CHAPTER 15. MARY HUNTER

[Stanley]

MARY HUNTER

Those of you who have been following the plot will remember that in mid-1984 when I learned my contract was to end in September I got in touch with Mary Hunter and asked her to get me the materials from the YTV series ‘Be Your Own Boss’, Mary being Community Education Officer for YTV at this time. By now Mary was living on her own at Addingham where she and her husband had moved from Salterforth shortly after she got the Yorkshire job. It was handy for both of them, he was teaching at Aireville School in Skipton and she had to travel to Leeds each day. They took out a large mortgage on the basis of their joint salaries and moved in at 41 Bark Lane. Shortly after this he left her to live with another woman under quite unforgivable circumstances. This episode is no part of my memoir but in view of later events my readers need to know the circumstances by which Mary came to be rattling round in a large house with an enormous mortgage payment. Being Mary she decided that she wasn’t going to move again but would show her ex-husband, her family and the rest of the world that she was perfectly capable of shouldering the burden and surviving. To her credit, she did but it was hard for her.

I took the ‘Be Your Own Boss’ exercise very seriously and became a regular visitor to Bark Lane as Mary helped me to complete what was a very well constructed series of exercises which led you to some definite conclusions about what you would be best suited to do. This took a few weeks because I had my work at the Centre and of course Mary was busy at YTV. I kept David Moore up to speed with what I was doing, he offered help but I said I didn’t think I needed it, I needed to strike out on my own with my new tools and make my own way. David had enough sense to realise that this wasn’t a rejection of all he had helped me to do, rather proof that the exercise had been successful.

In early November 1984 Mary left UK to visit with her family in Australia. She almost didn’t make it! She had arranged with me that I would take her to Heathrow, have the use of her car while she was away and pick her up when she came back. The day before she was due to leave I rang her from King Street and suggested she come over and stay the night with me so that we could get an early start the following morning. I could smell snow and had spent enough time working outside to know my instincts weren’t far wrong. We had decided that we needed to leave Barlick at 0600 so as to give us plenty of time to get to the airport. She said she’d rather come in the morning because she still had a lot to do before she could leave. Time management was never one of Mary’s strong points!

I got up early the following morning and looked out of the bedroom window on to nine inches of fresh snow! I rang Mary but got no reply, it was obvious she was on her way somewhere but God alone knew where she was or how she was doing. There is a hill between Addingham and Skipton called Chelker and it could be bad in snow. I was afraid that she was stuck there but there was nothing I could do. At this length of time I can’t remember when she eventually arrived but what I can remember is that it was late and I thought it was mission impossible. It had snowed again as I waited for her and reports on the radio indicated that it was the same down south as well. As soon as she arrived we set off and I lied like a trooper and told her that there was plenty of time. Mary settled down to knit and I settled down to drive.

The reason why this journey has assumed enough importance to be recounted after all these years is because it was so bad. If I had learned anything at all about driving in the preceding thirty years, that was the morning when I needed it. I went like hell down the road driving on hard snow in the fast lane almost all the way until we passed Birmingham. Mary knitted and purled in the passenger seat and I pushed my way past everything in sight. I remember that when we got to the roundabout at what was then the end of the M1 I turned to Mary and said, “Now you can have the truth, I think we can just about make it!” We did, Mary caught the flight and I had a snooze before driving much more slowly back home over clear roads.

There was one funny sequel to this which occurred the following morning. A friend of Mary’s, Thelma Pollitt rang up and asked when she could come for the car. Slightly mystified I asked what she was talking about and it transpired that Mary had told them they could have her car while she was away if they picked her up at the airport on her return! I said they could have it any time they liked but was quietly a bit pissed off by this development. They came round, I gave them the key and when they got in and tried to use the clutch, the cable broke! They had the job of repairing it. I reflected on the fact that I had driven all the way to Heathrow and back the preceding day with a clutch cable that must have been holding on by a couple of strands of wire and decided that there might be a God after all! I got a letter later from Mary and it was clear that she knew she had blown it that morning and also realised that it was my driving skills that had got her to the plane on time. This was significant but I didn’t realise it at the time.

