north york morrs – The Countryman's Daughter

A path to inspiration

A0C69DB8-C839-42D4-B3FF-1BCB902E0992 — Public footpaths have often existed for thousands of years

5F1EB9C6-750F-4799-B14D-F171AD5D722F — The familiar fat yellow arrows show which way to go after crossing the stile

As a follow-up to my last column about the tragic case of William Winter who lost his wife and three young children to Scarlet Fever in May 1889, I was planning this week to discuss the havoc the disease wreaked on England in the nineteenth century. But as I wrote, it dawned on me that the subject matter was thoroughly miserable. I questioned whether I, as a columnist for this esteemed paper, was serving you readers by showering you in melancholy and thus making you as miserable as I felt. Let’s face it, over recent weeks I’ve bombarded you with tales of disease, death and graveyards.

So I did what I always do when I’m faced with such a quandary; I stopped writing. As a writer, you have to trust that inspiration will come, and you learn not to struggle on when your ideas don’t work. By the next morning, I still had very little notion as to what misery-free topic I would write about and once I had exhausted all the usual procrastination-induced tasks (like hanging out washing, making pots of tea, watching Netflix), I did the next best thing. I went for a walk.

I’m lucky to have instant access to the beautiful North Yorkshire countryside outside my front door and, thanks to the kindness of a local farmer, am allowed to wander across his land up to the top of a hill where I can take in the glorious views over my home valley. It helps me clear my mind just a little bit.

The route through his field joins a public footpath across the top of the hills and I soon came to a stile where the way ahead was signposted by familiar fat yellow arrows put in place by the North York Moors National Park Authority. I didn’t need them though as the direction was clearly visible thanks to the many thousands of feet that had trodden it before me.

And that, dear people, is when the inspiration for this particular column finally arrived. How did this footpath get here, and how old was it?

A path across land can become an official right of way if it has been used continuously by the public for at least 20 years and, once approved, it is a classification bound by law. In many cases, these routes have existed for generations, and in the days before instant communication and motorised transport many were packhorse trails, used for delivering messages and shifting goods between settlements.

Different paths would be forged for different reasons, and there are clues as to their age and purpose. For example, if a path runs directly between two villages (and especially if those villages appear in the Doomsday Book), it is likely to have existed for thousands of years, originally linking tribal settlements to one another. Later on, from the first century AD until the fifth, we were occupied by the Romans who took highways and byways to a whole new level, being the first civilisation to construct formal paved roads, forging their way for many miles right across the landscape. It made it easier to move armies, weapons and supplies from one part of the country to another. Many Roman roads form the basis of our transport network today, while others have become public footpaths and bridleways, and the rest have been swallowed up by agricultural land or development, although their imprint can sometimes still be seen from the air.

Other public footpaths trace their roots back to specific purposes. A ‘monk’s trod’ ran between monasteries and religious sites, a ‘corpse trail’ was a path to church along which coffins would be borne, ‘miners’ tracks’ were formed in remote parts of the Dales and Moors when the land was exploited for tin and lead, and ‘drove roads’ were created to drive livestock to markets, sometimes stretching for hundreds of miles (much of the Cleveland Way is an old drove road).

These networks of paths provide insight into how our forbears went about their everyday lives. The one I was using led to a local historical monument, thought to be a late Bronze Age animal enclosure, which means I was following a route that was created around 3,000 years ago.

So next time you walk one of your local public footpaths, I wonder if you can work out its age, and how it came to be?

Read more at countrymansdaughter.com. Follow me on Twitter @countrymansdaug

This column appeared in the Darlington and Stockton Times on 7th and Ryedale Gazette and Herald on 5th April 2023

Out on a limb for leeches

242322A0-0D4B-4DD7-ABEA-008FC8E9CF1E — Dad loved his garden pond. Here he is feeding the fish a couple of years ago.

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on 2nd February 2018, & the Gazette & Herald on 31st January 2018.

I went through the ‘frogs and snails and puppy dogs tales’ phase with each one of my three boys when they were at primary school. They were fascinated by ‘minibeasts’, which was a new word to me, but referred to what we would have called creepy crawlies. They had no squeamishness about picking up spiders, worms, slugs, snails and wood lice and presenting them to me with great glee.

Even more excitement was to be had whenever we came across a pond, as there were more fascinating minibeasts to found in and around it. When my oldest was a toddler, we lived in house with a pond in the garden and I can’t forget the noise the frogs used to make, and the undulating surface of the water, during mating season. The females are attracted to the males with the loudest croak, hence the cacophony! They also lay up to 2000 eggs, so soon our pond would be teeming with tadpoles, although not all would make it to adulthood, and those that did risked a messy confrontation with the lawnmower if they ventured far from the water.

