with a proposal to put the building into good order in return for permission to maintain and use it as he
Skiddlethorpe and other stories Page 5