Life, Larks, and Liberty
The guitar tutor was called Tony Sheldon. He was to start lessons with us on Wednesday next, our parents told us. We had wild imaginings about what such a person should look like. We were apprehensive about him, and convinced ourselves he would arrive all in black leather and shades, with his guitar strapped to the back of a large noisy motorbike. He would have a beard and be rough and scary. We called it Black Wednesday, because we were very militant, and dreaded his appearance.
So at 11am on the following Wednesday, when a small white mini-van crept meekly into the yard, we were very surprised. Tony was wearing grey trousers, a grey and yellow jumper and had a quiff of floppy brown hair with a streak of red in it. He pulled his guitar case from the boot and came to the door in a perfectly orderly manner, not at all the wild character we had been dreaming up. But he did have shades!
Tony told us long afterwards that he had imagined a huge mansion with high brick walls and iron gates. And lots of Alsatians racing out to greet him. He doesn't much like dogs... So we didn't feel as foolish in our fancies after hearing that.
We loved the guitar. Tony played us some pieces to show us how we might sound if we could attain his level. He had actually just taken and passed his Grade 3 Trinity College of Music Exam, and was still very much in the process of learning himself. But he was an excellent teacher, and knew some amazing Carruli.
Daddy must have been very patient with us too, as we know he doesn't like Amazing Grace and Kum Bah Ya (who can blame him?) ... which we were always regaling everyone with in the early stages of our musical career. But we soon progressed to classical pieces; much kinder to the ears. And Tony was quite a lenient teacher, looking back, as we were not at all assiduous with our practise at times, and often lost our Fred Noad Guitar Tutor in the most unlikely places, sometimes having to spend half an hour hunting for it even after he had arrived to give us our lessons! He never got mad with us, although he was sometimes disappointed, which made us feel much guiltier than we would have been if he had shouted. We picked up all the basic chords quickly though, and straight away wanted to have a go at writing our own music. Tony gave us loads of encouragement, and Metia and I spent hours sitting in our bedroom poring over chords and composing songs. We had other sources of music too. Metia, Felix and I each owned a tape recorder, jealous possessions at the side of the bed, and jointly a turntable on the coffee table. Mummy had hundreds of LP's that she had bought from a mate when she was at college. So we listened to the Beatles, and loved their catchy tunes and soulful melodies, and told ourselves we could do it too. Metia liked Ringo Starr, and I liked Paul, but I told everyone it was George, to keep them off the scent. Felix just went along with Mummy and liked John.
We spent most of the daytime roaming in the seemingly endless network of ravines down the hill, in the summertime. There we could explore and be totally hidden and apart from the busy outside world. We climbed the steep cliffs of shale under the trees, and took great pride in our agility and ability to run along the narrowest ledges. We dammed the rich brown stream and built fern shelters and campfires in the glades. Here time had no meaning for us, days ran into weeks, and weeks into months. We erected a tightrope from one side of the valley to the other, two parallel washing lines suspended in the trees, a highly dangerous contraption, but nevertheless extremely entertaining; it gave us hours of fun, and was described as "a right rare thing" by the local farmer tenanting the land, who discovered us using it one evening. We crossed the stream on fallen trees, high above the swollen current, and picked wild raspberries and blackberries from the cliffs, dug up despicable old farm dumps dating from the 1800's, pulled the heads off foxgloves and made them into fairy hats and did all kinds of lovely things. The dreaded day Monday had never any significance to us. On Sunday night we could be cutting alder saplings for our bows, and on Monday morning at nine o'clock, when all the other kids were trudging in at the school gates, we might be sitting under a cool green canopy of rowan leaves, trimming the bark from our long arrows and binding them to shale flints and crows' feathers. Here we could spend the day from dawn to dusk stalking the imaginary enemy. Sometimes we came across soldiers training on the land and observed them unseen from the cover, delighting in our knowledge of the lie of the land and our own ability to stay undiscovered by the Army. We watched them trying to cross the ravine over a telegraph pole and falling into the muddy water, shared their pack lunches, helped them out when they were orienteering and had lost their way, and got given all sorts of goodies like hexamine stoves, boiled sweets, and biscuits brown.
And when we weren't out there in the fields, there was plenty to do inside.
Our bedroom, which Metia, Felix and I shared with Fergus, who was in the cot now, was directly over the kitchen. The kitchen was, of course, the heart of the house. The table, flanked by the mahogany settle and chairs mainly occupied it. There was a coal fire and electric cooker, with a white shelf by the back door for bread making. A beige telephone hung next to the back door, with a little picture of Felix's face, drawn by Mummy, on the dial. The sink in front of the kitchen window was crudely plumbed in, all the copper pipes running up the wall and through the ceiling. By the door into the study stood the fridge, which was always covered in paper and pens. The walls were roughly plastered, and the plaster on the ceiling was all coming down from the laths; we didn't help this as we were always jumping on our bedroom floor.
