Road to the Dales, The Story of a Yorkshire Lad

by Phinn, Gervase

  I remember setting off for school each morning past houses with every chimney belching out smoke from fires like our own. I would arrive at the top of Alma Road, where a cocktail of pollutants from the Don Valley mixed with the coal smoke from the houses to produce a cloak of thick, evil-smelling smog. It had a corporeal presence; it felt like something you could reach out and touch. Sometimes, when the steelworks were in full production, the carbon and the sulphur would burn your windpipe if you didn't wear a scarf around your mouth, and you could taste and feel its damp greasy fingers on your skin. It was like the backdrop of a novel by Conan Doyle.

  The front room of the house at Richard Road was sacrosanct and 'kept for best'. It was, I imagine, regarded as the working-class equivalent of the upper-class drawing room, always neat and tidy and where visitors were received. The only time it was used (and the electric fire turned on) was when an important visitor such as the priest or the doctor called, or my mother retired there to play the piano. It was kept scrupulously clean and tidy and smelt musty and unused. I was allowed to go in there to read quietly, but toys, drinks and food were taboo. A heavy green brocade three-piece suite dominated the room and the remaining space was occupied by the polished mahogany piano (my mother called it her 'upright grand'), a small occasional table, a radiogram and a veneered glass-fronted china cabinet in which were kept all my mother's bits of cut glass and china.

  On the wall there were two large reproduction prints of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, given to my mother by a grateful patient as a thank-you present when she was a nurse. One was of Dante on a bridge. The other depicted a group of beautiful young women with long auburn hair and faraway looks and five noble, handsome knights in shining armour looking on. The melting colours, the combination of mystery and sensuality, the classical perfection and balance, fascinated me. I discovered later (when my second son, Matthew, was studying for a degree in fine art) that the latter painting is Laus Veneris by Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones. As a youngster I would sometimes sit on the settee and stare at the picture of the Pre-Raphaelite beauties, illuminated by a pallid light shining through the net curtains, which were always drawn, and imagine the world in which the characters lived: a distant, exotic, colourful world very different from my own. More often, I would take my book into the front room - White Fang or Kidnapped, a Biggles adventure or King Solomon's Mines - and become lost in the stories, entering other exciting places, reading about fascinating characters and losing all sense of time. In that front room, curled up on that heavy settee, I vanished from the known world into the imaginary.

  Richard Road was a monocultural world, a friendly and supportive community of largely like-minded people. It was a safe, warm environment for children to grow up in and we had the freedom to play out all day on the street or at the park, something which is sadly denied to many children today. We were pushed out of the door on Saturday morning and expected not to appear back home until it started to get dark. It was an unashamedly unregulated and unsupervised world, and parents didn't worry about their children falling under a bus or being abducted or set upon. These days so many parents seem obsessively concerned with giving their children long and happy childhoods, with keeping them safe from harm and injury, in need of constant protection, away from potential risks, that they underestimate their offspring's abilities and resilience and deny them the great sense of freedom those of my generation had when we were young. As happy as crickets, we were unhindered by adult restraint.

  The inhabitants of Richard Road, who ranged from teachers to coal merchants, butchers to steelworkers, nurses to office managers, were solid, hard-working, ordinary, respectable folk and certainly didn't include any of the prosperous manufacturing families and professionals, who lived in the large detached houses and villas in the 'posh' part of town up on Moorgate. There was a real human warmth and neighbourliness in the street where I lived; there was a sense of togetherness and belonging seldom found in communities today. It was an egalitarian world where people didn't consider themselves superior to others and did not attempt to be so. Life for most people seemed distinctly better than it is now.

  The war had ended and there was a great sense of relief that the deprivation, disruption and destruction of those violent years were now over. People wanted to settle down to a quiet, peaceful life again, visit the shops, go to the pictures, to dances and football matches, to enjoy themselves and raise families. There was a great sense of national pride in the air. The images and memories of the war were still very much in people's minds and the next generation was made acutely aware of this, on the wireless, at the cinema, at school and in conversation. We walked tall, knowing that Great Britain had stood alone against the might of a ruthless, determined and better equipped enemy and had thoroughly thrashed it, the only country to have fought the war from the very first day to the very last. We were proud to be British.