My brother was also fascinated with such creatures in his youth, and in his February 4th 1978 column, Dad recalls the occasion when he built his own pond. Finding that a hole in the ground lined with polythene was no good, my brother resorted to using an old, Belfast sink, sunk into the rockery outside Dad’s study window. He filled it with with plants and pond life gathered from a local disused swimming pool and nearby lakes. He was very proud that soon his family of great crested newts had started breeding. He wouldn’t have known that 40 years later, if he disturbed the habitat of a great crested newt, he’d face up to six months in prison and an unlimited fine!

Alongside newts, frogs, sticklebacks and minnows, he also unwittingly rehomed a number of freshwater leeches, thankfully a small variety which were harmless to humans.

In medieval times, doctors were called ‘leeches’ due to their custom of treating all manner of ailment by bleeding their patients with the sluglike bloodsuckers. For many centuries, it has been one of the most effective treatments for a number of reasons, and this medical practice continues to this day. There is a farm in Wales which breeds medicinal leeches for this purpose, which is known as hirudotherapy (from the Latin name for these leeches, hirudo medicinalis). As well as supplying the NHS, the company sends them all over the world for use in surgery. The leech, which is about three and half inches long, is particularly effective in treating areas of poor circulation, especially in parts of the body with delicate soft tissue, for example when surgeons are trying to repair or reattach a severely injured limb. They clean up the wound by removing the clotted blood that is inhibiting blood flow, and then encourage circulation to restart.

It is the mechanics of mouth of the leech, a curious biological triumph, which makes it so effective for medical treatment. It has a circular, overlapping lip, and then three jaws, shaped a bit like the Mercedes-Benz logo, each with a row of 100 tiny teeth, perfect for making clean incisions into the skin at exactly the right depth. As they bite, they secrete a local anaesthetic, making the bite painless, alongside another substance, known as a vasodilator, which stimulates blood flow. Once the leech has filled its boots with blood, it then simply drops off to digest it. However, it leaves behind two important chemicals called hirudin and calin, which prevent further clotting and continue to stimulate blood flow for up to 48 hours after the leech has dropped off, which is so important when when it comes to success in treating these kinds of injuries. Although it all sounds a bit gruesome, it is one of nature’s amazing accomplishments, far more effective than many other medicinal treatments, and in fact the leeches only consume a relatively small amount of blood before they become full, around 15ml.

Incidentally, trials have shown that the anti-inflammatory and anaesthetic properties of leech saliva have been shown to be effective in treating pain and tenderness in the joints of people suffering conditions such as osteoarthritis. Vets are also finding them useful during surgical procedures on animals.

Now my question is, how would you feel with a leech let loose on your injured limb?
(Sources: biopharm-leeches.com, guysandstthomas.nhs.uk).

The Mystery of the Disappearing Chestnuts

F9A9518C-92CE-4D9B-9E1C-45A8A175B392 — Marmalade the cat

555EB19F-21C0-46F1-B7E0-2A2067E9A7CD — Sweet chestnuts

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on 19th January 2018, & the Gazette & Herald on 17th January 2018.

You may remember that in my column from the Gazette & Herald on 6th September 2017 (‘Dad’s swift actions stop a catastrophe’) and the D&S Times from 8th September 2017 (‘Saved from catastrophe by Dad’s swift action’) that I talked about the various family cats, both tame and feral, that lived in and around my childhood home.

Dad recounts a lovely story about our longest-surviving cat, Marmalade, in his January 21st 1978 column. She had wandered into our garden as a very young stray and never left, becoming a much-loved part of the family. She had come from a nearby farm, but the farmer had no interest in the cats that frequented his hay barn and was more than happy when they took up residence elsewhere.

Mum and Dad had been stumped by the mystery of the disappearing chestnuts from the windowsill. What was a full bowl a few days earlier, was now no more than half full, and no-one confessed to having eaten any.

Then one day, Dad saw the cat jump on to the ledge and scoop out a chestnut with her paw, which then fell to the ground. She leapt after it in an uncharacteristically energetic way, and chased it across the floor, flicking it up into the air and batting it from paw to paw, as she would had she caught a mouse. Once the chestnut had disappeared under the furniture, she went back again for another one. What was it about the chestnut that ignited this new obsession? Dad had no idea, and my own searches have shed no light on it.

