by Hatch, Ben
‘Because I was naughty last night,’ I reply.
I move onto a display about naval slang. ‘All my eye and Betty Martin,’ is an old phrase meaning nonsense. Another nice one is: ‘Whistling psalms to the taffrail’. This one means providing advice that’s ignored.
‘Why were you naughty?’ persists Phoebe.
‘I teased Mummy.’
‘That’s not very nice, Daddy.’
‘I know.’
‘Say sorry to Mummy.’
‘I have done.’
‘Say it again, more nicer.’
‘You’re whistling psalms to the taffrail, Phoebe,’ says Dinah. She pulls a flat smile. It’s her first move towards reconciliation. I seize it and apologise again.
The sea shanty that’s been blaring from a speaker since we arrived seems to grow louder.
Whisky whisky whisky oh
Rise me up from down below
‘Mummy, say that’s all right.’
I like whisky hot and strong
I’ll drink whisky all day long
‘Mummy, when someone says sorry, the other person says, that’s all right.’ ‘OK, that’s all right,’ says Dinah. ‘Well, hug then,’ says Phoebe. We hug.
Whisky whisky whisky o
Rise her up from down below ‘Let’s get out of here, this music’s driving me potty,’ says Dinah.
Our final stop is the seaside resort of Saltburn-by-the-Sea. Here we ride the nineteenth-century cliff lift, paddle in the freezing North Sea and then wander into the Smugglers Heritage Centre to hear the story of John Andrew, king of the smugglers (or ‘hiding people’ as Phoebe calls them), who centred his operations 200 years ago on the Ship Inn next door. The tiny museum has wax figures talking unrealistically to each other, often incorporating large chunks of history in their conversation. ‘No, I am not feeling very well as the king has introduced new duties on playing cards and dominoes so I might as well smuggle them into the country and make more in a night than I can in a month working the fields. How about you, Seth, and your plans to do the same kind of thing with rum and other products with large import duties designed to raise crown revenue to fight wars that don’t concern us?’
That night, in an eighteenth-century former coaching inn off the main A688 road into Bishop Auckland, sitting in the main bar after the kids are in bed with Channel 4 News on mute on the wall-mounted TV and an unread newspaper on our table, Dinah admits, after a couple of glasses of wine, that she has the three-month blues.
‘I’m sorry I’ve been ratty today. It’s not seeing friends,’ she says. ‘We’ve been away ages. We don’t get any outside perspective. I need that. We’re on top of each other the whole time. And we’ve still got weeks left, Ben. I just feel a bit glum.’
‘One day at a time, remember.’
There’s a rule. We’re not allowed to read ahead in the blue folder further than a couple of days. It’s the only way to handle the enormity of the timescale.
‘I know. It’s just I keep thinking we’ve mastered it and then something happens – ghosts, bats – anything can throw us off kilter and straightaway it’s back to the chaos.’
‘We’ve been in cities and big towns again. That’s what it is.’
‘You think?’ she says.
The more we talk though, the more we realise we’ve become unwittingly trapped in a sort of parallel universe. We’re in England but it’s a different England than the England everyone else is in and reads about in the papers and sees reflected back on their TV. We exist in a bubble because we don’t speak to anyone else. Our England is a virtual representation of England made up of no other people we know, no news events, no work-related matters, hardly any telly, and instead just kid-themed attractions, city centre NCP car parks and hotels and child-friendly restaurants. It’s like we’re abroad but in our own country. In fact, we somehow seem further away here from loved ones and friends than we would do in Egypt even though they’re physically only a motorway’s length away. It’s probably something to do with knowing we won’t be seeing anyone for such a long time.
A coach-load of pensioners arrives on a David Urquhart tour bus and, to snap ourselves from the downward spiral, we enter the pub quiz. The landlord has bingo-style showmanship (‘Who said let them eat cake during the French revolution? An event some of you may remember.’). Despite being hopeless at quizzes, an hour later the Chaos Monkeys (our team name) triumph. ‘The
River Severn’, which we were around for several days earlier in the trip, was the answer sealing the free bottle of wine.
