Out of the Woods But Not Over the Hill (22 page)

‘No, not really.'

‘Are you eating?'

‘Yes, but the food in here's not good,' she complained.

‘And are you regular?' I asked mischievously.

‘Yes, I'm all right in that department.'

‘Well, I'm very glad to hear it,' I said, smiling warmly. I turned to go.

‘Is that it?' she demanded.

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘Aren't you going to examine me?' she asked sharply.

‘No, I'm afraid not.'

‘Well, you are a doctor, aren't you?' she asked.

‘Yes indeed,' I replied, ‘but I'm a doctor of letters, not of medicine. Good morning.'

I left an acutely embarrassed daughter, a chuckling elderly patient with a replaced hip and the woman in question open-mouthed and, for once in her life, lost for words.

A Present for Christmas

‘Bah! Humbug!' exclaimed Dominic, when I informed him that I would not want any presents on a recent Christmas. It is not that I am a Christmas killjoy; I love the festive season and most of the things it brings with it, but I honestly do not need any presents.

‘Buy a cow for Africa,' I told my son, ‘or make a donation to the donkey sanctuary.'

You see, I have all I need. I want for nothing. I certainly do not require any more socks or scarves, shirts or cardigans, ties or underpants. I prefer to buy such items myself and do so in the January sales when everything is half the price. Invariably, any Christmas offerings of this kind which I receive end up in an Oxfam shop in the New Year.

At one time, I did like to receive a bottle of single malt for Christmas but my daughter put a stop to that. Elizabeth is a research psychologist at Newcastle University, looking into effects of alcohol on intelligence. She used to talk to her father but now she tends to observe me as if I am a case study. A week after her taking up the post I found bottles of wine had mysteriously disappeared. Lizzie watches me eagle-eyed if I so much as look in the direction of a decanter.

I only buy one Christmas present – for my wife. The children are quite content with cheques. Each year, I ask Christine what she would like. Each year, it is the same response: ‘Surprise me.' I once considered jumping out from behind the Christmas tree, wearing only a fake leopardskin thong and with ‘LOVE' and ‘HATE' tattooed on my knuckles. That would have surprised her and no mistake. In the past, Christine has received bags she never uses, CDs she never plays, chocolates she never consumes and jewellery she never wears. She is very gracious on opening the presents, and declares with great enthusiasm that the gift is lovely and one she really wanted. Then it is returned to the box and doesn't see the light of day again.

One year, I did surprise her – and every member of the assembled family as well. A colleague in the office at Harrogate enquired what I had bought for my wife that Christmas.

‘A very nice rope of pearls,' I informed him

‘Pearls!' he snorted. ‘Pearls! That's what old women wear.' Then the expert on the psychology of women informed me that: ‘When women get older they still want to feel attractive and desirable. You need to get her a bottle of expensive perfume, an emerald ring, an outrageous bouquet of winter roses or a sexy negligee.'

I was prevailed upon to accompany this colleague to an exclusive ladies' shop in Harrogate, and to buy some skimpy red silk underwear.

On Christmas morning, with all the family gathered in the lounge, Christine opened her present and held up the contents. It was as if she had been poked with a cattle prod. Our four children turned the colour of the underwear.

My sainted mother, sitting in the armchair by the fire, shook her head, sighed wearily and told my wife: ‘Put them away, Christine. His father went through that stage.'

This year I settled for a flat-screen television set.

Backward Reader

I was once asked, by a large educational supplier, to compile a book catalogue for schools, to recommend a wide range of reading material for teachers to use with infants. I was to write a short paragraph on each text. Over six months, I had the most wonderful time, reading more than 500 picture books and early readers. During the summer, while my wife Christine took Maeve Binchy and Sebastian Faulks, Dick Francis and Deric Longden on holiday to Majorca with her to read, I packed fifty or so large, bright picture books.

I would get up early – so early that I was always the first to the sun beds – take a glass of orange with me and relax around the hotel pool before anyone else had stirred, reviewing the early readers. Each morning Jose, the pool cleaner, would pass me as I read
Stories for the Very Young
or
Early Nursery Rhymes
, and greet me with ‘Ola!' to which I would reply ‘Ola.' He was not at all interested in my reading matter.

At about seven-thirty, a large, bleary-eyed individual in a white towelling dressing gown would flip-flop past me and reserve the four sun beds next to mine with towels, magazines, parasols, sun-tan lotions, cold creams, lilos and an inflatable dinghy, and then he would disappear until a couple of hours later, when he would re-emerge with his wife, his sullen-faced daughter, let's call her Tracey-Jo, and a large, aggressive-looking son, who we'll call Duane. There was the whole of the poolside to choose from but he picked the spot next to me. He would recline there for the day, gradually taking on the colour of a boiled lobster. On the fifth day, he spoke to me. I was at that time reading a delightful book all parents of young children should read. The cover depicts a large happy rabbit bouncing across the page and has the title
Read to your Bunny
.

