15. Barnard Castle
CC Site
10th-12^th April

I drove up the Roman road from Scotch Corner to Piercebridge and then westwards along the A67 towards Barnard Castle in Teesdale, stopping in Gainford, where I used to live in the 'Seventies and early 'Eighties, to get my monthly medication. The lady in the hairdressers told me the doctor's surgery, which used to be in an old stone house on High Green, was now in the bright-shiny health centre on the main road. Doctor Neville, the senior partner, is the son of my old doctor, who is now almost certainly no more. He was a lovely man and someone told me he had come over here from his native Ireland because there was a wartime shortage of GP's.

I    In about 1977 I played football for the firm's team in Holland. Just before half time I was running back towards my goal to head away a deep diagonal cross when, unknown to me, our goalkeeper came running out to catch it. He was a great keeper, but was a rugby player and didn't understand the finer points of defensive play, like calling for the ball. We collided at a combined speed of twenty-five mph and his sturdy scrum-half's knee met my family jewels. After about ten minutes, with the aid of the magic sponge and icy water, I had stopped screaming and everyone else had stopped laughing. I lasted until half-time then spent the interval soaking my privates in a basin of cold water in the toilets. I then survived the second-half and the massive extended booze-up which followed the match. I was staying at a Dutch friend's house and woke at 5:00am feeling strange. When I examined myself I felt even stranger because I had a black and purple todger and black plums. In the plane on the way home, while we were enjoying our in-flight meal, one of the warehousemen passed a black olive over to me and said “Have you lost something, Rog?” I went to see Doctor Neville on Monday morning. When I dropped my pants for him to have a look, all he could say was (provide your own Irish accent) “Jesus, that's a terrible injury.”

     The site just outside Barny (as the locals call Barnard Castle) is in open country on the road to Middleton-in-Teesdale and High Force, a spectacular waterfall and major tourist attraction. It's also next to the young offenders' prison, which seems to be thriving. Did my laundry then had a quiet afternoon and evening.

     On Friday I got the Scarlet Band Number 95 bus into Barny. It was a lovely sunny day and really warm – in the sun! In the shade it was still March. I wandered round this charming and surprisingly busy town for half an hour then caught the Arriva Number 75 into Darlington. It had either square wheels or no suspension. The main objective was to take some photos in Darlington because I'd been too tired to get them all on my last visit. I soon found I had forgotten my camera. The 75 goes via Staindrop, a small village with a strange name, first passing a huge housing and industrial estate which used to be a vast army camp. It also goes through Gainford, and this is when I noticed that St. Peter's, an enormous red-brick Colditz-like approved school, is still there just outside the village, derelict and depressingly wrecked. Who owns it? Why not re-develop it? Knock it down. Why leave it like this for twenty-five years?

I    I had a nice chat with an old chap on the bus and told him I'd been back to Gainford, having lived there thirty-five years ago. “I don't expect it's changed much,” he said and of course he was quite right. It now has the new health centre and one pub when it used to have three, but is otherwise largely unchanged (the Tees rolls on sedately) and this is true of this part of the country in general. Nothing much changes. 

Joseph Pease

 

     So, it's farewell, then, to Sue Townsend, a brilliant writer and a really important figure in the last thirty years. She was a major social observer and commentator. If you read Adrian Mole's diaries you see Britain, the Thatcher years, the post-Thatcher years and the Blair years, through his eyes. She deserves to stand alongside Dickens and Thackeray as one of the great social commentators and her books are a good deal funnier than theirs.

     Now here are some random observations about Darlington:-

 

1. The standard haircut for a young man in Darlington seems to be the US Army Mark 2 buzzcut, a sort of wide mohican, a stripe of short hair on top and hardly any round the back and sides.

    2. The Mechanics' Institute in Skinnergate, which has been some sort of fun spot for a Number of years, is being restored, but I'm not sure of its next incarnation. Probably a three-storey bookies. Darlington was a Quaker town, and the working man was encouraged to better himself by education and the Mechanics' Institute was where he could get it. (A 'mechanic' or 'mechanical', as in “A Midsummer Night's Dream”, was a skilled manual worker or artisan).

3. They have demolished the bus station and replaced it with – a demolished bus station. To be fair, a new cinema is going there eventually.

4. I was amazed to see two old shops, Affleck and Moffatt, gents' outfitters, and Cooper and Leatherbarrow, opticians, still going strong in Duke Street. Great names, aren't they?

5. Amazingly, there is a pub (horrid and modern but not a Weatherspoon's) called “The Joseph Pease”. Pease, a native of Darlington, was a Quaker and the founder of the Stockton and Darlington Railway and became known as “The Father of the Railways”. He was a teetotaller and would never have been seen dead in a pub. I'm amazed his statue in High Row hasn't fallen off its plinth.

Well, I did it. On Saturday I went to Bishop Auckland and watched Darlington versus Padiham in the Evo-Stik Northern Premier League, Division One North. “Why would he do that?” I hear you say and you may well ask, given the difficulty of getting there, the horrible weather and the fact that Darlington didn't come and see me when I was poorly. The Arriva Number 8 bus should have taken me from Barny direct to Bishop, but unfortunately it has ceased to exist; pity Arriva haven't updated the website. So I got the Number 75 into Darlington and then caught the Number 1 to Bishop. The driver begged me not to do it as he didn't go anywhere near the ground. He told me to get the X1. I checked all the timetables and saw no sign of any such service, so I got the next Number 1. He was right, it didn't go anywhere near the ground. I got off at the hospital (where my son Matt was born) and walked over two miles round the ring road, nearly to bloody West Auckland for God's sake.