Another strand had been running through my life at this time. Mother wasn’t well. I had been worried about her for a while. She had got to the stage where she was sleeping downstairs and using the commode, she couldn’t get up the stairs. I was emptying her bucket twice a day and doing the best I could to look after her. Susan and Janet were living away from Barlick at the time but Margaret called in whenever she could. It was Margaret who found out one day that the reason why mother couldn’t walk was the fact that her toe nails had grow so long they had curved round and were sticking in her feet. Mother hadn’t been able to cut them and hadn’t said anything. She never would let me help her with anything personal so the kids did it. We got the doctor and the chiropodist straight away but later we realised that the damage had been done. The long period of inactivity had increased her weight and she had started retaining water. She gradually deteriorated and in the end had to go to hospital. On April 1st 1985 she died after a short illness in Airedale Hospital. To this day I can’t understand how I could have missed something so fundamental as her feet. All right, so had everyone else including the professionals but I have never forgotten this and always remind people with aged relatives in their care to look after their feet.

I’m not going to go into a long description of how I feel about her dying, anybody with any experience can work that out. What I will say is that I’m glad I was in the right place at the right time and had the resources to buy the house in King Street. She was happy living there and any understandable friction there had been after the break-up with Vera had long since faded away. We got on very well indeed while she was living opposite me. There’s little doubt she took a great deal of pleasure in my achievements at Lancaster and afterwards, even now, I am surprised by people who tell me they know about me because mother talked about me. Being easily accessible in the middle of town meant that she had a constant stream of visitors and as long as she was mobile, had a lot of friends at the pensioners club in Frank Street. As with father, I wasn’t there when she died, I’d gone home and left Leslie and Dorothy on duty at Airedale but this was no problem, she was in a coma and I’d done my communication and grieving before the event. Mother never gave a lot of affection, I can only remember her kissing me once and that was at King Street. We just didn’t function that way. I was very easy in my mind about the whole thing and had an easy passage through the funeral and the breaking up of her house. Funny thing is that writing these memoirs has an effect, I dreamt about her the other night for the first time since she died. A sign of progress?

Mary Hunter and I were drawing closer together. Apart from the work on the LTP which was winding down by now we were spending time together because of her help with the job applications and my helping her with small jobs she needed doing but couldn’t afford to pay for. I was beginning to learn that one of the characteristics Mary looked for in her men was ability, the best way to her heart was to be capable of removing practical problems. This was why my drive down to Heathrow was so important to her. It was after doing a job for her in summer of 1984 that we were sat down having a cup of coffee and she was talking about how frustrated she was about certain elements of her life. She started to talk about John, her former husband. At one time he had got the camping bug in his head, had gone out and bought all the gear but had never got on with it. Mary said that she knew it was a silly thing but there was a ghost there that wanted burying and she felt she wanted to go camping just to show that she didn’t need John to do it. I asked her why she didn’t just make time and go off for a couple of nights under canvas. She said she should but that it was all too much trouble. I told her to tell me the first weekend she was free, I made her get her diary and set the date there and then. I said I would arrange it all and went away leaving her protesting.

I can’t remember where I got the tent or the sleeping bags but I found them. I rather think they were Susan and Janet’s. By this time Susan was working as a nanny in London and Janet had started a degree course in engineering at Nottingham so they didn’t need the kit. I rang Peter Hancock at Great Hucklow and got the name of the people that had Burrs Mount farm where we had gone to stay at the beginning of the war to escape the bombing, it was a retired Sheffield steel worker called Mr Hunt. I rang him and arranged with them to let us camp in the old quarry beneath Bradwell Edge which was on their farm and on the day appointed, whisked Mary off for her adventure.

Just to make everything quite clear, Mary and I were not an item before or after this weekend. It was simply a good adventure and as it turned out, did Mary a power of good. We arrived on the Friday night, set up camp, built a fire and cooked supper. By about eleven o’clock we were very happy, very tired and pleasantly plastered on some of the wine we had brought. Being a gentleman I let Mary get in her sleeping bag first and then I followed. I should say we were asleep in about five minutes flat.

