A date that will always stay with me

The latter date was when I inherited this column from the late and great Major J Fairfax-Blakeborough whom I had known since childhood.

He had written his column every week for about 60 years and today marks the beginning of my 39th year, so between us, we have chalked up almost a century of this rural miscellany.

I had known him since my very early childhood when we both attended the Catholic Church of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart at Lealholm in the Esk Valley, near Whitby. As a child of six or seven-years-old, I had difficulty following the Latin parts of the mass in my missal and he would reach from the pew behind to take my missal and point to the relevant place. I asked my mother who the “old” gentleman was, and she told me his name, adding that he wrote books and articles, his work appearing in many of our local papers. I then started to read his weekly rural column in the Whitby Gazette.

When I amazed myself by passing the 11-plus exam, or scholarship as we then called it, to gain entry to Whitby Grammar School in 1947 at age 11, he presented me with one of his books which he autographed and which I still keep on my library shelves. It is a volume of his Lizzie Leckonby tales.

Upon his death in 1976 aged 93 – and still writing his columns without the modern aid of a computer – I began to write “his” column for this newspaper and my first piece appeared on January 10, 1976, when I was almost 40-years-old. So far as I am aware, Major J F-B, as he was widely known, never knew that I had assumed his mantle in this way.

The second reason why I remember January 10 is because it is our wedding anniversary, but it was rather more than that. We were to be married at St Hedda’s impressive Catholic Church at Egton Bridge in the Esk Valley, known as the Cathedral of the Moors. It is my bride’s home village but I had to bring forward the date if there was to be any chance of being allocated a police house. I was then a police constable serving at Whitby and I knew of a police house that was shortly to become vacant, but I could not put my name down for it because I was not married. The solution was to get married earlier than anticipated even if it was the middle of winter.

The decision produced an occasion neither my wife nor I will ever forget, and neither will anyone else who participated, including our families, guests, priest and others such as the photographer and Whitby’s registrar of births, deaths and marriages.

The reason was a monumental fall of snow during the previous night and into that morning. As I had to travel from Glaisdale with other family and friends doing likewise but with many others travelling greater distances, travel by road was almost impossible.

Snow blocked the narrow lanes and rendered steep hills like Limber Hill at Glaisdale impassable. One of our guests walked four miles through knee-deep snow and others took a train to Grosmont and then walked two miles up the railway line which earlier trains had partially cleared.

The wedding was arranged for 11am which allowed little time for ploughs and diggers to open the roads. I had stayed overnight with my parents and, quite familiar with such weather, dad suggested we all caught the “down” train which got us into Egton Bridge before 9am. We could while away the time drinking coffee at a local convent which also provided snacks. And so we did. It seemed a long, long wait.

My bride also found herself waiting in vain for the bridal taxi – it was stuck somewhere on the moors – and the registrar had also become marooned in a snowdrift on Skelder, the fourmile climb out of Whitby. In those days, Catholic weddings had to have the registrar in attendance, unlike C of E services where the vicar acted as registrar. However, the photographer, John Tindale of Whitby, was accustomed to such conditions and he helped to dig the registrar’s car out of the drift, and eventually everyone arrived, if somewhat later than expected.

My wife’s home was only 100 yards from the church and so she waited there until the ceremony could proceed, and then walked to church in her bridal gown and fur boots. Before her arrival, a team of male guests set to work digging snow from the area in front of the church door, all acting under orders from one of my wife’s relations.

One of the diggers was the Whitby registrar. I must confess that the sight amused me greatly. He was a retired police inspector who was in charge at Loftus police station when I had worked there five years earlier as a 16-year-old police cadet.

One winter’s day, he ordered me to clear the snow from all around Loftus police station, including the yard and roads outside, as well as footpaths.

I set to work with a brush and shovel and eventually completed what I thought was a very good job of work.

But he was far from pleased and burst into the office, his face red with fury as he berated me for not doing a proper job. When eventually he calmed down, I asked him what I had done wrong and he said I hadn’t cleared the path to his house. I tried to say it was on private property, and therefore not my concern, but he refused to listen and ordered me to clear his path – which I did.

To see him clearing the area in front of the church for my wedding ceremony was therefore soothing – I never referred to clearing his footpath five years earlier.

However, I do remember thinking that God works in mysterious ways.

Readers might now agree with me that the date of January 10 has some longtime memories for my wife and I, and as for my wedding anniversary, today we celebrate 55 years of complete happiness with four children and eight grandchildren, all of whom are a credit to us.

To end these personal reminiscences, I should perhaps take a proverbial leaf out of J F-B’s notebook with a reminder that a heavy depth of snow in the countryside is not always bad news.

Falling snow can bring much-needed nutrients to cultivated ground and can also protect it from the severest of chills.

There are some old sayings such as “snow that lies fattens the ground”, “a snow year is a rich year”, “three feet of snow will make the hay and corn grow more” and perhaps the best known of all for rural purposes, “a fall of snow is the poor farmer’s muck”.

Perhaps the wisest advice is, “When snow and frost are both together, sit by the fire and spare your shoe leather.”