There was a good crowd (1,012), but an icy gale  and a hard pitch made for a dreadful game (well, two totally incompetent teams may have had something to do with it). Darlington missed six good chances in the first ten minutes and finally scored through Steve Thompson, their Player of the Season, after twenty-five minutes. In the first half Darlington's keeper touched the ball once and the nearest Padiham got to the Darlington goal was half-way into Darlington's half. Thompson was the only man on the pitch who looked as if he had played the game before; there couldn't have been much competition for his award. The game ended 3-0; I missed the third goal as I ran away with five minutes left when I had finally lost all feeling in my limbs and nearly lost my mind to boot. I caught an X1 back having waited for it in a shelter with no timetable or indeed any indication of which service stopped there or indeed moreover that it was a bus shelter at all. Luckily I had followed another demented supporter from the game and asked him.

I generally have nothing but praise for the buses in all the areas I have visited, but these around Darlington are the worst I have encountered. Arriva achieved a monopoly by driving Darlington Borough's own bus service out of business a few years ago by means of various dirty tricks and now they seem to have total contempt for their customers. I think this is the company owned by a Scottish born-again Christian, so what can you expect? 

On the way back to Barny I saw a man in the middle of a field, closely surrounded by a flock of black sheep with a grey and white border collie flying round and round them at top speed. These grey and white collies usually have one blue eye. As we pulled away I heard one of the sheep say to her mate “I wish he'd go and have his afternoon nap and leave us in peace and take that wall-eyed mutt with him!” Honestly. 

Talking of black sheep, it's good to see so many pubs round here advertising “Black Sheep Bitter”. When the Theakston brewing family betrayed their heritage and sold out to Whitbread a few years ago one member of the family broke away and started his own brewery right next to the old brewery in Masham. Talk about thumbing your nose. Good to see him doing so well.

The Tees at Barnard Castle. The castle itself was yet another victim of good old Oliver

 

After getting off the Number 75 in Barny I walked back to the site, over the River Tees and up the road to upper Teesdale. As I neared the site I started to smell fish and chips and, lo and behold, there was a chippie van at the site. Fish and chips, home-made mushy peas and a can of cloudy lemonade. Haute cuisine!

Yet another good day. Early night, very tired.

14. Richmond

CC Site
7th-9^th April

A 60-mile trip, the first few miles over the North York Moors. Even in spring it's really wild, hard country, with little growing beyond heather and gorse. After Guisborough you're into Teesside, with cooling towers, refineries, lime-green smoke coming from one chimney and orange from another (I lied about that; it was thirty-five years ago when I saw smoke like that here). I skirted Middles-brough and Stockton and made for Darlington. I lived near Darlington in the 'Seventies and early 'Eighties and it was our local town, a mixture off heavy engineering and farming. I remember being surprised at the time how industrial areas merge and fade almost imperceptibly into the countryside in the North-East. Perhaps this explains why miners were always interested in leeks and pigeons. And horses. Racehorses, that is, not pit-ponies.

     So, it's farewell then, Mickey Rooney, ninety-three year old former child star. I had a drink with him at Knock Airport about six years ago (well, I was standing at the bar with a pint of Guinness and he was standing next to me with a glass of lager). He was very small and rather frail, but there was a sharp intelligence shining from his twinkling eyes. Apart from that there was no mistaking the family resemblance with his son, Wayne. He was once married to Ava Gardner. Imagine that!

The site here is actually at Gilling West, just off the A66 near Scotch Corner. I have a strong feeling that Ian Botham used to live very close. The bus to Richmond or Darlington calls every two hours, so I'll take it into town tomorrow and then to Darlington on Wednesday. As soon as I arrived the skies opened and torrential rain soon flooded my pitch. I wrestled for some time with my TV but finally managed to get full reception after discovering the aerial connection had been dodgy. I must admit I did miss TV during my stay at Whitby, because, in particular, I missed the Grand National and 'Endeavour'. The final of 'University Challenge' tonight.

     While driving this morning, I had a road to Tarsus moment about fat people and giant 4 x 4's, both of which are to be seen in abundance in our green and pleasant land. Did SUV's become so popular because fat people couldn't fit into normal cars any more or did people just expand to fill the extra space available in SUV's? Which is the chicken, which the egg?

     By the way, again I wasn't driving at midday to-day, so nothing was playing on the MP3.

I    I passed another entry in “The Meaning of Liff” on the way:

     SADBERGE (n.) A violent green shrub which is ground up, mixed with twigs and gelatine and served with clonmult (q.v.) and buldoo (q.v.) in a container referred to for no known reason as a 'relish tray'.

    I didn't pass Clonmult or Buldoo (one is in County Cork and the other near Thurso in the far north of Scotland), but I'll include them here for completeness:

CLONMULT (n.)
A yellow ooze usually found near secretions of buldoo (q.v.) and sadberge (q.v.).

     BULDOO (n.)
A virulent red-coloured pus which generally accompanies clonmult (q.v.) and sadberge (q.v.)

    I must say I like a touch of relish with my poppadoms. 

 

    About two miles west up the A66 is the hamlet of West Layton. My boss used to live there, nearly forty years ago, and I used to drive over there from where I lived and get a lift from him to work near Newcastle. One day just nearby I saw Crisp in a field. Crisp was an Australian horse who came second to Red Rum in the Grand National of 1973. Nicknamed “The Black Kangaroo”, he was the outstanding horse in the race and was cruelly handicapped, giving joint-favourite Red Rum twenty-four pounds. After running a faultless race he was overhauled exhausted at the Elbow when he was 'treading water'. He was a most beautiful animal and looked just great in his retirement. He was a big horse and Red Rum was a plucky little horse and Red Rum became the hero. Before you ask, no, I didn't put my shirt on Crisp. I just have the normal British feeling for the gallant loser. 