I awoke sometime early in the morning to find it was blowing and raining heavily. As I lay there, enjoying the sound of the rain on the canvas, I realised that all was not well, the tent seemed to be shrinking! Mary woke up and I asked her to hold the torch while I had a look to see what the problem was. I should add that neither of us was wearing anything but this was no time for either sex or the niceties! It soon became clear that the Master Mechanic had erected the tent wrongly and that the problem could only be cured by going out into the rain and putting it right. Anybody who has ever wrestled with a collapsing tent in a rainstorm in the dark will know what it was like. I couldn’t do it single-handed and Mary had to help me. I think you probably have the picture now, this naked couple fighting wet canvas at God knows what time in the morning and getting soaking wet in the process! Eventually we got it sorted and got back into the tent. As I was towelling Mary’s back I commented that the kids would never believe that we could get in this position and manage the weekend virgo intacto as it were. We had a laugh, a drink of whisky and went back to sleep. The following morning was bright and clear and we had a lovely time just playing at being campers. The fire was even better that evening.

We had to pack up and leave early on the Sunday morning and as we were leaving Mary said it had been a great idea and the best weekend she could remember for a long time. As we were going down a very narrow lane I was telling Mary about the concept of the ‘nine foot gorilla’. This all stemmed from a joke I had told her about the bloke who was stood at a bus stop one day with a nine foot gorilla on a leash. His mate asked him what he was doing with it. “I’m taking it home for a pet!” “Where’s it going to sleep?” “Don’t be daft, a nine foot gorilla sleeps exactly where it wants to!” I pointed out to Mary that the bottom line was that as we pass through life we occasionally meet nine foot gorillas, the problem is they don’t always look like gorillas! Just at this moment, Mary, spotted a Yorkshire Terrier walking up the centre of the lane towards us. It soon became obvious that it wasn’t going to shift so Mary stopped and it walked right under the car and re-appeared at the back, still walking up the middle of the lane! We both started laughing and Mary said “Let me guess. That wasn’t a Yorkshire Terrier, it was a nine foot gorilla!” I told her she’d got it and we set off home in good humour. That weekend was a turning point. I was soon spending more time in Mary’s bed than my own and I for one was very happy about it. Eventually, we were to live together for eight years.

We had another nice camp that summer. In 1979, when I was researching water mills in the Lake District for the DOE I visited Gilpin Mill at Crook. Tommy Lowdon lived there and apart from doing some farming he was the chain saw trainer for the local council. I remember him well because the first time I went there, apart from having my mind blown away by the half collapsed water mill, he surprised me with what was in his shed! He asked me if I liked motor bikes. I told him I liked any machinery but couldn’t say I was a bike man. He opened the door to a small wooden shed and I looked inside. I can still remember the smell as we opened the door. The hut had been soaked with creosote over the years and the sun was shining strongly so the place had that lovely creosote and hot wood smell. It was dark inside and at first all you could see was the dust motes shining in the sunshine as it came in through the single window. After a second or two, as my eyes started to adjust to the gloom, I saw there was a big, black and polished aluminium bike up against the back wall. I had a closer look at it and apart from the big JAP vee twin engine I couldn’t christen it. Tommy told me that the reason for this was that he and his son had designed and built it themselves because they wanted to go to Bonneville and ride on the salt flats! They’d done it as well, they had a crack at some speed record, they didn’t break it but that wasn’t the point, they had achieved their objective just by going there with their own bike.

Mary and I went up to Crook and had a couple of nights camping next to the mill. It was a real break and with hindsight, we should have done more things like that but we never had enough time.

By this time Mary and I were living together at Addingham and it seemed to be working out well. It was early days and I still kept the house in King Street, you never know I thought, I might need a bolt hole. Memories of the days with Maureen and the lack of a secure base were strong in my mind.

I had introduced Mary to Gavin Bone, Coates man at Ellenroad and one night while he was staying at Bark Lane we had a conversation about holidays and he told us about the Isle of Eigg. We had never heard of it but soon learned it was one of the Small Isles just to the south of Skye and was owned by a man called Keith Schellenberg. Gavin had stayed in one of the crofts there and loved the island but couldn’t handle the fact that there were rats about the place. Mary and I pricked our ears up and made enquiries. It turned out that one of the properties that had been converted for high class camping was a disused watermill down at Kildonnan on the south end of the island. We decided it sounded all right to us so we booked it for a week immediately.

Gavin had told us that the drill for preparing to stay on Eigg was to take everything with you necessary to support human life for a week, there was only one small shop on the island and as far as we knew it couldn’t be relied on. We went to the supermarket, loaded up with everything we needed, chucked Meg, Mary’s Labrador in the back of the car and set off for Mallaig late at night because we had to be there in time to catch the 05:30 ferry the next morning.