  The books, comics and magazines we read, the films we saw, the toy soldiers, cigarette cards and merchandise embla-zoned with patriotic motifs, firmly established in our young minds just how lucky we were to be British and part of a great empire. Rider Haggard and G. A. Henty had written imperial adventures at the turn of the century, describing the glorious deeds and daring adventures of the British; now a new crop of literature appeared and we identified with the bravado of the fictional heroes.

  There was a great sense of renewal in the air too. England was becoming economically healthier, more productive, expansive and optimistic. There were higher living standards, guaranteed employment, greater educational opportunities and more varied recreational facilities. The Labour Government of 1945-51 launched a new kind of consensus based on a mixed economy and the welfare state. Major industries and institutions like coal, railways, road transport, civil aviation, electricity, gas, cable and wireless and even the Bank of England were brought into public ownership. Child allowances were introduced, old age pensions increased and the school-leaving age was raised. England was fast becoming a property-owning country. When Harold Macmillan (dubbed 'Supermac') and the Conservatives came to power in 1951 people really did think, as the Prime Minister was soon to tell them, that they had 'never had it so good'.

  Many, like my parents, bought homes on cheap mortgages and felt proud to own a house, which they kept neat and tidy. All along Richard Road, inside and out, the houses were decorated, gardens were carefully tended, pavements were kept litter-free and walls were absent of graffiti. It was a road typical of so many streets throughout the country, streets lined with ordinary, utilitarian, three-up, three-down redbrick semis with bathrooms and inside toilets and small front gardens.

  Although there was a genuine feeling of community in Richard Road, I felt different from the other children my age when I was growing up. This stemmed from a number of things. First, I was from a staunchly Roman Catholic family (which was large by the standards of the time) and no one else on the street shared my religion. Then there was the fact that I had a mother somewhat older than those of my friends (she was thirty-eight when she gave birth to me) and, unlike most other mothers on the street, she had a full-time job. My life was significantly different too in other respects.

  It is a fact that many children of the post-war working-class generation were brought up not to have what was considered unrealistic expectations in life because that would inevitably lead to disappointment. Youngsters, unless they were at the local grammar school or high school, on the whole did not aspire to do anything else beyond going down the pit or working in the steelworks, or perhaps enlisting in the army. If they were lucky, they might secure an apprenticeship. Few aspired to do anything different. Many followed in their fathers' footsteps and started a job that they would do for the rest of their lives. Children were sent out to work as soon as possible in many cases, and there was little chance of being supported through higher education. Within a marriage the man usually made all the important decisions, including sometimes how his wife voted.

  As the subsequent pages of t
his memoir will reveal, this was not a world I recognize. I was certainly 'enjoyed' by my parents when I was young and they spent many hours with me. I was, like my brothers and sister, supported through higher education and was encouraged to have hopes and ambitions. Interestingly too, the important decisions in my family were taken by my mother.

  Of course, I was different in another way. My unusual name stressed my difference. 'Gervase' wasn't just an out-of-the-ordinary name - it was unusually different, particularly in the 1950s when everyone around me seemed to be called Terry or Tony or Trevor or Tom. As a child you want to be one of the crowd, like everyone else; just ordinary. Being called Gervase in post-war Rotherham certainly set me apart.

  As a child I never really liked the name and insisted on it being pronounced 'Jervis'. It sounded more masculine. My brothers and sister still pronounce it 'Jervis' to this day, as does my wife Christine.

  I will digress a little here, if I may, to give a brief history of the name, for throughout my life I have frequently been asked where it originates.

