Road to the Dales

by Gervase Phinn

  My father, I recall, equivocated on another occasion. As he paid the bill, Reg would invariably ask Dad a question, always the same one, to which my father always shook his head. Reg spoke in a sort of sly, whispery voice, the sort spies used in the radio plays. I was intrigued.

  ‘Something for the weekend, sir?’ he would enquire.

  I asked my father what it meant as we left the shop one Saturday. He reddened and dismissed my enquiry. ‘Something you don’t need to know about,’ he told me. ‘And don’t go asking your mother.’ Once, when out of my father’s hearing, I asked Reg. He tapped his nose. ‘That’s for me to know and you to wonder,’ he told me. This made it really mysterious.

  Clustered around All Saints’ Square were cafés and shops, banks and offices. The building I remember most was Davy’s Café and Restaurant, where we used to meet my mother after the scalping at Reg’s. The restaurant was above the food emporium, which smelt of ground coffee and smoked bacon. In the shop, sugar was dispensed from open sacks with a silver scoop, weighed in great brass scales and the contents poured into stiff blue paper bags. Butter was uncovered in a huge mound, and the shop assistant would pat the creamy slabs into squares of the required weight using a wooden spatula. There was a huge bacon slicer, and joints of bacon and legs of ham wrapped in white muslin. The shelves were stacked with jars of pickles and jams, boxes of biscuits and cereals. I remember being fascinated by the long strip of brown flypaper that hung down from the roof and gathered struggling insects on its sticky surface.

  When I was in the sixth form a group of us would hurry out of school after the bell had sounded for the end of morning lessons, run down Moorgate and Ship Hill, and on to the High Street to Davy’s Restaurant. There we would have meat and potato pie or cod and chips, beef with Yorkshire pudding or two fat chops. This would be followed by spotted dick or jam roly-poly, bread and butter pudding or apple crumble. I always seemed to get very generous portions, because my Aunt Nora’s best friend, Ivy, was a waitress there and always made a fuss of me. Following the substantial lunch we would catch the bus back to school and attempt to keep our eyes open during the lessons that afternoon.

  It was in Davy’s that I developed my skill at eavesdropping – an important attribute if one is to become a writer. Ladies who lunch, businessmen and lawyers, shoppers and salesmen would be on neighbouring tables and their conversations intrigued me. I would often entertain my friends by mimicking these people. Sometimes my Uncle Doug, who worked in the finance department at the Council Offices, would appear with his colleagues, and on those occasions I made sure I was on my very best behaviour, lowering my voice and not laughing too heartily. He was a rather severe-looking man was Uncle Doug, with white winged eyebrows, and was of ‘the old school’, who believed that young people should be seen but not heard.

  Food played an important part in our family life. I was not a fussy eater but I turned my nose up at some of the delicacies to which my father was partial: black pudding (a black sausage containing pork, dried pig’s blood and suet with chunks of white fat in it), pigs’ feet, liver, cowheel, polony (a fat sausage made of bacon, veal and pork suet), ‘penny ducks’ (a mixture of cooked offal heavily spiced and seasoned) and chitterlings (the intestines of a pig). Dad’s favourite meal was tripe and onions. Mum would cook it in milk and drizzle chopped onions on the top. Of course, none of us children could be persuaded to try any. We would watch with screwed-up faces as Dad devoured the sickly white concoction and then licked his lips dramatically.

  There was a tripe shop in Rotherham and on Saturday, if I didn’t go into town with my parents, I was sometimes sent to get a large piece of the white rubbery honeycombed delicacy for Dad’s tea. I never minded going to the shop because the owner was a most interesting woman. She had steely white hair, a round red face and large salmon pink hands and would stand behind her counter, arms folded implacably under her impressive bay window of a bosom, which wobbled like a bouncy castle when she moved. I became accustomed to waiting in the queue and privy to the proprietor’s observations on life. Specific members of the locality were openly discussed, their opinions, prejudices, secrets, daydreams, aspirations and, of course, what they got up to. I would be quite content to wait and listen as the proprietor took her time, slicing a piece of tripe, weighing it (‘It’s just a bit over, love, is that all right?’) and wrapping it in white greaseproof paper, all the while holding forth and entertaining her clientele. I enjoyed the patter, listening to the rhythms, the turns of phrase and colloquialisms of speech. I think people would have been quite happy to go there for the conversation alone. Her observations were vividly illustrated with expressions, idioms and a dry Yorkshire sense of humour, which was delivered in the dead-pan manner of a comedian.