‘'Appen you'll get onto t'big books one day, then,' he said, grinning inanely.

‘I'm sorry?' I said, looking up.

He gestured at the picture book with a fleshy hand. ‘I said, 'appen you'll get onto t'big books one day.'

‘I have problems with my reading,' I informed him seriously.

The smile disappeared and was replaced by an expression of some discomfort.

‘Oh, I see,' he said. Clearly embarrassed, he rose from the sun bed and flip-flopped off to have a swim.

‘I don't know why you do that,' said Christine, looking up from her novel and shaking her head. ‘People will start believing you.'

‘Well, if I had got problems with my reading,' I replied, ‘the last thing I would want would be to hear that sort of comment.'

Later that morning, Duane approached. He was a large young man embellished with various silver studs and rings. He clutched a pint of lager, which he then placed in front of me.

‘Mi dad's sent this,' he said, articulating every word. I felt awful. ‘He says he's sorry for what he said.' I felt worse. Christine sighed and tut-tutted. Then the lad turned to my wife, adding in a theatrical whisper of a voice and nodding in my direction: ‘Mi dad didn't know he was backward.'

 

A Message for Mums and Dads

T
each me compassion.

H
elp to keep an open mind and respect the views of others.

E
xpect a lot of me.

 

A
llow me some space.

D
on't tell me my dreams are wild and my fears are foolish.

O
ffer advice now and again, but please don't nag.

L
isten to what I have to say.

E
ncourage me and please don't criticise me in front of others.

S
upport me and realise that – once in a while – I can be difficult.

C
ope with my moods and try to be a bit more patient.

E
njoy my successes but please don't be disappointed in my shortcomings.

N
ever make promises you can never keep.

T
ake no notice when I say hurtful things, I don't mean them.

‘God's Own Country'

 

 

Yorkshire

Discovering Yorkshire

Young people these days are much more widely travelled than was the case in the past. They see much more of the country than I did when I was young, and many have had a Spanish holiday or visited the Disney theme parks in Paris or Florida. Growing up in Rotherham in the 1950s, the child of parents with modest incomes, I saw little of the country outside South Yorkshire, and my first trip abroad was to Paris for a weekend when I was fifteen.

Most summers, when the steelworks had ‘shut-down week', the family had a fortnight in Blackpool. Apart from Christmas, the holiday fortnight held the greatest thrill for me. Most families like mine had neither the money nor the opportunity to travel and see the world, and therefore spent the holidays at one of Britain's seaside resorts. Rotherham is about as far as you can get from the sea so, apart from the day trips to Scarborough, Filey and Bridlington and the school trips to the Isle of Man, I saw little of the coast. There was, therefore, an extraordinary feeling of excitement and anticipation when the summer holiday came around.

It was only when I was in the sixth form, studying for my ‘A' levels, that I discovered North Yorkshire, where I was later to spend much of my working life as a school inspector. On the field study trips, organised by my geography master, the inimitable J Alan Taylor, I came across the Yorkshire Dales and the North York Moors for the first time, and the experience was unforgettable.

One memorable field trip was to Malham Cove. We had read about ‘clints' and ‘grykes', limestone pavements and caverns, potholes and subterranean rivers in our physical geography text-book, but I was not prepared for what I was to see. We approached by a footpath from the south, and this immense bow-shaped cove came into view like some great walled cathedral. It was breathtaking. I had never seen anything quite as bleak and rugged. Mr Taylor had us stand beneath the towering cove and not say anything at all – just take it in for a moment. Then he explained that it was formed millions of years ago, when the earth's crust cracked, fracturing the rock so that it dropped vertically. ‘It's over two hundred feet high,' he told us, ‘a thousand feet wide and, once, a crashing waterfall cascaded over the vertical cliff, creating a fall higher than the Niagara Falls. Now, can your small minds take that in?'

Another time, we stayed in a youth hostel set in the North York Moors. This part of England, a silent, bleak world with its great tracts of heather and bracken, fascinated me. We explored the incredible landscape, visited great abbeys like Byland and Rievaulx, ate our sandwiches in the shadow of lofty castles at Helmsley and Pickering, and sat in the sunshine outside local inns, in villages untouched by modern life. One weekend, Mr Taylor led us deep within the moors towards the coast at Ravenscar. The journey followed the old Viking route known as the ‘Lyke Wake'. Legend has it that the Vikings carried the ‘lyke' or corpse across the forty boggy miles to the sea, where the body was given up to the waves. With the coming of Christianity, the practice was continued, but it took on a deeper meaning and the walk came to symbolise the journey of the soul towards heaven. I had never seen such magnificent scenery in my life. Beneath a shining blue sky, there stretched a landscape of every conceivable colour: brilliant greens, swathes of red and yellow gorse, which blazed like a bonfire, dark hedgerows speckled in pinks and whites, twisted black stumps, striding walls and the grey snake of the road curling upwards to the hills in the far distance. Light, the colour of melted butter, danced amongst the new leaves of early summer.

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'.