Hull, Hell And Incidents, Deliver Us By Patrick Henry

My arrival in Scarborough at the age of zero happened only months after my folks moved here from the Hull area, so that their voices and views impressed me stronger than those in my birthplace. Mother said Hullers look down or up to nobody, but Scarborians look always over their shoulder jealous of anyone having more than deserved, or more than grabbed by themselves.

Father said that most Scarborians were too grudging and blinkered to appreciate the great place they lived in. On a Royal Navy mine-sweeping trawler in 1915, he first set eyes on, and ever since valued, it as the finest historic coastal Town anywhere from the tropics to the Arctic. He served in the infantry trenches and in the Royal Navy in the First War, in the dragoons in India in the '20s, in the RAF in Africa in the Second War, then in the Air Ministry CID throughout post-war England, but always came back to Yorkshire, where I saw him briefly. He worked at Hatfield Main Colliery, Doncaster at the time of The General Strike, and on coastal constructions at Hornsea and Scarborough in the 1930's.

Mother grew up alongside Hornsea Mere, but Grandma came from Hull, her father a horse-cab driver at King William's statue in the 19th Century. Her brother made it a motor-taxi firm and moved to Darlington. Grandma lost two husbands rapidly: one a dockside tally-clerk to heart-attack, the second being Sergeant-Major of the East Yorkshire Regiment killed on The Somme. Now she had four infants and a widow's mite income, so became the cook for a rural gentleman at Riston Grange, having no skill in this but bluffing her way to get a home for them all.

She shone best at telling stories and also at reading fortunes in tea-leaves, or playing-cards. Highly superstitious, she always threw spilt salt back over her shoulder; thought that a dropped knife meant that a stranger was coming, and believed a cat's back turned to the fire predicted bad weather. So she shooed it away. She retained a close regard for horses, placing the odd bet, and for the great Hull Fair, so along with the clairvoyance I had the fancy that a touch of Romany lay in the family. Once at Hornsea, a relative, Aunt Amy went missing, broken romance being on the cards.

Grandma fetched from Hull Fair a real clairvoyant, no dabbler. The wise lady demanded an intimate item of the lost aunt. A kid glove on her hand, she went into a trance and then a shaking fit saying she felt to be in some place as cold and damp as death. Where two waters meet they must search. Then the mystic lady had to be put in a warm bed for her feverish empathy. At a weir called Barmston Drain, sure enough, the body of Aunt Amy was found.

When Hull Fair re-opened post-war, it stood in a devastated area the Luftwaffe had flattened. By comparison Scarborough had slight bombing, but during a few strikes we kids were bundled from beds into Anderson air-raid shelters. Then Grandma heard from folk in Hull that the concrete roof of one such structure caved in to kill all occupants. So after that we were hidden in the gas-meter cupboard under the stairs until the all-clear signal came and Hitler gave up.

Then Mother and Grandma ran a boarding-house near the sea-front, the visitors like Wakes Week sorts, returning at the same period every year from the mills at Bradford, Oldham and so-on. For those surviving world-war, a chilly Yorkshire seaside holiday seemed paradise. The barbed-wire had just been cleared from the beach. Food, sweets and clothes were still rationed for years. No television (thank heavens), meant queuing three hours for the cinema. I saw Angels One-Five and Morning Departure several times, and Casablanca. The boarding-house was still going full-swing at the time of the Suez Canal Crisis and the Eoka Emergency in Cyprus, when I was called-up by the RAF and drafted to the Middle-East, and left our old Yorkshire coast behind. .

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