Out of the Woods But Not Over the Hill Page 16

  Now, as I reach pensionable age, and have visited many parts of Britain and a goodly number of foreign places over the years, it is the dales and the moors of North Yorkshire which still hold for me an enduring fascination.

  A Language of its Own

  When I sent the manuscript of my memoir to my London editor, she returned it with several words ringed. She had written in the margins: ‘What does this word mean?’ I assumed that everyone knew what ‘mardy’ meant, despite the fact that it does not feature in the computer thesaurus. It is such an expressive word for that sort of whining, sulky, spoilt child (‘with a face like a smacked bottom,’ as my grandmother would say) and was so well used when I was a youngster that I assumed everyone knows and uses it. ‘The sight of the steam train on its journey from Settle to Carlisle, clickerty clacking down the line,’ I wrote, ‘puthering sulphurous smoke and smut and sounding the shrieking whistle reminds me of the heady childhood days.’ Here was my editor again with her pencil. ‘Puthering?’ Then she got to ‘crozzled’ and ‘sprag’ and ‘wammy’.

  Yorkshire dialect is full of the most vivid and unusual words, intriguing examples of how English continues to be the most quirky language in the world. Three colourful examples are ‘stridewallop’, a term for a tall and awkward woman, ‘shot clod’, which describes a drinking companion only tolerated because he pays for the drinks, and ‘crambazzled’, used to describe someone who is prematurely aged through drink and a dissolute life. I had never come across the words ‘fornale’ (to spend one’s money before it has been earned), ‘cagg’ (a solemn vow to abstain from strong liquor for a period of time) and ‘petrichor’ (the agreeable smell in the air after a rain shower) until I met the professor of linguistics who introduced me at a conference. He had heard of all three, and many more. He was a self confessed ‘bowerbird’ – someone who accumulates an amazing collection of quite useless objects.

  When, as a school inspector, I visited Upper Nidderdale High School for the first time, I sat with a young man, looking through his work. It was wonderfully descriptive and entertaining, but I stopped at a word he had used and I had never come across before. I asked him what he meant. A slight smile came to the boy’s lips and his expression took on that of the expert in the presence of an ignoramus – a sort of patient, sympathetic, tolerant look. He had written in his account that his father, a farmer, had arrived home on the Friday night, after a really tough week, thoroughly exhausted. He used another colourful word for ‘thoroughly exhausted’ which I will not repeat, but I am sure it is one with which you are familiar. However, the boy had written: ‘My dad came in from the fields, flopped on the settee and said, “I’m fair riggwelted.” ’ He explained: ‘It’s a word which describes a yow when she’s heavily pregnant, so heavy you see, she falls over on her back and just can’t move, she’s helpless. Sticks her legs in the air and just can’t shift. It’s called “rigged”, proper word is “riggwelted”.’

  Some weeks later, I was speaking at the North of England Conference in York. A Minister of Education enquired of me how the teachers were coping with the recent changes in the National Curriculum. I smiled and just could not resist. ‘They are feeling “fair riggwelted”,’ I replied.

  Afternoon Tea

  An American friend of mine stayed with me for a couple of days over the summer. I met Bill when I was lecturing in Vancouver at an international education conference, and invited him to stay should he ever visit these shores, stressing that the place to see in England was not London but Yorkshire.

  Bill was en route from the capital to a conference on contemporary English literature in Durham, so broke his journey in God’s own country. He was very keen to see something that was typically British, and had heard about the tradition of afternoon tea. There was only one place to take him: Bettys Tea Rooms in Harrogate.

  To say my colleague was impressed by the interior was something of an understatement. He stood and stared at the opulence of the surroundings: light brown leather banquettes, burnished brass handrails, elegant easy chairs and carefully arranged centrepieces on each sparkling table. The café was very busy, but Bill espied a couple of vacant seats. Before I could stop him, he approached two elegant elderly ladies, let’s call them Myriam and Joyce, taking afternoon tea in a quiet corner. One was considering the selection of dainty finger sandwiches and miniature cakes displayed on the tiered stand, the other pouring tea from a silver-plated pot into a Royal Doulton china teacup.

