LOST PROPERTY (Humour/autobiographical)

(Image courtesy of Clipartfest)

Now I'm kept on a short leash by chronic neurological illness, it's easy to romanticise how I used to be a giddy gadabout.

Freedom to
- go on open-ended adventures,
- cycle down hills,
- wander around graveyards scanning masons' chiselled lettering on memorial stones for names of my ancestors,
- go on a summer jaunt to the coast or the capital,
- take a trip to the countryside, a museum, a gallery, a shop full of clocks and mysterious antique curiosities, a West End show, a Wednesday match, a weekend under the stars.

I can't pretend that's freedom I don't miss, even now. I can't just shrug and settle for memories.

Lots of these adventures used to begin at Sheffield Midland Station.

Two occasions spring to mind that have my rosy recollections face-planting with a down-to-earth kind of thud. There were, in reality, times when I wasn't really safe to be let loose on the world!

One of those times, I was in a queue in the main ticket hall at the station. I was juggling my purse, my luggage, a cellphone the size of Scafell Pike, shuffling forwards behind a snake of fellow commuters doing a slouching conga towards the ticket window. Nothing to see here? In fact, I was soon seeing a whole lot less than usual!

Somehow, under the harsh fluorescent strip lighting glaring from the ceiling, my contact lens parted company with my right eye, which was, at the time, attempting to protect itself from the ferocious flicker offensive by pouring out more tears than when Scott and Charlene got married on 'Neighbours' the week before.

I looked down at my chest. I felt gingerly down my front for the prodigal optic. Nothing. I blinked. I squinted. Nothing. At my feet, a sizeable rectangle of jute carpeting at the entrance to the ticket area. I dropped to my knees, feeling about for the recalcitrant lens, narrowly avoiding having my fingers trampled by travel-focused Dr Martens and kitten heels.

I never did find that lens. I wondered for years whether a passenger breaking their journey from Edinburgh Waverley to London St Pancras might some day see a flash of convex glass winking up at them from the Network Rail logo on the matting and wonder who once lost it there.
That would be me.

The second occasion of note at Sheffield Midland was during my days as an undergraduate, shuttling between my parents' home in South Yorkshire and the breezy platform at Leicester, the city where I studied English Lit. Most trains would pass through Nottingham, pulling into the station platform forwards before reversing out as if heading back in the direction from which we had already come. That in itself caused me several heart-stop moments in my greener days.

More than once I'd register the unnerving reversal of direction and leap from my seat to button-hole a passing guard, stammering my fears along the lines of the old Music Hall song 'Oh Mister Porter'; "I want to go to Birmingham and they're taking me to Crewe!" Or, as I imagined, back to Sheffield Midland, thus missing my lecture at Leicester University. The guard would roll his eyes at this common passenger panic trigger:

"Of course you're on the right train, luv. Always happens, you know. Tickets, please!"

It always did happen. I never did get used to it.

I never quite recovered, either, from the moment my last shred of dignity (dignity - what dignity?) fell away on Platform 1 of Sheffield Station circa 1982. The Eighties were a nadir in general due to my vague nods in the direction of fashion. As if corkscrew perms, shoulder pads and blue eye-shadow weren't enough humiliation, there was my underskirt. My pink nylon underskirt with the elasticated waist and the hem of greying lace.

I loved that underskirt. It had done me a lot of service. That underskirt had almost earned its long service medal and retired with a carriage clock and a nice little pension. But before it could rest on its laurels, there was "that incident on Platform 1."

I knew the waistband was getting a little "tired". The elastic wasn't so elastic, any more. That day, as I strolled from the concourse onto Platform 1, I felt a distinct slackening around my midriff. My mid-length skirt covered a multitude of sins. I wasn't certain if it was my knickers, my underskirt, or those 'serviceable' taupe tights that might be threatening to wrinkle around my ankles. I was only aware of an impending sense of doom.

I quickened my steps along Platform 1 towards the Ladies, to snatch a moment of privacy before my train arrived to adjust whatever undergarment was slowly but surely migrating down over my hips.
The passengers on Platform 2, parallel to my platform and adjacent, were obscured, thankfully, I thought, by the length of an intercity train with many carriages.

My underskirt, however, had scented its moment of liberation at that point, and would wait for no man. Or woman. Or, indeed train.

As the elastic finally gave way and the underskirt slumped like a puckered pink wreath around my feet, I followed what now seems an unthinkable impulse to step out of the thing. I did so with some magnificent hauteur, I like to think, or I would have done, if I hadn't almost tripped over its loop of textile smugness as I strode on towards the shelter of the conveniences just as the intercity locomotive pulled away from Platform 2, leaving me exposed to the gaze of all humanity.

I know I missed my own train before I finally re-emerged, hoping my audience on Platform 2 had dispersed to their various onward destinations.

No. I didn't stoop to scoop up the forlorn underskirt. It may still be there, along with my lost right contact lens, in the great Lost Property Office of memory, or imprinted on the traumatised mind's eye of some unfortunate punter on the 2.47 to Bristol Temple Meads.

MY DAD: BORN THIS DAY 1924

Today would have been my dad's 93rd birthday.

He isn't here to celebrate it with us, but we remember him with love through the years.