  Her caustic comments on other people’s appearance were legion: ‘He’s like a streak of tap water’; ‘She’s a face like a parish oven’; ‘He comes in here like a sack of spuds, tied up ugly’; ‘She’s no oil painting herself, I can tell you’; ‘He looked as if he was dragged through a hedge backwards’. It occurs to me now, looking back on my days in the tripe shop, that three words come to mind – ‘pan’, ‘kettle’ and ‘black’. There were expressions the proprietor used which made no sense to me at all: ‘She’s all kid gloves and no drawers’; ‘There are more ways to kill a cat’; ‘I’ve not sat down since I got up.’ A frequent turn of phrase, if she was told some interesting news, was, ‘Well, I’ll go to the bottom of our stairs!’ The proprietor of the shop was a mistress of the non sequitur: ‘He wants to get down on his knees and thank God he’s still standing up,’ she would announce, or ‘Nobody ever goes there these days, it’s too crowded.’ Such vibrant, colourful use of English was a paradise for the connoisseur of the colloquial, and I enjoyed the constant patter. Here was the precursor of Norman Evans’s gossipy neighbour, ‘over the garden wall’, and Les Dawson’s wonderfully comic characters Cissie and Ada, with their sharp observations, dry humour, deadpan delivery and amusing banter, all accompanied by expressive facial contortions.

  I would often enter the shop at some crucial part of a story: ‘Of course, if she’d have tied it up with a piece of string, it wouldn’t have happened’; ‘And I said to him, if you think I’m doing that with my bad back, you’ve got another think coming’; ‘When the police finally arrived, you will never guess where she’d put it’; ‘I’ll tell you, if it was me, I’d give her a piece of my mind, and no mistake.’

  Ailments, operations, confinements, illnesses, medical problems, all were discussed in graphic detail and inquests held. I heard about surgical removals and diseases, hernias and gallstones, arthritis and lumbago, tennis elbow and water-on-the-knee. If it was ‘a woman’s problem’ or something she didn’t want little ears to hear, the proprietor would lower her voice to a confidential whisper, ending with a tantalizing silence when she mouthed the particular condition or observation.

  One story I remember well was when she related a visit to see her daughter in Listerdale Maternity Unit. The woman in the next bed was huge. ‘Like a mountain she was. It’s a wonder the bed didn’t collapse under her. She lay there like a beached whale, heaving and puffing and moaning. “You’ll feel a lot better, love,” I told her, “when you’ve had your baby.” “I’ve had it!” replied the woman. I wanted the floor to open and swallow me up.’

  Another time a woman was foolhardy enough to complain about the tripe she had bought the previous week. ‘I had to give it to the dog,’ she announced in a loud voice for all those in the queue to hear.

  ‘Is that so?’ said the virago behind the counter. ‘Well, I’ll tell you this, if the Queen herself and the whole of the royal family were to visit Rotherham, they’d come here to this shop for their tripe and buy the bloody lot!’

  Looking back to my childhood I reckon I was unusual in this interest I had in adults and their conversations. I was gifted with a fertile imagination and a good memory and soon became a keen observer and a dedicated listener, fascinated by people a
nd by the language they used. I can still see in my mind’s eye that large woman in the tripe shop, in her white nylon overall with her fat pink hands, holding forth to her customers and putting the world to rights.

  One wet Saturday morning I was sent to buy Dad’s tripe as usual but on the way out of the shop I dropped the parcel. It went splat on the pavement. Now dogs love tripe, and there was always some mangy beast hanging around near the entrance. On this particular day a bristly little mongrel shot out from behind me and snapped up the tripe, paper and all. I chased the dog, shouting and waving my arms, and finally managed to get the tripe back but not before it had been chewed and had rolled into the gutter and picked up a fair bit of dirt.

