OneGuyFromBarlick

Reprints of articles published in the Barnoldswick and Earby Times.

CHEER UP!

I'm writing this article in that strange limbo between Christmas and New Year but by the time you read it this will all be behind us and we'll be girding our collective loins to face whatever 2012 throws at us. I have a side issue, I realised this morning that I was slightly depressed, to quote a Star Trek concept, my crystals were definitely a bit drained! After some thought I decided that I was suffering from the mid-winter blues or, as the scientists inform us, Seasonal Affected Disorder. The combination of dark mornings and the onset of evening at any time after three in the afternoon, depending on how heavy the cloud cover is, was getting to me. I gave myself swift kick up the backside and decided I had to snap out of it and do something concrete like write an article for you. I doubt if I am alone because the professional Jeremiahs are constantly assuring us that we are all doomed. Don't worry, I am not going to repeat their predictions. It's high time someone started to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative! (They don't write lyrics like those these days....) So I drew up a mental list of Reasons to be Cheerful.
The first big bonus we have is that we live in Barlick! Despite the dire predictions of people like the anti-Tesco campaign which seems to be forecasting the death of our town centre if a supermarket is built many people seem to be taking the sensible view that the survival of our splendid little shops depends entirely on whether we support them. One thing about this controversy is that it has focussed a lot of attention on how lucky we are to have good family-owned businesses looking for trade and serving us well. If you like living in Barlick and appreciate a busy town centre the remedy lies in your hands.
I was pleased to see the good news that the Greyhound is doing well under its new management and that a micro brewery is producing Barlick Ale. When you consider what has happened to the town centre pubs under the dead hand of the pub companies this is something of a miracle and demonstrates that if a need is fulfilled the public will support it. I wish them well and my mind goes back over the years and the part the Dog played in my life. Good memories and it looks as though there is a good chance of others having the same experience. I can still see the landlady stood on a stool behind the bar screaming at me to “Get that thing out of here!” after my ferret escaped one evening after Ted Lawson and I had been rabbiting up at Airton. Magic! Mind you, we were barred for three weeks and it cost us thirty shillings in broken glasses.
Despite all the complaints about Pendle Council they are doing a good job of looking after our parks. I walk up to Letcliffe almost every day and if you haven't been up there for a while, have a stroll up the hill. It will give you a good aerobic workout for free and when you reach the top you can see as far as the Lake District on a clear day. Mind you, I am convinced that the hill gets steeper every day. Either that or gravity is increasing in strength! Perhaps this is simply the natural result of having led a hard life and being nearer to eighty years old than I care to think. I was talking about this to a contemporary the other day describing to him the difficulty I have getting up if there is anything to be done at ground level. He told me he knew exactly what I meant, “If I'm down on the floor I always think to myself, now, is there anything else that needs doing while I'm down here?” Don't laugh too much, it will happen to you one of these days!
During a conversation about the value of voluntary work in the town I remembered something that struck me when I was in Todmorden last year. I noticed that odd corners of the town centre were planted out with vegetables and when I enquired I found that a local volunteer group had started a campaign to make the town self-sufficient in fruit and vegetables by 2018 by planting every unused space they could find and allowing anybody to pick the produce free. The critics said that the beds would be vandalised or cleared out by thieves but this hasn't happened. As one of the organisers said, it seems that people are hard-wired to respect food and care for it. It struck me that we have plenty of spaces in the town where we could do the same. Suppose we found the funding to install some raised beds on the Village Green. Suppose we planted the existing flower beds in the Town Square with vegetables instead of flowers. Are there enough keen gardeners in the town to look after them? Has anyone floated the idea to see what sort of a response there would be? The croft up on Letcliffe where the toilets are was allotments during the Second World War and lies unused today. Indeed it's a liability, the grass has to be mowed. What I'd really like to see is a town pigsty on the green where kids could chuck vegetable waste into the trough and watch it being eaten. All right, someone would pop up and tell us that there were regulations against this sort of thing. I'm old enough to remember Marshall's piggeries at West Marton run by Harry Addyman where pigs were fed on boiled waste food and produced some of the best pig meat you've ever tasted. Surprise surprise, this was banned by the EU in 2001 after it was thought that a rogue ham sandwich, imperfectly processed, had caused the Foot and Mouth epidemic. In a world where it is estimated that 30% of food produced is wasted this seemed to me to be throwing the baby out with the bath water. High time it was looked at again and proper use made of this valuable resource.
So cheer up and bend your minds to what we can do to help ourselves. There was a time when everyone had a vegetable patch, a few hens and a cottage pig. The one thing that the experts agree on is that we are increasingly disconnected from the source of our food. How much difference could we make with a minimum of investment and some good-hearted people?
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Simple pleasures. Feeding a friendly pig.

