Out of the Woods But Not Over the Hill

by Gervase Phinn

  ‘What breed is that then?’ Graham asked.

  ‘Breed?’ I repeated.

  ‘Aye,’ said the child. ‘What breed is he?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I answered in a rather pathetic tone of voice.

  ‘Don’t you know your sheep then?’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ I replied.

  ‘Miss,’ shouted the child, ‘could Tony come over here a minute? I want to know what breed of sheep this is.’

  We were joined by Tony, another stocky little six-year-old with red cheeks and a runny nose. ‘Let’s have a look at t’picture then,’ he said. I turned the picture book to face him. The large white sheep with black patches and a mouth full of shining teeth smiled from the page.

  ‘Is it a Masham or a Swaledale?’ he asked me.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I answered, in the same pathetic tone of voice.

  Another child joined the discussion. ‘It looks like a blue-faced Leicester to me. What do you reckon?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ I replied.

  ‘Don’t you know your sheep, then?’ I was asked again and once more replied that I did not. By this time, a small crowd of interested onlookers had joined me in the reading corner.

  ‘They’re not Leicesters,’ ventured Tony.

  ‘Is it a Texel?’ ventured a plump girl, peering at the picture. Then she glanced in the direction of the ignoramus. ‘That’s a Dutch breed.’

  ‘Texels have white faces, not black,’ Graham commented.

  Very soon, the whole class was concentrating on the breed of the picture-book sheep.

  ‘Well,’ smiled the teacher, ‘you are causing quite a stir in the reading corner, Mr Phinn. In order to solve the mystery, will you pop next door, Tony, and ask Mrs Brown if we could borrow Marianne for a moment. Say we have a little problem she can help us solve.’ Tony scampered off into the next room. ‘Marianne has eight breeds on her farm,’ explained the teacher, ‘and her grandfather’s prize ram won a blue ribbon at the Yorkshire Show.’

  ‘She knows her sheep, does Marianne,’ I was told by a serious-looking girl with dark plaits. The children nodded in agreement. Marianne strode confidently into the classroom from the juniors.

  ‘Is it sheep?’ she asked.

  ‘What breed of sheep are these, do you reckon, Marianne?’ asked Tony, stabbing the page on the picture book that I was holding.

  Marianne scrutinised the illustrations, shook her head, sucked in her breath. All eyes were on her, everyone was waiting for the definitive answer.

  ‘I reckon they’re Bleu de Main or Rouge de l’Ouest,’ she suggested. Then she turned to the dunce holding the book, and looked me straight in the eyes. ‘What do you reckon?’

  Before I could answer, Tony, shaking his head like a little old man, remarked, ‘It’s no good askin’ ’im. He knows nowt abaat owt!’

  Hail Caesar!

  One of the most unusual venues at which I have appeared on my recent theatre tour was the Skipton Auction Mart. During the day, livestock is auctioned and the place is crammed with would-be buyers and sellers, inspecting, comparing, conversing and bidding. In the evening, the space is converted into a makeshift theatre with tiered seating, and a stage, good acoustics and excellent lighting. It is such a clever, innovative concept and brings comedians, folk groups, pop bands, one-man shows and actors to the market town, and they perform in an intimate atmospheric arena redolent of animals, earth and hay.

  It was to the Skipton Auction Mart that I made a special journey, to see a Belgian Blue bull being auctioned. It was a magnificent beast, like a huge box on legs, pale brown and white in colour with a massively thick neck, mighty horns and great muscles. Here was the Schwarzenegger of bulls.

  I had seen my first Belgian Blue when, as a school inspector, I visited a school in the Yorkshire Dales. In a nearby field I had come across this striking-looking creature of impressive girth and incredible muscles, staring impassively over a gate. Approaching him, I could smell his grassy breath, and felt a tingle of fear as he scraped the compacted earth with a massive hoof. He was, indeed, a remarkable creature. I was told by the head teacher of the school I later visited that the bull was called Caesar and was owned by her neighbour, Mr Purvis, a man of few words and strong views.