  ‘May we join you?’ asked Bill, amiably.

  The women gave him looks that would curdle milk.

  ‘Certainly not!’ they snapped in unison.

  ‘One has one’s own table at Bettys,’ the more formidable of the two informed him, frostily.

  ‘And you have to wait to be seated,’ added the other, screwing up her mouth.

  A moment later, a smiling young waitress, in a pristine white blouse with the Bettys logo emblazoned in red on the front, escorted us to the adjacent table.

  It was then that I lost my colleague, who eavesdropped on the conversation between the two ladies. ‘Tell me, Gervase,’ he whispered after a while, ‘is this rehearsed?’ I listened in too. I had to admit it was fascinating.

  ‘Do you know, Myriam,’ said the formidable one, who bore a remarkable resemblance to, and sounded very much like, Dame Edith Evans playing Lady Bracknell, ‘I was up and down those steps like a shuttlecock.’ I guess she meant yo-yo. ‘If I vomited once, I vomited five times.’ Her companion nodded and made a little sympathetic noise but she didn’t interrupt the monologue. ‘Of course, Sidney would insist on coming back via Cherbourg. He’s that stubborn. We always come back via St Malo but, oh no, he thought best and we set off from Cherbourg, against my better judgement I might add. The sea was mountainous, the ship rolling and rollicking. Up and down, up and down it went, like a fiddler’s elbow. I was closeted in the ladies’ lavatory, heaving and splashing, the sea was outside, heaving and splashing, and where was Sidney?’ I was tempted to ask where he was too. ‘I’ll tell you where he was,’ continued the woman, now well into her stride, ‘he was in the restaurant with a French bap, a lump of Camembert and a half a bottle of red wine. Static. If he’d have been on the Titanic he wouldn’t have shifted his backside. “Bit on the rough side,” he says to me, when he did finally emerge. I could have crowned him. It was horrendous.’ She paused to select a sandwich before adding: ‘I’ve never been so glad in my life to get my feet back on terra cotta.’

  ‘Gervase,’ asked Bill, after the women had departed, ‘does your Alan Bennett come here for his material?’

  The Great Yorkshire Eccentric

  On a recent visit to South America, Christine and I took an aerial tram through the rain forest and saw the most amazing variety of vegetation and animal life: towering trees which grow five metres a year, blood-red tree frogs, shimmering blue butterflies, sloths and snakes and strange reptiles. The guide, a professor of ecology, asked me where in England I came from. When I told him Yorkshire, his eyes lit up.

  ‘Yorkshire!’ he cried. ‘The home of the great Charles Waterton.’

  I was then informed that Waterton inspired Charles Darwin and many other scientists, and was England’s first eco-campaigner, an outspoken pioneer and conservationist, a passionate man who despised the destruction of the natural environment, especially when wilfully done. He is considered a visionary to environmentalists throughout the world.

  Embarrassed, I had to admit that I had never heard of the said gentleman.

  Back home, I undertook a little research. Born at Walton Hall in Wakefield, in 1782, ‘Squire’ Waterton travelled widely, exploring remote areas in the world and recording his observations and discoveries in wonderful detail. In 1825, he published a travelogue, Wanderings in South America, which became an instant bestseller. His love of animals, and of the natural beauty of the tropical rainforest, fills every page.

  It was Charles Waterton who created England’s first wildfowl and nature reserve, erect
ing a nine-foot-high wall around three miles of his estate at a cost of £6,000, which was a considerable sum of money in those days. He fought a long-running and ultimately successful case against the owners of a soapworks. The factory, built close to his estate, exuded toxic chemicals, causing widespread pollution.