 

    The wild rabbits on the site here are very tame.

 Richmond was rather disappointing. It's quaint and, being on the edge of the Swaledale, has a sort of frontier atmosphere, but it's just a small market town and, frankly, there's not much to see. It has a strong connection with the Army, because of Catterick Garrison just down the road and there is a Green Howards Museum, which was closed for redevelopment.

     The curiously-named Green Howards, or to give them their proper name, The Green Howards (Alexandra, Princess of Wales's Own Yorkshire Regiment, made Richmond their home in 1873. The regiment was raised as the 19^th Regiment of Foot at Dunster in Somerset in 1688 to serve under William of Orange and fought at the Battle of the Boyne. In 1744 its Colonel was named Howard and the regiment started to be known as 'Howard's Regiment'. Because there was another regiment with a colonel named Howard they became known as the 'Green Howards' because of the green facings on their uniforms. In 2006 they were merged with others to form the Yorkshire Regiment.

     I came home early, had a sleep and looked forward to visiting Darlington tomorrow.

    Wednesday started badly. My gas ran out and I couldn't have my heart-starter, my morning cup of tea. It got immediately better when I learned that Maria Miller had resigned. I know her husband is a solicitor, but I wonder how she will manage now to pay the mortgage on her new £1 million house she bought with the proceeds of fiddling her expenses. I guess, given all the money she has made from the taxpayer, that she has a very small mortgage on it.

     On the subject of government ministers, it seems have become the norm to make every back-bencher a minister of something-or-other in order to guarantee they will toe the party line. Every time a minister comes on the radio or TV it seems to be a new name. How, for example, can we have a Minister of Prisons without having a Minister for Public Toilets? I'm sure the Home Secretary did both these jobs in the old days. Like most of the bad features of politics, it was an approach invented by Blair and is called, I think, clientilism. Or something.

     Well, Wednesday morning, bitterly cold, and it's off to Darlo. Number 29 Dales and District bus via Melsonby, Aldbrough St. John, Fawcett, Eppleby, Manfield and Stapleton, all tiny picturesque villages of stone houses with red pantile roofs in a cluster around Scotch Corner and Darlington. I couldn't see if it was still there, but there used to be a lovely plant nursery in Melsonby which was run by quite an eccentric local. The plants were in the ground, not in containers, and if you went to buy a plant at the wrong time you were sent away with a flea in your ear. Most of the villages have a stone-built church with a square tower and they all looked very similar. One could imagine they had been built by the same mason. Possibly he built one, then went round to the other villages asking them if they wanted one the same or possibly he offered to build them all a church at a knock-down price. Just kidding.

 

 

 

     We were travelling from Swaledale to Teesdale, over the top, and the height gave us a good view of Teesside's chimneys and cooling towers smoking away on the horizon. The bus was five minutes late when I caught it and it became later after a lady got on at the wrong place in Eppleby and was given a good dressing-down. The driver, though, was a regular Jehu and had made up the time when he got to Darlington. It was a very rough ride as he floored it down winding lanes not much wider than the bus and flanked by hedges giving him little view of the road ahead. I have to say I felt very queasy when we arrived and had to settle my stomach with a Gregg's sausage roll.

     The last bit of the ride was through the posh Darlington suburb of Blackwell with Blackwell Grange, now a hotel, at its centre. There is actually a street called 'Blackwell' here, too, so I could move here and have letters addressed to me as “Mr Blackwell, Blackwell, Blackwell, Darlington, Co. Durham” (I don't know the postcode). The only letters, though, would be from the bank or from solicitors as it's a very expensive neighbourhood and well out of my range.

     I got off the bus in Houndgate (great name). I noticed that the Falchion pub had disappeared, possibly absorbed by Binns' department store. It was awful, but it was one of only two Darlington pubs which sold real ale when I lived up here. Happily the magnificent covered market in High Row is still going strong, with every kind of stall, but notably a wet fish stall, two splendid butchers and two greengrocers. Neither had fennel.

 

 

    When I brought my Dad here many years ago he still remembered the pubs in the market place from his time at Catterick Camp during the war. The Boot and Shoe, the Hole in the Wall, The Bluebell (oh dear, no Bluebell any more). As you can see, the working men's club scene is still alive and well in this part of the country. The federation used to have its own brewery, but I think that's gone now.

 

     And tonight I watched 'Forrest Gump'. I'm sorry, but I make no apologies; I love 'Forrest Gump'.

Some people like me were born stupid

Others get more stupid as they go along

      And that's all I have to say about that.

 

13. Whitby
Private site
5th-6^th April

I wasn't driving at midday to-day – it's only 20 miles from Scarborough to Whitby – but when I turned the MP3 player on this morning it played 'Scarborough Fair' by Simon and Garfunkel – honestly!

The site here is very much a holiday site, but I'm next to the excellent shower block and have a view of the sea. No TV reception at all but digital radio good, so no worries. Bus stop to town just at the entrance. It's eye-wateringly expensive, though. £54 for two nights! I shall expect room service.

Into town to have a look round and possibly to watch the Grand National. What a great place. An almost suffocating smell of fish and chips emanating from fish and chip shops everywhere you look. So many pubs as well and throngs of people wandering around in the sunshine, seemingly all of them eating fish and chips. That's it! There is no shortage of fish in the sea. It's just all being eaten in Whitby.

 

 

                                                   How to become famous in Whitby

And then it started to rain.

