WAXCOATS AND WELLIES

One

I’m not sure how I gravitated to Harry other than that he was standing at a waypoint in my life. For some, long forgotten, reason I was looking for an old shepherds crook to take back to Canada as a reflection of our family’s heritage in Ripon.

I was following a trail, like breadcrumbs, starting in Harrogate, looking in Otley, Ilkley and all the way up to Hawes.
No matter what the weather it’s spectacular up there and yet you’re really not far from anywhere by Canadian standards. Nothing has changed much up here in the Yorkshire Moors. They got electricity some time back and that’s about it.
If you’ve never been there this is the land of Herriot, the Fells and soaring moorland. The only sounds the constant wind, curlews riding the air, the bleating of distant sheep and the burbling of a close by beck. The Lake District beckons slightly to the West but that’s a different area….a different story.

All of us, as we cruise through life, have contact with characters. Not just characters in our play but people who are slightly larger than life in their own way. People who, although they might have stepped onto our stage for only a moment in time, leave an indelible mark on our consciousness.
For many of us our lives are parochial…..certainly not a bad thing. We live, work and die in our parish and are happy with this. We live good productive lives, rear good productive children and are remembered for being just that – good people but parochial.
Some of us live or have lived, at times, a different type of life, quite often brought about by travel more often brought about by curiosity. Certainly less parochial. Certainly more risky. More rewarding? Depends on your parish.

These characters that punctuate our lives. These folk that are “larger than life.” Larger than whose life? My life? Your life? Life in general?
Quite often they could easily have lived in a different time. They march to their own drum. Some are well educated. Some have no formal education at all. They all have one thing in common. They are happy being inside looking out!

Two

It was easy getting out of Leeds/Bradford Airport in my rented car.

Now I had to navigate my way to my mum’s place in Harrogate…..on the wrong side of the road I might add.
I wanted to avoid Leeds. Leeds was the antithesis of everything I disliked about the industrial north. Each to his own for sure but I never liked it. I remember it as a dirty place. Grey with grey people, grey buildings, grey lives. I also am well aware that these are my glasses I’m looking through, certainly not rose tinted when it comes to Leeds. Perhaps your glasses have a different tint…..which would be a good thing.

There is one fact that is and was always phenomenal to me, surely planned at some point in time. You drive North out of Leeds, turn up the Harrogate Road, drive through Moortown and Alwoodly and pass Wigton Lane.

Leeds ends right there !

Like a knife cut. No gentle transition here. Leeds just ends! North of Wigton Lane the land is soft and pastoral. The Harrogate Road leading you through one of the more southerly, more benign Dales. Through Harewood, the home of the Queens cousin. North into a different world -The Yorkshire Dales.

So I turned a different way, map on lap, looking the wrong way at roundabouts. Heading up the Otley Road in the general direction of my brother’s haunted house on the Killinghall Beck. Woops……turn right. My mum’s in Harrogate hard by the old Granby Hotel . A jumping place in the forties and fifties. Now a retirement home for the well healed.

Mum’s place. An island of nostalgia. My dad had passed on five years previous. My mother never got over it but what has that got to do with you. Not much I guess.

The flat was filled with all things remembered. The only difference the building itself. A retirement flat. A modernized Victorian throwback. The groundfloor with a stunning, very “Harrogate” view. The “Stray.” A two hundred acre common in the middle of town. A huge grassy areas dotted with ancient oaks surrounded by buildings all built from local Yorkshire stone. All trimmed in white, most with roses out front.

In the distance, out of my mother’s front window, the square tower of Christ Church, known locally as St Johns. Nothing between us but two hundred yards of well tended grass and a couple of oak trees. Gravestones, crooked sentinels of the past, huddled behind the moss covered stone wall.

Three

Where did this idea of a shepherd’s crook come from? Still haven’t figured that part out so many years later. Perhaps it was from watching “All Creatures Great and Small” on PBS.
My search for the Grail (replace Grail with Crook) started in Harrogate and ended in Skipton. I won’t bore you with the trek itself other than to say that it took me through some of the more spectacular parts of the Yorkshire Dales. Certainly a most circuitous route as Harrogate to Skipton, in a straight line, is only about ten miles.

The real “characters’ in my life can perhaps be counted on one hand. Jason who taught me how to sail a small boat on Mudeford Water. Jacques a crazy French rugby player with fingers like bananas and a family that owned a chateau in Normandy distilling Calvados, that apple brandy, they drink like water. Donald (Dongo) a logger on Vancouver Island, a woodland philosopher and Harry a dour Yorkshireman with a startling side.
Not one of these folk was well educated, formally that is. In fact just the opposite is the case. All of these folk were distilled products of their environment. Steeped in tradition and honed by experience. The net result a spirit to be envied.
These four had traits in common. An inner satisfaction with their lot. An abiding love of history and how they saw themselves “fit.” A philosophical view of their world and, at times, critical of the new and perhaps outside world. An innate curiosity.
All this wrapped up in a quirky sense of humour.

