Dear Blog,
Is it
me or is it me????
Blog
I kid you not when I tell you that my wife has just spent the last 11 minutes
repeatedly saying 'Hello, Hello.' into her mobile phone. She is stood in our
living room. It seems one of my daughters has phoned her and my wife cannot
hear what she is saying so she has been standing there repeating 'Hello, Hello
....'.
'Hello, Hello ... '
'Why don't you use the land line to find out what she has to
say' I ask my wife. 'No' she replies, 'We have to pay to use that, my mobile is
free'
'Hello, Hello ....'.
'Hello, Hello ...'
Blog I kid you not. You couldn't make it
up!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And they say Yorkshire MEN are tight!!!
I
was in God's Own Country last weekend for a dinner for the 'Hasbeens'. It was a
very pleasant day ..... a morning stroll of about 4 miles along the Warfe river
bank in the autumn (winter??) sunshine followed by an extended lunch (dinner)
into the early evening at the Red Lion. The room where we ate looked out onto
the Fell on which I had my first Fell Race ever! All that pain and suffering
... 16 minutes up and about 90 seconds down give or take a couple of cracked
ribs. Nice to catch up with everyone
I
was away for five days, on one of which I took a stroll to where this
photograph was taken, about a couple of hundred yards (180 metres to you Blog)
from our council house. By this time we had moved from our one up - one down
hovel in Hainworth Lane into a house on an estate in Broomhill which had
electricity and a bath. OK the toilet was still outside, but it was only a few
steps away, not a bloody route march up the Lane, down the snicket and into the
next street - Ebenezer Square in fact! When I was 17 and started to take an
interest in running I used to start my interval efforts here, where there used
to be a band stand in the early 60s. I had little idea about training for
running - my sparse knowledge gleaned from what few books were available on the
sport. I was lucky as the local library, the first one to be built in this
country by money from the steel giant, William Carnegie, was excellent. Despite
my poverty stricken background, my mother introduced me to the library when I
was about 6 or 7. By the age of 11 I had exhausted Lenin, Hitler, Stalin etc.
God only knows what the librarians thought of me as I only had a children's
ticket and they had to see my mother to question if such material was suitable
for a young child. I bet mum thought they all played football for Bradford Park
Avenue and I was trying to pick up tips .... on second thoughts, as I went to a
strict Northern Grammar School, she must have thought they were cricketers as I
wasn't too keen on rugger! As a kid, I spent ages down amongst the book shelves
fascinated by the range of books ... and that smell, the pleasant aroma of old
books and polish. The library seemed to have all the latest running books,
which wasn't very many in the early 1960s, but there were enough for me to
glean some idea about what to do. That was before I decided there was only one
person who knew best!!!
The houses in the photograph background have not changed in
any way. The only difference standing there last week was the absence of the
rampant rhododendra bushes (rhododendrons to you Blog) which were totally
invasive around the park when I was growing up in Ingrow.
The photograph shows the first running club in the town,
which is curious as it was the area in which I grew up, a dire slum area of
back to back terrace houses with no electricity or toilets, most of which, like
ours, was one up - one down with a tiny kitchen big enough for a sink and the
steps, one set going upstairs and the other down into the unlit cellar in which
we kept the coal, that is whenever mum and dad could afford any. Mostly it was
dead wood pinched from one of several woods which grew on the steep hillside
around the mill houses. In the depths of winter when we had had a snow fall and
the council gritting lorry had been up the lane spreading waste from the local
gas works in town, the cellar contents was swelled by the scrap coke pieces
spread by the men on the lorry and picked up by all the locals like us scavenging
with our wicker baskets after the lorry looking for any scrap of coke that the
council workers had thrown out onto the lane to afford any vehicular traffic a
grip if any were foolish enough to attempt go up or down in the snowy
conditions. It was many years later when dad was talking to one of his mates in
town that I learned that the foreman at the gas works (him!!) used to
generously augment the load of scrap coke waste destined for the highways with
quality coke and some coal if he thought his gaffa wasn't looking. He knew the
lorry routes and the crews, and they all worked the fiddle together, knowing
when they would be visiting the poor areas of the town. He also added with a
smile that the lorry driver used to drive his lorry particularly slowly in such
areas to give the workmen plenty of time to spread excess waste and speed up
when doing the better off areas of the town like Spring Gardens lane!!! I
assume that the members of the Ingrow Harriers must have been the mill workers
from what was essentially a slum village on the western outskirts of the town
where the river Worth flowed down the steep Pennine hills on its way to flow
into the Aire in Town and then eventually into the Humber and the North Sea.
WAKE
UP BLOG.
.
Bloody well wake up.
Are you paying attention .... I don't make
this lot up, you know. It's from my blood sweat and tears and all that stuff.
Colin
'Hello, Hello ...'
'Hello, Hello ..............................................................'
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