No one could ever accuse me of polyglottism, but I did manage to collect a bit of Yorkshire during the time I lived there.
‘E wooks while dinner, for instance.
This was the response when I recently enquired what hours the estate agent valuer works on a Saturday.
Translation: “He’s available until midday”.
It was a short stay in Huddersfield, driving up on Friday evening and returning Saturday afternoon. I’m beginning to sense that the town’s grip on me is loosening at last. Let’s face it, perhaps it was never that strong. Incomers aren’t truly accepted until the roots of at least two generations are deep in Yorkshire soil.
Friday night I was able to enjoy the luxury of the Travelodge in Mirfield. I wondered why it was so cheap until I got there – when I was vividly reminded that this busy stretch of the A62 runs alongside the town sewage works.
The double-glazing works overtime at this place. My room admitted no noise, no smell. The relief was so powerful that I stayed awake most of the night, weighing up the pros and cons of spending the rest of my life there, rather than venturing out again. But in the morning, I remembered: I am a marathoner, and holding my nose and rushing forward like a Second Row joining a scrum,
made it to the adjacent Little Chef – still conscious.
Little Chef, eh? Their staff are always interesting.
Last time I was in one, I asked what flavour ice cream was on offer. The waitress went off to the kitchen then returned with the news. “White”, she said. “They’re both white”. It was said with such an air of alarm, that I didn’t dare press the issue.
Yesterday I was approached for my order by the Saturday kid with the pudding-basin haircut. I regard myself as culturally savvy, so, avoiding eye contact, and careful not to expose my teeth, I whispered: “Beans on toast, please”.
He repeated: “Beans on toast?”, as though hearing the triplet for the first time. And then: “‘old on a moment”.
He returned with a notebook and pen. “I’ll only forget”, he explained. “Now. What were it again?”
Sometime later, as I munched and ruminated, he approached once more. “Is everything alright with your meal, Sir?”
“Very good”, I assured him. “A breakfast classic, sublimely executed.”
A few hours later, after I’d finished crushing the estate agents beneath the heels of my CATs (see illustration), I went for a mooch round the flea market in Huddersfield. Up to my Adam’s apple in the mostly worthless residue of other people’s lives. Chipped plaster ornaments, prints of fluffy kittens, tarnished tin sugar tongs in search of a bowl, Kajagoogoo’s Greatest Hits (did they have more than one?)… you know the sort of thing.
A few things did reach out and grab me though. We all have our weak points.
I spent a while running my hands over the used First World War grenade vest, wondering what horrors it had seen. And those thin, tin miners’ tags from Wakefield Colliery. 1850s, 1860s. Just the year, and the miner’s number stamped into it. Identity tags – in case of death.
Years ago, when I was a kid – 19 years old – I had a girlfriend who came from a mining village near Pontypridd. The Rhondda Valley. I visited her there two or three times. Her three brothers were miners in the local pit. Her father had been down the mine too, but now lived on a sofa in the downstairs back room of their council house. Dad had been retired sick, and no longer had the lung capacity even to get up the stairs. I didn’t actually meet him; he never emerged from the room. But I used to hear him coughing and choking in the night. At first, I thought it was strange that his family thought so little of him. They sort of ignored him; pretended he wasn’t there. He was like some mad relative locked in the basement. But after a while, I learned that most of the local mining families had inert fathers holed up somewhere nearby. It was the accepted thing. A father over 50? Still on his feet? Never been down the mines then.
I was a London kid. I’d been to Trafalgar Square and the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace. The Rhondda folk, and I spoke to many who’d never travelled beyond the Valley, seemed to think that I knew everything that was worth knowing. What I knew was free to every tourist, and available to anyone in any library, almost anywhere in the world. All I did was mooch around the front window; the display case. These boys knew the really important stuff. They knew more than I would ever know, and they knew about places in a way that no library could understand.
I quickly fell in love with the huge, brown slag heaps of the Rhondda, and the mining fraternity; getting drunk in the ‘NonPol’ club with the sooty-cheeked lads from the pit. It was all new to me – as new to me as Dartmoor had been a year or two earlier, when I ran away for the first time. And I suppose I was running away again now, and wanted to stay away this time.
At the JobCentre, I enquired about becoming a miner. It was one of the strangest, and most humbling ‘job interviews’ I ever had. I queued up for ages, and eventually got to see someone. “I want to be a miner”, I said.
There was a silence, while the pasty-faced girl behind the desk looked me over. Eventually, all she said was: “You’re not from round here, are you?”
I remember grinning. “No, I’m from London”.
There was no return grin. She looked down at the card I’d filled in. Then she held it out to me.
“Go home, Andrew”.
And that was it. It was the day that I decided to end my relationship with the Rhondda, and her womenfolk.
One day, 30 trembling years from now, I’ll unlock that big old suitcase in the loft, and somewhere in there I’ll find the card from Rhydfelin JobCentre, and wonder what the fuck it’s all about.
Back in the Huddersfield market, what did interest me, and made me think, was a stall selling pre-decimal currency. Thruppeny bits, tanners, two bobs, half crowns. It’s a long time since we used them, and they were now a strangely comforting sight, despite making me feel old again.
I wondered.
I wondered if decimal coinage had helped distance us from our heritage.
When I was a kid I would gaze at Victorian pennies and their dates. 1840, 1850, 1860… 1900. As kids, we marvelled at the difference between the coins, and wondered about the lives of those who had handled this penny before us. Survivors from the Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimea? Jack The Ripper in foggy Spitalfields? Chirpy soldiers on their way to the French battlefields of the Great War? Famous sportsmen? Was this penny ever tossed to decide who batted first in an Ashes test?
You could lose yourself in these thoughts. This penny in your hand was a true link to your country’s past.
But now? Now our coinage starts from the early 70s. How can you ponder the depths of the national psyche with a ten pence piece from 1971?
That’s it, I thought, as I drove back down the M1. Decimal currency was the descending curtain that sequestered our past. It murdered the imagination of a nation’s youth.
The Get Healthy Painlessly campaign has started. Still no running though.