Four

Harry from Skipton was the most surprising of them all.
By asking around I had been directed, in almost unintelligible Yorkshire dialect, to a gunshop called The Shooting Lodge. I had been assured that they had a selection of walking sticks and crooks.
A gunshop! Not like a North American store with it’s camouflage, blaze orange racks, handguns under the counter and insistence upon the rights of the second amendment. Rather a quiet, tastefully decorated shop. Behind the counter a gentleman in blazer and tie, not Harry by the way, no handguns in sight and very few rifles.

This is the world of Purdey and Churchill. The world of old money, tweeds and huge estates. A world in which the most important date in the year is August 12th……..the glorious twelfth.
No Harry though. No sticks. No crooks. More breadcrumbs. The clerk in the blazer directed me to another shop just across the cobbled yard, no more than twenty paces away. Waxcoats and Wellies!

Beams in the ceiling and an old pine floor. Counters that looked as though they belonged in a Dickens story and the smell of floor wax. All this not the mental machinations of an interior decorator seeking ambiance. The beams held the roof up. The floor was the original. No attempt to duplicate times gone by here. This was as it was…as it is. No elevator music. Quiet.
It was the type of store described in England as “A purveyor of country clothing to gentlemen” as pompous as that might sound. The home of Barbour and green wellies. Jodhpurs and cavalry twills. Plus fours and flat caps. Real Arran sweaters and shoes that might cost a months salary. Truly if you had to ask you couldn’t afford it. Most items bought “on account” unless you were a tourist. A visitor. Just passing through.
Waxcoats and Wellies. Owned by The Shooting Lodge. Owned by Harry.

Five

Harry, as bright in my mind as the day I met him fifteen years ago. A Yorkshireman through and through. Not overly tall and a little older than myself. Extremely ruddy in complexion, as a result of a lifetime outdoors, but clean shaven. Salt and pepper hair usually hidden under an old Trilby. Inevitably wearing a tweed suit that would weigh a normal man down. Jacket cut in the hacking style. Pants with cuffs. Brogues with a military shine. Pale blue twinkly eyes that always seemed to be laughing at some unspoken joke.
Harry was not, in fact, your typical storeowner although it should be said he was entrepreneurial by nature and typically canny. He was in fact a cattle breeder of some renown. He was also a cattle judge at the many “Fairs” held both locally and in Scotland his breed of choice being Aberdeen Angus. He also kept some Highland Cattle simply because he said he liked the look of them.

“Crooks? Nay lad nuthin’ in t’shop. Might ‘ave summat at’ome I might be willing to part wi’.” “Why don’t you drop in at farm later in t’day?” My first encounter.
The end of the breadcrumb trail is perhaps in sight…….but the tale is only just beginning.

He gave me instructions to the farm:
"Go out of Skipton and bear right at t’fountain. Go three, four mile then turn left at t’church. Follow thee nose until tha gets to auld barn on t’right.”
OK I’ve already had it. There’s no way I’m going to be tramping round the tops, in a rented car, looking for a farm I wouldn’t recognize and Aberdeen Angus cattle….they’re mostly black aren’t they?

“Why don’t I come back when you’re ready and I’ll just follow you home?”

“That’ll work right fine” he said.
Later in the day I followed his, mud splattered, Land Rover out of Skipton driving, as if in a tunnel, between the dry stone walls that crisscross the entire countryside in this part of the world.

We headed west. The sun was low in the sky making it even more difficult to see. Harry was in no hurry. I don’t think he ever was now I think about it. After a while he pulled over onto the well cropped verge. I pulled in behind him. He got out of the car and climbed over a stile built into the limestone wall. I followed him.
“I often stop ‘ere on t’way ‘ome when sun is low like this” he says. “Reminds me of wot I am and ‘ow little I am.”

The close, sheep cropped grass, ran down to a little beck running through limestone rocks. On the other side the fell rose up, beneath the vaulted blue/grey sky, checkered with dry stone walls and the odd stone barn . Little white dots of sheep in the distance. Beyond this, across the valley, the land became the land of heather bright purple and red in the waning day. You could see the shooting butts marching along the horizon and a huge limestone escarpment off to the west with the sun seemingly balanced on its lip. Quiet now but busy come the middle of August.

“Quiet” is the word.

