I remembered a man today, a tutor from long-ago college.
Feeling that us soft and ignorant southerners needed to know about The North he organised a weekend trip to Nottinghamshire, to stay with pit families in terraced houses, toilet down the bottom of the garden, in the snow.
He organised us visits to the Co-op bakery, to a factory making metal cans and to a coalmine – Blidworth – where we descended in the cage, took a train to the coal face and watched the whirring of the gouging teeth, astounded by the noise and the airy cavern at the bottom of the lift-shaft.
In the afternoon he drove us through D.H. Lawrence country, speaking of the man and of the places of his books, the countryside hard edged, unforgiving and beautiful, and then to Hardwick Hall, where he spoke of Bess and of her self-promoting skills to build and to survive.
He was Celtic, dark and passionate, wore a red tie, tweed jacket, taught us Economics, but I cannot recall his name.
The radio in the minibus played the just-released 'The last time’ by the Stones non-stop.
Sorry - but I have to laugh at the idea that Nottinghamshire is 'north'. I'm in Nottingham at the moment (and yes - I know it used to be a mining county and the bits where D H Lawrence lived were fairly grim - still are actually) but it isn't the north. Even Sheffield is pushing it a bit by my definition. :)
ReplyDeleteWe were taken down a mine (Markham Main near Doncaster) and a steel works, as part of our journalism training. I wasn't popular when I said that if those were my only two choices I'd have gone down the pit........
I know exactly what you mean by Nottinghamshire not being north - from Teesside it's very south - and there's nothing like standing on Scapa Bay in Orkney and looking at the hills of Scotland to the south to know just how relative it all is. On this occasion we were starting from Hertford, so you can see he had a point!
ReplyDelete