  In his lifetime, Waterton was on the edge of social exclusion; he was an odd character, one of the world’s great eccentrics, of striking appearance and with an anarchic sense of humour. He had his hair cut short when the fashion was to have a full head of hair, he devised a new method of preserving animals, using them to create unusual tableaux, he climbed St Peter’s in Rome and left his gloves on the top of the lightning conductor and he jumped on the back of a cayman and rode it like a horse. Waterton didn’t care what others thought of him or how crackpot they thought his opinions. Edith Sitwell, a biographer of English eccentrics, concluded he was an extremely happy man. ‘Few of us,’ she wrote, ‘are so full of life, love, curiosity and plain joy.’ I guess he would have made a splendid teacher.

  I have to admit that when I visited schools as an inspector, I always had a soft spot for the teacher who was a little bit out of the ordinary. Some, of course, would say that there is no room in education for the eccentric teacher. I would disagree. Thinking of my own schooldays, it was the teachers who were idiosyncratic, and who did not always follow the various directives, who made the greatest impression upon me. In a rather gloomy and violent world, there is room for the Charles Watertons, for eccentrics, in my experience, brighten our lives; they are less inhibited and more imaginative and are often disarmingly childlike in their approach to life than we ‘ordinary’ folk. And, after all, there is a pantheon of men and women – Isaac Newton, Mary Ward, Elizabeth Fry, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, William Blake, Charles Darwin, Winston Churchill, Barnes Wallis, Lewis Carroll and many more – who were labelled outspoken, non-conformist and eccentric during their lifetimes, and who have gone on to be viewed by later generations as monumental people, gifted with originality and vision.

  Drama Off-Stage

  My wife and I are regulars at the theatre; we enjoy the variety of events staged there, love the intimate atmosphere and like watching the reactions of other playgoers.

  One memorable performance at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield was of Edward II, Christopher Marlowe’s greatest tragedy. Christine and I had just settled down comfortably, in the middle of row B, when an elderly man informed us that we were in the wrong seats. We compared tickets to discover that he and his companion (a diminutive woman, who observed proceedings from the aisle with a tragic expression on her face) were in the row behind. There was no apology, just a sort of snort from the man and an impatient tut-tut from the woman.

  I knew, when the couple who were now directly behind me, started discussing what they were about to see, that I was destined for an ‘interesting’ evening.

  ‘What’s it about?’ asked the woman of her companion, who, I guessed, judging by the noise of pages turning, was flicking through the programme.

  ‘It’s historical,’ he told her without further elaboration.

  ‘Is it a musical?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I thought it was a musical.’

  ‘It’s like Shakespeare,’ the man told her.

  ‘I thought it was a musical about Edward and Mrs Simpson.’

  ‘No, that’s another Edward.’

  ‘I shan’t like it.’

  ‘Well, we’re not paying for t’seats are we, and it were a pity to let ’em go to waste,’ he told her in true Yorkshire fashion. ‘We can always leave at t’interval if we don’t like it.’

  ‘I shan’t like it,’ repeated the woman.

  ‘Shurrup moaning,’ he told her.

  Then the conversation turned to other, rather more mundane, matters. First, it was the sweets they had bought.

  ‘Do you want an Opal Fruit,’ asked the woman, ‘or a Werther’s Original?’

  ‘I’ll have an Opal Fruit,’ said the man.

  ‘What flavour?’

  ‘Lemon.’

  There was a rustling of a bag, accompanied a moment later by a variety of sucking sounds.

  ‘Did you put the cat out?’ asked the woman.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And lock the back gate?’

  ‘Yes.’

  And so it went on, until the play began.

  Edward II has some pretty brutal parts in it, the most violent and shocking being the murder of the king when a red-hot poker is inserted in a rather intimate part of his anatomy. Screams and shrieks filled the theatre as the king writhed and flailed under his murderers’ hands. This was followed by a deathly silence as his body flopped back dead.

  The voice of the woman behind me could be heard quite distinctly.

  ‘And I only hope the dog’s not been sick in the car.’

  How Much?

