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  Alan Titchmarsh is known to millions through the popular BBC TV programmes British Isles: A Natural History, Ground Force and Gardener’s World. He has written more than forty gardening books, as well as six best-selling novels and his first volume of memoirs Trowel and Error. He was awarded an MBE in the millennium New Year Honours list and holds the Victoria Medal of Honour, the Royal Horticultural Society’s highest award. He lives with his wife and family and a menagerie of animals in Hampshire where he gardens organically.

  Also by Alan Titchmarsh

  FICTION

  Mr MacGregor

  The Last Lighthouse Keeper

  Animal Instincts

  Only Dad

  Rosie

  Love and Dr Devon

  NON-FICTION INCLUDES

  Alan Titchmarsh’s Favourite Gardens

  Gardener’s World Complete Book of Gardening

  How to be a Gardener Book One: Back to Basics

  How to be a Gardener Book Two: Secrets of Success

  The Gardener’s Year

  British Isles: A Natural History

  Trowel and Error

  A Yorkshire Childhood

  Copyright © 2006 by Alan Titchmarsh

  First published in Great Britain in 2006 by Hodder & Stoughton

  A division of Hodder Headline

  The right of Alan Titchmarsh to be identified as the Author

  of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with

  the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  A Hodder & Stoughton paperback

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  Epub ISBN: 978-1-84456-879-6

  Book ISBN: 978-0-340-83118-2

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  A division of Hodder Headline

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  The story, ‘Dispatch from the Beyond’ in Chapter 18 is quoted from the book, Unglaubliche Geschictem (Fantastic Stories) by Pierre Bellemare, translated by France Brifaut. Copyright © 1989 by nymphenburger in der F. A. Herbig Verlagsbuchhandlung GmbH, Munich.

  For Polly and Camilla, with love as always.

  Contents

  Foreword

  Early On

  The Outsider

  The Allotments

  Grandma Titch and Auntie Alice

  Me Mam

  Doctors and Nurses

  Grandma and Grandad Hardisty

  Me Dad

  Skewell

  Dahn Leeds Road

  Down by the River

  The Lone Ranger and Cindy

  Company

  To Catch a Train

  Domestic Offices

  Out the Back

  Arts and Crafts

  The Dawning of Reality

  The Voice

  The Posh End

  Back to Nature

  Hopes and Dreams

  The Piano

  Street Theatre

  Playing With Fire

  ’Osses

  Wheels

  The Trades Fair

  Moving On Up

  The Lame Duck

  Greener Grass

  Foreword

  A friend asked me if I was using people’s real names. There was a note of warning in his voice. ‘What if they get upset?’

  It did concern me. I contemplated replacing each one with a pseudonym just to be on the safe side, but where would it all end? The temptation would then be to change facts to suit. And to embroider a bit. Could I actually make it more of a novel? It was an attractive proposition. I could spice it up a bit then. But having written one volume of memoirs – Trowel and Error – in which people appeared under their real names, it seemed somehow dishonest to suddenly go all coy and call them something else.

  I don’t think there is anything libellous here, though a few school friends might not always see things quite the way I did. I hope they’ll forgive me. My memories of them may well have been coloured by the passing of time in pretty much the same way as their memories of me. Only where the use of a real name would have caused genuine embarrassment and discomfort have I changed it, and even then, very rarely.

  My English teacher, Miss Weatherall, who turned eighty this year and about whom I was not especially kind in Trowel and Error, wrote to thank me for the birthday card I sent her, and at the same time admonished me for what she perceived as inaccuracies in my reporting of events. She said that the only reason she didn’t sue me was that I could afford to lose and she couldn’t. While not entirely agreeing with her sentiments, I appreciate her generosity of spirit and hope that other people I encountered in my childhood will be similarly forbearing. As Dame Edith Sitwell remarked, ‘There is no truth, only points of view.’

  This book is not strictly chronological, and neither is it a detailed memoir like Trowel and Error. It is more a series of tales from childhood. The occurrences described all took place, though in the interests of a smooth narrative I have occasionally compressed a series of events or arranged them in a different order. It is a relatively gentle read of a relatively gentle Yorkshire childhood in the 1950s. It is not overly peppered with ‘Si thee’s and ‘Wee’r’s ta goin’?’s by way of giving it local colour. My parents were both Yorkshire born and bred, but they resented any implication that it somehow meant that they had to speak only in the local dialect. My dad did indeed say ‘Y’alreet?’ when enquiring after a friend’s health and ‘Na then’ when passing someone in the street, but he would not have said either on meeting the Queen or to a lady ‘up the Grove’ whose lavatory he was repairing. Both my sister and I have Yorkshire accents (my vowels now rather more rounded than hers after thirty-odd years ‘down South’), but we were not allowed to use bad grammar. Much as it might make for a more interesting read, I can’t claim that we suffered extreme poverty or, at the other end of the scale, great privileges. I was not born into a persecuted minority, nor was I neglected or abused – apart from the odd clip round the ear.