It brings to mind the effect of catnip, often used to scent pet toys. Catnip is a plant from the nepeta, or catmint, genus in the Lamiaceae family, and there are many varieties. In an article by the appropriately-named Kat Arney on the Royal Society of Chemistry website (www.chemistryworld.com), she explains that catnip contains a chemical called nepetalactone, which in cats induces behaviour similar to a person having taken drugs. They act with languid abandon, brushing their bodies against the leaves or rolling around among the stems. If they chew or eat it, they soon become what one might call ‘out of it’. For us humans, the plant can be infused to make herbal tea, and in times gone by small doses were used as a mild sedative. It is not recommended to be taken in large quantities, even though hopeful hippies gave it a go in search of a cheap high. All they ended up with was a painful headache and an upset stomach.

Catmint is a lovely garden plant, but to avoid delirious kitties flattening your borders, it is recommended that you place a small crop of nepeta cataria, the most potent catnip, in a place where you don’t mind them being mauled by frolicking felines, and then they will ignore the other milder varieties you have planted in pride of place. I have no idea if this distraction tactic works, and would be delighted if any readers can tell me!

After Marmalade arrived, she was soon followed by her sister Eric (my brother chose this name. He was outnumbered by females of both the human and feline variety, which might explain why!).

Eric remained feral, and we could never get close enough to tame her. After she had been with us for about a year, she produced a litter of kittens. We’d known she was pregnant and, due to her sudden change in appearance, that she had given birth, but we couldn’t find her litter anywhere. Then, on Christmas Eve 1977, she produced her own feline nativity scene in a very prominent position near our back door. Of course when we found the kittens, we instantly fell in love, and they were named (again courtesy of my brother) Alfred, Rodney (both girls) and Jackson (a boy).

But Eric would never be able to live indoors, and so Dad found the little family a cosy place in our disused henhouse, ensuring they had plenty of straw to keep them warm. We carried the kittens up to the henhouse ourselves, and lured Eric with some cat food on a spoon. She stayed there for about a week, before bringing her kittens back down to the back door on New Year’s Eve. So we repeated the process again, and this time she stayed. The young kittens thrived, and although they never became household pets, they became very much a part of our family history.

A mass farewell to 2017

293F25DD-002F-4E85-B2BB-530C3A7B5545 — Dad’s column from this week in 1976 was dated Christmas Day itself

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8B5B267F-9D3B-418B-B69B-4F80B47C7F0F — My Dad pulling a cracker with his grandson Joseph in 2006

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on 29th December 2017, & the Gazette & Herald on 27th December 2017.

I can’t quite believe that here we are already at my last column of 2017. Writing it every week has been an absolute pleasure, giving me an excuse to spend some time alone with my thoughts, and some time alone with my Dad’s thoughts from long ago.

I was surprised to find that the column I planned to work from this week is actually dated Christmas Day itself, and as that day was a Saturday in 1976, I wondered when the day of issue for the Darlington and Stockton Times changed to a Friday. I’m sure someone somewhere knows and will tell me! In it, Dad talks about our family tradition of attending Midnight Mass at the local catholic church. At first, I was too little to go, and would get frustrated at being the only child left behind in bed while my three siblings would totter off with my dad at the excitingly late hour of 11.30. There is an oft-repeated family story that one year, one of us fell asleep on the kitchen table while waiting to go, but to this day we debate which one of us it was. My mum says it was me!

Eventually, I was old enough for my parents to have confidence that I wouldn’t nod off half way through, or fidget and whine noisily. Poor misguided fools! I lost count of the amount of times I was ‘shushed’ due to my habit of sighing very loudly. And as long as I maintained contact between bottom and pew, then I classed that as sitting still. Arm folding and unfolding, feet tapping and swinging, or bum shuffling and shifting were all perfectly acceptable to me. Otherwise, how does a five-year-old get through an hour-long Catholic mass led by an elderly priest? It’s a lifetime, especially when all you really care about is the moment when you emerge excitedly from church, knowing it is finally officially Christmas Day, look up into the night sky and try and spot Santa on the way to your house with all the presents. You also hoped that by some miracle, while you were in there, the snow fairy would have paid a visit and sprinkled a little bit of her Christmas magic around for your walk home (sometimes she even did!).

Our family tradition continued for many years, and there were countless moments of light relief, including the time when our friend’s little boy, dressed as a shepherd near the altar, proudly held up his hand and shouted, “My tooth’s come out!” And another time, when a little boy was sitting next to his friend and both of them had taken their hands out of their jumper sleeves. One bumped the other and they both toppled over like weebles (they wobbled and they did fall down).