We stay up drinking it, and only go to bed after mistakenly watching on a TV over the bar what we think is an old episode of The Bill, featuring a long surveillance scene, but which turns out to be grainy black and white CCTV footage of the hotel car park; a fact we only realise when it pans round and we see the roof box on our hire car.
CHAPTER 21
Draft Copy for Guidebook: Yorkshire, the country’s biggest county, is England’s Texas only with flat caps instead of Stetsons and Yorkshire puddings and parkin instead of oil and natural gas. Dynamic (well, they set up Asda), brash and hugely sentimental about itself, Yorkshire is also the official nostalgia capital of Sunday night TV, with Heartbeat, All Creatures Great and Small and Last of the Summer Wine all having been filmed here. It’s a very friendly place, although be warned: Yorkshiremen, prone to bouts of self-aggrandisement and to starting sentences with the word ‘’Ark’, are extremely proud, even if it’s only about how it was tougher in their day ‘When I had to sleep in’t shoebox in’t middle of t’road and be beaten t’death by me dad every night.’ Often identifying more with their own county anthem ‘On Ilkla Moor Baht ’at’ (a song about being outside without a hat on) than the country as a whole, the average Yorkshireman will point his pipe in the direction of the historic city of York and remind you George VI famously said ‘the history of York is the history of England’, although nowadays the history of York is more the history of the elevenses (Terry’s, Thorntons and Rowntrees having all been based here). As the county
boasts the pretty harbour town of Whitby and the North Yorkshire Moors, why would anyone need t’ travel anywhere else, our invented heavily stereotyped Yorkshireman (of whom we’re actually rather ashamed now) might ask. For families holidaying here the answer is: they don’t.
There’s something slightly decadent but also seedy about celebrating a birthday, even a four-year-old’s, in a hotel room: it’s half like being a rock star yet also a bit like being Alan Partridge. Thirty miles from Whitby in room 109 of the Gisborough Hall Hotel at 8.30 a.m., Phoebe receives her Winnie the Pooh foldout suitcase of crayons, the Build-A-Bear Fluffy she made and a baby doll, Max, that cries when you press its tummy and makes a sucking sound when you put a bottle of milk to its lips. Max also has a hat that doesn’t stay on that will get lost today approximately thirty-five times. Phoebe is also given her Hello Kitty lunch box and Part One of the Ancol rabbit grooming system (a flea comb). Part Two of the Ancol rabbit grooming system (the actual rabbit), we’ve promised her when we return home. At breakfast two waitresses sing her ‘Happy Birthday’, their heartiness seemingly undiminished by the fact Phoebe, as they do this, is wiping her chocolate-Coco-Popped hands on their perfect white tablecloth.
And your birthday treat,’ I tell Phoebe, as we set off.
‘Don’t build it up too much,’ says Dinah, under her breath. ‘We don’t really know what’s there.’
‘Is that we’re going to the place WHERE WALLACE AND GROMIT COME FROM.’
‘Where Wallace and Gromit come from?’ repeats Charlie, his eyes bulging. ‘YAY!’
Dinah stares at me. ‘I can’t believe you just did that.’
‘It’ll be fine.’
‘What sort of birthday treat is that?’ she whispers.
‘It will be fun.’
She shakes her head at me.
‘Dad, do you mean we’re watching a Wallace and Gromit film?’ says Phoebe.
�
��No, Phoebe, we’re going to the place where they live.’
‘Charlie, we’re going to Wallace and Gromit’s house.’
‘Y-aaaa-ay,’ he shouts.
‘Where they have those machines,’ says Phoebe, ‘that make their breakfasts and they slide down into their trousers and have cups of teas?’
Dinah gives me a knowing look.
‘Well, it’s not strictly their house, guys,’ I say.
‘It’s the Wensleydale Creamery Visitor Centre,’ says Dinah. ‘Which we were going to anyway,’ she says under her breath.
Phoebe looks at me in the rear-view mirror, confused. I explain.
‘You know Wallace likes cheese, Phoebe. Well, the cheese he likes best is Wensleydale.’
‘Wendysdale!’
‘Yes, we’re going where they make Wensleydale cheese.’
‘Oh,’ says Phoebe, then translating for Charlie. ‘Wallace likes cheese, Charlie. You know he likes cheese. You remember in the film, Charlie? And the cheese Wallace likes bestest of all is… What is it again, Dad?’