  ‘He’s a great, fat, pompous creature,’ the head teacher told me. ‘The bull that is, not Mr Purvis. He keeps Caesar only for breeding purposes and the bull looks like the emperor himself, the way he struts round the field until he’s called upon to “do his duty”, as one might say. But he has a really vicious streak, has Caesar, and many’s the time Old Mr Purvis has stamped back to the farmhouse, cursing and swearing, and black and blue with bruises. The bull broke his arm a couple of times when he was trying to get hold of him. Anyway, when Jacob, his grandson, was about eleven, as the story goes, he rushed into the farmhouse kitchen one morning, shouting blue murder. “Grandfather! Grandfather!” he cried. “Caesar’s gone! He’s not in his field! Somebody’s stolen Caesar!” His grandfather didn’t bat an eyelid but carried on drinking his tea. Then he nodded in the direction of the window. In the field beyond was poor old Caesar, yoked to a plough, pulling away down the furrows, with two of the farmhands flicking his haunches with sharp switches. Caesar snorted and bellowed and puffed and heaved and looked very hard done by. “I’ll show him that there’s more to life than love-making!” said Mr Purvis.’ The head teacher chuckled loudly, her body heaving and her eyes filling with tears of pleasure.

  Farmers often struggle to make a living. Their life is hard, wearisome and often with little reward. They are also guardians of the country, and preserve its beauty. It is important for them to have a sense of humour. Another story concerning Mr Purvis and his young grandson was about their visit to the Auction Mart. On their way out of Skipton, in the Land Rover with attached trailer, which had several recently purchased sheep in the back, the old man asked Jacob. ‘’As tha put t’cooats in?’

  ‘Yes, Granddad,’ replied the boy.

  ‘And t’tools?’

  ‘They’re under t’seat.’

  ‘And t’bran?’

  ‘It’s in t’back.’

  ‘I’m sure there’s summat we’ve forgotten,’ said Mr Purvis, shaking his head.

  ‘Where’s Grandma?’ asked the boy.

  A Dalesman to His Son

  Well lad,

  I’ll tell thee summat:

  Life for me aint been no easy road to walk.

  It’s been a long hard journey –

  Mostly uphill all the way.

  At times it’s been a hot and dusty trail,

  Wi’ potholes and sharp stones beneath mi feet

  And a sweltering sun burning the back o’ mi neck.

  Sometimes it’s been knee-deep wi’ mud

  And thick wi’ snow and blocked wi’ fallen trees,

  With an icy wind blowing full in mi face.

  There were times when it’s been dark and dangerous

  And I’ve been lonely and afraid and felt like turning back.

  But all the time lad,

  I’ve kept plodding on,

  And climbing stiles,

  And scaling walls,

  And seeing signposts,

  And reaching milestones,

  And making headway.

  So lad, don’t you turn round,

  Don’t go back on the road

  For I’m still walking,

  I’m still walking,

  And life for me aint been no easy road to walk.

  ‘The Slippery Snake’

  Troublesome Language

  Places Out of the Ordinary

  Following the publication of my book, The Other Side of the Dale, I received a letter from a disgruntled reader. ‘Not being a native of Yorkshire, but reading all about the county in your book,’ she wrote, ‘I decided to have a week in the Yorkshire Dales, hoping that while I was there I might visit some of the quaint villages – such as Scarthorpe, Barton Moor and Hawksrill – which you mention. I wa
s very disappointed to discover that they do not exist.’

  It is true, I made them up. Being a somewhat cautious person, I felt it politic not to mention actual place names in my books, in case it gave offence to the residents or attracted unwanted visitors to their villages. So thorough was I in making certain the names I invented did not in fact exist, that I checked in The Penguin Dictionary of Place Names, written by a fellow Penguin author, Adrian Groom. I should never have opened the pages of this book. Devoted to the origins of the names of towns, villages and other spots throughout the country, it is a fascinating and comprehensive compendium. The reader learns about the oldest and newest, longest and shortest, most obscure and just plain silly, places throughout the British Isles. I just could not put it down, and now carry it with me as I tour the country on book signings and theatre tours, enlightening any companion brave enough to travel with me, with the origins of our destinations.

