Everyman's England (4 page)

And the other thing? It is that abortive garment, the product of class-consciousness and the able supporter of many a comedian's gags, the dickey. In a shop in one of Halifax's main streets I saw dickies for sale – with collars attached, and I remembered at once red-nosed comedians with straw-coloured hair raising roars of laughter as their white dickey fronts came adrift from their waistcoats at awkward moments to smack them heartily across the face. And now, even on the stage, the dickey is dying the death forced upon it by those who once favoured it. I cannot imagine that there are many waiters who still wear dickeys, and as a source of comedy it seems to have outlived its day.

CHAPTER 4

There are two Yorkshires; one the county of woollen mills, sprawling industrial towns, smoking chimneys, polluted streams and cobbled streets, and the other, the county of wide moors, of fertile valleys, pleasant seaside resorts, and broad acres of daleland where the wanderer from the crowded cities can find peace and consolation for a life of febrile toil in the loneliness of a skyline that rims the world for miles, and in the long sweeps of valley dipping to the slow ribbon of a river.

That was the advice of William Morris, a man born out of his age, and it is good and easy advice to take in Yorkshire or any other county, for no town spreads so far that it is impossible to shake free from it and the greatest pall of smoke cannot live against the winds that sweep over moorland scarps.

There are some towns and counties which are only at their best during certain parts of the year. The Holland district of Lincolnshire should, I think, be seen first of all at tulip time, when the fields are a pattern of colours brighter than any carpet that ever came from Hamadan, and the Fens when the corn is ripening and the beet waves its luscious leaves in a moving sea-green panoply. Somerset is a county of autumn, when the Quantocks smoulder with the turning bracken and the royal hues of gorse and heath, and Cornwall is of high summer with tall yellow and purple mullein spikes in the hedges and the sea a blue which blazes to silver as the eye travels towards the horizon.

I am not a Yorkshireman. If anyone jingles a bridle over my grave when I am dead I shall not arise to go horse-stealing, and probably many Yorkshiremen will want to correct me when I say that I think the best time of the year to visit the Pennines and the dale country is in those cold months at the beginning of the year when only the snowdrop has dared to show its petals and the windflowers and ‘the host of spring flowers still sleep deep in the earth'. But I hold to my opinion. No doubt, because it was so when I first saw the dales. First impressions not only last; they are loveliest and their freshness never fades. January is the time to wander away from the huddle of towns into the clear air and the steel-bright landscapes of the dales. It is walking weather and man's weather.

There is something in the sweep of grey crags and the brown folds of upland pastures that is intensified by frosty days and given an austerity that is lacking on the warmer, softer days of summer. The dales reserve their full charm for those who have the courage to seek them in the winter.

Nearly all the dale rivers have preserved their beauty, and escaped the encroaching ugliness and the despoliation which follow hard upon the heels of wide roads and factories. Rivers, apart from their natural function of drainage, have been chained by man to work his utilities, they give him power and cleanse his wools and do a hundred other labours for which they get no thanks and much abuse. This is inevitable, but I do think that the rivers which have brought affluence and importance to towns should be accorded some mark of respect and thanks, though these be only symbolical. Once a year the Lord Mayor of Leeds should drive in state to one of the bridges over the Aire. There should be ceremonies made and a speech of thanks read to the river, and then with his own hands the Lord Mayor should pour into the stream, from a golden chalice, a libation of rich brown ale. Afterwards, from the hand of the fairest maiden in the city, should be dropped a bouquet of flowers to adorn the bosom of the waters, to drift seawards to commemorate the pride and gratitude of the townsfolk towards the river. At the least it would give the newspapers material to enliven our breakfast tables, and the newsreel cameras pictures to fill up those few dull minutes before the chief film begins.