‘Wensleydale.’
‘Is Wendysdale. So we’re going to Wendysdale where we’re going to see Wallace and Gromit. The real Wallace and Gromit, Charlie.’
‘Daddy?’ says Dinah.
‘Well, guys, we hope we’ll see them.’
I shrug my shoulders at Dinah. ‘It’ll be fine.’
It’s what I’ve been saying all week. ‘It’ll be fine.’ It’s become my new mantra and on the whole it has been. After the haunted house meltdown things have been better. We’ve had a little purple patch. The weather’s been great, which helps, the kids have slept and we’ve not been attacked by bats or slept in any haunted castles. This last week we’ve cut a large scoop out of North and West Yorkshire. In Saltaire we saw the world’s largest collection of David Hockney paintings at the 1853 gallery. We descended in a pit cage 140 feet into a former coal mine in Wakefield. We visited the Brontë Parsonage in Hawes and got hopelessly lost in the warehouse room of the National Railway Museum of York amongst the aisles of memorabilia in the company of some strange looking train buffs in brightly coloured pacamacs a little too excitedly handling muffled pop safety valves and signal lever frames. And at the Yorkshire Air Museum in Elvington we had a laugh when Phoebe described a thermonuclear device thirty times more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima as ‘cute’ because it was marginally smaller than the earthquake tallboy bomb stood next to it.
We have two tactics to appease Phoebe on long journeys. The first is adapting well-known children’s stories into tales involving Phoebe herself. We do this by replacing the main character’s name with hers so it becomes, for instance, ‘Phoebe and the Three Bears’ (‘And then Phoebe tried the medium-sized bowl of porridge…’) or ‘Hansel and Phoebe’ (‘And the wicked witch told Phoebe, I will eat your brother, be he fat or thin.’). The thrill of hearing herself thrust into unlikely adventures involving beanstalks, glass slippers and evil witches buys us valuable time. The other game is a variant on I spy except to make the game last longer it becomes: I don’t spy, as in ‘I don’t spy with my little eye something beginning with P’, the P capable of being anything in the known universe unobservable from a speeding car, in this case, on the A1.
It’s 3 p.m. when we finally arrive; too late to observe the production of the Wensleydale cheese. From the viewing gallery instead we stare into empty, huge, stainless steel tubs, and read information boards detailing the various processes of milling, tipping, blocking, salting, moulding and pressing whilst learning facts the kids aren’t really interested in such as this: Wensleydale cheese won the 2002 Nantwich International Cheese Show’s supreme champion cheese award. Afterwards there’s a film about how cheese-making, brought to England from France in the twelfth century by Franciscan monks, was first threatened by the dissolution of monasteries and then by the Milk Marketing Board in the 1960s until it was saved by a Dalesman with a pipe known as Kit Calvert.
‘Daddy, where’s Wallace?’ asks Phoebe, outside the screening room.
The reason I put the attraction on our itinerary and talked it up was because of the huge picture of Wallace and Gromit on the information leaflet from the Yorkshire Tourist Board.
‘We’re not sure. He might be out delivering cheese,’ I improvise.
‘Where’s Gromit, then?’ asks Phoebe.
‘He’ll probably have gone with Wallace.’
‘When are they back?’ she asks.
‘We’re not sure, pops. But in the meantime why don’t we have some of Wallace’s favourite cheese in the buttery restaurant? Who’s hungry?’
Twenty minutes later Phoebe announces she doesn’t like her Wensleydale cheese, cranberry and walnut panini. Charlie’s not keen on his either.
‘Where’s Wallace and Gromit?’ she says, for the dozenth time and Dinah looks at me.
‘Why am I always right?’ she says.
In the hour and a half we’ve been here the solitary reference to Wallace and Gromit has been a chalk outline of the characters on the specials board.
‘Go and play for a minute,’ Dinah tells the kids.
They run off and she begins the inquest. ‘So, you saw that cartoon image of them both sticking their thumbs up holding some Wensleydale cheese on the information leaflet and, because of this, you assumed there’d be life-sized models of the characters wandering about what is actually a working cheese factory.’