  I have heard it said that the Yorkshireman’s war-cry is: ‘How much?’ On our recent holiday in France, I used this well-worn phrase so many times that Christine, my long-suffering wife, started to total them up. It started at East Midlands Airport. The flight to Nice on easyJet was a reasonable £152.78 for the both of us. When we checked in at the airport we were told that it would cost a further £64 for the two small cases we were taking.

  ‘How much?’ I exclaimed.

  ‘And,’ added the smiling young woman at the check-in counter, ‘just to let you know, all refreshments on the plane must be paid for.’

  Then we got to France. We took a taxi from Nice to Vence, where we were staying, which is some fifteen miles away.

  ‘Soixante euros,’ said the lugubrious-looking taxi driver, when we arrived at our destination.

  ‘C’est combien?’ I exclaimed.

  He shrugged. ‘Service non compris,’ he added.

  ‘Sixty euros and a tip on top!’ I cried. ‘We’ll be going back on the bus.’

  In the pâtisserie the next day, I peered into the display cabinet at the delicious-looking pastries and flans. The apple tart cost 22 euros.

  ‘C’est combien?’ I exclaimed again.

  The assistant shrugged.

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you this, Christine,’ I said, ‘we’ll not be eating cakes.’

  ‘I wish you would enter the holiday spirit,’ chided my wife later, as we wandered around the supermarket.

  ‘What, with these prices?’ I grumbled, pointing to a shelf. ‘Even the wine is dearer than in England.’

  ‘Not everything’s dearer,’ the English woman behind me vouchsafed. ‘Cotton buds are cheaper in France.’

  It is not that Yorkshire folk are parsimonious. It is just that we like value for our money. We are thrifty, prudent, economical people and there is no way we would pay £20 for an apple pie.

  A friend told me the story (clearly a tall tale, but worth repeating) of the Yorkshireman who went to place an ‘In memoriam’ notice in the Yorkshire Post, following the death of his wife. The couple had been happily married for fifty years.

  When informed of the cost by the woman at the desk, the man uttered, in true Yorkshire fashion: ‘How much?’

  Shaking his head, he reluctantly produced his wallet. ‘I want summat simple,’ he explained. ‘My Gladys was a plain, good-hearted and hard-working Yorkshire lass, but she wunt ’ave wanted owt swanky.’

  ‘Perhaps a small poem,’ suggested the woman at the desk.

  ‘Nay,’ said the man, ‘she wunt ’ave wanted anything la-di-da. Just put in: “Gladys Braithwaite’s died”.’

  ‘You need to say when,’ he was told by the receptionist taking his order.

  ‘Do I? Well, put “died 17th March, 2008”. That’ll do.’

  ‘It is usual for the bereaved to add some meaningful phrase,’ said the woman. ‘Something tender and heartfelt about the dearly departed.’

  The man considered for a moment. ‘Well, put in “Sadly missed”. That’ll do,’ he said.

  ‘You can have another four words,’ the woman at t
he desk explained.

  ‘No, no!’ cried the man. ‘She wouldn’t ’ave wanted me to splash out.’

  ‘The words are included in the price,’ the woman informed him.

  ‘Are they?’ The man raised an eyebrow. ‘You mean I’ve paid for ’em.’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ replied the woman.

  ‘Well, if I’ve paid for ’em,’ exclaimed the man, ‘I’m ’avin’ ’em!’

  The obituary was duly printed:

  Gladys Braithwaite. Died 17th March, 2008.

  Sadly missed. Also tractor for sale.

  Christine and I didn’t bring much back from France: a couple of bottles of wine, a wedge of Camembert, some ground coffee and a mug. We did, however, stock up on enough cotton buds to last us for the next forty years.

  Conversation in the Country Inn

  I don’t spend a great deal of time in country inns but, some years ago, I had a memorable evening listening to a Dales’ farmer in The Black Bull entertaining his two companions. I was inspecting a school near Settle that week and, having finished my report that evening, went down for a well-deserved pint.