Day 28: Dark and True and Tender (Part 2)

“… bright and fierce and fickle is the South,
And dark and true and tender is the North.”

The past month has taken me as far north as Richmond and the rugged Dales, as far south as eclectic modern Sheffield, as far west as Hebden Bridge and Settle yet further, as far east as wild folkloric Whitby and the fierce seas beyond.

I spent my summer discovering what has always been right in front of me. And yet, there is still so much more. I always ask myself what I could have done better whenever I’m finished with any job, and the list is always too long. I cast my eye over a map of Yorkshire and let out the inevitable sigh.

I didn’t visit Harrogate or Ilkley (though I know both well). I didn’t visit Thirsk or Ripon, and only passed by Malton and through Pickering on my way to the coast. I didn’t set foot in the East Riding. I didn’t visit Tadcaster or Barnsley, Doncaster or Rotherham, Castleford or Pontefract. Nor Selby, Shipley or Skipton. Nor Hornsea, Holmfirth or Hull.

Never mind twenty-eight days. Twenty-eight years isn’t enough to appreciate all that we have to offer across these dark, true, tender hills and plains.

But what I did appreciate on my brief travels, I will hold onto and remember.

The tenderness I found in the kindness of strangers, in all those people around the county who invited me to their lovely cafes and restaurants to say hello, who let me join them in their places of work or their social lives, who simply offered me a lift or showed me around. Whether it was David – one of the Morris troupe I followed to Whitby – who drove me back to Leeds that evening in his sublime Morgan 4/4; or Sita Brand who showed me around Settle ahead of her incredible upcoming storytelling festival; or Jan who offered me not one but two dresses (and a handbag!) to get truly into the swing of things at Leeds Pride, there was tenderness at every step of the journey.

There is tenderness too merely in the way we speak and think, the way we treat one another as human beings. I can almost exactly remember when it was in my final year at university (my third away from the North) that I realised northern girls are sweeter, prettier, and simply better. You think I’m joking? It gradually dawned on me that all the most beautiful and thoughtful girls I was meeting were from the North. I remember for instance one evening at one of Oxford’s predictably pitiful clubs meeting an innocent fresher from Sheffield in the smoking area, over-merrily singing (perhaps shouting) at her the chorus to the old song ‘My Girl’s A Yorkshire Girl’ – which I’d only just discovered a few days before. The words may be less than flattering to the eponymous Yorkshire lass’s honour, but they certainly convey well the truth that every man deep down wants a Yorkshire woman to call his own.

But I’m being flippant; there’s more to our tenderness than that. It’s not only the way we call one another “love” or “pal”. It’s our entire attitude towards others: not merely as atomized units with whom we share only the bus journey home, but as people just like ourselves and in whose well-being and happiness we too have a stake.

Think of the Bakelady and her famous Secret Tea Parties, bringing into her home guests who have neither met each other nor even their host, sharing her kitchen and her living room for the enjoyment of others, each of them leaving having had a lovely afternoon and even made new friends.

Think of Nick and Linda at Baraka in Garforth, a coffee shop and social enterprise committed to bringing the community together, and to reducing loneliness, in their own words. Think of Create, the new Leeds restaurant and part of the Create Foundation which has trained jobless people back into work in catering and hospitality, and continues to thrive in its driving goal of helping others help themselves.

So there is tenderness yes, but darkness too. Darkness, not only in the awe-inspiring grandeur of the view from Ted Hughes’s old house at Lumb Bank near Hebden Bridge where to this day writers join the Arvon Foundation’s incredible programme of courses. Darkness, not only in the bleak, ghostly beauty of the old mills and foundries at Halifax or Shipley or Holbeck.

Darkness more in the sense that our best days are behind us, the saddening plaintive refrains I heard from Malcolm as we looked out across Bradford from the top of the old post office, or from Steve and Freya at Ella Riley’s Toffee and Sweet Shop in Horbury Bridge just months after they had been forced to shut down their shop in Holmfirth.

Darkness in the fear that we’re always one step behind, that we’re someone else’s poor relation. Darkness when Tony Harrison writes how his South Leeds accent meant he’d be given the joke parts in Shakespeare. Darkness in the tone of Billy Liar’s voice, as all he longs for is to escape here for somewhere better. Darkness even in the days when we were king: compare Dickens’s dour and doomed Coketown (a Lancashire town rather than Yorkshire, mind) with Dickens’s sprightly London – without even mentioning what Dickens had to say about Leeds.