  ‘Sorry, love,’ said the tripe shop owner, when I returned to the counter hoping for a replacement. ‘I can’t be doing that. You’ll have to buy another piece.’ I explained to her that I had no more money. ‘Well, it will teach you to be more careful with your tripe, won’t it?’ she told me, before resuming a conversation about the state of the public urinals in the town centre.

  When I arrived back home I had already devised a plan. If I explained to Mum what had happened she would, no doubt, send me back to the shop, which was the last thing I wanted. I was keen to meet my pals at Herringthorpe playing fields that afternoon. So before Mum could take the tripe from my hands I shot up the stairs and into the bathroom.

  ‘Have you got your Dad’s tripe?’ came her voice up the stairs.

  ‘Yes,’ I shouted back, ‘but I’m desperate for the toilet.’ I then washed the tripe thoroughly under the cold water tap.

  Mum cooked the tripe, Dad ate it, and I watched with a screwed-up face.

  ‘Delicious,’ said Dad, licking his lips when he had finished. ‘Best bit of tripe I’ve had in a long while. You must mention it, Pat, the next time you go into the shop,’ he continued. I gulped and prayed Mum would do no such thing.

  23

  I was brought up in a devout Roman Catholic family and religion played a prominent part in my childhood. Most of the small Catholic minority in Rotherham (as indeed in the rest of the country) were of Irish working-class stock and could be best described as timorously conservative. The laws of the Church were to be obeyed and the priest’s word was law. There was a certainty in the belief, for, after all, Catholics had a monopoly on the truth and others were out of line. Ours was the one true church, founded by St Peter, defended and preserved by his successor, the Pope, who was infallible.

  It wasn’t so much the practice of attendance at Mass and Confession that had the greatest influence on me, it was the pervading deep conviction of my parents that the best course in life was, as Jesus exhorted, to do unto others as we would wish them to do unto us, to treat people with kindness and compassion. This guiding principle was ever present in my life, and should I do something of which my parents disapproved, I would get the stock question: ‘Would you have liked someone to do that to you?’

  Each Sunday all of us children would be scrubbed and combed and dressed in our best clothes to attend Mass at St Bede’s Church at Masborough, a strongly traditional parish. This was before the Vatican II Council when Pope John XXIII, son of an Italian peasant and third of thirteen children, reinterpreted the Catholic faith in the light of modern circumstances and unleashed within the Church a liberalization which many found disquieting. Within three months of taking office in January 1959, the new Pope summoned the General Council of the Church and things began to change, including the use of the vernacular, rather than Latin, in the services. I was thirteen at the time.

  The whole family, all in our Sunday best, would walk down Wellgate through Rotherham town centre, with its great red sandstone church of All Saints, on past the dark weather-blackened buildings and row upon row of endless back-to-back terraces, over the rusting bridge that spanned the greasy green canal, with the pungent smell of industry and the taste of dust in the air.

  On the exterior, St Bede’s was an ugly dark stone church, but inside it was another world. It was in this church that I had my first introduction to indoor beauty, of ornament, ostentation, spectacle, sacrament and mystery. It was like entering a magical world, a world of burnished metal, gilt, stone and polished wood. As a small child I would sit on one of the hard wooden pews in the shadowy interior, the smell of candles and incense in the air, the rain beating against the windows outside, and look at the bright plaster tablets lining the walls depicting the ‘Stations of the Cross’.

  Christ’s passion and death fascinated me – it was a violent, colourful, exciting story full of interesting characters. The places he visited had irresistibly attractive-sounding names too: Palestine, Jerusalem, Galilee, Jericho, Bethlehem and Gethsemane. Here was a compelling saga indeed. From humble origins this son of a carpenter attained exceptional power and influence, transforming so many people’s lives, and he did it not by telling people that they were worthless and evil, by haranguing and disparaging, but by telling them little stories about a man who fell among thieves, a spendthrift son and a poor widow who gave her last coin.