Millions of dogs, too, but no weapon dogs to be seen, just small friendly ones. Not even any weapon children. So many dogs, it was like 'Crufts Goes on Holiday'. One was sitting outside a butcher's shop waiting for his mistress to return and he was just staring fixedly at a pork chop in the window. I could see he was trying to fetch the chop by telekinetic energy! And then I could see it moving very slightly, just a corner beginning to levitate. And then his mistress returned and his master dragged him off!

Oh happy dogs of England

Bark well as well you may

If you were to live anywhere else

You would not be so gay.

 

(A poem by Stevie Smith)

 

Virtually all the shops were local (except yet another Boyes, with, among many other departments, its lingerie, fishing tackle and model-makers' supplies but there was a Mountain Warehouse, well placed on the steepest hill I've ever seen in a shopping street.

 

 

Whitby Abbey

 

When I went into town again on Sunday those fish-eaters were at it all over again. Every fish restaurant was packed and nearly everyone was strolling around with their faces in a fish parcel. Every pub advertising food was advertising only fish and chips. I had walked from the site to the sea front and from there along the front down to the Captain Cook Memorial statue at the harbour mouth. He stands at the centre of a compass on the pavement and faces east. It was interesting to read that all of his four ships ('Endeavour', 'Resolution', 'Discovery' and 'Adventure') were colliers, very robust no-nonsense broad-beamed workhorses and all built at Whitby.

 

Whitby Abbey is quite eerie on the hill overlooking the town. This is where Dracula hung out after his ship was wrecked off Whitby and he jumped off it in the shape of a large dog (or wolf, I can't remember which). He has a shop in the town now.  

The railway station was rather puzzling. There were NYMR (North York Moors Railway, a preserved steam railway) logos all over the place. I was surprised to learn that the NYMR had now reached Whitby, because it used to run from Goathland to Pickering across the moors. However, there were then loads of posters and information boards about the Esk Valley Railway. This was shown running from Whitby, connecting with the NYMR at Goathland and continuing on to Middlesbrough. It seems almost as if the railway company is trying to hoodwink the public into thinking that the Esk Valley Railway is also a preserved railway, presumably to make it more attractive. What a strange reversal of fortunes. 

 

Captain James Cook

12. Scarborough
       C&CC Site
       April 2^nd - 4^th

A short journey, again of around forty miles and again not much to speak of. The AA Routefinder instructions seemed to bear no relation to the real world and I found the site in spite of them, coming at it from the opposite direction. It's rather a sad site, rather scruffy. Huge open spaces, dotted with six big ochre-painted buildings, a women's toilet block, a recreation block, a men's toilet block, three more of them, unidentified. The hard-standings are, in fact, grass with plastic honeycomb mats, perfectly serviceable but scruffy. Few trees. The whole place has the atmosphere of a second-rate holiday camp and the depressing feel has been made worse by a blanket of sea-mist which has hung overhead, almost touchable, since I arrived. The bus service which used to stop outside the gate has been discontinued because a subsidy has been withdrawn. I feel guilty about whingeing like this; it's only £12 a night, I'm only here for three nights and I'm warm and the staff are friendly and helpful.

At midday as I drove along the MP3 was playing 'On the Road Again' by Canned Heat. Honestly.

A small gnome-like old man is next to me, complete with small, un-gnome-like old wife. They have a tiny caravan and a huge car., the first instance I have seen of a car bigger than the caravan it tows. He stares, but then looks away when you try to say 'hello'. Further on is a couple with a motor-home and a savage-looking hairy Alsatian, which seems to sleep in its own tent. It went a bit postal when it saw me returning from my shower and it was, for a minute, frightening when I thought it was off its lead (streng verboten on all club sites). It was, in fact, tied to a peg and was quite harmless. I'm a bit fragile in the mornings.

 

I watched the second part of 'Shetland' on Tuesday night. I like Ann Cleeve's books (she also writes the police detective novels from which ITV made the 'Vera' series with Brenda Blethyn. Douglas Henshall, who plays the Shetlander police detective Jimmy Perez, a descendant of a Spanish Armada survivor, is always good. My enjoyment was spoiled, though, because I could understand barely a word. Henshall had turned-up his accent to full-bore and his young lady assistant Tosh (who I can't remember in the books) was incomprehensible. It's good to be realistic, but not at the expense, surely, of transparency. Perhaps when Scotland becomes independent we will get sub-titles on TV programmes with Scottish actors.

On Thursday I walked down to the 'Ivanhoe' pub to get the No. 3 'bus, ' Sea-Life Centre to Town Centre'. I had discovered that the site used to be Scalby Manor Caravan site, so I guess the Club must have bought it as a going concern. This is probably why it lacks the cosy warm cuddly feeling you get with both Clubs' sites. I walked past Scalby Manor, now a Hungry Hippo eatery or something (“Sorry, pub closed until Fri”)(Fish and unlimited chips £6-50), down over Scalby Beck where it falls over a pretty weir and up to the pub. No sign of a bus stop or timetable. I asked a man walking a friendly yellow labrador, but he was so unfriendly himself and wouldn't even stop to tell me he knew 'bugger all about 't booses'. The Yorkshire accent often makes men sound like surly thugs; or perhaps this particular ray of sunshine was a surly thug. Mmmm. I carried on walking to town and found a stop complete with friendly old lady who had a chat.

The bus goes past the North Bay Amusement Park (rather fetching with a miniature railway set in pine woods) and Peasholm Park, very attractive. All quite Bournemouth and very encouraging. It also has 'Europe's Biggest Open-Air Theatre'. There were lots of seats arranged in a sort of amphitheatre, but no apparent stage. In front of the seats, where a stage normally belongs, was a lake. I was rather puzzled. Do they board over the lake when there is a performance, or do the actors perform from boats or pontoons floating on the lake or do they declaim whilst swimming?