When we were young adults, Midnight Mass was where we ended up after the evening in the pub. Some of us were guilty of being slightly north of sober, which we thought we hid very well, until one of us (not me) became very unwell in a pew. It must have been so annoying for everyone else (sorry!) and drunkenness was cited as one of the reasons why the service ended up being moved to 8.30pm in recent years (which must have come as a relief for many parents of young children!).

But enough of Christmas, that’s all over – it is nearly the New Year now! Dad’s last column of 1976 was published on New Year’s Eve, and in it he pays tribute to his predecessor, Major Jack Fairfax-Blakeborough, who died almost exactly one year before. As those who’ve been reading my columns since I began in June will know, Major JFB wrote the Countryman’s Diary for 54 years, and my dad took it over in 1976 until his own death in April this year.

JFB was a very special influence in Dad’s life, and I hope that it would fill him with pride to know that 41 years later, the words of his tribute to the Major could very easily be applied to him.

‘His individual contribution to the understanding of country life and lore will never be forgotten. He was a man of immense knowledge, industry and faith.

‘The Grand Old Man now lies buried at Lealholm but his work will live on forever in the libraries of the world.’

I want to thank you all for being so understanding and supportive in reading my columns thus far, for all the wonderful letters and feedback, and for putting me right when I go wrong!

I wish you all the very best for 2018.

All Spruced Up For Christmas

65C13E61-244F-4BEF-9925-0CCBBB4664CB — Christmas selfie with my dad and mum last year, 2016. We didn’t know then that it would be Dad’s last one.

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on 22nd December 2017, & the Gazette & Herald on 20th December 2017.

As a child, I used to nag my parents to get our Christmas tree early, but they steadfastly refused to buy one until the very last minute. I’d see trees going up in windows all around the village and looked on with envious frustration. Some people even had those trendy new artificial silver ones, whose shimmer and sparkle were mesmerising to those of us eagerly awaiting December 25th, which always approached at the pace of a sloth on a slow day.

Finally, around 23rd December, when I was about fit to burst, Dad would go to buy a real tree and out would come all our decorations that had seen many, many years of use. Back then, the round baubles were nearly all made of wafer-thin glass, so we’d usually lose one or two mid-decorating. We also had more ornate metal baubles which varied in shape from the conventional, like yellow bells and red santas, to the more bizarre, like pink bunches of grapes (why?), green minarets, and those with the front scooped out to reveal the shiny innards (well that’s what they looked like to me).

The good, bushy tinsel would have pride of place, front and centre, while its sad, threadbare relatives, now barely more than straggly string, would be relegated to a lowly position round the back (We all know the unwritten rule of Christmas is still ‘Thou Shalt Not Dispose of Old and Tatty Decorations but Keep Them Forever Even if They Will Never Again See the Light of Day’).

Our plastic Christmas fairy, in a faded net tutu, would go on top last of all. She wasn’t the smartest or prettiest fairy, but we never thought to get rid of her until one Christmas, when we were all grown up, we came home to find she had been replaced with a rather fancy star.

The mood of 1970s glam rock was reflected in the baubles and tinsel, a glittery assortment of styles and colours which now would be considered the polar opposite of taste and sophistication. But we loved it all, and were prepared to suffer the pain of a thousand Norway Spruce needles in our fingers to make sure we covered the tree in just about every decoration we owned. There was no such thing as too much tinsel back then. Today’s kids, with their poncy soft-needled, non-dropping, fire-retardant Nordman Firs will never understand the kind of dogged determination needed to decorate a Norway Spruce.

In his column from 18th December 1976, Dad explains that the Norway Spruce was by far the most popular real tree of the day, and the reason he and Mum were so reluctant to put one up early was its propensity for shedding. We did keep it up, as tradition dictated, until the Epiphany on January 6th though, which was when we regretted our decorating zeal, as removing them was like rolling your arms along a hedgehog over and over again. Then Dad would carry this bone-dry fire hazard outside, followed by a thick trail of browning needles.

Many people think Queen Victoria’s husband Albert brought the Christmas tree custom over from Germany. But according to Her Majesty the Queen’s own website, http://www.royal.uk (possibly the finest web address on the planet), it was Queen Charlotte, consort of George III, who first introduced a Christmas tree into the royal household in the late 1700s. But the popularity of Victoria and Albert was the reason it became a national institution.

The association of royalty with Christmas trees still persists, and every year, the Queen gives trees to Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s Cathedral in London, as well as to St Giles’ Cathedral and Canongate Kirk in Edinburgh. She also donates trees to schools near the Sandringham estate where the Royal family spend Christmas.