There were only two bedrooms in the house at this time that were habitable, out of a possible 6. There were loads of holes in the floor, very handy for shouting requests for cups of tea and food down to Mummy, and we had a kind of blue and white electric walkie-talkie with wires, which we passed through the largest gap, known officially as The Hole. This was a marvelous communication tool. We could cry for help, order food and get told off via it too, when we were playing Night Silent, a game that we loved and which was anything but silent. (Night Silent involved switching the bedroom light off and tracking one another down across and under the beds and table.) The three beds and the cot took up nearly all the available floor space, save where a long coffee table stood under the window, and we each had black deed box at the side of our bed, to put cups of tea and books on. We also banged our heads and shins on them loads in the dark!
Our tape recorders provided endless hours of fun. We sometimes listened to the Archers and other BBC productions on our parents' radio in the kitchen, and I hit on the idea of writing plays for us too. Why shouldn't we do plays about farmers if the BBC could? Soon we were gathered round the coffee table with a script and jostling for a turn to read into my tape recorder. Metia was the farmer (she had a wonderful repertoire of growly voices) Felix was his son, and I did all the narrating and the less important parts. I was always laughing too much to act seriously anyway. My job was really to write the scripts, and scout for new material. Acting was tremendous fun, and I started to look round for other more colourful characters to fabricate tales about. And there was no shortage of these in the area!
We drove Rovers in those days. Our mechanic, Tony Peate, from Brandside, near the notorious Flash Village, on the way to Buxton, had been a worker at Rover in Solihull in his youth. He told us he'd broken his back in 20 places when a car had fallen on him off the assembly line, and been told he'd never walk again. He was a tiny, broad man with a huge hands, an infectious laugh and a wild beard, always exaggerating, and standing on anything elevated, like a large stone outside, to make his point when talking.
"Aye, kids!" he'd say. "The things I do for you!" He had a funny accent, somewhere between American and Yorkshire. He watched too many Westerns and idolized Clint Eastwood, we thought, judging by the way he swept back his hair. Or was it John Wayne? We weren't sure, as we didn't have a telly. Some famous cowboy anyway.
Tony had a new woman called Lindsey, with the very same kind of voice and persona as him. She was tough talking, cynical, blonde and even shorter than he was. He had met her at the Cat and Fiddle when she was working as a barmaid there, our parents told us. Together they lived in a house in the middle of the trees in the valley below Axe Edge, a house with lions on the corners of the roof, all painted in dark brown, and with a pack of mad dogs to look after it when they were at work. Tony was an amazing character. Once we drew up on the road outside his garage and he came out laughing, and covered in blood; he had just pushed a screwdriver right through the back of his hand! We were not amused... Daddy told him to get to the hospital instantly, but he wouldn't. But Tony provided the material for many recorded episodes of "Tales from Moor Cottage", and our parents used to roll about in bed laughing when we played back to them the fruits of an evenings' work elaborating on and exploiting his characteristic comments, his brazen attitude to life, and his amazing adventures on tape. He had a quiet friend called Chris, who wore a woolly hat, didn't like fruitcake, and made a convenient sidekick, and Lindsey was always there to keep his feet on the ground with her dry, cynical brand of humour.
Tony didn't have any children of his own, and he sometimes took the three of us out to car-boot sales on a Sunday morning with Lindsey. They would give us each five pounds to spend occasionally too. And of course we always bought tape recorders. You could get a smart one for five pounds in those days!
When I was twelve, I used to read a lot. So much, in fact, that Mummy and Daddy often had to stop me from reading with an Army torch I had found on the moor long after lights-out. And if you read a lot, sooner or later, you discover the Bible. We had a children's' bible that our Granny must have bought us for Christmas one time. It was full of impressive colour pictures. I loved any tales of treason and chivalry, and La Morte D' Arthur had always been my favourite book from a very early age, so as can be imagined, I had soon read the Bible from cover to cover. And then Metia and I decided we wanted to go to church.
I cannot remember the first time we went to church for a service. As I have said before, we had visited many churches when we were very little and Daddy was writing his books. But this was different. We wanted to go to the local church and see a service for ourselves, to find out what it was all about. And so, with earnest hearts and open minds, we started to attend our local church, in the small village of Longnor, just five miles away over the hills towards Derbyshire. Looking back, and considering all the bewilderment and grief we have experienced overall from the decision, we really should never have bothered.
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