  Mum and Dad were ordinary working class when it came to their position on the social scale, but extraordinary when it came to their effect on my sister and me. I don’t think any children could have been, in turn, more devoted to, influenced by, exasperated by, loved and better served by a plumber and his wife who quietly got on with their lives and gave their children a chance to get on with theirs in whatever way they chose – provided they knew where we were, what we were doing and who we were doing it with.

  There were rules; there were standards, but there was no hint of snobbery or social climbing – apart from my mother’s inherent dislike of ITV (common) and the belief that certain things were ‘not nice’ – and my sister and I were brought up to believe in such hackneyed principles as ‘Do as you would be done by’ and ‘If you can’t say anything nice about somebody, then don’t say anything at all’. This last maxim wasn’t always adhered to by my mum, but then another of her favourites was ‘It’s do as I say, not do as I do’.

  She was a woman of unaccountable prejudices. She adored the doctor, tripe and vinegar, and a drop of Bell’s Scotch whisky. She disliked Geordies, flirty women (being one herself), chewing gum and cream soda. But in spite of her little foibles, she was a good mother and, by today’s standards, relatively strict.

  She didn’t, I hope, turn us into little goody-goodies. But along with my dad – the quieter of the two in that classic way of many Yorkshire
couples – she did, somehow, give us a fairly optimistic outlook on life, and imbued us with a sense of responsibility for those around us. Not in a relentlessly holier-than-thou way, but in that ‘Get on with it and stop making a fuss’ way that prevailed in the 1950s.

  We were never encouraged to think that we were better than anybody else. If anything, we were taught that we were just the same. The most important thing in life seemed to be to blend in and get on with everybody, and I suppose that’s what I’ve spent the rest of my life doing. Blending in.

  I don’t think these are sentiments that were confined to our household, though I do, from time to time, encounter people who look at me as though I’m from another planet.

  Judge for yourself.

  In terms of bodily constitution I don’t suppose it makes a ha’p’orth of difference where you are born, but I’m glad that I took my first breath of air on the moors. It was in a stone-built maternity home called St Winifred’s. I’d like to think she was the patron saint of children – or gardeners – but she wasn’t. They get St Nicholas and St Fiacre respectively. The Oxford Dictionary of Saints only offers St Winefride, a Welsh virgin, and there weren’t many of those in Ilkley. The building stands by the paddling pool on the very edge of the moor at the top of Wells Road. It’s a block of flats now, but before it was even a maternity home, it was a private house, and Charles Darwin was staying there when he heard from his publisher that The Origin of Species was a commercial success. Or so I heard. It’s the kind of fact that I’d like to believe.

  I was born at nine o’clock in the evening on 2 May 1949 to Alan (plumber of this parish) and Bessie Titchmarsh (née Hardisty) in a heatwave, and my mum had a bit of a struggle. ‘I almost burst a blood vessel,’ she would say confidentially when pressed for details. They clearly decided that one child was enough, until time had healed the wound. That would account for the fact that my sister, Kath, arrived almost five years later, so for the toddling years I was on my own.

  Early On

  ‘Now look what you’ve done. You’ve made him cry.’

  I wish that the first words I remember hearing had been more positive. Less suggestive of an oversensitive nature. They were spoken by my maternal grandmother, Kitty Hardisty, and directed at my mum. We were in Grandma’s sitting room at 46 Ash Grove. The one that was never used. The one with the glass domes of stuffed birds and the crystal lustre candlesticks on the mantelpiece. I can’t have been very old. One and a half, maybe two. And it can’t have been that difficult to have made me cry.

  My mum wasn’t naturally cruel. Strict, yes, but not cruel, and I can only guess that it was the sound of raised voices that moved me to tears. Some trivial family disagreement. Whether to have chops or fish for tea. Nothing more. But then I’ve never been good with raised voices, especially from those close to me.

  And that’s about the extent of my mistreatment as a child. A few raised voices. Those and a couple of swipes on the bum with a whalebone hairbrush, after which Dad would have to go out into the garden for a cigarette, racked with guilt.

  It took him days to get over it, my mother told me later. It probably took me rather less.

  I read of other writers’ early lives with just a tinge of envy – all those drunken fathers and irresponsible mothers; of children deserted or repressed. I don’t for one fleeting moment wish I’d shared their lot, neither am I unsympathetic to their plight, but it does impart a certain cathartic quality to their writing that I suppose mine lacks.

  I am not naturally pessimistic. Whenever I’m asked, by some newspaper interviewer, what is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, my mind goes blank. I can never think of anything that might be acceptable, except for the loss of my parents, and that seems far too heavy for their needs. Most of the ‘little local difficulties’ along the way I’ve expunged from my memory. It seems more rewarding to save space for happier recollections.

  I’m also deeply influenced by the traditional northern ethic that ‘There’s always somebody worse off than yourself’; I’ve been happy to espouse this in the sure and certain belief that if I do think I’m having a rough time and complain about it, then the hand of fate will be happy to prove to me that if I think this is bad, just wait until I see what’s round the corner.

