Open Writing

My paternal grandfather was an autocratic old bastard – being the result of a misalliance between his mother, a servant, and a local landowner. It gives a new meaning to the phrase ‘in service’.

My grandmother was born in a cottage in Dimpledale. The perfect setting, in a quiet valley, made me wish that I lived there in a self-sufficient solitude.

My first day at school was dominated by a doll’s house in the reception class. I was drawn towards the rooms and their attendant miniature furniture. By comparison my classroom was huge. High windows were operated by a series of pulleys. Central heating pipes doubled as extra seats for our class size of almost fifty.

The school building was sandstone…blackened by pollution and time. The infants and the first two years of the junior school were separated from the ‘upper school’ by an unmade road. The school had originally been a 17thC Century grammar school. I remember huge playgrounds with an intricate patterned green iron fence. Through the fence we glimpsed freedom and the distant view across the Calder valley towards Ossett church and a water tower.

Piles of coke stood adjacent to the boiler like failed pyramids. This area was strictly out of bounds although the rule was often disobeyed. In summer the outside toilets smelled to high heaven and had a cluster of midges in attendance. In winter they were often frozen solid. The activity was a nightmare in the cold damp winter. Classroom regimes were strict and we were not allowed to visit the toilet before obtaining permission. There were one or two nasty accidents en route.

In a childhood uninfluenced by television we played traditional games that depended on the school calendar. Whip and top made an appearance after Easter. Brave children acquired chalk stubs from the classroom to make the pattern.

Conker competitions were, of course, limited to Autumn. It was gender specific girls being excluded from the wild competitions. ‘Gloggies’, or marbles, were played by both girls and boys in separate groups. Some boys lurched about the school with a hundred or more marbles in their pockets.

No doubt today playgrounds are liberally sprinkled with sand in icy weather. We used to have ice slides that went the length of the sloping playground. A ‘Torvill and Dean’ expertise was required to prevent an untimely death on the railings.

The only games influenced by a world outside our village were ‘westerns’ and ‘Japs and English’. A Saturday morning cinema opened up opportunities for variations on cowboy stories. The ‘Jap and English’ game was a throwback from the recent war. Germans were never involved in these games- maybe we were more interested in the Far East. Our German cousins were too near home. As a child, however, I used to mix up the words Nazi and nasty.

There was a certain amount of play in the infant classroom. I remember being in trouble when I dropped a bowl of water when we were supposed to be washing our dolls. We endured gender-determined play. Boys used to make boats and planes from wood.

Corporal punishment was used. Miss Wilkinson, who taught 2A, was a martinet and regularly gave us a wallop across our hands with a yardstick – by which she measured our misdemeanours. We were convinced she wore a ginger wig. During the winter months she had to climb on top of the desks to light the gas mantles with a long taper (yes as late as 1950 gentle reader.) How we longed for a conflagration.

St Michael and All Angels Church stood nearby. We spent an inordinate amount of time there including doing PE in the churchyard. Fortunately this took place on spare ground there was no gymnastics amongst our ancestors.

My mother was buried there but I did not discover this until after I had left the junior school. In the fashion of the time I had been ‘shielded’ from the truth.

My grandmother, she of the Dimpledale origin, took a whole summer to die. We lived at the other end of the village and I remember interminable visits to my grandparent’s cottage. Because of work commitments Sunday was the usual day. With so many cousins about one might imagine fun and games and playing out in the vegetable garden. Forget it.

We sat like statues – the last vestiges of a Victorian respect and dread of death. Grandma’s breathing droned on and everyone spoke in whispers. I watched the light on the windowpanes and noted the dark, dancing spots you get when you concentrate for a long time. I was intrigued by the patterns formed by pressing on my eyeball and wished that I could produce paintings to show this ‘inner eye’.

One day I went to use the outside privy, instead of returning to the mausoleum I decided to walk home. I was aged six and the distance was about one and half miles. To my amazement there was no one at home. Fortunately my neighbour took pity on me and fed me treacle sandwiches.

Food has always played a big part in my life – too big a one some might say. As a toddler I was often lost amongst the rows of peas, in our vegetable garden, searching for green gold. My father was a keen gardener who designed a magnificent vegetable and fruit garden.

At the top end of the garden we kept some ‘Light Sussex’ hens. They were good layers. They provided occasional Sunday dinners. In winter their foul-smelling meal was cooked for hours. It seemed like a combination of turnips and wallpaper paste. When I was ten years old my brother and I were told to kill the remaining birds. What a dilemma! We didn’t know whether to pull and twist or twist and pull their necks. We sought refuge with the local butcher who completed the job for us.

When I was older ‘potato picking week’ in October presented opportunities for earning money and to bring home damaged produce at the end of each day. A whole week was spent scavenging the earth and loading potatoes in huge sacks. At each day’s end the farmer’s wife used to pay us out at 1d a sack. One day, to my great consternation, I dropped my money in one of the sacks and we had to tip all the potatoes out. The images of potatoes and earth were so strong that I used to dream about them every night.

My father and his brother worked part-time on their small holding and part-time at the colliery during the 1920’s. After the war his brother chose farming whilst my father became an engineer at the pit.

Three shifts were worked. My brother and I used to take a meal in a basket covered by a red and white tea towel. It was often meat and potato pie and smelled wonderful. There were no health and safety regulations and we used to go right into the winding engine room. A smell of oil hung in the air and there were many brass implements with clocks and gauges. A continuous noise like an old man with severe breathing difficulties turned out to be the pump that sent fresh air down one of the ventilation shafts. The warm foetid air returned in a series of burps.

My father was responsible for all the machinery and the safe negotiation of the cage that transported colliers down to the work seams. At a neighbouring pit, in 1947, more than fifty colliers died in explosion.

Napoleon claimed that religion was the cement of the social order. Thornhill was well catered for having five chapels and two churches. The Catholics were served, beyond the pale, in a neighbouring village.

The Primitive Methodists had ‘lay’ preachers and therefore out of the control of the more moderate Methodist circuit. Consequently there was plenty of hell-fire and damnation. Strident voices echoed in every corner of the chapel. I felt wary of God. It was difficult to reconcile all this with the Beatitudes. I could not understand how He could be such a tyrant yet have a loving and forgiving Son.

I participated in the usual rites of passage, nibbling apples destined for Harvest Festival, Christmas Concerts and Whitsuntide Parades. At about the age of twelve I raised my head above the parapet and started to question eventually making a unilateral decision. I WOULD STOP GOING TO SUNDAY SCHOOL. This was not an easy decision as discussion was impossible.

Three of us decided to go AWOL. We set off and returned at the appointed times but spent several delightful Sunday mornings exploring the local woods and meadows being careful to keep fairly clean in our Sunday best. Collection money posed a problem that was solved by the purchase of thirst-quenching lemonade from a local farm. Four weeks later the bomb dropped.

‘Mrs Cod told Auntie Ethel you haven’t been going to Sunday School’.

New horizons took me beyond my village, first of all to a school in Dewsbury and then to college in Lancashire. I returned to Thornhill and taught for nine years at the Junior School that had metamorphosed into a First and Middle School. Like the lame man in the Bible the school had also taken its stick and walked to the old Secondary Modern building. These were not the only changes. Thornhill seemed much smaller in spite of the population that had trebled.