As we entered the town I noticed that Scarborough is twinned with Cahir in Tipperary in Ireland. I've never seen an English town twinned with a Irish one. We passed a cinema so battered and ruined-looking that it called to mind the hotel in Belfast (the Europa?) which was the most bombed building in Northern Ireland (or was it the universe?). Amazingly, it was alive and well and showing three of the latest films.

I saw a 'J' reg. (1991) Hymer camper van on a Talbot chassis, the oldest Hymer I've even seen and a venerable old lady in very nice condition. The A165 into town is lined with boarding houses, five-storey terraces a bit like the old Edinburgh lands. The population must double in the summer.

A nice old gent on the bus directed me to the station; he was so solicitous that at one point I thought he was going to come with me. The station is a fine solid almost fascist piece of architecture (but not in the same league as Milan station) with a handsome glass roof. Nearly all the trains seemed to go to Liverpool Lime Street. Very curious. Opposite it is the Stephen Joseph theatre, previously the massive Art Deco Odeon cinema, where Alan Ayckbourn’s plays are staged. He still lives in Scarborough, but I notice he was born in London and went to prep school in Wisborough Green near Horsham.

 

In the main street a shaven-headed brute in a 'Help the Heroes' hoodie was talking to a mate in a loud Yorkshire-thug voice using, in the main, one word - “fookin'”. I decided to tell him he was giving the charity a bad name but then, for some reason, I decided not to. Was he ex-Army? Had military training made a brute of him? The Army was recruiting just up the street. Some squaddies who looked to me to be twelve years old were strolling around in desert camouflage fatigues. Had he entered service from school like one of them and become the brute he is now? We'll never know.

Pondering these imponderables, I went on to Tesco's, a vast building which seems to be built on the edge of a cliff (Scarborough is very hilly). Among all the usual groceries I got a bulb of fennel which I'm going to braise to-night. I love fennel.

The Station

The whole town was redolent of fried fish and chips. Very tempting and not surprising as I gave up counting fish and chip shops when I got into double figures. I think I will probably succumb tomorrow. I wonder what cod and chips is called here. In some places it's called 'fish and chips', in some 'cod and chips' (way too obvious) and in some 'a fish lot'. 'A fish parcel' sounds familiar too. Only one way to find out. Tomorrow is another day.

As I write Judy Collins is singing Leonard Cohen's song 'Priests'. I think this is his greatest song, but (and I may be wrong) he never recorded it himself.

“And all of you have seen the dance

                           That God has kept from me”

 

Now that is a sad line. It out-Cohens Cohen. Never listen to Leonard Cohen when you're on your own, Rog. Well, I know, but it's just the way the MP3 player churns them out, Rog, you don't know what's coming next.

I've just remembered listening to a programme on Radio 4 the other day about micro breweries (or 'craft breweries' as they seem to call them now). I was only half-listening when a bloke mentioned Michael Jackson and the role he had played in the resurgence of proper beer. I had a surreal moment. Michael Jackson? Then I remembered another Michael Jackson had been a major figure in CAMRA. Quite disappointed.

Harbour mouth

 My last day dawned – yes, you guessed it – cold and misty. Undaunted, I cycled down to the Sea-Life Centre and then from North Bay right down to the harbour, about 8 miles there and back. No cycle paths anywhere, not a single one . The only reference to cycling was a sign saying 'NO CYCLING' at the start of the promenade. I saw only three other cyclists the whole time I was out and one of those was an Über-cyclist clad in head-to-toe Lycra and doing about ninety mph. The harbour was nice, with a mixture of leisure craft and fishing boats. The boats were just coming in while I was watching at the end of the jetty at the harbour mouth. From there you can look back across South Bay at the beach and the seafront. The lighthouse at the harbour mouth is now the Scarborough Yacht Club – 'Private, Members Only'. There is an enormous hotel on the cliff looming
over the beach.                                                                                                                     Scarborough seems to go in for large buildings.  

When the boat comes in............

 

 

11. York
      CC site
      30^th March-1^st April

Over the Humber Bridge - £1-50 toll and worth every penny. What a great bridge, towering over the Humber Estuary just west of Hull. The river is very wide even here. Lots of people walking across the bridge, taking their Sunday constitutionals. More scenery here on the bridge than anywhere else around here.

New Feature

From now on I'm going to tell you what my MP3 player was playing at 12:00 on the road each time I move sites (I hook it up to the van stereo). And to-day it was 'Mother's Little Helper' by the Rolling Stones.

Not much to say about the journey (about 40 miles). I think it's through the Wolds; certainly the road undulated in a woldish sort of way. More trees and hedges. The site is about 3 miles from York and is set on a stud farm. The two mares looked to my untutored eye like racehorses and were beautiful chestnuts.

Sat in the Sunday afternoon sun and read my book. On Monday I cycled to the Park and Ride and caught the bus to the city. Now, anyone who knows me will not be surprised to learn that my first target was the National Rail Museum.

This is just so magnificent that I felt I was floating on air. When you enter the main hall there is a strong but delicate scent of machine oil which turns the head as not even the finest perfume could. I think the last time I was here was about 35 years ago; it was great then but it's improved. Can it get any better? I'm not going to bore you with the minutiae of steam locomotives, but here are a few tit bits.

In the cab of 'Evening Star', the last steam locomotive built for British Rail, there are two seats, one for the fireman and one for the driver. The driver's is padded, while the fireman's is wooden (albeit carved to fit a bottom); a pecking order, always a pecking order.

