Child from Home by John Wright Read Free Book Online Page A

rotten wood swung back and forth on creaking, rusty hinges. The ugly scars were sad reminders showing where the bowels of the earth had been ripped open and turned out in the frantic search for iron ore; the ore on which my hometown’s very existence had once depended. Close by, an old fifty-foot stone chimney that had once been an air shaft for the underground workings still dominated the skyline. It was to be demolished for safety reasons some twenty-one years later and the stones and rubble were used to fill in the 300-foot-deep pit shaft.
    High above on the cliffs stood a dark, derelict, square tower, which seemed to teeter on the very brink of the precipice. The elderly lady said, ‘Yon ruin is Skelton Tower. It’s all that’s left of an old shooting lodge that once ’ad stables on its ground floor.’ It had been built for an allegedly dissolute reverend gentleman of that name.
    The train began to slow by a tall white signal post at the point where the single line became a double track, and we passed over a narrow level crossing by a wooden coal storage hut. We rumbled over a wide wooden-gated level crossing that stood close to a tall, brick-built signal box with blast-taped windows. Just past the ticket office, we pulled in alongside the neat and tidy stone platform of a little station called Levisham Halt. On the platform were a couple of paraffin lamps mounted on cast-iron posts that had been freshly painted in cream and maroon.
    A few people got off and, as the red-and-white arm of the signal went up, we continued on our journey. Crossing over the points, the double line became single track again for the next six miles and the train rattled southwards on a flat, straight stretch bordered by the tree-covered slopes of Blansby Park. Here the valley widened out and the track had several bends. We could lean out of the window and see the steam and smoke-shrouded engine and, in the other direction, the guard’s van. High above stood the curtain walls of Pickering Castle.
    Pickering Beck was always in sight and we finally rumbled over it and into Pickering station where a wooden newspaper and magazine kiosk stood at the end of a long platform. The walls and doorways were piled high with sandbags that almost reached the glass roof. The great black engine gave out a long echoing hoot as, with an agonised squeal of brakes – amid billowing clouds of steam – it slowly clinked and clanked to a halt. To a staccato clattering of carriage doors, we climbed down onto the platform to be met at the W.H. Smith bookstall by Miss Florence Thorne, the auburn-haired, middle-aged matron of the new nursery school, who had travelled down from Middlesbrough a week or so before to get things organised.
    We followed her slim figure out of the station, through a wrought-iron gate to a single-decked motor coach where the driver loaded our cases and we set off. My friend Eric was on the seat behind me as we travelled through a couple of villages and turned north up to Cropton. After passing the New Inn, the road forked to either side of a large chestnut tree with a low wooden seat encircling the wide girth of its gnarled trunk. Miss Thorne said to Mam, ‘The local gentry and landowners used to assemble here for the Sinnington foxhunt, a regular event before the war.’
    Bearing left onto the Rosedale road, we travelled down Cropton Bank, with a grassy mound on our right that was once the site of a Norman motte-and-bailey castle. Heading north, we passed through a pleasant river valley lined with sunlit meadows and hedges; we drove up the narrow country road for another four miles, passing the inn at Hartoft End on our right. Beautiful spruce and pine-clad slopes rose up on our right-hand side before we pulled in at the large inn on the square in the village of Rosedale Abbey. Small groups of people were waiting as Miss Thorne, the other mothers and a few of the children got off. I was quite upset to see