The only sound the ticking of the car engines as they cooled down. Every now and again the sound of a pheasant in the distance happy that it’s not August. Hardly a breeze at this time of the day. In the background the sound of the beck as it made its way towards the sea. Reminded me of Smetner’s Moldau. If I missed anything about the England I’d left so many years ago……this was it.

Back in the cars. Stopped a couple of times for sheep on the road. They seemed to think they had more rights than we did. Across a splash where a beck ran across the road. Not worth building a bridge. Hardly anyone passes this way…..not even the tourists. Up the steep, winding road on the other side. Cresting the top of the hill, to a new vista, Harry suddenly turned sharp left through a wide gateway. No actual gate but a cattle grid across the laneway. He stopped. Got out and beckoned me over to him.
“There ye are lad. T’home farm.”

Six

Nestled in the valley below us at the end of a winding, deeply rutted track, lay a group of buildings that looked as though they’d been there since the beginning of time. They seemed huddled together as if for protection.
“Bought if ofn ol’ George Hislop almost thirty year since” he said. “’aven’t changed much since then. Put in a new generator. No electricity up ‘ere. T’farm isself is four hundred acres but I ‘ave grazing rights over another thousand. I keep big beasts close to farm but ‘ave Swaledales on t’tops.”
We pull into a cobbled yard my rented Golf happy to arrive. Two border collies tear out of a stone shed, greet Harry then sniff me carefully to make sure I pose no threat. “ ’ang on a minute” he says “ ‘ave to turn on generator, get some lights on.”

By now it was almost dark the sun having disappeared behind the fell climbing up to one side of the farm. I was already wondering how the hell I was going to find my way back to Harrogate which was starting to feel like a distant, far away place.
A muttering from another stone shed a little further from the house and with that lights sprang up in the old house shining yellow onto the old cobbles.
“Come in lad. Don’t ‘ave to tek shoes off. Mek your sen at ‘ome.” His accent was deeply Yorkshire but seemed in keeping with the surroundings.
We were in the kitchen. Stone flagged floor. Huge green Aga off to one side. He saw me looking at it. ‘Ave propane tank outside. Runs Aga and water ‘eater” he says. Answers that question I thought. “Waters good” he says. “T’wells not deep but t’water ‘s just grand. Never’ad it dry up neither.” Another question answered.
Coats hanging on wooden hooks. A row of boots on the stone flagged floor. An enormous pine table occupied the centre of the room scrubbed almost white over the years. The sink was old porcelain which reminded me of my grandmother’s kitchen. Beamed ceiling. Plaster and lathe walls. Chilly just now.
We go through a low door. “Watch your ‘ead” he says. “all doors are real low. You’ll only crack yoursen once.”
We enter his living room. Dropping to his knees in front of the fireplace he put a match to a fire already layed. “Soon warm up in ‘ere” he says. “Walls are real thick.”

A man’s room. A man’s house! Comfortable furniture drawn up to the fire, dogs already on the rug waiting for the warmth. Magazines everywhere. Shotguns in the corner, slippers in the hearth. Cattle prints on the walls. An old roll top desk in one corner and a TV, incongruously out of place, in a nook to one side of the fireplace. He saw me looking at it.
“I see you ‘ave a lot of questions. Let me tell you about the place. Like a drink?” We settled into chairs either side of the fireplace single malts in hand, fire just starting to take. A satisfied whimper from one of the borders.
“Like I said I bought the place from old George over thirty year ago. I don’t know how long he ‘ad it but I think it ‘ad bin in ‘is family for a long time. He’d done nothing to it! I added plumbing and wiring and installed the generator. There used to be an outhouse. Terrible in the winter.” He smiled at the memory and took a sip of the whiskey.
“There’s no phone but I use my mobile. It’s only recently I put in the dish for the TV but the reception’s a bit wobbly being down in the valley ‘ere.”
The main house, this building, was built just before the civil war as a gamekeepers cottage. The only thing different today is the plumbing and wiring I put in.” He stood up and shoveled some coal onto the fire. The room had quickly warmed up. “I never married. Haven’t found t’right woman yet. My neighbours wife comes over twice a week and fettle’s place for me. Does a right grand job. Not that I mek too much of a mess being on my own an all. I pay her a few bob and she’s ‘appy. Anyway lets ‘ave a look at wot we’ve got. Follow me lad.”
He got up and I followed him down a stone flagged corridor. The heat hadn’t got down here yet and it was cool. Not damp just cool. He entered another room and flicked on the light. “Lets see if we can find you summat in ‘ere” he says. I stood there in amazement. The end of the breadcrumb trail!

