Road to the Dales, The Story of a Yorkshire Lad

by Phinn, Gervase

  CONDUCT Very Good

  PROGRESS Gervase is a steady worker, always trying his best. He shows an interest in all activities.

  Head Teacher: ......... J. Leslie Morgan ..........

  This is a revealing report, not because it tells you very much about the pupil's attainment and progress, but because it indicates, in its paucity and restraint, the sort of information parents were likely to receive about their child's education in the 1950s. It was perhaps thought by the teachers that it was not good for pupils to be too cocksure, so there was no fulsome praise or hearty congratulations. However, I should have thought that the full marks I achieved for English might have merited an 'excellent' and the 18 out of 20 for composition a 'very good'.

  The report indicates that I needed to try harder in mental arithmetic. I hated mental arithmetic because I was frightened of the large, craggy-faced teacher in the tweed jacket and shiny black shoes who smelt of tobacco and shouted. He would fire questions around the classroom like a Gatling gun and I would stutter or freeze when he got to me. It wasn't that the teacher humiliated me or smacked me, as some teachers undoubtedly did in the 1950s, but he failed to inspire me.

  Christine, my wife, loved arithmetic at school and the challenge of numbers. Her 'party piece' is adding up the prices of the items in the supermarket trolley as fast as the assistant at the till can enter them in the cash register. She then gives the exact money. 'How do you do that?' asks the person on the checkout. Richard, my eldest son and an accountant, as one might guess, loves figures and became fascinated with mathematics when his teacher at secondary school, the brilliant Mr Hopley, came into his life. He told them in that very first lesson: 'I am going to show you the magic of mathematics.' This enthusiast, with the smiling eyes of the dedicated teacher, generated in his students a real excitement for mathematics. Had I been taught by such a teacher I would undoubtedly have enjoyed the subject, perhaps performed better in the Eleven Plus examination and my life might have taken a completely different course.

  I do remember the weekly elocution lesson that took place in the last term of the final year at the Juniors, when it was the teacher's avowed aim to improve the way we spoke. I have an idea that the woman with the thin grey hair scraped savagely over her scalp and the steely grey eyes who appeared in the classroom was some sort of supernumerary brought in for the sole purpose of teaching us to speak 'properly' like the BBC announcers. When she spoke, she sounded to me as if she had a hot potato in her mouth or, as the woman in the tripe shop might have said, 'a plum in her gob'. The idea of getting us to speak 'properly' no doubt was well-intentioned, but the poor woman was, of course, on a hiding to nothing. We were Yorkshire children growing up in a world where everyone seemed to drop their aitches and pepper their speech with 'sithee' (see thou), ''ey up' (hello), 'geeore' (give over), 'naaden' (now then), 'shurrup' (shut up), 'thawhat' (pardon) and 'gerron' (get away with you).

  Each Monday morning we would chant our sentences, and I have to admit I quite enjoyed the lessons and discovered I had something of a talent for mimicry.

  'We have a nice hice in the country, you know.'

  Of course I would never use this affected voice when I was outside the classroom, unless it was in the playground to entertain my peers. That would have meant certain ridicule at best and severe bullying at worst.

  Recently I discovered the grey-covered exercise book in which I had copied out the various 'Speech Exercises' all those years ago, and smiled at the memory of sitting behind a hard wooden desk chanting the silly sentences and doggerel with forty or so other children.

  Gertie Gordon grew a gross of gaudy gay gladioli.

  Careful Katy cut and cooked a crisp and crunchy lettuce.

  They thought they fought to defend the fort.

  It was Harry Harding's habit to help his uncle in the haberdashers.

  Down the path and across the grass,

  The little children run,

  To see the bird bath by the bower

  And the tall trees in the sun.

  In the book I have copied down some notes from the blackboard and have added a small drawing. The illustration shows a man in a top hat and another in a flat cap. Between them, like a fence, stands a great capital 'H'. Underneath is the caption: 'When is an H not an H?' The notes that follow explain how important it is not to 'drop the aitch in speech.'