Darkness of course in the thought that there are people across Leeds who haven’t been to the Corn Exchange, or inside the Town Hall, or to the Grand; people across North Yorkshire who don’t know about Caedmon’s dream at Whitby; people in Sheffield who haven’t seen the eclectic and exciting works on show in galleries across the city. Darkness in the tragedy that Leeds Library on Commercial Street or the Bradford Wool Exchange are spoken of as “hidden gems”, when they ought to be world-renowned.

Darkness wherever around Yorkshire we speak of “culture” as something discrete, something set-apart and faintly unknowable, when in fact we’re speaking of ourselves, our past and our future, our bond with one another.

But then there’s another, perhaps brighter kind of darkness: a darkness in mentality, in wit and humour. Like Colin in Richmond, who told me about his teenage daughter and her schoolmate waiting in line at the fish shop one day, as two squaddies from nearby Catterick Garrison came along and gave them their best. “You won’t get anywhere with us,” she told them sharply, “we’re both lesbians.” The squaddies wouldn’t have it: “Oh come on! You’re not really, are you?” She replied, “Yes. We are.” A mate of the two girls enters and she calls out to him instantly. “Tell ’em, we’re lesbians us two, aren’t we?” Quick as a flash, their mate nods his head: “Oh yeah… I always knew you two were!”

Or Freya, back at the sweet shop in Horbury Bridge, who discovered her grandmother’s age-old recipe for toffee. She told her father what she’d found and without hesitation he insisted: “Burn it!” Why ever do that, she begged? “That bloody toffee ruined my teeth. They went the way of the union – once one was out, they were all out.”

Tenderness; darkness; and then truth? Where is the “truth”?

Everywhere I’ve been, day after day, I’ve found dedication and passion, people who pour their heart and soul into what they do. Think of the incredible work to connect our past with our present done by Yosra at Leeds University in her project exploring the city’s history as part of the abolitionist movement. Look at Dean Clough in Halifax or Saltaire or The Station in Richmond, and see our past, present and future come together thanks to the efforts of committed people through the ages.

Think of the huge effort being made neighbourhood by neighbourhood, even soul by soul, all over Yorkshire, to bring human beings together, connecting us one by one. Think of John and Michelle and the team at Knaresborough’s FEVA, where the shops around town all got in the action by decking out their windows in the festival colours, and where music could be heard from the pubs and cafes, and art on the walls for anyone and everyone to stop and marvel at.

Think of Sita Brand in the storybook town of Settle; of Colin and the crew behind Richmond’s upcoming walking and book festival; of the crowds coming out in droves to sample the delights at Huddersfield Food Festival earlier in the month; or think of Europe’s oldest West Indian Carnival on Bank Holiday Monday.

Think of the true heart and soul that has gone into the renovation of the City Varieties, or the rebirth of Munro House where my own dear grandma once spun thread working for Austin Reed.

Once again: never mind twenty-eight days; if only I had twenty-eight years…

“O tell her, Swallow, that thy brood is flown:
Say to her, I do but wanton in the South,
But in the North long since my nest is made.”

So how do we make our nest here, where our brood remains?

I used to harbour a fanciful vision of Yorkshire growing to become something akin to Greater London: a vast and diverse landscape which draws the crowds from all over the world who come and find something different at every turn. Imagine, as I sometimes do, that here in Yorkshire we had our own Underground system like the Tube.

Imagine yourself embarking at Leeds station, and then after a short shuttle in whatever direction you have chosen, alighting at last at Hebden Bridge in the west or Beverley in the east, in Barnsley to the south or Knaresborough to the north – observing none of the steadily contrasting landscape or industry between each port.

Imagine leaving the sandcastellar Victorian Gothic of Bradford behind and re-emerging amid the medieval beauty of York, or stepping on the Tube near the farmlands of Swaledale and arriving by the seaside at Scarborough or Filey.

Imagine this, not merely as a quaint thought-exercise. Imagine this, as I do, as a way of demonstrating how widespread and varied our region is today and always has been. Surely you will struggle to find anywhere else on earth quite so complex, so beautifully diverse as this county, these pastures and rivers and villages and towns we call “Yorkshire”.

Our identity, our past and our future; let us share what we are, loud and bold. Sing about it, write about it, shout about it. Let us celebrate all this and more, as our truth.

“… dark and true and tender is the North.”

Relive the journey as Mark made it, from the very beginning…