Seven

I discovered later at the Great Yorkshire Fair that Harry had, by far, the largest collection of sticks and crooks in the UK and quite possibly the world.
They were everywhere. Stacked like cordwood. All shapes and sizes. All colors. Many of them carefully carved. An incredible mix of woods, horn and bone. A lifetime of travel and collecting.
“Not all of ‘em are fer sale” Harry said. “Most o’them are irreplaceable but I’m sure we’ll find you summat.”
An hour later we were done. Spit on palm handshake in the old tradition. Four crooks and two walking sticks. Paid far more than I had anticipated but what the hell. I told you he was canny.

So now you think this is the end of this yarn? No way….it’s only just begun.

My search for crooks had led me to one of the more fascinating people in my life , one of the more weird experiences in my life and certainly one of the more startling sights in my life……all in one evening of my life……all in the one, unexpected, location.
“Dust tha’ want summat to eat lad” he says. “Nobbut take a few minutes to ‘eat something up.” “ ‘elp yoursen to the whiskey. I’ll ‘ave one too.” he said disappearing into the kitchen.
Half an hour later we’re sitting at the kitchen table. Huge plate of stew in front of me and a Guinness in a glass. Should go well with the two large whiskies I thought.
Harry was a comfortable man to be with. A man’s man in a man’s home. Stew on the table, dogs under the table, fire glowing in the room next door. Not much conversation. It wasn’t necessary. The lights flickering every now and again as the generator hiccupped. Must be great for TV reception I thought.
Harry in his braces. Stuck into his stew like it was his last meal on earth. Periodically tipping up his Guinness. “Want another beer lad?” he says.
“No thanks Harry at some point in time I have to find my way back to Harrogate.” It was getting late already and it was as dark as it can only get in the country.

Bang! Bang! Bang! Someone banging on the front door. I look up, startled. Who, in the world, can this be? We’re on a lonely farm in the depths of the Yorkshire Moors quarter of a mile down a worn, rutted laneway that demands a four wheel drive of one sort or another. Harry barely looks up. Picks up his beer then resumes eating. More banging on the door.
“Aren’t you going to get that Harry?” I said.
“Nay lad” says Harry. “It’s only George. He’s bin banging on the door since he died ten year ago. He’ll go away after a while. Thinks it’s still his place tha’ knows.”

Fair enough…….. not that I’m particularly looking forward to walking across the yard to my car later. Cross that bridge when we get to it.
“Nuther whiskey?” “I think so” I say as we retreat back into the cozy living room.
“Lotsa strange goings on up ‘ere” he says. “Nobody’s ever surprised. Strange sightings. People disappearing for several days then showing up again. Bright lights in the sky Bit further down t’road government has an observation post on top o’ fell. RAF blokes in there quite often. Supposed to be ‘ush ‘ush.”

Eight

We sat there, in front of the glowing fire, in companionable silence, gazing into the embers glasses in hand.
“ “ere lad there’s summat else I’d like to show thee.” I followed him down the passageway again but this time he turned into a different room and flicked on the light. “What do thee think of that then?” he says. I walked into the room and stopped dead. It takes a lot to truly surprise me but I was stopped in my tracks. It was so unexpected, so out of place, seemingly so out of character.

The room was quite large. A bedroom. Decorated in pink and white with a highly polished wooden floor partly covered by a beautiful far eastern rug glowing in the soft light. Chintz window coverings matched the coverings on the two easy chairs and the seat at the dressing table. Matching silver hair brushes and mirror on the dresser with fresh flowers in a cut glass vase.
Harry proudly walked across the room and opened another door giving entrance to a tastefully decorated modern ensuite complete with white, fluffy towels on a rail and lavender soap, still in its wrapper by the sink, all poised as though waiting for its user.
A woman’s room! Probably not just any woman but a woman of discerning taste and a love of nice things.

“I thought you said you’d never married Harry.”
“That’s quite true lad. Just never met the right ‘un….but when I do her room’s ready!”

An amazing, startling, loveable man full of surprises. He’d never used the room. Didn’t use an interior decorator. Got all the ideas out of magazines. Had his cleaning lady replace the flowers he brought up from Skipton every few days.

When I left he thoughtfully turned on the yard lights. I still watched the darker corners carefully and the shadowy sides of the lane as I drove off the farm.

I got lost of course. Ended up in Burnley which is in Lancashire in the exact opposite direction. Got instructions back to Harrogate, which is in Yorkshire, from an East Indian making Fish and Chips for locals in flat caps!

Had to use the expressway. Traffic. Trucks. Bright lights. Smell of diesel. Noise.
I much preferred Harry’s world……even with George.
I never knew if he found a woman befitting his room. I hope he did!