As we decorated our tree this year (a Nordman Fir put up nice and early!), it was with more than a little sadness that for the first time, Dad wouldn’t be here to share the festivities with us. But we have enjoyed many lovely Christmases with him, and were very lucky that last year, we had a wonderful family celebration with no idea it would be his last. So I want to pass on my good wishes and thoughts for the season to all of you who are missing loved ones at this special time, and ask you to spare a thought too for those who are spending Christmas with no-one at all.

One less Christmas stress

187BAD10-0245-40D1-A2CE-016FC50E81D5 — My dad Peter Walker heading towards my house to celebrate Christmas on a snowy December 25th in 2010.

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on 15th December 2017, & the Gazette & Herald on 13th December 2017.

As a mother of three children and host to family at Christmas, I often had so much to do that one year I decided to put sending cards at the bottom of the priority list. Each year leading up to this decision, I would envision an evening where I’d be sitting cozily by the fire, a glass of mulled wine on the side and Christmas music gently wafting in the background as I lingered over meaningful festive sentiments to express to friends near and far.

But that imagined evening would never materialise. Instead I’d end up at the last minute furiously scribbling the same short bland message in each one, race to our post office to queue for ages under its horrible fluorescent lights, before gasping incredulously at the ever-increasing cost of the stamps.

So I relegated the chore to the bottom of the pile, and of course, it never got done. Amazingly, my friends didn’t disown me, so the following year, I did the same, until eventually I stopped thinking about it altogether. Now, I don’t post any at all except to hand-deliver a few to people I see regularly. Some might see it as a sad diminishing of a well-loved tradition, but I’m just glad to have one less thing to stress about on my festive ‘to-do’ list.

That’s not to say I don’t enjoy receiving them, and am very happy for people who want to carry on the tradition to do so, just as long as they don’t expect one from me. Nowadays, it is so easy to share your good wishes through social media that sending cards is less necessary.

When I was a child, only posh or rich people sent fancy cards worth keeping to turn into gift cards for the following year (Yes, I actually do that!). The rest of us were content with sending those you bought in a box of 50 for a couple of quid, and extravagances such as glitter, embossing and cards thick enough to stay upright were few and far between.

In his column from 11 December 1976, Dad mentions a splendid example from one such posh friend which featured a coach and horses galloping through the snow.

He says: ‘It all looks so cosy and romantic, but in truth it was far from the case. After one coach trip, Queen Elizabeth I confided to the French ambassador that she was unable to sit down for several days.’

That was when coaches had no suspension to speak of, and it must have been incredibly uncomfortable on our appallingly uneven, muddy and pot-holed roads. Springs were introduced in 1754, and by 1775 there were 400 commercial coaches operating, with one running from Leeds to London in 39 hours. As they travelled at an average speed of eight miles an hour, they would have stopped at the various coaching inns along the route to rest, change horses and take on refreshments (and no doubt to rub ointment into sore bottoms!).

The late 1700s became known as the ‘golden era of coaching’ until they were superseded by the ascension of the railways early the following century. One of the most famous coaches was the Wellington, which travelled a route between Newcastle and London. One of its drivers was a Northallerton man called Thomas Layfield, who was reputed to be one of the finest, and a favourite of the Duke of Northumberland. But he realised the days of coaches had come and gone when he set off one day from Newcastle, stopping at Darlington, Northallerton and Thirsk, without collecting a single passenger. By 1830, the railways had become firmly established in our region, reaching speeds of thirty miles an hour.

I’d like to say thank you to readers Frank Boocock and John Woolway who spotted an error in an earlier column (One potato, two potatoes, three potatoes…splat! November 17th). They pointed out that the Lion Inn, Blakey Ridge, is not the highest point in the North York Moors National Park, but that that honour goes to Urra Moor which stands at 1489 feet above sea level (454 metres). The pub lies at a mere 1325 feet (404 metres). Perhaps someone can tell me if instead it’s the highest point accessible by road?

It’s one of those questions that had Dad still been here, he’d have known the answer to immediately. Clearly, I still have a way to go!

Who put the snail in the mail?