  H is what we call the aspirate or breath sound and is often left out where it ought to be put in and put in where it is not supposed to be there. The H in the sounding of a word separates the well-educated from the less educated. Anyone who hopes to speak correctly must know when and when not to use it.

  Then there were exercises to practise:

  Henry Hall hops on his heels.

  What an odd habit.

  How horrid it feels.

  Hopping on his heels

  Is not hopping at all,

  So why not hop properly, Henry Hall?

  Harry went to Hampstead,

  Harry lost his hat,

  Harry's mother said to Harry,

  'Harry, where's your hat?'

  Harry said he'd lost it.

  It wasn't true at all.

  For Harry's hat was hanging

  On the hatstand in the hall.

  He hit him on his head

  With a hard and heavy hammer

  And it made him howl horribly.

  I can just imagine the children of Rotherham practising their aspirates on their way home.

  I was once told a story by a former headteacher that when he was a child living in Huddersfield there was the feared visit of the school inspector. He was a stickler for 'correct English' was this dark-suited, sour-faced individual from the Ministry of Education in London, and was dismayed to find that the children spoke in a strong regional accent. Having watched a lesson, the inspector observed that the young pupils were deficient in their speech and that the teacher must try to eradicate the use of dialect. He had noted, for example, that many of the children used the word 'putten' instead of 'put': 'I've putten it down' instead of 'I have put it down.' He suggested that remedial work was needed in this area. The teacher complied, and when the inspector made a return visit some weeks later assured him that the offending 'putten' had been eliminated from the children's vocabulary. To demonstrate this the teacher wrote on the blackboard the sentence: 'I've putten the apple on the desk.'

  'Now children,' he said, facing the class, 'what is wrong with the sentence on the blackboard?'

  One bright spark raised a hand and replied: 'Tha's gone and putten putten when tha should have putten put.'

  Alban, a friend of mine who farms near Whitby, when a child, once asked his father which was the correct pronunciation of 'either'. Was it pronounced 'eether' or 'eyether?' His father replied, 'Owther'll do.'

  The former school inspector Leonard Clarke described a visit to a Yorkshire School in the 1950s. The headteacher asked him if he wanted to hear the children sing and the inspector soon found himself in the school hall where the senior choir were assembled to perform for him. He enquired of the music teacher what the children were going to sing.

  ' "Wetherby Socks",' replied the teacher, a large, bluff Yorkshireman.

  'I don't know that particular tune,' said the inspector. 'Is it a local folk song?'

  'Nay,' replied the teacher, looking at him as if he were not quite right in the head, 'it's very famous. 'Asn't thy 'eard of it?'

  'I can't say I have,' replied the inspector.

  The music teacher turned to the choir, which then gave an enthusiastic rendering of 'Where the Bee Sucks'.

  In the aftermath of the Second World War a high proportion of children had school dinners but our response to them was not one of gratitude. School dinners at Broom Valley Juniors were dire: thin cuts of pale meat with thick rims of white fat and pieces of gristle, lumpy gravy, lukewarm mashed potatoes, over-boiled carrots, watery cabbage, to be followed by insipid semolina, tapioca (frogspawn) or rice pudding with
a splodge of raspberry jam in the middle. Sometimes dessert would be a rock-hard chocolate sponge square covered in sickly pink custard. In the playground, out of the teachers' hearing, of course, we would chant:

  Splishy, splashy custard,

  Dead dogs' eyes,

  All mixed together with giblet pies.

  See it on the dinner plate, nice and thick,

  And swallow it down with a bucketful of sick.

  In those days there were no salads, fresh fruit, yoghurts or squeezed orange juice on the menu at school, just the same old fare served from large shiny tin containers by a dinner lady who, if we complained, told us we should think ourselves lucky because there were people starving in Africa who would be glad of it.

  I recall one of my friends saying sotto voce that 'the Africans were welcome to it', and he was sent to Mr Morgan and had to stand outside the headteacher's room all dinner time for being ungrateful.

  One memory of the Junior school was being forced to sit through school lunch while the lumpy gravy and fried parsnips slowly congealed on my plate.