I doubt whether a quart of nut-brown, or a handful of roses, could compensate Father Aire for his sufferings. Yet even if the river is spoiled for most of its length, it still has some beauty, and nothing can belittle the grandeur and surprise which mark its birth at the foot of Malham Cove. An abrupt wall of limestone rock stands like a barrier at the end of the Aire valley and from its base bubbles up the young stream, freed from the dark channels and mysterious passages of the earth, to pour away into the sunlight on a new venture – a venture which soon loses its splendour as the stream grows in girth and passes Bingley and Shipley. But if the Airedale is doomed, the others remain, and of these, I think, the most beautiful are Wensleydale and Wharfedale, and it was to Wharfedale that I first came on a day not long after Christmas.

It was a day when, although the sun had a surprising warmth, there was hoar frost in the shadow of the walls and the trees, and the grass crisped beneath my feet as I walked. From the hollows under the topmost crags there came the gleam of snow. I entered Wharfedale by Bolton Abbey, a ruin around which thousands of tourists have dutifully walked, comprehending little and making gentle, insincere gestures of awe and wonder. Most guidebooks are careful to explain that the Abbey was built by one Alice de Meschines, in 1511, as a memorial to a son who was drowned in the Strid while hunting, and then carefully explain that this cannot be true, because the son's signature appears on a charter which allowed the monks of the Abbey to receive the manor of Bolton in exchange for other concessions. If the legend has been disproved, why bother about it? It would be wiser to omit the damning proof and let us enjoy the fiction. But the writers of official guidebooks are sticklers for truth, and unpractised in the art of falsehoods. And, unless you happen to be a student of architecture, I cannot imagine that you will be interested to know that you must note there is a large, plain, circular-headed recess, high up at W. of S. wall, in connection with a narrow wall passage, for which there is no apparent reason, or that there are two fragments of a limestone slab, with indents – one for garter, and three curvilinear windows N. of aisle, in the Abbey ruin.

By the time you have worked out which is W. of S. wall and have stared at the wrong thing you will probably have a headache and a crook in your neck and wish that you could hurl one of the slabs of limestone, with indents, at the head of the writer, or push him through any kind of window, French or curvilinear. That the Abbey has beauty and once had even greater beauty is undeniable, but to have to waste a fine afternoon searching for corbels and reliquaries when you could go and sit by the river and eat your sandwiches while you speculated as to how the monks lived, whether they fished from the spot where you are sitting and whether they were such a drunken lot of merry tipplers as history reputes, is an imposition which I resent. The architectural technicalities are useful. There should also be some information for the ignorant, unenlightened being like myself who is aware that the monks who inhabited these places were alive and that the masons who carved the gargoyles and capitals were probably as cheerful and fond of their joke as the masons who walk any modern scaffolding.

I stood on the spur which overlooks the river just above the Abbey. Below me the river swirled over its boulder-strewn bed, dark and deep on the outside of the curve and frothed with rapids where it broke away over the shallows by the far bank.

All around was the silence of the fells, their bottom slopes cut into fields and the crests broken in places by black patches of firs. Farther up the valley the ridge of the hills stretched in an unbroken line against the pale grey sky with moving puffs of cloud above them. Between the black trunks of the trees I could see the weathered skeleton of the Abbey, surrounded by its green walks and lichened gravestones. The autumn colours had long gone from all the trees except the beeches to which still clung a few rags of brown leaf. It seemed impossible that these bare twigs and branches would, in a few months, be bursting into green and that even now the tight buds were moving imperceptibly to the swelling sap.

As I watched the river, I heard the quick whistle of a curlew and then a heron rose from one of the thin spits of golden sand that lay along its banks and with heavy wings flapped away upstream. I wondered how much damage the bird did to the fishing, for they are voracious feeders, and then I decided to follow its lead and go upstream.

The decision was a fortunate one. If anyone imagines that the English countryside is no more, and that there are now no places where it is possible to feel cut off entirely from the hum of cities and the ringing of telephone bells, let him follow the road which runs up the Wharfedale from Bolton Abbey, by Barden Bridge and Grassington and so to Kilnsey. I do not know the exact distance, perhaps eight miles, but there can be found no such eight miles anywhere else in England. The same might be said of many stretches of eight miles, that they are unique. How many such stretches would anyone want to travel again?