63F85F17-D774-4E2C-B843-29C8C998BA32 — The post box near Eden Camp, Malton, with its adapted slot to deter hungry snails

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on 8th December 2017, & the Gazette & Herald on 6th December 2017

Now that it’s December, I’ve lifted my embargo on all things Christmas. I no longer shut my eyes when the festive John Lewis TV advert comes on and am less irritated by Christmas music. Talking of the John Lewis ad, hasn’t that become such a ‘thing’? Although they’d been making cutesy adverts for years, Monty the Penguin really captured our imaginations in 2014. Set to Tom Odell’s tender version of the Beatles’ Real Love, it was a perfect storm of fluffy snowflakes, twinkling lights and festive coziness enveloping the heartwarming story at its centre. When the little boy found a longed-for friend for Monty, it had the nation reaching for the tissues before we hurried out to the shops to stock up on cuddly Monty’s for our little ones. Every year, we await the new John Lewis advert with great anticipation. What a marketing triumph it has been, and other retailers must look on with envy. Most have tried to emulate it, but it is still John Lewis that sets the bar for Christmas TV advertising.

I love Christmas, but hate the way the build-up has crept forward over the years, diluting the excitement while increasing the stress. I blame the supermarkets who put up ‘Back to School’ displays before the children have even broken up for the summer holidays, and then when they go back in September, out comes the Christmas stock. And no sooner have you finished singing Auld Lang Syne than the Easter Eggs are on the shelves. The supermarkets say its down to consumer demand, but I don’t believe it. I don’t know anyone who buys their Easter eggs in January unless they are posting them to Outer Mongolia via snail mail.

Talking of snail mail, do you know when that term first began to be used? Although it had been heard sporadically before, it is American tech entrepreneur Jim Rutt who is credited with being the first to use the term when comparing the speed of surface mail to email.

I know for certain it wasn’t in common use when Dad wrote his column on 4th December 1976, as he would never have passed up the opportunity for a pun when naming this story, which he instead called ‘Snails in the post’.

Apparently, a recent decision to stop postal collections on a Sunday lay behind a new problem. According to Dad, some rural areas became plagued with the arrival of snails in their pillar boxes over the weekends.

Instead of heading for their usual feeding grounds, namely our vegetable patches and flowerbeds, they would slither up and into the postbox and feast upon the missives within. A snail’s tongue comprises thousands of rasp-like teeth, which they used to gnaw through the defenceless piles of post.

But what was making the mail so attractive to these ghastly gastrpods? It turned out that the gum used to seal the envelopes contained something akin to snail catnip. As the last collection was lunchtime on a Saturday, the snails had all weekend to sniff out the letters and feast to their hearts’ content. Come Monday morning, the poor postman would open the box to find it full of replete snails lounging on beds of mutilated mail.

Despite Dad highlighting the problem 41 years ago, it still hasn’t been solved. I’ve found articles in the national press from 2001, 2009, 2012, 2014 and 2016 (most of whom by then, of course, were using the ‘snail mail’ pun in their headlines!). The most recent was a case near Eden Camp, Malton, in April this year.

Various deterrents have been implemented, including leaving slug pellets in the pillar box and adapting the posting slot by either fitting bristles to it, or by reducing its size. So far, no-one has come up with a definitive solution, and it leaves a challenge for all you ingenious thinkers out there.

As I was only nine when Sunday collections ceased, I’d forgotten all about them, but Dad was pretty miffed, especially as it was the first time since the reign of Charles I that this country didn’t have a Sunday mail collection. So miffed, in fact, that he included in his column the address where you could send a note of protest to the Post Office.

He advised people to send their letters before the weekend, or risk it becoming a snail’s breakfast.

One potato, two potatoes, three potatoes…Splat!

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on 17th November 2017, & the Gazette & Herald on 15th November 2017

As Dad mentions in his column from November 13th 1976, last Saturday 11th November was St Martin’s Day, and the custom in this part of the world was that it marked the start of the ‘hirings’, when farmers and prospective labourers would gather to suss each other out, discuss wages, working conditions and the like. They’d enter a mutual agreement which would bind them to each other for the coming year. The practice came to an end in 1924 with the passing of the Agriculture Wages Act which formalised a minimum wage for farm workers.

It was common in our village for youngsters aged 14 and above to go ‘taty’ picking on a local farm for a fortnight in the autumn. I’m not sure the farmer who employed us had read the Wages Act, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t wait to turn 14 so I could earn some real money, a whole 50p an hour.

I was nervous on my first day to be alongside the intimidating older kids, but hours on end spent plucking row after row of potatoes was a real leveller. You soon worked out who were the more robust pluckers, who was lazy, and who were the naughty ones.

Until you’ve experienced the sight, stench and feel of a rotten potato between your fingers, then you do not know the meaning of proper horror. How a seemingly inoffensive and plain vegetable can transform into such a seething, stinking mass of putrid flesh I find hard to fathom. I’m still getting over the trauma of finding one among my bag of spuds last week.