‘Did your panini taste all right to you? My stomach feels weird.’
‘Never mind that. It’s an hour and a half back. They’re going to go mad. What are we going to do?’
‘What about the gift shop?’
‘Go and have a look.’
But all I can find that’s Wallace and Gromit related in the gift shop are packets of Wensleydale cheese that they don’t like. They haven’t even got The Wrong Trousers DVD.
‘Can you believe that? This is where they make the cheese that the global brand that is Wallace and Gromit are on record as saying is their favourite, and they don’t sell any of the movies. It’s like going to Disneyland and not being able to buy a Mickey Mouse toy.’
‘Love, just get anything. It doesn’t matter if it’s Wallace and Gromit themed. You need to get something, though.’
‘I know you’ll say this is very convenient, but I do feel a bit poorly, love.’
‘I know you want me to do this, Ben,’ says Dinah. ‘But I’m not going to. This is your fault, go and buy them something.’
I return to the gift shop, except not only is there nothing
Wallace and Gromit related, there isn’t anything at all for kids. It’s all aimed at the pensioners getting back on their coaches in the car park: bath salts, expensive cheeses and tins of fudge. The best I can do is a DVD entitled The Way We Were. It’s about bygone days in the north-east and Yorkshire.
Dinah shakes her head contemptuously. ‘How much was it?’
‘Twenty quid.’
‘You are joking?’
‘You said I had to get something.’
‘Right, it’ll have to do. Round them up.’
‘Who’s going to break the news?’
‘YOU.’
‘I feel poorly, love.’
‘You’re doing it.’
I tell Phoebe and Charlie that Wallace and Gromit’s van broke down so we won’t be seeing them after all. But there is some good news.
‘I’ve bought you a NEW FILM for the way home.’
The Way We Were is not made by Pixar or Disney. And it rather shows. The film stars old people from Yorkshire reminiscing about some of the north’s great industries, including, for several excruciating minutes, the driver of the opencast mining crane nicknamed the ‘Big Geordie’ talking about the dragline system. Forking south on the A61, Dinah keeps skipping it forward. But every time she presses play it’s the same. We’re near Ripon, still forty-five minutes away, when we reach the section entitled, ‘All in the family. It features fascinating film interviews
with descendants of some of our great industrial families including fire hose manufacturers George Angus and Co and chocolate makers Rowntrees of York.’
‘The only other option was Yorkshire Crafts and Traditions,’ I tell Dinah. ‘It was about drystone walls. I did my best.’
‘What about Tractor Ted in the Springtime?’ says Dinah. ‘I saw that just walking through the shop and I wasn’t even looking properly.’
‘What, the one with real-life farm footage?’
‘It was aimed at kids, Ben – I saw the box.’
‘It wasn’t aimed at kids. It was aimed at farmers.’
Miraculously the kids hold it together so that a few miles from our serviced apartment in Leeds, I’m able to lean triumphantly across to Dinah: ‘Of course, you know what Gromit would have done if Wallace had suggested driving an hour and half to the Wensleydale Creamery Visitor Centre for his daughter’s fourth birthday?’
‘What?’ says Dinah.
I do my impression of Gromit’s stern eyebrows.
The next morning I wake at 4 a.m. The pain in my side is so deep I cannot tell where it’s coming from. I nudge Dinah. After I’ve been through my symptoms she says, ‘Lie on your back and cycle in the air. It’s probably trapped wind.’ I cycle in the air but it makes no difference. Dinah tuts as I toss and turn so I climb out of bed. I try to walk it off next door in the kitchen-living room but it gets worse. I feel the need to shed my pyjamas I’m so hot. But straightaway I feel the need to put them back on because I start to shiver. I pace up and down rubbing my stomach, occasionally lying down, sitting up or moving about again. The pain becomes so acute I think I’m going to vomit. I run to the toilet. All I do is gag. I remember Dinah pregnant in the Royal Sussex County Hospital unable to get comfortable. It feels like this. Back in the bedroom Dinah says, with her back to me, her voice muffled by the covers, ‘Do some deep breathing? You always think you’ve got appendicitis. It’s wind from that cheese. Or constipation. You said yourself you haven’t been for a poo in a couple of days. Please, let me sleep.’