  There is a village called Lover, just outside Salisbury in Wiltshire, that attracts hundreds of die-hard romantics each year, but this is not the only place where ‘love’ appears in the British landscape. There is Truelove in Devon, Heart’s Delight in Kent and Cupid’s Hill in Monmouthshire. Couples can kiss in Valentine’s Park in London, find Red Roses in Carmarthenshire, cuddle in the shadows of Love’s Hill in Peterborough and say Isle of Ewe off the coast of Scotland.

  Amongst the strangely named places to be featured in the dictionary are: Beer in Devon, Wyre Piddle in Worcestershire, Little Snoring in Norfolk, Spital in Lincolnshire, Rest and Be Thankful in Argyll, Barton in the Beans in Leicestershire, Bonkle in Lancashire, Pease Pottage in Sussex, Loose in Kent, Pennycomequick near Plymouth, Matching Tye in Essex, Dirt Pot in Northumberland, Pity Me near Durham, Great Cockup, Robin Hood’s Butts, Pratt’s Bottom and Puttock End. There’s a wonderfully expressive place called Old Sodbury, in Gloucestershire, which sounds like the wrinkled retainer in a P G Wodehouse novel, and Shitterton in Dorset, the name deriving from ‘the village on the stream used as an open sewer’ (but you probably knew that anyway).

  My editor at Penguin, the redoubtable Jenny Dereham (who edited the James Herriot books and Miss Read amongst others), was slightly dubious about some of the more imaginative places I invented in my books – Backwatersthwaite, Ugglemattersby, High Ruston-cum-Riddleswade, and others, until I pointed out that Yorkshire is famed for its bizarre place names. ‘God’s own country’ is particularly rich in imaginative and wonderfully expressive names: Sexhow, Booze, The Land of Nod, Land of Green Ginger (near Hull), Bedlam, Idle (near Bradford, and home of the famous Idle Working Men’s Club), Bugthorpe, Slack (near Halifax), Jump (near Barnsley), Wetwang, Giggleswick, Blubberhouses, Studley Roger, Thwing, Ugglebarnaby and Fartown. At the Rock and Heifer Inn at Thornton, near Bradford, is a signpost pointing the ways to Moscow, Jerusalem, Egypt, Jericho and World’s End, all of which are a couple of miles away. Also near Bradford is a Greenland and Cape of Good Hope, and, at East Ardsley, near Wakefield, is an area known as ‘Who Could Have Thought It’, which was the scene of a tragic mining accident in 1809.

  The story goes that William Hague, on becoming the MP for Richmond, telephoned a constituent but dialled the wrong number.

  ‘Is this a Hawes number?’ he enquired cheerfully.

  ‘Certainly not!’ came the sharp reply, before the receiver was slammed down. ‘There is no sort of woman like that here.’

  Just Words

  I love this rich, poetic, tricky, troublesome, inconsistent language of ours. Since an early age, I have written down words in my notebook which have unusual spellings, ones which I have never come across before and those which simply appeal to me. I have lists of them.

  Here are some of my favourites: hobbledehoy, ragamuffin, brouhaha, autochthonous, esurient, lucubration, prescience, swashbuckling, dandified, deracinated, troublous, inspissated, monody, propinquity, nonchalance, haecceity, ptarmigan, viscosity, weasel, pontificate, avuncular, contrapuntal, expostulatory, harridan and gewgaws.

  Shakespeare was the first recorded user of about two thousand words, of which nearly half have now, sadly, fallen out of use. We continue to use ‘abhorred’, ‘abstemious’ and ‘accessible’, but we have lost some wonderful words like ‘adoptious’, ‘abidance’, ‘allayment’ and ‘annexment’. He was a great one for inventing words too, was the Bard of Avon. Like Shakespeare, some people still love to create new words and expressions, words that don’t exist in the language but the inventor thinks they ought to. There was a wonderful office cleaner who was greatly adept at this. ‘Mr Phinn,’ she once said to me, ‘you’re so artificated.’ On another occasion, she saw a colleague waving at me madly from across the office, and pointing to the ringing telephone. ‘Mr Smith’s testiculating,’ she told me.

