Field Notes. The North.

The sound of brass, the smell of cut grass, cousins and the comedic beat.

I've been in the North of England for the last week or so. When I'm away from here (which is most of the time) I wonder whether I overdo the Yorkshireman and northerner narrative. Is it just an easy schtick that I fall back on? Is it slightly reductive of who I am now? I left the North in 1997 at the age of nineteen and I’ve not lived here since.

Most of my life has been away from West Yorkshire and East Lancashire, the two halves of my adolescence that share a landscape, separated by 25miles, and 600-years of rivalry. I’ve called the East Midlands home, London, and then Western Australia. Sometimes I don't know whether to ask for a teacake, cob, bap, or simply a bread roll; I strain to properly name the narrow passageway between two houses (ginnel or snicket are both acceptable); yet I’ll assert my northern-ness at any given opportunity.

Then, I come back here and I realise how deeply embedded in me it all is. I get joy or at least comfort as the landscape changes from the train window and I start to see mill chimneys that haven’t blown smoke in decades, the texture and solid craft of a dry stone wall, the colour of a wet slate roof, and the way that the threat of rain is painted on the sky; the smell of cut grass and freshly spread manure; the pace, tone and comedic beats of northern conversation, the muffled din of a pub as you pass, a church bell ringing late into the night, the bleating of lambs and the birdsong of undetermined species (too long since I was in the Young Ornithologists Club). I can hear a bit of brass, a colliery band, and my chest puffs out and my eyes well.

I stood in a golf club car park at a cousins wedding yesterday, looking out to the Pennines beyond the manicured greens, a gentle continuous drizzle cooling me, and I felt a lightness of being in a place where I could point with compass accuracy to the direction of my childhood home, primary and secondary school, the route of the cross country run, moments in my younger life. Conversations with family and old school friends unlocked deep buried memories; mostly things of little consequence, small details of life thirty-odd years ago (nicknames, teachers, shops long closed).

Geographically we’re in the Pennines but nestled just below the Dales, the border to West and North Yorkshire is just a few miles away. I stand at the bar and talk with Lancashire cousins about them moving to Yorkshire. There’s light hearted smugness that plants me very much in the white not red rose camp.

In a meeting of now and the midst of time there is the strangest of coincidences: meeting the cousins of Mark Diacono or in their words “the Pendle witches”, who lived next door to my own cousins in the 1970s. This was in itself a small world moment but the fact that their cousin (not Mark) was the groom and my own cousin was the bride, added an extra layer of “WTF” to the occurrence.

I’ve started to delve into family lore, to my grandparents and further back to people who were never in a colour photograph. I found the picture above of my great grandfather’s worsted mill near Haworth (“where’s 'ar millions” joked one cousin), started to research (well, Google) my great great grandfather who was an Alderman and later Mayor of Keighley amid the tension of the interwar years. I have his mayoral medal and portraits of him and my great great grandmother, who in the late nineteenth century came from Ireland for domestic service. Both in their regalia, I think about what they saw in their lifetimes.

I found a letter my grandmother wrote to an editor when she was 90 years old which gleaned a little bit of knowledge I didn’t have. Maybe I’ve tipped into that age where you want to know about the family lines and capture the stories before they’re gone. It’s a question I ask myself and one of the answers I come back with is that I spend my working life telling the stories of other people, asking questions of them and their families, but maybe it’s the time I start to write the story that made me, asking questions of my family, whether that’s for a wide audience or just one that I’m linked to by blood.