  'Come along,' said the dinner lady sharply, standing over me with her arms folded underneath her bosom. 'Get it eaten or you'll be sent to Mr Morgan.'

  I thought of a wonderful ruse. 'I'm a Catholic,' I told her.

  'What?'

  'It's against my religion to eat parsnips on a Holy Day of Obligation. It's like not eating meat on Fridays.'

  The plate was cleared away, much to my satisfaction. I decided that this would be one lie I would not be admitting next time I went to Confession.

  I got my first real glimpse of a world of unimaginable privilege when, as a child of ten in 1956, I came upon Wentworth House. Our class of forty plus pupils was bussed out one bright sunny Monday morning from Broom Valley Juniors to Wentworth Woodhouse, a village twixt Rotherham and Barnsley, so that the female students training there to be P.E. mistresses could 'practise on us'.

  Wentworth House was once the palatial residence of the Earls Fitzwilliam. Built in the 1720s for Thomas Wentworth, later Marquess of Rockingham, this vast, imposing stately home, with its 600-foot-long Palladian east front, the largest facade of any building in Europe, with its five miles of passageways and a room for every day of the year, took over sixteen years to complete. The surrounding park had upwards of 1,500 acres of vast lawns and majestic woods, ornamented by temples, columns and picturesque water features. After a colourful catalogue of family indiscretions, endless arguments, forbidden loves, contentious court cases, feuds and financial setbacks, the residence became a white elephant, too big and expensive to manage.

  The redoubtable Lady Mabel Smith, sister of the sixth Earl Fitzwilliam, with the keen social conscience of the more liberally minded aristocrat, suggested turning Wentworth into a school, and in 1947 she used her not inconsiderable eloquence and influence to get the West Riding County Council to take on the house on a fifty-year lease.

  This historic mansion subsequently became a training college for female P.E. teachers and was named the Lady Mabel College in her honour. In 1979, when the maintenance costs proved too prohibitive, the college closed, and nine years later Lady Elizabeth Hastings, the tenth Earl's granddaughter and beneficiary, put the house up for sale. Today the vast building stands in its lonely acres, stark and shuttered, the home of a recluse, its great iron gates closed to the public.

  So in 1956 I got my first sighting of Wentworth. I had read about such buildings in the history books but had never seen such an immense edifice. I recall climbing down from the bus in my P.E. kit of white vest and black shorts and plimsolls (which we called pumps), to see what looked like a huge cardboard cut-out. It was breathtaking. I marvelled at the great stone pillars, ornate pediments, porticos and domed pavilions (although I had no idea what these were called at the time), and the many hundreds of windows. Of course, we small urchins were not allowed to ascend the flight of steep stone steps and enter into this palace. We were lined up on the lawns to the front of the house ready to be 'practised on'.

  We were joined by a group of young female students, all identically attired in short navy blue pleated skirts (well, they were short for the 1950s, stretching from their waists to just above the knees), white short-sleeved blouses, pristine white ankle socks and remarkably white, unblemished plimsolls. I had become susceptible to girls since reaching double figures, and the sight of this bevy of athletic long-legged beauties in short skirts and tight blouses is one of my favourite memories! Behind the students strode a much older woman with short cropped hair, broad shoulders and massive arms and a face that could freeze soup in cans. She was attired rather differently, in a white jacket with sleeves and a more capacious white pleated skirt. Later we discovered that this Amazon was the students' teacher and she called the shots. The bossy woman in white put the fear of God into us as she boomed out various orders, telling us to line up smartly, be on our best behaviour and listen carefully to all instructions. Even our teacher looked frightened of her and stood like a spare part, watching proceedings but venturing no comment.

  Each student was assigned five pupils on which to practise her skills. It was not an unpleasant experience for me and my pals to have our own personal fitness trainer - this tall willowy blonde with a soft smile and long legs who helped us with our physical exertions: star jumps and squat thrusts, hand springs and forward rolls, handstands and press-ups. After half an hour of stretching and jumping, leaping and running, we were allowed to rest and get our breath.