It was years since I had been so far up into Scotland and just driving up there was an adventure. We got to Mallaig in good time, found the ferry, parked the car and set sail into the Sound of Sleat on our way to what was to turn out to be paradise! When we got to Eigg we had to transfer into the ‘fly’ boat, a smaller ferry boat that took us the last couple of hundred yards into the harbour at Galmisdale. We knew about this before we went but it was another adventure. As well as us, there were a couple of other passengers who lived on the island and a whole raft of supplies for the village shop most of which appeared to be UHT milk, fags and canned beer! When we got to the jetty we were met by Peter Wells who was Scellenberg’s factor. We loaded everything into a Land-Rover and drove the mile and a half to the watermill.

The mill was on the seashore of a small bay with Galmisdale Head on the west side and Kildonnan peninsula on the east. Peter and Paula his lady, lived in the Kildonnan Hotel on the peninsula and we were the first guests that year. The mill was a single room with the original hursting frame and stones still in place. The bed was on a mezzanine alongside the stones and downstairs there was a sink with running cold water and a seriously ugly Jötul cast iron stove. There was a flush toilet outside to the rear of the mill and the wrought iron frame of the waterwheel was still in place on the end of the building. Lastly and most important, there was a small lean-to full of logs and a splitting axe for dealing with them! I had a fire going in ten minutes and we had a brew and got sorted out.

It’s difficult to know what to say about Eigg. This trip was the first of many, at one point Mary and I were spending a week in March and a week in October on the island. We were usually the first in or the last guests of the year and soon got to know all of the locals. It got to the point where the owner, Schellenberg recognised us and we were invited up to the Lodge when he was in residence. The island is only about three miles by two an Mary and I walked every inch and never got tired of it. We climbed the Sgurr and walked the Singing Sands. We found the wreck of the Jennie, a Clyde puffer that was stranded in fog off the north end of Eigg in 1954. Its remains are jammed in one of the sea caves below the cliff at Talm. Our favourite walk took all day and was straight up the east side of the island on a path below the cliffs to Talm and then back down the road to Kildonnan. We used to picnic and have a big fire on the beach halfway, our excuse was we were burning rubbish but in truth we liked fires. At this point we could lie back and watch the Golden Eagles that lived on the cliff as they circled and soared way out to sea. It was always a pleasure to get back to the warmth of the mill, get the stove roaring and play house with the door open so we could see and hear the sea. We have sat there in front of the fire many a night with the stove red hot and watched snow blow past horizontally out to sea. Enough, I could go on for hours, the place was magic and we never tired of it.

You might be wondering about rats! I have a rat story from Eigg for you. One evening, we were lay in bed and I heard a plate fall. I knew what it was immediately by the sound. Something had disturbed the saucer on which our king size bar of Imperial Leather soap was resting. I grabbed the torch and went down but the soap had gone. God knows how big the rat was but it had simply picked the bar of soap up and set off with it. We never found it. The following evening, Mary was having a stand up bath in front of the stove and I was dividing my time between reading a book and enjoying the sight of her stood like Venus arising out of the waves. I realised that she had stopped moving and was pointing in the direction of the sink. I followed her gaze and saw the cause of her distress, there were two large rats on the draining board. Going into hunting mode, I moved as stealthily as a panther towards the sink and in one movement seized the carving knife and stabbed both rats! Well, nearly, I did stab the rats but I have an idea they were so full of rat poison they never heard me coming! Be that as it may, I was Mary’s hero, remember what I said about her being a push-over for able men? The following morning she told Peter Wells and the story must have got round because the before we left the island I was presented with a large rat-trap for a souvenir. It hangs on my wall to this day.

A couple more Eigg stories and then I promise we’ll move on. Keith Schellenberg used to run an event called the Eigg Games every year. The series of events included sports but also war games. These were supposed to be a re-run of the struggles between the Hanoverians and the Jacobites but in fact were more like a re-run of WWII! I saw a yacht sailing in one morning and standing in the bow was a man dressed in full Kriegsmarine Admiral’s uniform! The locals had the same opinion and didn’t like being used as a battlefield. This caused a lot of bad feeling and in the end led to trouble, this included arson when one night a garage containing Keith’s fire engine burned down mysteriously.

