'A Yorkshire childhood?' - Alex Marchant
Last
weekend I was asked to join a fellow author in an event at a local library. I’m
a member of a group called Promoting Yorkshire Authors (PYA, https://www.promotingyorkshireauthors.com/),
which is exactly what its name suggests: an organization of authors working
together to promote their books. The ‘Yorkshire’ part covers both authors born
in the English county of Yorkshire and those who currently live there. The
event in question was to be two children’s authors talking about and reading
from their books. And the theme was ‘A Yorkshire Childhood’.
It
has to be said I was a little uncertain whether this was really an event for
me. I come under the latter category of membership of the PYA – I wasn’t born
in what the locals call ‘God’s Own County’, although I recently realized I have
now lived here something more than half my lifetime. (I was once told I could
qualify for my Yorkshire passport after about fifteen years, but I’m still
waiting…) But that ‘half a lifetime’ has been the latter half – not a moment of
my childhood was spent here, unless one counts the single day on which I
visited the city of York for a university interview at the age of seventeen. So
I felt a bit of a fraud. Am I in any way qualified to speak about ‘a Yorkshire
childhood’?
My
fellow author undoubtedly is. Maggie Cobbett, author of Workhouse Orphan
among other books, may be the daughter of a
Kentish-born father, but her mother was born, and she herself grew up, in what
was once known as the West Riding (and still is in true Yorkshire circles,
although now known officially as West Yorkshire). Workhouse Orphan draws upon that heritage in various ways, from
basing its central character on a distant family member from the early 1900s to
its setting in a fictionalized coal-mining (or ‘pit’) village in the West
Riding. In addition, much of the dialogue is in local dialect, which Maggie is
of course able to render brilliantly on the page.
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| Maggie Cobbett reading from Workhouse Orphan |
Interestingly,
though, the title character of the book, David, isn’t himself from Yorkshire at
all. He is as much an ‘off-cumden’ (an outsider, ‘not from round here’) as I am
myself. Until the age of twelve, he lived in London – could in fact have been
neighbour to my own forebears, all of whom at the turn of the twentieth century
lived in England’s capital city. And most of whom, like David’s father until
his early death, were dock labourers or similar – very much from the lower
classes, living in some of the worst slums in the world at that time.
But as in many of the best children’s books (and perhaps adult books too), the drama stems from someone being uprooted from all that is familiar to them and shipping up somewhere very different, alien even, and seeing that place (and the people who inhabit it) from the point of view of an outsider. And having to deal with life in that strange place and the events that unfold there. In David’s case, this means adapting to life two hundred miles away from his brothers and sister still in the London workhouse, toiling long hours in the dark depths of a coal mine and living among the family of strangers to whom he was sent by the workhouse authorities so they no longer had to pay for his keep.
In
some ways, David has in fact left his childhood behind – such as it was. There
is of course some debate over what constituted ‘childhood’ in the past – was it
really a concept at all before the Victorian period? And even then, for
youngsters such as David – forced into a life of hard labour and looking after
his younger siblings – in what way was it so very different from the toils of
adulthood?
My
own books provide a sharp contrast. Set four hundred years before Maggie’s, in
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| The Yorkshire Dales, through which The Order roam |
My
own childhood games in that parkland often involved forming gangs or secret
clubs with my friends – like the Famous Five or ‘Secret Seven’ of Enid Blyton, or
Malcom Saville’s ‘Lone Pine Club’ – or perhaps today, Harry Potter’s
‘Dumbledore’s Army’ – with secret dens, oaths of loyalty, codes, messages
written in invisible ink, and covert signals (once upon a time I could passably
hoot like an owl). And these childhood pleasures of course found their way into
The Order of the White Boar. Its very
title is that of the ‘gang’ (in this case, a secret order of chivalry) that the
child characters form.
When
I spoke about all this at Harrogate Library, I saw our audience nodding and
smiling with recognition. And as Maggie and I answered questions after our
individual talks, and discussed our books together, the more it became clear
that, despite the differences dictated by class, many aspects of childhood are
very similarly experienced across space and time. In our books, two boys of the
same age, although with very different backgrounds, are plucked from their
families and relocated in the depths of Yorkshire, and each feels the same
insecurities and vulnerability, each makes firm friends among welcoming people,
each faces bullies against whom he must stand firm or go under, and each takes
what simple pleasures he can, wherever he finds them – among those friends, in
those games. And my conclusion? That there are sufficient common experiences in
childhood – whether in Yorkshire, in Surrey or in the working-class slums of
London – in the nineteenth, twentieth or fifteenth century – for me to be able
to speak about at least one version of ‘a Yorkshire childhood’. But for all
that, I still don’t expect to receive my Yorkshire passport any time soon…
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| Maggie and Alex at Harrogate Library |
Alex's books can be found on Amazon at:
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