YORKSHIRE MEMORIES
(Translation by Alf Bessemer) Matthew Stanley
I was the first in our family to go to school. Me Dad had been born down the pit, me Mam toiled in the workhouse since she were three years of age and me Grampa had died of asbestosis - it took them three weeks to cremate him. So I was the first to try out the newfangled" Education".
At five years of age I started the six mile walk to work. Past the grim glare of the furnaces, 'cross the wind-weathered cobbles and the dead dreams of the oppressed working class. Blackened stacks belched the blood of proud Yorkshire into the air and guided me on me way. From me Dad I had the flat cap, from me Mam the heavy wooden shoes that warned off the Yorkshire chill. Only Southerners get corns and blisters.
Then there it was against the leaden sky. Cast iron gates with the rust of ages coating their spiked phalli. Yorkshire baked bricks and the proud mortar of our quarries holding it together.It were imposing, I'll admit, but so were the dark hell of the bowels of the earth when I first scraped coal from the pit. What could I expect? Me Dad had heard rumours of a new idea called "The Three R's" - a Southern invention to corrupt the real men up in the wastes of the North. He had said to me that morning, as he had scraped the coal dust from his face."Don't let them teachers near your R's. son".
I had nowt to fear. Me first teacher had a proud Yorkshire name. He was called Naysmith after the inventor of the ferocious steam hammer - and when he slammed his cane down on that desk he reminded me of that pounding hammer. He was a bull of a man; six foot seven with wild red hair and huge tombstone teeth that clenched a briar pipe. Some said he were so proud he smoked coal. I had to believe them when I saw his face alight with fire during a blackout. We all admired him when he promised not to touch our R.s and told us that wood craft were today's subject.
Aye. the rasp of chisel on timber, the cough of saw on the grain; the whine of a trapped finger in a lathe. Them lathes were Naysmith's first love (he had left his wife for a Richardson's Vulcan) The blur of speeding wood and the jarring of the chisel in your teeth was his passion. He would spend many a midnight hour alone with a pot of No.6 grease in them workshops. We couldn't wait to start.
This is what he said to us that first morning: "No running in the workshops, no long hair, no holding hands, no sodomy,no Southern whining when your flesh is bitten by the drill-bit." When the lad next to me asked what sodomy was, the fire in Naysmith's pipe raged and his hands nervously fondled the No 6 grease - "See me after school",he said. And then we began. I smelt the sweet scent of resin, the moan of the lathes and the glint of Sheffield steel...
Sheffield steel. The skeleton of Yorkshire, our food, our blood. From the deep gloom of the impoverished North it shines out across the globe like a set of God's own cutlery. Pans. knives, machine parts - all from Sheffield. All too expensive for us.
Then it was dinner-time and the lathes stopped their pitiful moan. Yorkshire pudding and gravy like crude oil, potatoes like coal. Bullet peas and the tough shoe-leather meat of a Yorkshire cow. Aye, it were a grand meal. A barrel of bitter were rolled out for us to quench the thirst of weary graft, the gasping need of a real worker who wears unwashed wool in the winter and bears his skin to the elements in summer. And all eaten with stainless steel cutlery.
Afterwards we returned to the saw dust and the noise, and when I went home that night I had a set of four chairs and a heavy oak table - all carried for six miles on me sturdy Yorkshire back. Me Dad gave me a friendly punch and told the neighbours that I were a scholar. It'll come in handy when we move to Reading.
END.
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