The ex-GWR 'King' class express engine never reached its full potential speed because a single fireman couldn't keep up with its appetite for coal. ('GWR' is short, by the way, for 'Great Western Railway', but railway aficionados (a.k.a. train spotters) regard it as the paragon of railways and accordingly call it 'God's Wonderful Railway'.

The EM1 electric locomotive, which was designed by Sir Nigel Gresley to haul heavy coal trains over the Pennines because the crew of steam engines on that line used to pass-out from smoke suffocation in the Woodhead Tunnel, was made from re-cycled military tanks.

In a section called 'The Warehouse' is an enormous collection of railway bric-a-brac; station name boards (including Llanfair PG), locomotive name plates ('Marmion', 'King George V', 'Christ's Hospital') , express train head boards ('The Master Cutler', 'The Irish Mail', 'The Atlantic Coast Express'), lamps, signalling equipment, stained glass windows from station waiting rooms, and on and on and on. What caught my eye, though, was a huge number of models and rolling stock of all scales labelled with such detail as “Built by Mr Arnold Bulbtoilet, 1949-1956 and donated to the Museum by his family”. How nice.
 

Royal York Hotel

There was a horrifying exhibit devoted to crashes, including the celebrated Tay Bridge Disaster of 1879 which brought to the world the sublime poet William McGonagall. The peak of his poetic achievement is “The Tay Bridge Disaster”

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember'd for a very long time.

And so on..........

 I was there for four hours and it seemed like 4 minutes. And it was free! Of course, I made a small donation. Again I noticed that, as Paul Theroux said, everyone around old steam trains walks around with a gentle smile on their face.

York itself has so many attractions. The narrow mediaeval streets, the city walls, the seductive dark old pubs, the river (Ouse) and, of course the Minster. Who could but love a city which has a street called 'Whip-Ma-Whop-Ma Street'? I saw the end wall of a terrace of houses on which was painted the advertisement 'Nightly Bile Beans keep you bright-eyed, health and slim'. Was it an original? Is there anyone alive who took Bile Beans? What were they?

 

Some English Kings (and old ladies)

The next day I went in again, this time to see the Minster. There was a serious fire a few years ago, but the damage seems to have been repaired. I had a nice chat on the bus with a lady who came from Newcastle but who moved to York twenty-five years ago. We were both singing the city's praises, and the only negative she could think of was the tourists. “They do get under your feet a bit”, she said. They certainly do; they were queuing outside Betty's Tearooms and it's only April .

For me the best bit of any cathedral is the choir, but at York I love the Astronomical Clock. There is also a superb collection of carvings of the kings of England from William the Conqueror right up to Henry VI. There is a strong family resemblance between many of them, but I suspect that it's just that the sculptor had a limited repertoire of faces.  

 

The Choir

I was glad to see the Royal Station Hotel still in its splendour, although it has been re-named “The Royal York Hotel”. I stayed there for a happy weekend treat with my family thirty-odd years ago and it was like being in another world and another century. I remember I managed to flush my contact lenses down the drain in the bathroom.

Cycling past the farm next to the site on the way to the Park and Ride I had seen a fox and a pheasant in the farmhouse's front garden, standing facing each other, twenty-five feet apart and totally motionless. I watched for a bit but I was concerned for the pheasant’s welfare and tried to startle them by clapping my hands. No response, I tried again. So I wrote the pheasant off as either deaf or daft and in either case deserving removal from the gene pool and carried on cycling. When I returned, the pheasant had fallen over but the fox was still staring at it. I couldn’t resist and cycled up the drive to take a closer look. Of course, you guessed it, they were made of plastic. The pheasant had simply blown over. Doh! The first thing I did was to look all around me to make sure nobody had seen me. I thought I did hear sniggering coming from somewhere though. 

I very much enjoyed the first episode of the new “Endeavour” series on Sunday night. If you don't know, it's about the young Morse. He's a much more attractive character (he's not always on the pull every week for a start) and is a much better detective than his older self. I spotted a great little clip. At one point he goes to visit someone and stands at the door in front of an array of brass nameplates with bells. The bottom one says “R. Duck”. Ah-ha, Raymond Duck, from “Withnail and I”, Uncle Monty's theatrical agent. 'Raymond Duck, a horrible little Israelite, four floors up on the Charing Crorss Road and no job at the top '. Someone's having a laugh! Marvellous!

And so it's farewell to York, a civilised place.   

 

                                                               A fox and a pheasant

 

 

 

 

10. Barrow-upon-Humber
       Private site
       27th-29^th March

60 mile drive up the A15 from Lincoln. The road, which was dead-straight, was the Roman Ermine Street, which went from London to Lincoln, the Humber and York. The only noteworthy feature was the number of places ending in “-by”, one of the Danish/Viking place name endings. Among them were several entries in The Meaning of Liffe, including:-

CLIXBY (adj.): Politely rude. Briskly vague. Firmly uninformative

Talking of “-by”, I've been listening to Radio 4 and Simon Russell Beale reading Ben McIntyre's latest book, “A Spy Among Friends” about Kim Philby. As with all McIntyre's books, it's fascinating; he really is the master of studies of espionage, a subject which I find absolutely absorbing. In hindsight it's difficult to understand how members of a privileged middle-class elite like Burgess, McLean, Philby and Blunt could have been so utterly captivated by communism. There was, of course, idealism (Philby is quoted as saying “the rich have oppressed the poor for too long”) but they must have seen the monster's true colours when Stalin's Five Year Plan and his purges killed millions in the Twenties and Thirties and when he signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler in 1939. Of course there was “the end justifies the means” school of thought, but so many others left the party after these revelations that it's impossible to understand how these golden children could have overlooked such horrors. And then there was the personal betrayal of friends and family and the terrible fate of hundreds of agents throughout Europe as a result of the treachery of Philby in particular. I suppose he was Bill Haydon in le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. At the end, Smiley's wife says something along the lines of “Bill betrayed totally, absolutely, didn't he?” and it's easy to imagine, for example, Philby's loyal friend and disciple Nicholas Elliott uttering this terribly sad postscript. Simon Russell Beale is a wonderful reader, by the way.