WALKING DISTANCE

I think you all know I like living in Barlick. Writing about terraced houses last week triggered off some more thoughts about how lucky we are with our houses and the town. We have to start three thousand miles away in the United States. The main thing I remember about my first visit was the scale of the place. I once travelled across America on the Greyhound bus and was struck by the fact that it took 24 hours to cross Texas! This availability of land governed how towns were laid out, large plots, detached houses and plenty of space. This, added to the distance to the next town meant that a car was essential. True, there are more concentrated areas of housing in large towns but even in the high rise cities the suburbs are spacious and some distance from the centre. This is fine when people are economically active and can afford a car but as mobility decreases with older age problems can arise.
When I chose this little terraced house in Barlick as my last mooring place my daughter asked me what had attracted me to it. I told her it was mid-terrace so had only two outside walls, there was room for my workshop, it was only 100 yards to the shops and George Swift who lived next door had an electric wheelchair and could set off to anywhere in the town whenever he wanted. Not a bad location and I have never regretted the choice. Ten years later I decided I didn't need to have a car sat outside the house eating money when I only drove about 2,000 miles a year so I sold it and kicked my driving licence into touch. Apart from the fact that this delighted my daughters as they had experience of people driving long after they were fit to do so, my income rose by about £1200 a year! A no-brainer.
The thing is, what makes this possible? We looked at how the town was built last week but now we need to ask the question why? The answer is of course the textile mills. In the early days industrial settlement clustered round the water mills. Gillians and Lane Bottoms, the Walmsgate area round Clough Mill and Coates near the old mill at Coates where Rolls Royce car park is now. When the new steam mills at Butts and Wellhouse were built this triggered off more housing within easy reach and in the case of Wellhouse Billycock Bracewell bought land and built houses, Wellhouse Square and the nearby Nineteen and Twenty rows on Railway and Wellhouse Streets were dedicated to his workers. As the numbers of mills grew, private investors saw a profit in building to accommodate the workers, indeed, many of the workers were doing well enough to finance their own houses and sometimes a few to rent and a shop at the end of the street. The overall effect was that all the workers lived within walking distance of their place of work. This is where we get the description used by historians of the 'Walking Distance' town.
The days of the textile industry are over but we still have this legacy and one of the side-benefits is that it makes it very easy for retired and elderly people to function because there are plenty of small cottage properties within easy reach of essential services. Consider the difference between this situation and a similar person in the sprawling housing of a typical American town where a car or good public transport is vital. I am old enough to have a free bus pass but I sometimes feel guilty because I never use it. I am still capable of walking anywhere I want to go, indeed, I can be walking in green fields within ten minutes of leaving my door. Walking distance is just as useful to me as it was to the textile workers. When I lived in King Street I bought my mother the house opposite me and she moved up there from living on the Coates estate. Her small back-to-back house was easy to heat and literally a short step from the shops and the OAP centre on Frank Street. Her friends were forever passing and calling in for a cup of tea and it was ideal for her. I have no doubt it would be illegal to build those little houses under today's planning laws but, properly maintained they are still ideal single person's houses. It says something that all those little cottages round the centre have been refurbished and command quite astonishing prices. I bought my mother's house in about 1980 for £2,000 and my own through house on the opposite side of the street for £4,000, I suspect that they will be a lot more than that now!
There has been another effect on the town centre. The proximity of these small properties to the town centre means that there are plenty of people within walking distance of the shops and services. I suspect that if a survey was done, most of the shoppers will have walked to the shops. True, there are some people who seem to use their car for even the shortest shopping trip but it may well be that as the cost of running a car rises walking will become popular even with them.
Of course there are many workers in Barlick who can't find employment in the town and are forced to use a car to go further afield. The days of the large mill within walking distance have gone. I sympathise with them but my message is Cheer Up! The day will come when you no longer have to commute and you will be able to take advantage of the benefits of living in a small town where all you need is within easy reach. Why not start to sample the delights and make a conscious decision to walk more while you are still fit and active? It's a good habit to get into and I can assure you it doesn't half help to make the pension go further!
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King Street in 1981. Houses like these are ideal retirement homes.

Written 11 years ago. Still true. Look on the bright side!