  That morning I lay on my stomach staring across the parkland dotted with grazing deer, avenues of tall cedars, dense woodland of ancient oaks, manicured lawns, wide borders bursting with colourful flowers, pale statues and spouting fountains. I had never seen anything like it.

  On our way back to school, our teacher, now in rather a chatty mood, told us that the house had once been the home of just one fabulously rich man and his family, a grand and very wealthy lord, and that he would have had 700 servants to look after him - gardeners and grooms, coachmen and carpenters, kitchen maids and cooks, brewers and butlers, stewards and housekeepers, lamplighters and a man to wind up the clocks. He even employed a mole-catcher. A hundred thoroughbred horses would have been kept in the stable block, which resembled a huge Georgian house. With all the precocious confidence of a ten-year-old, I asked him why would anyone want to live in such a big place and was it not unfair that someone should have all this while others have so little? I cannot recall the teacher's reply, but I guess that he merely shrugged as he always did when one of his pupils asked an awkward question.

  I returned to Wentworth House some thirty years later and this time I went inside. I was General Adviser for Language Development with Rotherham Education Department at the time, and was given the task of disposing of the remnants of the college library. In 1979 when Lady Mabel College closed, Sheffield City Polytechnic took over the property, but by the mid 1980s, when the local authority gave up its lease on the house, all educational materials and equipment of any value were transferred to the city campus. A residue of several hundred unwanted books, teaching texts, guidelines and journals was left behind and it was my job to dispose of them. Rather than just sending them to a waste paper company for pulping, I initially circulated all Rotherham schools inviting interested teachers to come and take what books they wanted for the school libraries. I would be there all day on a Saturday I specified, to supervise matters.

  On the day when Wentworth was open for the collection of books, it snowed heavily. I drove up the long gravel drive, now thick with snow, and parked the car in front of the house. I describe the scene which I beheld as I sat looking out over the expanse of white, in one of my Dales books.

  All around the hall stretched a strange white world stroked in silence. No wind blew the snow into drifts, no birds called, no animal moved and, save for the sporadic soft thud of snow falling from the branches of the towering dark trees which bordered the drive, all was silent. There was a stillness, as if life itse
lf had been suspended.

  The caretaker responded to my banging after some time and the great door was opened and I stepped inside. I followed him through a vast pillared hall which must have been sixty feet square and forty feet high, with a gallery supported by huge fluted marble pillars. In its day the grandeur of the dimensions, the ornate decoration, the magnificent paintings and statues and the lavish furnishings would have been unparalleled in their beauty and opulence.

  The books had been stacked in the Marble Saloon. It was here in 1912 that the great ballerina Anna Pavlova had danced for King George V. I set myself up on a hard-backed chair in the Ante Room, an area which must have been at least forty feet in length and half as much wide, with an immense stone fireplace guarded by a pair of fearsome-looking carved stone griffins. It was strange and rather unsettling for me, sitting there on a shabby hard-backed chair amidst the piles of old books in this cold, empty building, thinking of what this house must have been like in its heyday.

  As I left that winter afternoon, having dispensed the books to those hardy teachers who had braved the weather, I paused for a moment at the top of the stone steps and looked out over the snow-covered lawns and I pictured that little scrap of a boy in his P.E. kit doing star jumps on the grass.

  26

  'No childhood,' writes Philip Roth in The Plot Against America, 'is without its terrors.' My terror came in my last year at junior school in the form of the bully. I was a popular pupil with my teachers. Most were kindly, smiled a great deal, rarely shouted and clearly enjoyed the company of children. I also found them mines of information and would not be afraid of asking them questions or reticent about sharing my own thoughts and feelings. From what my school reports say about me, I was 'well-behaved', 'a steady worker' who 'tried his best', a boy who was 'good-natured and helpful' and one who caused his teachers no trouble. I wasn't a high flier, nor was I a child in need of special help with my work; I was just an ordinary sort of boy. When I visited Broom Valley Junior School as an education adviser in Rotherham many years later, the present headteacher, Philip Crutchley, informed me he had looked through the old punishment book prior to my visit to see if my name appeared when I was a pupil at the school. Thankfully, there was no mention of me. Nor was there a mention of my achieving anything of note either.