  Without any advantages of brute force, money, status or useful connections, he managed through his personality, his example and his oratory to put across his teachings so effectively that 2,000 years later they are still being followed. There were in Jesus the qualities of tolerance, compassion, innocence and courage which demanded my admiration. Jesus I never feared, for he was always to my mind the mild, caring man like the one depicted in my children’s Bible and he gave his life for others. He was the Good Shepherd, the Lamb of God. His was the statue with a sacred heart, the outstretched hands and the gentle face. It was easy to love such a person. I wasn’t so sure about God, though. He was a more mysterious, less forgiving figure, rather fearsome, like a white-haired, long-bearded headmaster who was forever watching me. He saw what I got up to and knew what I was thinking.

  I never found going to Mass burdensome. I loved the words, the pageant, the imagery and the rhythms of the strange language intoned by the priest and chanted by the congregation. I would wait in anticipation for High Mass to begin. It was theatre. The thundering organ would fill the church, the choir would raise its voice and then would come the procession from the rear of the church and down the central aisle. The senior server, holding before him a great golden cross, would be followed by four altar boys, dressed in scarlet and white and bearing lighted candles, and the solemn-faced priest in shimmering green silk swinging the censer. Clouds of sweet-smelling smoke would fill the air. In the sixth form I visited my first Protestant church, a Nonconformist chapel, and was amazed at the contrast. Where were the sweeping colours, the heady smell of incense, the stained-glass windows, the pictures and statues to which I had become accustomed? There was no mystery here in this dark and spartan building. It was as chilly and dimly lit as a cellar and about as unattractive, with its rows of long hard pews, pale plain walls, exposed heating pipes down the side, liver-coloured floor tiles, windows high and mean with plain glass and metal grilles. At the front was a wooden lectern above which, writ large, was the lettering: ‘Fear the Lord.’ This was a place of penance, not praise, cold, colourless, unwelcoming; it didn’t seem to me to be the sort of place in which God would feel at home.

  At St Bede’s there were great brightly coloured plaster statues staring down serenely from their plinths, a flickering red light hanging in a casket of gold above the tabernacle, heavy wooden pews redolent with lavender polish and camphor, rows of shining candles, and the great high altar draped in white linen with the huge brass candlesticks and an ornate golden cross. Then there was the lingering smell of the incense and the chanting of the Latin, which for a child were so mysterious, so magical. I learnt all the Latin responses by heart – ‘Dominus vobiscum’, ‘Credo in unum deum’, ‘qui tollis peccata mundi’, ‘miserere nobis’ – without understanding very much, but I derived great pleasure from the sound of the words.

  Children have a need for certainty in an uncertain world, and in Cath
olicism there was a real certainty. Nothing was left to doubt, there was no discussion. The stability of this highly structured but simple supportive faith gave me great solace. Everything was explained in the little blue-backed penny catechism which every Catholic child was given and required to learn, and for those prepared to conform and repent of their wrongdoings the ‘one, true Catholic Church’ was a comfortable haven, offering salvation.

  I was brought up to believe that Catholics had the ‘one true faith’; ours was an orthodoxy that had been passed down for centuries from Jesus and St Peter. There was heaven for those who had lived unblemished lives and eventually, after a period in Purgatory, for those who were truly sorry for their sins and sought forgiveness. Heaven was somewhere in the sky above the sun, in the clouds, where everything was light, happiness and peace. The great golden gates opened on to a paradise where God, like a genial old man with a white beard, sat on his heavenly throne. On His right was Jesus and on His left the Blessed Virgin. Hovering above were the angels, saints, the cherubs and seraphim. Deep below in the bowels of the earth was Hell, where an eternal fire raged and where the Devil, the fallen angel, held sway. Evil people, whose souls were damned, were in perpetual torment and denied the sight of God. In between there was Purgatory, where the not-toobad people were purified of their sins before being promoted to Heaven to join the angels and saints. Then there was Limbo, full of grave-faced babies who hadn’t been baptized.