  2

  'Gervase' comes from a Norman French form of the Old Germanic name Gervas, said to mean 'spear servant' from 'ger' (spear) and 'vass' (servant). The name was introduced into England by the Normans and was relatively common for a few centuries. The blacksmith in The Miller's Tale, the rudest and funniest story of Chaucer's epic poem The Canterbury Tales, is a Gervase, and famous bearers of the name include the twelfth-century English author Gervase of Tilbury, the thirteenth-century English chronicler Gervase of Canterbury, and the sixteenth-century military commander and equestrian Gervase Markham. I guess I am unique, as the only Gervase of Rotherham.

  It is a fact that wherever I go I have to either repeat or explain this unusual name of mine. I have got quite accustomed to this by now and have come to expect that it will inevitably be misspelt or mispronounced. The spell-checker on my computer changes my name regularly to 'Greasy Pin'. Over the years I have collected a delightful range of inventive spellings that have appeared on my letters. They range from 'Grievous Pain' to 'Gracious Dhin'. I have been called 'Germane', 'Germain', 'Germinal', 'Gercase', 'Jarface', 'Gerund', 'Garfase' and even 'Geraffe'. One letter arrived addressed to 'Sharparse Thinn'. It sounded like the character Grytpype Thynn from The Goon Show. I did enquire of the sender, when I met him, 'Do you think any parents would call their child Sharparse?' 'Well, I thought you might be from the ethnic minorities,' came the reply, 'and it was pronounced Shaparsi.'

  The late Miles Kington, a fan of the crime writer Edmund Crispin (whose main protagonist is the sleuth Professor Gervase Fen), doubted that I actually existed. In his amusing piece in the Independent - 'Now where have I heard that name before?' - he discounted coincidence. 'The similarity between Professor Gervase Phinn and Professor Gervase Fen,' he observes, 'is really so boring that we shall have to discard it.' Gervase Phinn, he concludes, 'is really called Felix Proctor or something banal, but because of his work as a schools inspector he had to use a pseudonym and decided to adopt (and adapt) the name of a fictional detective'. The journalist does, however, posit another theory: 'that Mr Phinn's parents loved the detective novels of Edmund Crispin so much that they decided to call their little baby Gervase Phinn, and it is an entirely genuine name'. Ah, Miles, how wrong you were.

  My name is indeed entirely genuine but I was not named after a character in a detective novel. My mother, a devout Roman Catholic, after two difficult pregnancies, was advised not to have any more children. With my eldest brother Michael she very nearly died, and doctors were strongly in favour of her calling it a day. But they had not reckoned with my mother. She was a woman of very strong views, great courage and with a stubborn streak, and being an obedient R.C. would have no truck with artificial forms of 'family planning'. She went on to have two more children. I was the last - perhaps a happy little accident. Heavily pregnant with me, she commissioned a special mass at St Bede's Church to pray for my safe delivery. I imagine that she sat on the front pew wondering what to call the new baby and listening as the priest intoned the long litany of saints:

  All you holy Patriarchs and Prophets pray for us: St Peter, St Paul, St Andrew, St James, St John, St Thomas, St Philip, St Bartholomew, St Matthew, St Simon, St Thaddeus, St Matthias, St Barnabas, St Luke, St Mark.

  At the very end, almost like afterthoughts, were the two appendices saints: St Gervase and St Protase. Poor St Gervase suffered a dreadful end (beaten to death with a lead-tipped whip) before the megalomaniacal Emperor Nero, and for some odd reason became the patron saint of haymakers. I guess my mother felt a little sorry that he came last in the litany of saints, or maybe she just liked the sound of the name, or perhaps she offered up a special prayer to a neglected member of the great and the good with the promise to name her baby after him if I arrived safely. My mother never would tell me. She was at great pains, however, to assure me that I was not 'a little accident'.

  Just after my first Dales book was published, I was in Oxford, to speak at the Literary Festival. Having forgotten a copy of my book The Other Side of the Dale, from which I intended to read, I called in at a large bookshop in the centre of the city to buy my own book.

  'Have you any books by Gervase Phinn?' I enquired of a rather snooty-looking assistant.