So you can understand why a rotten potato out in the field brought perverse joy to the person who found it, as you could use it as ammunition against your taty-picking enemies (as long as you spotted it before your busy fingers sank unwittingly into the mush, unleashing a rancid smell that glued itself to the inside of your nostrils). Getting splatted in the back by a flying rotten potato was the ultimate in humiliation, so you had to be constantly on your guard to dodge those vile little missiles.

Although we weren’t paid well, our employers were kind, and would bring us mugs of hot sweet tea and the odd plate of biscuits. The tea was a colour I’d never seen before, like the leftover water in a mop bucket. Despite that, we drank it, presumably because it was hot, and the days were mostly wet and cold. A side-effect of monotonous, repetitive work was that when you tried to go to sleep at night, all you could see when you closed your eyes was row after row of potatoes. I wonder if that’s true in other walks of life?

I am now receiving a steady stream of correspondence as a result of this column and one of the most charming so far comes from John Randles, who has lived in a moorland village since 1939. One of his reminiscences relates to my August piece about Dad taking over Countryman’s Diary from Major Jack Fairfax-Blakeborough. I’m taking the liberty of repeating it here, because unless these wonderful memories are shared, they will disappear forever.

Mr Randles writes: “On the day the Major died (1st January 1976), we had been to my sister’s at Glaisdale. We got back safely, but it was snowing hard. The telephone rang soon after we got in and it was the Major’s son Noel. His wife was stuck in the snow with the car near Blakey pub.”

The Lion Inn, Blakey Ridge, is at the highest point in the North York Moors National Park. Not a place to get stuck, nor to venture out to, in a snow storm. But as we know, us Yorkshire folk are not deterred by a little bit of snow. Nor by a lot of snow, as it happens.

Mr Randles continues: “My son and I put shovels and ropes in the Land Rover. We picked Noel up and set off in the blizzard. We managed to get her and the car down safely. The Major died that night.”

One can only imagine what a difficult and perilous journey that must have been, never mind the effort needed to dig the stranded car out during a blizzard. What a heroic act of selflessness from Mr Randles and his son, one which enabled Noel and his wife to be with the Major during his last moments.

Conkering a crisis

6232810E-3380-41BC-900F-3D1D05806EEA — My brother Andrew in his conkering heyday

Horse Chestnuts — Conkers can be found up until November depending on the summer weather

(This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on 3rd November 2017, & the Gazette & Herald on 1st November 2017)

I associate conker time with the children going back to school, so it surprised me to read in Dad’s column of October 30th 1976 about the plentiful conker harvest, as it seemed so late in the year. But I’ve discovered that horse-chestnuts can ripen from August right through to early November, depending on the weather during summer.

As soon as they were ripe my three boys would begin conker-gathering but, unlike my own childhood, I recall few occasions when we actually turned them into competitive ‘stringed’ conkers for the school playground. I got into the habit of keeping a carrier bag on my person at all times for the inevitable daily conker-gathering. The bag solved the problem of finding mouldy, festering conkers in unexpected places like trouser pockets, coat pockets, school bags, washing baskets, toy boxes, down the sofa and who knew where else! It didn’t, however, solve the problem of having bagful after bagful to deal with (if you’ve ever experienced the death howl of a child discovering their treasured (mouldy) conker collection has disappeared, you’ll understand why I never just chucked them away).

I came up with an ingenious solution though. “Let’s make a Conker Garden!” I announced enthusiastically one day. The boys responded with unexpected delight. At last, they had something they could do with their conkers, and I would never have to touch a mouldy conker ever again.

For those of you experiencing a conker crisis, here are my step-by-step instructions on how to create your own Conker Garden. Please follow them very carefully:

Step one: Collect conkers in a carrier bag

Step two: Decide where your conker garden will be

Step three: Tip out your bag of conkers in designated spot

Step four: Repeat daily

It was a shame that we didn’t find a better use for them, as I had such fond memories of conker competitions myself. We did lace up a few over the years, but it just didn’t catch on with my boys and their peers, perhaps as a result of being brought up in an age where technology overtook traditional playground pastimes.

My brother was a great conker fan though, and according to my dad’s column, was determined to become the 1976 School Champion. Dad was ‘Coach Conker’ and had passed on the secrets of top conkering, such as soaking them in vinegar and keeping them in a drawer for a whole year, after which they emerged like shiny little brown balls of concrete. My dad taught him to drill his holes in exactly the right place (dead centre), and with the correct diameter (the same width as the string or shoelace it would hang upon. Too large would result in weakening the conker). The knot securing it had to be just the right size, not too big or too small. Points were scored by smashing another conker. So if you defeat one, you are a oner, defeat two, and you become a twoer and so on. If a twenty-sevener knocks out a forty-niner, it becomes a seventy-sevener, by adding all the points together, plus one for the victory.

