Open Writing

This time of year always puts me in mind of 1961, the year I arrived in Yorkshire as a student at Leeds University. These days people of 18 think nothing of going to Australia or Thailand, but for me the culture shock of moving from my Birkenhead Welsh chapel roots to Yorkshire seemed just as great!

I had visited London and I had been on a two-week German Exchange when I was at school. Holidays had always been in North Wales, most often with relatives who still lived there. But this was different. This was to be living in a strange place. My mother said that she had heard that Yorkshire people were very clean and that some of those terraced houses were like little palaces inside.

Armed with this knowledge, I set off one Saturday in September to view the lodgings or ‘digs’ to which I had been assigned. The journey seemed like an Odyssey. Bus to Woodside Station for the underground train to Liverpool Central. Then the train from Lime Street to Leeds City. The Pennines might have been the Rockies or the Alps for all the novelty of the landscapes I passed through.

In City Square I asked a policeman how to get to Headingley – you could do that in those days. He pointed me towards the green double-decker bus. This couldn’t be right; the double-decker buses I knew were bright blue. The bus conductor – they had them in those days – put me off at Shaw Lane.

The address I had was 17 Moor Park Villas, which put me in mind of a large Victorian or Edwardian house set back from the road, of the kind that lined Shaw Lane, but at the end of that I found that Moor Park Villas was a cull-de-sac of probably 1930’s semis.

I was amused to discover a Leeds style of street-naming which went thus: Moor Park Villas, Moor Park Road - Avenue, Drive, Grove, View etc. In some parts of Leeds this went on to Back Moor Park something as well. At least you knew that if you found one, the others would be nearby.

The beginning of October saw me installed as a student, and I cannot believe how homesick I was. My parents didn’t have a phone so our communication was by weekly letter – mine (and theirs) written after lunch on Sunday. My younger brothers and sisters usually added bits or drawings, which added to my homesick pangs when I read them.

Sometimes I would receive a letter card from my grandfather (I was his favourite grandchild) and he would, against instructions on the card, include a ten shilling note. He was so proud of my letters back that he would show them to other family members, and years later they told me that he would have scraped ‘10/ - note’ away with his penknife and would have written ‘stamps’ in a different coloured ink! He also used to send me rolled-up copies of The Birkenhead News.

My digs mates were always jealous when I received at least one neat blue Basildon Bond envelope every Monday at breakfast.

One evening I rang my Auntie En but left the phone box in tears as soon as I heard her beloved but on-so-distant, ‘Hello, love.’

Walking back to the digs in the evening as the nights drew in and the leaves began to fall and lights would be coming on in other people’s houses, plus a feeling of not quite knowing how things worked at university, all gave me what I suppose was a mild depression that autumn, a mixture of nostalgia, unfamiliarity and nervousness.

Lying in bed at night I missed the familiar sound of seagulls and the foghorns on the Mersey, and on each bus journey that involved going up a hill I was still disappointed that we didn’t see the sea when we got to the top.

Another layer of difference at that time was having a landlady instead of a mother. We were more than lucky with Mrs. Borrill though, a very Scottish lady, ‘from Dundee, dearie,’ whose response to any mild disaster was always, ‘Och, worse things have happened at sea!’ Her braised steak was to-die-for, and I can still taste the tinned salmon, tomatoes and chips we had for Saturday tea.

Come Novermber 5th I was feeling better enough to buy large packets of sparklers, and we four students danced around the garden of 17 Moor Park Villas waving them, which encouraged the family who lived in Moor Park Avenue, Grove, Drive, etc, whose garden backed on to ours to come out and wave theirs as well.

And when the mother said afterwards, ‘That were grand’, I think I began to feel at last that perhaps I could become at home in Yorkshire. I’m still here 44 years later.