The road runs up and down the cliffs and scarps which overhang the river, and although at times dark woods hide the road and twisting hills seem to take you away from the river, it is never far distant. There is a variety of scenery, difficult to match. The broad valley pastures are cut by the winding river into curved jigsaw pieces, and the rising slopes of the fells that look down into the valleys are sometimes gentle and green, and sometimes steep and broken with the grey outcrops of limestone crag.

Now and then the road crosses the river by little bridges over which it is a crime to hurry, for such parapets were made to cushion stomachs as you look into the swift flow of brown water and watch for the glint of trout and grayling.

Anyone who can cross a Wharfedale bridge without wanting to stop and look over has little hope of discovering the real charm of this upland dale, where, as the innkeeper at Kilnsey told me, it is no uncommon thing for villages to be cut off from the world by snowdrifts for days at a time.

You should not miss that inn at Kilnsey. Its name, if I remember correctly, is the Kilnsey Arms, but it should be easy to find for it is the only one there. It faces the hurrying Wharfe, while behind it rises the sheer grey precipice of Kilnsey Crag, which reminded me for a moment of the cliffs at Cheddar. The building is unpretentious. Inside it is full of good things, and not the least is the conversation of the landlord and the men who sit in the chairs about the fire.

The room was empty, save for the landlord standing behind his curved bar, when I entered. I knew I had found a place of good cheer from the chairs. They were old, well-worn and had that comfortable look of belonging to a place, and I guessed that the men who had worn them to such a shine on the arms must be as interesting as the chairs looked. No one could sit in that bar and be out of temper for long. I sat there listening to the laughing landlord who, although he was not born a Yorkshire man, loves the county as much as the dalesmen who came into the bar, clapping their hands from the cold wind, and filling the room with gusts of talk and laughter and the fresh, bustling spirit of the dales.

I learned a great deal there about the ways of dalesmen and their love of their sheep and dogs before the landlord called me to my lunch which had been set in another room. At that time of year the hills were deserted of sheep for they had been taken down from the dales into the flat plain of eastern Yorkshire to feed on the richer pastures. There they stop until just before April, when they are brought back to the dales again for the lambing.

At the time of the annual exodus to the lowlands in September the roads are packed tightly with bleating flocks of sheep, barking dogs and sturdy drovers. If the ewes are kept on the fells the whole year round some deficiency in the feed causes their milk to dry up when the lambs come. To prevent this they are removed from the hills as soon as they have been served, or ‘tupped' as the dales men call it. There is little rest for the dales men when the lambs come.

Shepherding is not the idyllic occupation suggested by some biblical illustrations. The shepherd has more to do than sit upon a hummock counting his sheep and occasionally going to search for straying lambs. Sheep have no great resistance to disease and a ewe may die suddenly behind some rock leaving two lambs to bleat for milk. Orphans have to be put to other ewes, and some ewes do not take kindly to orphans. When the lambs are old enough they have to be tailed, then there is the foot-rot and, with the warmer weather, the fly to watch, and then shearing… A summer's day for a shepherd is no lying in the grass watching the clouds and chewing a straw. He must for ever have his eyes on the flock, watching for that nervous movement which tells of a ewe with fly… and if you have ever seen a fleece working with fat white maggots, you will realise that it is no job for a squeamish man.

It was at this inn that I got, for a ridiculously small sum, a lunch which more than ever endeared me to Wharfedale, for after a man has had a morning full of beauty there is no better cap to it than a lunch which in itself is a thing of beauty. There was a rich, dark soup which was not only hot but full of the flavour of vegetables, then turkey with thyme and parsley stuffing, roast potatoes, Brussels sprouts, a fruit tart with a crust it was a shame to break and a joy to eat, a portion of Wensleydale cheese and a cup of as good a coffee as you could expect in England. I found it did not do to encourage the landlord's tabby with titbits. It misconstrued my lamentable kindness and leaped to the table to feed direct from the plate!