  She gave a small, rather patronizing smile. 'I think you will find the name is pronounced Shervay Fine - and you'll find her books in the travel section.'

  'Gervase is a perfect name for a character out of romantic fiction,' I was told by a fellow writer at another literary festival. 'In my next historical novel I shall have a character called Gervase. I can picture him now.' In due course the novel was published and, sure enough, a character with my name appeared. I thought I might be the Regency buck, with coal-black curls, swarthy skin, dark smouldering eyes and tight-fitting breeches. As it turned out I appeared as Lord Gervase de Morton, a bloated, raddled old roue with quivering jowls, a wet handshake and extremely questionable habits.

  The name Gervase in literature is usually given to aberrant aristocrats, narcissistic, dandified poseurs and devious, upper-crust, well-connected villains. In Slightly Tempted (a story of 'sparkling courtship, scandalous passion and all-consuming love') by Mary Balogh, Lord Gervase Ashford is the notorious rake intent on ravishing the beautiful Lady Morgan Bedwyn. In The Faun's Folly by Sandra Heath, Lord Gervase Mowbray, Duke of Wroxham, is only marginally better. Georgette Heyer, in The Quiet Gentleman, had a central character called Gervase, Earl of St Erith, and in The Queen's Man by Sharon Kay, Gervase Fitz Randolph is no better than he should be. In Mistress Wilding by Rafael Sabatini, portly Sir Gervase Scoresby is someone not to be trifled with, and in Mr Castonel, the eponymous hero is Mr Gervase Castonel: 'It was a prepossessing face; it was silent, pale and unfathomable with grey impenetrable eyes that disliked the look of you; and dark hair.'

  So I think I have made my point: the Gervases in literature are well-connected but not very nice. When I met the novelist Margaret Dickinson at another literary event, I suggested rather facetiously that she might like to name the hero of her next novel, Suff ragette Girl, Gervase and use my second name, Richard, as his surname. To my surprise and delight, she agreed. True to her word the novel features a young, dashing military hero called Gervase Richards.

  When I started school my name was placed on the register alongside Marjorie and Margaret, Judith and Jennifer. The teachers thought it was a girl's name. This has been another cross to bear - being mistaken for a woman. I spoke at a conference in Tamworth a few years ago and the evening before, sitting quietly in the bar, I eavesdropped on a couple of teachers in animated conversation.

  'Have you heard this Gervase Phinn speak before?' asked one.

  'No,' replied her colleague, 'but my head of department came on this course last year and said she was quite a good speaker.'

  One of the first schools I visited when I became a school inspector was a large comprehensive. After observing a number of lessons, I was sitting with the Hea
d of the English Department in the staffroom to share my deliberations, when my unusual name entered the conversation.

  'Is it Welsh?' enquired the Head of English.

  'No,' I replied.

  'It sounds very Welsh. I have a cousin in Cardiff called Geraint and another called Gwillam. I thought it might have been of Celtic origin.'

  'It's not Welsh,' I told her.

  'Is it Irish then?'

  'No, my name's not Welsh or Irish,' I replied. 'In fact, the name Gervase -'

  'It ees a French name.' The French assistant, Michelle, who was sitting behind us, interrupted the conversation. She was a strikingly good-looking young woman with dark, long-lashed eyes and a mass of raven-coloured hair. 'Gervais ees pronounced "Gervez" with a soft sounding "g", as in zer word "genre". It ees a French-Norman name and ees very common in France.'

  'Really?' I said, disappearing into the dark eyes of the speaker. 'It ees a most beautiful name,' she sighed, and fluttered the incredible eyelashes.

  'Would you mind pronouncing it again?' I said. 'I rather like the way you say it.'

  'Ggggervez,' she repeated in the most seductive of voices. 'Ggggervez ees an 'ouse'old name in France. Everywhere you go you will 'ear the name Ggggervez.' She smiled widely and then added, 'It ees the name of a yoghurt.'