There was a full time doctor on Eigg called Hector McLean, he had two sons one of whom, Lachy, spent much of his time on the island. He and his father had the two newest cars on Eigg, both of which were taxed and insured! This was very unusual. They met on a bad bend in the road one day and both were a total wreck, nobody was hurt and it was seen as hilarious that the only serious road accident the islanders could remember was fully covered by insurance! The doctor always wore the kilt and always met the ferry. It’s childish I know but Mary and I really felt we had arrived when we were greeted by the doctor by name one day when we landed.

That’s enough of Eigg for a while, I must tear myself away or we will have a book devoted to it! I think I’ve said enough for the time being and you should be getting the picture by now, Mary and I were never happier than when we were on Eigg. The main reason was that we were totally divorced from all the pressures of everyday life. I remember someone asking if they could get hold of me while I was on holiday and I told them certainly! Just drive up to Mallaig, catch the ferry if the weather is OK, land at Eigg if you can and walk over to Kildonnan. We may be in, if not, go into the Watermill, stoke the stove, brew up and wait for us. By the way, bring a tent because there’s only one bed! Nobody ever attempted it.

Our most exciting trip across to the island from the mainland was one October, I think it was in 1987. The ferries were stopped because there was a series of very severe gales coming in and Calmac didn’t want to be caught out at sea in one of them. We booked into ‘The Moorings’, a guest house in Mallaig run by Mabel and ‘Drew Crockatt and stayed the night hoping for better luck the following day. I had a thought before we went to bed and rang Murdo Grant who owned the harbour at Arisaig. I asked if he was going across to Eigg at all, he said he was due to go the following day if there was a break in the weather. I arranged to call him at eight the following morning.

Next day I rang Murdo and he said he thought there was a lull coming in and if we came down we could have a trip over with him. When we got there we found he was going to use a beautiful teak yacht that he was trying out before buying it. It had been derelict for some years but otherwise was seaworthy, or so he said! My first job was to get the bilge pump working for them! We set off about ten o’clock and as soon as we got out into the sound we hit the swell coming in from the north. The funny thing is that Mary was a bad sailor, she suffered terribly from sea-sickness but she didn’t have any trouble at all on that trip even though we were in this small boat being thrown about terribly by a crossing swell. We had Norman Crerar with us who helped around the harbour and he decided we could steady the boat by raising the mainsail. Norman was nothing if not a leader of men and he ordered me to help him. I could see that Murdo wasn’t very happy about this, he was more of an engine man but he didn’t demur as Norman and I raised the mainsail. This steadied us wonderfully and we had a marvellous sail across to Eigg.

The wind blew all week and one night the wind blew so hard, 156mph in the Cairngorms, that it lifted the water out of the bay and blew it away across Kildonnan! We laid in bed that night listening to the roof of the mill lifting and dropping on its fastenings and Mary kept asking me if it would be all right! I just kept saying yes but I was as apprehensive as she was! When we got home I rang the coastguard on Tiree and asked what speed they had recorded at the weather station. He asked me why I wanted to know and I told him where we had been. He said he bet that was interesting! He told me that all they knew was that it blew at over 120 mph for twenty minutes at a time, that was the maximum speed on their recorder and the reading just jammed there. The ferries were still stopped and by the end of the week I was the only bloke on the island with any pipe tobacco. Quite a few friendships were cemented that week by judiciously doling out a few pipefuls of Condor!

The day we were due to leave came and went. Mary took great pleasure in ringing YTV and telling them to cancel her appointments because she was stormbound in the Hebrides! I rang Murdo and asked him if he could do anything about it, he said there would be a lull the following morning and for £50 he would take us off so I agreed. We were down at the jetty when he came in, Norman was with him and I could see they weren’t very happy about it. We wasted no time getting on board and set off for Arisaig. It was a much worse trip than the first one. I reckon we were near the limit for a small boat by the time we reached the entrance to Arisaig but it was OK, we got across with no incident. Once again, Mary was unaffected by the motion and I was glad about that. It shows how much she liked Eigg because she would put up with the misery of sea-sickness to get there.

