JILL: Well you should try sitting behind mine, you’ve got a computer, I haven’t even got a power point.
HOBSON: I have an impeccable career record and academic record, I have confidential information of all kinds at my fingertips, I have men and women at my command who will obey orders without question, I have legal status and the backing of the judiciary and yet.
JILL: You remain unfulfilled?
HOBSON: One thing still defeats me Mrs Swinburne.
JILL: I hope you feel able to confess it Inspector.
HOBSON: The dark, impenetrable, tantalising, mystery; the psychology, Yorkshire!
Alan Plater, The Beiderbecke Connection (Yorkshire TV 1988)
The recent death of my father has prompted me to reflect on his Yorkshire-ness. Through the culture he had absorbed, I came to learn that Yorkshire had always been England’s largest and most important county, and therefore when viewing the world from within it; beyond the Pennies became another country, and what happened over the Humber was really only the proper business of the Diocese of Lincoln!
Father (Michael) and his elder brother (Peter) were born and brought up in and around York, itself at the heart of the Vale of York, they like Alf Wright’s (James Herriot’s) son Jim, knew the view from Sutton Bank from a young age. Standing on the edge of the north Yorkshire moors looking westward were ‘the Dales’ of popular fiction whilst behind you were the hill farms that made up the daily rounds of the vet, born in Sunderland but brought up and educated in Glasgow. Similarly Alan Plater was not born in Yorkshire either. The central theme of the Beiderbecke trilogy is how outsiders somehow cope with living in Yorkshire. Yet in the end Inspector Hobson suffers the greatest indignities because he wants to understand rather than grudgingly accept. (The true Yorkshireman asks no more than that - he’d be seriously worried if you were not found to be defending your own part of the country, at least on important occasions!)
I grew up between the age of eighteen months and eleven years three months close to Newcastle, then my father thoughtlessly took me away a second time, to somewhere where no one understood what I was saying - Devon. But, ‘we adapt’. Throughout childhood l was his ‘general dogsbody’ and unpaid ‘deputy assistant under-manger’ whenever it came to DIY, gardening and navigating in the car. With all this came a certain amount of park-bench philosophy; ‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it’, ‘more haste less speed’, ‘a poor craftsman always blames his tools’.
In retrospect, and with the benefit of hindsight, the greatest frustration was his decision-making process. One learnt to ask a question a good two weeks before one needed a reply. One work colleague often reflected that she was always finding father simply staring out of the window, concerned this might be a sign of distress she would enquire how he was and get the reply; ‘I’m thinking’. What he meant was he was ‘thinking through’; everything had to be thought through. Impulses and spontaneous reactions were always suspect, but if you waited long enough the ‘right’ answer would emerge. But it was an active process of contemplation, something more than setting aside to consider in a calmer mood (he always endeavoured to be in a calm mood). And it is at this point that we arrive at a particular kind of Yorkshire-ness, and perhaps at a particular history.
Separating the emotions and cognitions of the man from the upbringing or cultural environment is particularly difficult in close family relationships, however one breakthrough in understanding came to me when Alan Bennett (truly a lad from the outer reaches of Leeds) wrote and presented the documentary Dinner at Noon, filmed almost exclusively in the Reception area and front Lounge of a Harrogate hotel.
‘The real solvent of class distinction is a proper measure of self-esteem. A kind of unselfconsciousness. Some people are at ease with themselves so the world is at ease with them. My parents thought this kind of ease was produced by education: “Yer Dad and me can’t mix, we’ve not been educated”. They didn’t see that, what disqualified them was temperament. Just as, though educated up to the hilt, it disqualifies me. What keeps us in our place - is embarrassment.’ Alan Bennett (BBC TV 1988) Dinner at Noon.
I may be reflecting on a quite specific time in Yorkshire history too, which just happened to have a broader cultural appeal because of its oddity and therefore potential humour! A time in fact between the reign of Queen Victoria and the final disenfranchisement of the Yorkshire male by another Victoria, that is the Lancashire lass Victoria Wood!
But much of that ‘have-a-go at Yorkshire’ humour centred round buttoned-up emotion and suppressed sexuality. Now that could only succeed as humour if it was restricted to a minority. I well remember the last time I got a belly laugh out of my father. It was when I repeated an old joke from season two of Last Of The Summer Wine (BBC TV 1975?) written by Roy Clarke – one much reworked and watered down later over the years of what was to become the world’s longest running ‘sitcom’. The show began as a tale of men made redundant in late middle age trying to recapture childhood play, and in the process reconstruct the reality of their lives. They made relative, the taken for granted reality of the other members of their community. They made themselves a disruptive influence. Anyway, without context, the joke reads thus;
(Nora seen showing Compo off the premises with aid of broom.)
BLAMIRE: Why does that man keep chasing that woman?
CLEGG: Probably because it’s more fun than actually catching her!
In time, as the reader may know, Nora’s husband dies, but Compo never gives up in his pursuit of her, which we are always led to believe began when they all came of age around the time of WWII. When Compo dies, Nora is devastated. Compo was always tramp-like and unwashed and rejected by Nora because of it. She was a woman who naturally enough took a scrubbing brush to her front door step once a week. But Compo, without a thought to what others thought, was as devoted in his admiration of her as was humanly possible, he had paid her the greatest complement he could. That is the context.
But the line is actually spoken by Cleggy, the only one of them who was ever married for any length of time, and is now a widower. She was strict Chapel and he had realized there was no escaping from her from the moment their eyes first met at a chapel tea. Compo naturally was the only one uninhibited enough to approach the subject of sex with Cleggy. He in turn confesses that they had indeed had their moments but that the chief difficulty had been the necessity to negotiate so many layers of flannelette even on a summer’s evening. He now found it a great relief not to be married.
Roy Clarke was also the author of Open All Hours (BBC TV) about a corner shop, somewhere in the suburban streets of somewhere like Doncaster. Again the humour is of a time and a place which chimed with my father. My favourite line is uttered by Arkwright the owner, when describing a customer; ‘That man has the silent tread of a Yorkshire county cricket supporter’. Which kind of places it in the early 80’s when it was possible a fan might need to hang his head, and skulk home, hopefully unobserved. Arkwright despite his cynicism and often appalling treatment of others is a passionate man, first - it has to be said – for money, and second for the largely imagined delights of marriage to the community nurse living across the street.
Now then, my father enjoyed classical music, but like everything else, ‘passionate for’ or ‘passionate about’ were never phrases that sprung to mind when you heard him talk of the people who interested him. He knew perfectly well that down the road from Doncaster was Thorn the birthplace and childhood home of singer Lesley Garrett, famous for finding her voice whilst sat on the outside privy as a child. He considered it a fault that her passion appeared at times to overwhelm her technique, whilst I was feeling, that’s the point – passion must lead.
I believe myself to have been, partly at least, saved by the ‘television age’ bringing me a broader education than my prescribed environment contained, and later by the Web offering an explosion of alternatives.
