Hayloft
Publishing, 249 pages, £12.00 from the Ratty stations and other
local shops
Margaret
Armstrong Elliott was born in 1931. Her family farmed at Paddockwray
and the Woolpack, also running the Inn. The farms were separated by
Christcliff, inconveniently occupied by a hostile Mr Vicars. From
Eskdale High School, where the teacher was her Aunt Gladys, Margaret
gained a grammar school place in Millom, but was unable to take it up
for want of transport. At the suggestion of two teachers who were
regular guests at the Woolpack, she went instead to a Spartan girls’
boarding school in Southport, and later to university in Newcastle.
During the holidays she returned to the Woolpack as a maid of all
work. Finally leaving Eskdale in 1958, she travelled extensively,
before becoming a teacher and landscape artist in Canada.
As
the subtitle suggests, the author is strongly aware that before the
War, time had moved more slowly in Eskdale than elsewhere. Horses
were still used rather than tractors and cars were rare, although her
father owned one, and Auntie Gladys was a famously erratic driver.
Such agricultural machinery as there was would have been familiar to
Victorians, and life was dominated by the weather and seasons. The
farms were not only self-sufficient in many foodstuffs, but also
provided most of the vegetables and fruit for the inn. Valley fields
were still being ploughed, and the Woolpack had a large garden. The
use of chemicals was unknown, until introduced as part of the war
effort. Even the impact of rationing was hardly felt.
The
clarity of recollection in the book of life as a young child, in
surroundings surviving from another age, is remarkable. Long
unaccompanied walks in complete safety, close observation of nature
and farm animals, the confining of conversation to the outdoor work
of men, and a detailed account of women’s endless indoor labour,
make us realise both what we have lost and gained. There are some
wonderfully evocative photographs. The author remembers Eskdale mill
as a going concern, and Ned Bibby, the last miller, who died in 1937.
But her memory of ‘the wooden wheel - - scooping up the water as
it flowed past’ does not seem quite right.
Surprisingly, the Armstrong family seem to have thought of the inn as
of less importance than the farms, even though they had arrived in
Eskdale only in 1914 and had previously run hotels elsewhere in the
Lake District. Margaret Armstrong Elliott regards tourists, hikers
and other refugees from urban reality with the sardonic eye of an
Eskdale native. When she last visited the valley in 2006, she was
rudely shouted at by an off-comer (who can this have been ?) for
approaching Boot mill outside hours. Perhaps the experience
influenced her dismissal of the mill as a tourist theme park. Food
for thought, as we seek to change its presentation, but not its
essential character, over the next few years.
Paul
Pharaoh
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