We had several bad trips in gales across to the island. One of the worst was on the Pioneer which was a big ferry of about 1,000 tons, we were the only passengers. We sailed right round the Small Isles for six hours and didn’t manage to get off at Eigg because it was too rough for the fly boat. When we got off in Mallaig they tried to take our tickets off us, I asked them if they charged twice for a parcel if they couldn’t deliver it. They saw the light and we went over the following day on the same ticket. The worst trip we ever had on Calmac was on the Loch Mor, a much smaller boat. It was a late sailing and there was a forecast of a force 11 gale, one degree short of a hurricane. Nevertheless the Loch Mor sailed with a full load and us as well. I found out that the reason why they were crossing in such bad weather was because there was a large party of Americans on board who were going to Rum for the annual deer cull. This was seen as so important for the island’s economy that they were stretching a point.

As soon as we got out of the harbour I knew we were in for trouble. Everyone was ordered below and we all crowded in the saloon and watched the potholes as they dipped completely under water. The noise was tremendous and every now and then the bow buried itself in a sea with a tremendous clang and I sat there hoping the welders at Ardrossan had been good men at their job. We just managed to get into the bay at Rum and get the Americans off. The captain told us he thought we would be all right to transfer to the fly boat at Eigg as, because of the direction of the wind we would be sheltered behind Castle Island off Galmisdale. He was right, but it was a close run thing and a very exciting transfer. The following day it was still blowing but had moderated a bit. Mary and I were walking at the back end of the Sgurr and we saw the Loch Mor battling her way down towards Mallaig in the afternoon. The wind was about force 8 but even so, the Loch Mor was like a submarine, she was under water more than above most of the time! God knows what it looked like the day before.

Years later, Janet and Harry went on a walking tour of South America and one of the pictures they showed me was the boat which the Chilean Navy used to supply the lighthouses down on Tierra del Fuego. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw it, it was the sister ship to the Loch Mor. I made some enquiries and found that the firm who built the Loch Mor had done some work for the Chilean Navy, whether they built the other boat or just designed it I don’t know but the point is that it was good enough for some of the worst weather in the world down on Cape Horn and after our trip in the Loch Mor that day, I’m not surprised.

One last story about Murdo and Arisaig. Norman Crerar was an interesting person, rumour had it that he had been the youngest submarine captain in WWII but I don’t know about that. He was certainly ‘officer class’ and when he said things like “I remember when I was climbing at 23,000 feet in the Himalayas.” You believed him. He used to live in a caravan parked in the harbour yard which belonged to Murdo and did various odd jobs about the place. One summer he had a great opportunity, he had been offered a teaching job somewhere in North Africa and by chance, Murdo had been refurbishing a yacht for a retired sea captain who wanted a hand to take the boat down into the Mediterranean. Norman got the job, moved all his stuff into a room over the post office for long term storage and the two captains sailed off on their adventure.

They didn’t get far. God knows how these two highly qualified seafaring men did it but they hit a rock as they were entering the Sound. After a quick distress call they managed to raise the coastguard and arrange for a salvage lighter to come up from Fort William as the repair was too big a job for Murdo. Much later, after a weary, and I have no doubt, silent, trip down to Fort William, Norman arrived back in Arisaig on the train, got off and enquired what the cloud of smoke was above the harbour. “Murdo’s burning your caravan!” came the reply. Evidently Murdo was making some sort of statement about Norman’s status at the harbour! Norman went off for his job and I haven’t heard anything about him since. The funny thing I learned later was that the caravan actually belonged to Murdo! He must have been really pissed off to burn it.

One more event that needs to be inserted here is my 50th birthday party in 1986. We had Janet staying with us at the time and she persuaded me to take her swimming first thing in the morning. This was faintly unusual but how can you refuse a daughter anything. We went off for our swim and when we got back the house had been transformed. Mary and Margaret had spent months planning the best surprise party anyone ever had! They had trawled through my address books and contacted everyone they could identify. The party started at ten in the morning and didn’t finish until three o’clock the following morning! It was all great but the highlight was early in the evening when there was a knock at the back door and Anne McDougall walked in, this was the lady I’d dragged out of the car on the motorway all those years ago. I just grabbed hold of her and we both burst into tears. My eyes are filling up as I write this, it was a wonderful surprise and confirmed a bond that started in unusual circumstances and is still strong to this day. The older I get the more I realise that these bonds, whether family or friends, are the most valuable possessions we have and we would do well to care for them.

6,367