I've just noticed there's a place called Bessacarr on the outskirts of Doncaster. There's a caravan and motorhome manufacturer called Bessacarr. For some obscure reason I had always thought these were French but now I see they are much more exotic.

Radio Four Extra is broadcasting some old 1970's issues of Alastair Cooke's Letter from America starting on Sunday morning. The preview has him reviewing Watergate and Nixon. Should be fascinating.

Blimey, I've just heard on the radio that cats have been giving people the strain of TB found in cattle. Perhaps the badgers were innocent after all. Is a cull of cats next? There's a few votes down the drain if Dave goes for that.

I came to Barrow-upon-Humber in search of a particular story (more anon) and was unaware until I got here that the village had a connection with John Harrison, the man who solved the longitude problem. Until his super-accurate chronograph went into service, it had been possible for navigators to pinpoint a ship's position north-south (its latitude) but not its position east-west (its longitude). In 1707, 2,000 Royal Navy sailors under Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell were lost off the Scilly Isles because of this problem and Parliament offered a prize of £20,000 for a solution. Harrison's family moved to Barrow when he was seven and he worked as a carpenter and watchmaker there for 58 years in a workshop close to the market place, developing successively better chronometers. His last design (“H4”) came after his move to London. In a number of sea-trials it fulfilled Parliament's requirements but Harrison had to petition the King (George III) to get his money. (It seems that Parliament was a nest of vipers then, too. They probably wanted to spend the money on duck islands). The story of Harrison and the longitude problem is told in Dava Sobel's excellent book “Longitude”.

But now the main story. I'm a great admirer of Paul Theroux's travel books, written over, I guess, a thirty year period. I first read “The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train through Asia” in around 1980. In it he meets a man called Duffill whom he describes thus:-

“He was old and his clothes were far too big for him, so he might have left in a hurry and grabbed the wrong clothes, or perhaps he's just come out of the hospital. He walked treading his trouser cuffs to rags and carried many oddly shaped parcels wrapped in string and brown paper – more the luggage of an incautiously busy bomber than of an intrepid traveller. The tags were fluttering in the draught from the track, and each gave his name as R. Duffill and his address as Splendid Palas Hotel, Istanbul.”

(Now, before I go any further I'm going to tell you the lesson I learned from the story, so you can see what an important story it is and so that you continue right to the end, however distant and obscure that end might seem. The lesson is never to judge anyone by their appearance. It was wonderful to see the vile Simon Cowell learn this lesson when Susan Boyle began to sing).

They travel together as far as the French/Italian border, Theroux from time to time describing Duffill's frailty and advanced age. At Domodossola on the France/Italy border Duffill is left behind by the departing train after he has gone to get some food. With another passenger, Theroux does all he can for him, leaving his belongings with the station master at Venice, but he is not seen or heard from again in the book.

In 1982 Theroux undertook a journey around the coast of Britain, mainly by train, and wrote about it in “The Kingdom by the Sea”. It's a wonderful evocation of our strange country at the time of the Falklands War. At some point, Duffill had let slip that he came from Barrow-on-Humber in Lincolnshire, and Theroux goes there to find him. He finds that Duffill had died two years earlier, but he meets his brother Jack's wife and she tells him about him.

'His name was Richard Cuthbert Duffill. He was a most unusual man,' said his sister-in-law........................ He had been as old as the century – seventy-three the year he had stepped off the Orient Express at Domodossola. She asks 'Do you know about his adventurous life?'

I said 'I don't know anything about him.' All I knew was his name and his village.

'He was born right here in Barrow, in the Hall cottages. The Hall was one of the grand houses. Richard's father was the gardener and his mother was a housemaid. ….......of course the Duffills were rather poor.'

But Richard Duffill was brilliant. At the age of eleven he was encouraged by the headmaster of the village school to go to the Technical College in Hull. He excelled at Maths, but he was also a gifted linguist. He learned French, Latin, German, Russian and Spanish while still a teenager at Hull. But he had become somewhat introspective, for when he was twelve his father had died...................

His main recreation was swimming, and his skill in this resulted in his becoming a local hero. One summer day in 1917 he was on a swimming expedition with some friends at a quarry called the Brick Pits, near the Humber Bank. One of the boys, a certain Howson, began to struggle. He shouted, and then he disappeared beneath the murky water. Duffill dived repeatedly after him and finally surfaced with him and dragged him to shore, saving the boy's life. A few days later, the Hull newspaper reported the story under the headline “A Plucky Barrow Boy”.

For this, Duffill – a boy scout – was awarded the Silver Cross for Bravery. It was the first time this honour had ever come to a Lincolnshire scout. Some months afterwards, the Carnegie Heroes' Fund presented Duffill with a silver watch “for gallantry”, and they gave him a sum of money to help him in his education and future career“.  

In 1919, still young, and fluent in half a dozen languages, he joined the Inter-Allied Plebiscite Commission and was sent to Allenstein, in what was then East Prussia, to deal with the aftermath of World War One – sorting out prisoners and helping at the Special Court of Justice. In the following few years he did the same in Klagenfurt and Oppeln (Opole, Upper Silesia – now Poland). Berlin was next. Duffill got a job with the celebrated firm of Price, Waterhouse, the international accountants. He stayed in Berlin for ten years, abruptly resigning in 1935 and leaving – fleeing, some people said – for England.