  Maybe I’m too secretive to admit to being unhappy. Or too thick-skinned to have been deeply affected by misfortune. The latter I know to be untrue, the former I’m nervous of admitting, but I know that I do have a tendency to make the best of a bad job, to avoid complaining (except to my most intimate friends) and to put a brave face on it.

  Does this make me dishonest? Or shallow? Is it better to dissect bitter feelings and lay them bare for the benefit of others than to soldier on and forget they ever happened? Not in my case.

  But there I can blame my mother again. At the end of her life, her mobility curbed by arthritis, her once-beautiful hands swollen and deformed and most of her body gripped by pain, she would answer the question ‘How are you?’ with a single word: ‘Fine.’

  And I suppose most of us are ‘fine’. A bit battered by this and that. A bit bruised. A bit odd. But basically fine. And growing up in a pleasant town in the Yorkshire Dales in the 1950s was, for a child who liked to be out of doors, the best of all possible worlds.

  Not that it was without incident, or occasional tragedy. But that’s growing up. And growing up, even in the best of all possible worlds, is a confusing thing to have to do.

  I was given my father’s name at my christening – Alan – as well as my paternal grandfather’s – Fred – but to avoid confusion at home, where there were now two Alans, I was known as ‘Sparrow’ by my mum and ‘Algy’ by my dad. Later on, when I was of an age to read The Eagle, Dad would call me ‘Digby’ or ‘Dig’ – after Dan Dare’s sidekick. My sister calls me ‘Ala’. Always has.

  Things could have been very different. My mother favoured the name Rodney until put off by the doctor: ‘For God’s sake, don’t call him that.’ She adjusted it to Robin, but when I was born she was clearly overtaken by a wave of sentiment and called me after my dad.

  My mum had no sympathy when I complained that the name Alan led to me being confused with my father, and that Fred was a rotten middle name that everyone poked fun at. She hated her own name, Bessie, saying that it was only ever given to cows and fire engines. Her family called her ‘Bet’. Dad called her ‘Beff’. Always.

  The Outsider

  I seemed always to be out of doors, and if not actually under the sky, then certainly within spitting distance of it. Mum always had the back door open, come rain or shine. Nowadays it would be called claustrophobia, but throughout her life she would have none of that and put it down to the fact that ‘I can’t do with being fast’, meaning that she couldn’t bear to feel that she was enclosed. Which is called claustrophobia.

  There wasn’t a lot of sky where we lived, not compared with East Anglia. Apart from the terraced houses, which got in the way, if you looked to the south, you would see the moors rising upwards – green in spring, purple in summer and brown in winter – and to the north Middleton Woods. The River Wharfe ran between them in the bottom of the valley.

  In all but the worst of weathers, my massive pram would be parked outside the back door; the door that in summer was hung with a deckchair-striped curtain on specially fitted hooks to prevent the sun from causing the woodgrain-effect paint to blister. Dulux was in its infancy. The three back steps were built of stone, freshly edged with a line of creamy-white chalk once a week. It was done for show, but there was a practical side to it as well. There was no street lighting down the back, and with white edges to the steps there was less chance of you tripping up over them and measuring your length; especially if you came home late having had a couple, though the chances are that then you would have used the front door, where the steps were chalked in the same way. For a few years, anyway. Then it wore off – the habit, not the chalk. Some folk painted their steps all over in red lead. Dad quite l
iked the idea, and even brought a large tin of the stuff home from work. But Mum thought that for outside that was a bit too ostentatious (one of her favourite words) and got him to paint the kitchen floor with it instead. For the next two years we shimmied around on the glossy red flagstones like dancers at the Tower Ballroom in Blackpool.

  You could come in and out of the front door if you were wearing smart clothes, otherwise you used the one round the back that led into the kitchen. If my dad came home for his lunch in his overalls, he could eat it at the Fablon-covered breakfast bar that he’d made in the kitchen, and then he was allowed to flop in his armchair in the front room for his cup of tea, but only if a newspaper was laid over the chair first. And he had to take his cap off and drink out of the cup, not the saucer, however hot the tea might be. My mum did have standards, and although her dad drank his tea out of the saucer, it was not something that was encouraged in her own house.

  In those early days Mum was a creature of habit. Monday was washday, Tuesday was ironing, Wednesday and Thursday were cleaning, Friday was baking, Saturday was shopping and Sunday we went out for a walk.

  The code by which we lived was, by today’s standards, rigorous and enforced. It wasn’t of the joyless ascetic variety, but there were just ways of doing things. Proper ways. Respectable ways. If someone in the street died, everyone would draw their curtains. Those who didn’t were regarded as being, at best, thoughtless and, at worst, downright rude.

  Mum’s favourite word for inconsiderateness in other women was ‘sackless’, and women of whom she disapproved were known as ‘that dame’.

  On Nelson Road, our very ordinary little street of stone terraced houses, the niceties of life were observed almost as fastidiously as they must have been in Jane Austen’s England. When a funeral cortège went by, you didn’t carry on walking, but stood still until it had passed. Gentlemen raised their hats, and boys their school caps. If I forgot, I would feel a dig in the ribs. ‘Algy – cap!’