Yorkshire Tea

The memory snippets fortuitously preserved from childhood can be subconsciously woven by your brain into a story that makes perfect sense. But it can be a story that is quite simply, and spectacularly, wrong.

Here’s an example. My Dad’s younger brother Malcolm got married between January and March 1952, and Mum, Dad, Ian and I were at the wedding. There’s very liitle I can remember of it now, but there must have been enough memories at one time to convince me that this wedding was in St. Austell, Cornwall. Grandpa was a Methodist minister, he conducted the service, he lived in St. Austell and so, after they were married, did Malcolm and Maddie. Therefore (so went the story I’d constructed) we must have visited Cornwall for the wedding, and then a second time for a summer holiday.

It was only a couple of years ago, nearly seventy years after the event, that I looked up Malcolm and Maddie’s marriage record online. It came as a huge shock to see the marriage listed as having taken place not in Cornwall at all – but in Horsforth, Yorkshire. My first reaction was no, the authorities have got this wrong. Or maybe, for some administrative reason, the wedding was registered in Yorkshire although the ceremony took place at the other end of the country. It took a few months to accept that this was nonsense, but once I had, other memory fragments which I’d thought unrelated slotted into place.

The first one was being collected by a gentleman we knew from church – I think his name was Mr Bates – in his big car. Dad in front, me, Mum and Ian on the back seat. All I knew was we were going to Leeds. I can retrace the journey now – up Queens Drive, along the straight, interminable East Lancs Road, the crawl through towns like Eccles, Salford and Oldham – but can’t remember anything of it until we were on the moors between Manchester and Leeds, where Dad asked if we were now “in the Pennines?” Mr Bates, who might have been deaf, gave a non-committal kind of answer. At the time it didn’t strike me as strange, but this might have been Dad’s first time on this journey as well, if he wasn’t sure where we were.

Mr Bates pointed out the industrial smog to our left: “that’s Bradford over there”. So the only place name I could remember being mentioned from the entire journey was the city where Jill had been born four years earlier (our paths didn’t cross for another fourteen). There’s something faintly disconcerting about that.

My next memory is of Auntie Annie, Uncle George and their huge stone built house on Hawksworth Road in the Aire valley near Kirkstall Abbey. Annie was Grandma’s younger sister and we loved her. George was a true Yorkshireman of few words, probably a bit shy around children – they’d had none of their own – but like Annie he was warm and friendly and we liked him too. We made several subsequent visits during the fifties and sixties, so it’s difficult to pick apart the various memories of their house, but I’m sure this was my first sight of a clothes airer – the wooden rack for damp clothes which was hauled up to the high ceiling with a rope where it stayed out of everyone’s way. All we’d ever seen before was a steaming clothes horse standing round the fire.

Auntie Annie was a great cook, and before the evening meal she announced that “we’ll be having pudding before dinner”. Wow! Imagine my disappointment when it turned out to be a big Yorkshire pudding with gravy (the traditional way to fill up guests so they didn’t eat too much precious meat in the main course).

I can remember lying awake in our attic bedroom and hearing a very strange sound. I subsequently discovered it was the burbling of woodpigeons in the trees outside. In those days you did only hear them in woods and there were none of those near our house in Liverpool.

No memories at all remain of the wedding ceremony conducted by Grandpa, but the reception afterwards took place in a church hall, with everyone seated at long tables. I sat to Mum’s right, with Ian on her left, and presumably Dad next to him. After we had eaten, cups of tea were served by waitresses, probably schoolgirls doing a Saturday job, carrying huge teapots around the room.

A vivid memory began with Ian screaming, and Mum quickly jumping to her feet and turning to him. My first thought was that he must have done something terribly naughty for Mum to react like that (it wouldn’t have been without precedent). Within seconds though, as all the adults in the near vicinity leapt to their feet as well, I realised something terrible had happened.

A waitress, somehow distracted, had lost concentration on the cup of tea she was pouring for Mum and directed the scalding liquid onto Ian’s upper right arm instead. From that point on the memory is lost, but Ian was bundled out of the room with Mum, Dad and other concerned adults. I imagine he might have been taken to hospital by car, certainly I didn’t see him again that day.

Cut to a big house and garden filled with adults and children, a few of whom I knew, but most I didn’t. It was Maddie’s parents house I presume, and I’d have known half a dozen or so adults and Alison, who was my only cousin (at that time) on Dad’s side. One of the adults I didn’t know was Maddie’s brother Claude, who had a prosthetic hand or arm; a consequence of WWII which had ended seven years before.

Some of the older children asked their granny (Maddie’s mother) to come and play outside; not surprisingly she declined with the excuse “I’ve got a bone in my leg” which struck me as a strange phrase (and still does) which I’d never heard before.

Ian’s arm made a speedy recovery I think, though I still have an image of the huge blisters seen when the dressings were changed back at home. He has no memory of the trauma. It must have been a terrible incident for the poor waitress as well and I hope she’s not been troubled by any guilt.

I still don’t know (and never will) whether Mr Bates did us a favour by giving us a taxi ride from Liverpool to Leeds, or whether he had to go there for work anyway. I suspect the former. I’ve no recollection at all of how we got back home, which means he probably did the return trip as well. An act of great Christian kindness, if so!