Politically, he was of the Left. His friends in Berlin thought he might be gathering information for the British secret service. ('One felt he would have made the ideal agent', an old friend of Duffill's told me.) In any case, he left Germany so suddenly it was assumed that he was being pursued by Nazi agents................... He made it safely home, and he was also able to get all his money out of Germany. ('An exceedingly clever and daring feat,' another friend told me. 'His fortune was considerable.').

He may have had a nervous breakdown then; there was some speculation. He sank for a year, re-emerging in 1936 as a chief accountant for an American movie company..................In 1939 there was another gap, lasting until 1945: the war certainly – but where was Duffill? No one could tell me. His brother said, “Richard never discussed his working life or his world-travelling with us.”

In the late forties, he apparently rejoined Price, Waterhouse and travelled throughout Europe. He went to Egypt and Turkey; he returned to Germany; he went to Sweden and Russia, “for whose leaders he had the greatest admiration”.

After his retirement he continued to travel. He had never married. He was always alone. But the snapshots he kept showed him to be a very stylish dresser – waistcoat, plus-fours, cashmere overcoat, homburg, stick-pin............ He wore a rug-like wig.................... He had had brain surgery. He once played tennis in Cairo. He had gone on socialist holidays to eastern Europe. He hated Hitler”.

Theroux discovers that, after being left by the train he had collected his belongings and got to his goal, Istanbul. Mrs Jack had read Theroux's book and had put aside a copy to show Richard, but “ he had his stroke and just deteriorated. And he died. So he never saw it.”

“Thank God for that, I thought”, says Theroux.

I was moved and fascinated by this story and, in a lukewarm sort of way, decided to follow it up. I had been given “The Kingdom by the Sea” for my birthday in 1985, so my resolve was a bit of a slow-burner. But now here I was. The owner of the caravan-site where I stayed at Goxhill a mile or so from Barrow, Ian Briggs-Smith, referred me to a chap called Adrian, who apparently, was “a bit of an historian”. I went into Barrow and left my phone number with Steve, the landlord of the Six Bells, asking Adrian Rawnsley to call me. As I was waiting for the bus I saw Adrian stick his head out of his front door and I went across. He knew who I was because Steve had phoned him. We sat down in Adrian's back room and had a chat and a coffee. Adrian was fascinated by the story. When I said that it taught us not to judge by arrearances, he said something like “Angels walk among us”, which I thought was rather fine. He called another local, Charlie Denniff, who he thought might know more. Adrian, a former teacher who now makes terrariums on the site where John Harrison's workshop had stood, had lived in the village for four years, but Charlie had been born there. Charlie talked about Billy Duffill, who had kept an ironmongers shop in the village and mentioned “Dick Duffill”. Eureka! For some reason I had assumed that “Duffill” was a false name given to him by Theroux. So this was his real name. Both Adrian and Charlie thought that I should talk to Colin Heaton, who was also Barrow-born, and arranged for me to meet him at Charlie's house the following morning.

Colin knew quite a bit, and what he knew corroborated Theroux's story. “He was a small man with a very long coat trailing on the ground”. “When he came back from Istanbul he brought us some Turkish delight, but it was horrible”. The American film company was MGM. Colin also thought that Richard had worked, presumably as an interpreter, at the Nuremberg Trials, but wondered if he had mixed that story up with his work after the First World War. On Saturday nights he used to drink in the other pub, the Royal Oak, with his cronies, among them Sam Hall, the manager of Bentley's, the agricultural supplies company and major local employer, which had closed in 1992. Colin had inherited Richard's father's shotgun, but everything else had been left to his nephew, who had burned all his papers, including a number of pictures and what Colin described as a CV. My heart sank.

I took my leave of these kind, friendly and helpful gentlemen to look for his grave. When I had first got to Barrow I had met a lady in the churchyard who told me that the cemetery was just outside the village. No-one seemed to know where Richard was buried, but that was my only hope. I cycled down there and found quite a large cemetery, perhaps 300/400 graves, and a chapel. I quartered the graveyard in, for me, a surprisingly systematic way, watching in particular for more recent-looking headstones. Some went back to the early years of the last century. After an hour I had almost exhausted all my search areas when I came across a small, dingy rectangular stone, one probably of the last twenty to be examined. And here he was. I knew from the beginning that I would never meet him and I now suspected that I would never see a photograph of him, but at least now, after nearly thirty years, I had found his grave, a connection however tenuous. A simple inscription:-

Richard Cuthbert Duffill

1900 – 1980

 

 

(Cuthbert was his mother's maiden name). The simplicity of the stone and the inscription seemed entirely appropriate to what little I knew of him.

Theroux concludes his chapter on Barrow in “The Kingdom by the Sea” with a most wonderful paragraph.

“What an interesting man that stranger had been. He had seemed frail, elderly, a little crazy and suspicious on the Orient Express. Typical, I had thought. But now I knew how unusual he had been – brave, kind, secretive, resourceful, solitary, brilliant. He had slept and snored in the upper berth of my compartment. I had not known him at all, but the more I found out about him the more I missed him. It would have been a privilege to know him personally, and yet even in friendship he would never have confirmed what I strongly suspected – that he had almost certainly been a spy”.

Imagine being able to write like that. But, even better, imagine if someone had written that about you. I don't believe in the afterlife or ghosts or messages from the other side or any of that stuff but I stood at Richard Duffill's grave and read Theroux's moving tribute aloud just in case. And then I set off again on my travels.