Dad must have felt a surge of pride in seeing my brother’s prize conker on the brink of stardom. It had smashed many naïve young conkers to bits and had earned the esteemed rank of a 108er. But family hopes were dashed when his run came to a bitter end at the hands of a sneaky adversary who knew the trick of getting the strings tangled. This subversive tactic enabled him to yank my brother’s shoelace out of his grip and propel the conker onto the floor, where he promptly stamped on it. My brother was crestfallen, but this was a legitimate move in those days. The blow was softened when the sneaky boy’s young, softer conker only made it one more round before being demolished by the more deserving hard shell of a cultivated opponent.

The tradition of conker competition is still going strong in the form of the World Conker Championships hosted every year by the Ashton Conker Club in Northamptonshire. My brother might be saddened to learn that he would not be permitted to bring his own specially-prepared specimen as the club provides all the conkers and strings. But he will be pleased to know that deliberate string-tangling can lead to disqualification, and stamping on fallen conkers is no longer allowed.

Harvesting the good will of the village

(This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on 22nd September 2017, & the Malton Gazette & Herald on 20th September 2017)

T’is the season of the harvest festival where churches up and down the land welcome donations from their generous congregations to help people suffering hardship. I remember as a child the altar and window ledges of our local church being laden with fresh produce of the season, including carrots, potatoes, marrows, apples, pears and tomatoes. I also remember oranges, but obviously these exotic interlopers must have been flown in especially for the occasion to provide an extra splash of colourful glamour to the muted hues of our home-grown exhibits.

In his column from 18th September 1976, Dad describes how churchgoers only brought their finest examples which were spruced up and polished to perfection: ‘Somehow the fruit on display looks more tempting that it did at home…It seems the people bring forth their best for this service,’ he says. There’s no doubt that a whiff of rivalry hovered over parishioners who determined whether competing donations were up to standard. Woe betide anyone seen to be bringing in some unfortunate malformed marrow or a misproportioned potato.

I felt similar pressures when my children were at primary school. By then, harvest festival had become more about helping those less fortunate than yourself than about celebrating the bounty of the harvest. I’ve been trying to find out why, and some sources suggest it is because these days, our locally-grown produce ripens much earlier than mid-September. Certainly, the apples in my garden are about done and the blackberries, elderberries and sloes on my dog-walking routes are more or less over. Others suggest it’s because we have lost seasonality in our produce, with growers being able to ripen fruit and veg all year-round with the help of artificial sources of heat and light.

The truth probably lies somewhere between but I’m sure I wasn’t alone in being one of those mothers who could be found digging around in the kitchen cupboard late of an evening after one of the children had told me that they needed a donation for the school harvest service the following morning. We had to provide non-perishable food or toiletries which would be given to the homeless and people living in poverty. These were the days before late-night-opening shops were within easy distance (today’s parents of young children have no idea of the difficulties we suffered!). So it was usually a toss-up between baked beans, tomato soup, or an out-of-date tin of plum tomatoes (bought by mistake instead of chopped tomatoes and left to languish. Who has the time to chop plum tomatoes?). And obviously, brands were always donated before own brand for fear of being thought a cheapskate. I do wonder how many tins of beans, soup and tomatoes ended up on the church altar, and now feel a pang of guilt for inflicting this uninspiring collection of tomato-based foodstuffs on people who couldn’t choose what they were given.

The word harvest comes from the old English word ‘haerfest’ which referred to the period between August and November, now called Autumn. A Rev. Robert Hawker from Cornwall reportedly started the Christian tradition in 1843 by offering communion bread made from the first corn of the harvest, although the festival itself began life as a pagan celebration many centuries earlier.

Dad loved his food, especially a good old Yorkshire curd tart, and so it’s no surprise that for him, the highlight of the festival was the harvest supper. As he explains: ‘The ladies of the village forget their differences and bake mountains of fresh bread, cakes, pies and buns, and these are laid out beautifully on white clothed tables in the village hall.’ According to my mum, after the supper all the produce that had been brought to church would be sold off to raise much-needed funds. Where I live, the annual harvest supper no longer takes place, but I’d be interested to find out if this tradition still persists elsewhere.

I’d be even more interested to know what differences the ladies of my village had to put aside to work together for the harvest supper? Suggestions on a postcard please…