Dad died at 65, 20 years after suffering a series of massive strokes at 45 (or as the doctor airily insisted to my mum, who knew only too well what had happened, "It's just a touch of bad bronchitis, Mrs Barrass!"). The doctor walked out of my parents' bedroom that day, leaving my mum bereft and alone with the obvious lie that my dad had merely a bit of a chest infection, even though his speech was slurred and he was weakly doing the opposite of every action, pushing away when he should be pulling towards, spilling when he should be holding steady.

Only a second opinion brought diagnosis, but soon the ambulances were on strike and he was forgotten for much of the time he should have been fetched to physiotherapy. Such were the times at the dawn of the 1970s. The strokes left him permanently disabled and unable to do anything without support. For many things he most loved, that meant not enjoying them at all, ever again.

At 8, I saw the happy, strong, capable, funny dad who used to stand on his head to make me laugh and gave me fireman's lifts till I was hysterical with giggles, turn overnight into a stranger who struggled to make himself understood by slowly spelling out words on my old toy chalkboard with magnetic letters, choked at almost every meal and lived in a huge hospital-issue iron bed in our tiny front room with calipers, pulleys, feeding cups, commodes, canes and humiliating helplessness.

No more running down the path, past the freight weighing shed, across the yard, along the platform to meet him at the little station at the bottom of our garden where he worked as head porter and shunter. No more that thrill of hearing the purring crescendo of the engine of his motorbike as he arrived at the school gates to whisk me off home or on some impromptu adventure in the Yorkshire countryside.

Dad overseeing my first steps on the lawn

But that happy, strong, capable, funny dad was still inside that often child-like, stubborn stranger as I learned to understand, growing up in the shadow of his loss of freedom and dignity. So many things remind me of him with thankfulness: maps, bikes, unplanned picnics, cherry genoa cake, corned beef sandwiches with brown sauce, trifle, playing patience, silly black-and-white movies, radio comedy, pit ponies, mystery outings in the motorbike-and-sidecar, steam trains, railways, picking the second favourite in horse races on TV, the spiral staircase up Hooton Pagnell church tower, watching the wrestling and scrambling and snooker, tinkering with things, laughter with crinkled-up eyes.

Me & Dad near Filey, c1965

My next book, Cloudhover Solstice, is dedicated to him, set in the places on the beautiful Yorkshire Coast my dad loved and which, without him, I might never have discovered or laid down such treasured memories that keep him alive in my heart. I could go on, but I'll just say:

"Happy Birthday, Dad! We love you and we'll never forget!"

Dad & his only child - yours truly, 1961

My dad, porter at Bolton-on-Dearne railway station in the last days of steam.
Quintessential Yorkshireman and a decent, lovely lad.

Goatsucker Harvest: Sir William Cubitt & Doncaster Railway Plant Works

Sir William Cubitt (1785 - 1861) Civil Engineer

Most of the characters in "Goatsucker Harvest" are inspired by the author's own ancestors or wholly fictional figures from the mid-century Victorian Yorkshire they inhabit. The sole exception is Sir William Cubitt, a real live figure from England's past. In the book, he appears in the breathtaking breakneck climax of the story, when someone who was once a fan of his engineering talents turns against him in a tidal wave of jealous vengeance and focussed fury.

Sir William, in the plot of the book, returns to Doncaster as an esteemed guest of honour to give a speech at a presentation at the famous railway Plant Works in the town. He little suspects that he is in the cross-hairs of a deadly and death-dealing invention devised by the man who now counts him as his bitterest enemy. Can Bram warn Sir William in time to save his life, the lives of many more innocent citizens and the steam and locomotive heart of Doncaster itself? Only Goatsucker Harvest has the answers!

The historical Sir William, son of a miller in Norfolk, was a man of many talents during the heady days of the Industrial Revolution that transformed Victorian England and which suffuses the novel, always in tension with the natural world.

He designed the patent windmill sails that bore his name. He designed the treadmill widely used in Victorian prisons and on which the author Joyce's great great great grandmother's cousin, the Sheffield Chartist hero Samuel Holberry died in York Castle in 1842.

Known for the accuracy and precision of his patterns for the iron castings of machinery, Cubitt was appointed chief engineer of the world-famous Crystal Palace, erected in London in 1851 and was made president of the Society of Civil Engineers in the years leading up to the action of the novel.

He worked on canals, too, designing bridges and locks, Thirza's heartland and home in "Goatsucker Harvest". His designs for docks and harbours were in demand in the UK and on the continent, including the Oxford Canal and Liverpool Junction Canal and he made improvements to rivers like the Severn.

He left a living monument to his genius in the world of Victorian railways, the South Eastern and the Great Northern. An example of his work, the Welwyn Viaduct, is still standing magnificent in 2015.

He and his equally talented son, Joseph Cubitt, designed and built the original buildings of the Plant Works in Doncaster, birthplace of great locomotives like The Flying Scotsman. This is what draws the fictionalised Sir William into the drama of 'Goatsucker Harvest', towards the end of his illustrious career.

In the world of history we call "real life," Sir William died an old man in 1861. In the world of fiction, in Goatsucker Harvest's 1855 world of shifting shadows, phlogiston, peat, ball lightning, "chemic what-me-nots" as Lucas would put it, steampunk and subterfuge, you'll have to explore and enjoy the story to see if Sir William's fictional alter ego is afforded the same luxury!

Doncaster Plant Works pictured in 1957 (NRM)