  I met Hilary Murphy on a cruise ship. She was in the front row for one of my lectures on English spelling – always a hot potato – and was willing, with some in the audience (but not all), to have a go at a spelling test. ‘Anyone who gets them all right,’ I said, confident in the knowledge that none would, ‘I will give to him or her a signed, first edition copy of my latest book.’ I have given this spelling test numerous times before, to parents, teachers, head teachers and academics, and no one got them all right. Hilary, however, not only spelt the thirty words correctly but gave me a list of other tricky words. I was amazed by her knowledge, and then discovered that it is she who sets the questions on the television programme, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? I am indebted to Hilary for these wonderfully expressive words and their meanings:

  ALEATORY – depending on the throw of the dice

  BIBULOUS – addicted to alcohol

  BORBORYGMUS – rumbling of gas in the intestine

  CICATRIZATION – healed by the forming of a scar

  DEFENESTRATION – throwing a person out of a window

  ERGOPHOBIA – dread of work

  EXCORIATE – peel off, strip, remove skin by abrasion

  GALLIMOUFRY – jumble, medley

  GLABROUS – bald, completely smooth

  GNOMON – the rod of a sundial

  PICAYUNE – insignificant thing or person

  STEATOPYGIC – having excess fat on the buttocks

  TERATOGENIC – producing monsters

  Being a nosy sort of person, I asked Hilary what was the most memorable moment on that popular quiz show. A contestant, she told me, was asked the question: ‘The Archbishop of Canterbury is known as a . . . ?’ There were four options: ‘primate’, ‘marsupial’, ‘mammal’ and ‘rodent’. The contestant opted to go ‘fifty-fifty’, and was given two choices, of ‘primate’ or ‘marsupial’. ‘I’ll phone a friend,’ said the contestant. The friend, yes, you have guessed, opted for ‘marsupial’. Whenever I see the warm bearded face and shining eyes of Dr Williams on the television screen, I cannot think of him as being anything other than ‘The Marsupial of All England’.

  A Tricky Language

  Robert McClosky, a State Department spokesman, once said:

  I know you believe that you understand what you think I said, but I’m not sure that you recognise that what you heard is not necessarily what I meant.

  How true. What we say and write can lead to a great deal of misunderstanding and unintentional mirth. ‘Better to trip with the feet than with the tongue,’ said Zeno, 300 years before the birth of Jesus Christ. Shakespeare, that master wordsmith, shows us in his plays that words can be delightful and amusing, but also can be cruel, cutting and dangerous in their seduction.

  I have just returned from a week in Tenerife. Whenever abroad, I am always interested in the ways in which foreigners try and get their heads around this tricky and troublesome language of ours. In the toilet at the hotel in which we stayed was a large notice which read: ‘In the event of fire evacuate immediately and leave the premise.’

  Over the years, on my travels abroad, I have collected a fair number of amusing, inventive and ambiguous instructions and notices. Here are a few:

  Would you
like to ride on your own ass? (Egypt)

  Special today – No ice-cream (Venice)

  We take your bags and we send them in all directions (Sweden)

  It is forbidden to enter a woman even a foreigner if dressed as a man (Bangkok temple)

  A special cocktail for ladies with nuts (Tokyo)

  If this is your first visit to Moscow you are welcome to it (Russia)

  Specialist in women and other diseases (Rome)

  English well talking (Majorca)

  You are invited to take advantage of the chambermaid (France)

  Our wines leave you nothing to hope for (Lisbon)

  Drop your trousers here for best results (Nanjing cleaners)

  Ladies have a fit upstairs (Hong Kong tailors)

  You are welcome to visit the cemetery where famous Russian and Soviet composers, artists and writers are buried daily except Thursdays (Moscow monastery)

  Of course, we indigenous speakers of English have a few problems with our own language:

  PLEASE LEAVE HEATHER FOR ALL TO ENJOY (Peak District)

  Bargain Basement upstairs (Harrogate shop)

  Children may not skate on the frozen water unless passed by the head teacher (on school staff notice board)

  The management is looking for a mature person to cook (Doncaster café)

  Tek Care! Lams ont road (Wensleydale)

  Labrador for sale. Eats anything, fond of children (newspaper advertisement)

  Toilet for sitting down customers only (Sheffield café)

  Playground fine for littering (children’s playground in Halifax)

  Lions, please stay in the car (safari park)