Sheffield 3

My sister is developing a mania for British post-boxes. Annie explained to her that the monograms on the side tell you which monarch's reign they were set up during, and so far we've found "contemporary", Victorian, and even Georgian post boxes. The attraction to Pip, I think, is that they come in different shapes and sizes.


Today was a "downtime" day in order to get some practicalities sorted out. We caught the tram to Cathedral station. After Yorkminster and Lincoln, Sheffield's cathedral came as a shock; it's only the size of a parish church. Gives you an idea of how fast this city just exploded in the Industrial Revolution.

Mum and Pip shopped around Fargate for more long-sleeved tops (funnily enough, it's COLD here) while I looked around for some kind of phone deal. After making dad promise not to snarl at the shop assistant (it's their job to be evasive to a certain extent, and politeness stops that so much more effectively), we went and negotiated with a girl in the T-mobile shop. Result: £10 phone with plenty of credit. First thing I did was to make contact with Pat after a week of total silence. I made the call standing just outside a huge Primark store where Pip had been scouting for the cheap "foonky taahts" described by our hostess in Manchester. The conversation between Pat and I was only a tiny snippet - I had to catch up to my family, and Pat had to sleep.

The family then set out for the Millenium Gallery, and after a few wrong turns up slum alleys (you don't need to scratch deep to penetrate the shiny bits of Sheffield) we arrived and met dad's old friend Barry. We all had a nice lunch in the gallery cafe together; the conversation was mostly dad and Barry's catching-up, as Pip and I had never met Barry before, and mum just the once. As a result, we three females left dad and Barry to be able to talk without being hindered by poor Barry's politeness. We went to see the gallery's wintergarden briefly, as well as a mini-exhibition exploring John Ruskin's theories about art. Remind me, someone: I must hunt down some of Ruskin's books. He seems a total idealist; I think his ideas would be fascinating.

Next stop was Sheffield central library, for internet access; and then back to the gallery cafe to collect dad and say our farewells to Barry.

As dusk was falling the four of us deliberately boarded a tram traveling in the wrong direction, so as to see a little more of Sheffield and make the most of our day-tickets. It was interesting to see Sheffield's suburbs, and to see the numbers of buildings being put up on the outskirts of the CBD.It's impossible to turn a corner in Sheffield without seeing at least two big cranes silhouetted on the horizon.

We eventually switched trams and headed "home" again to Coniston, where Pat rang at a more reasonable hour and we talked for the first time in a week. I slept very contentedly.

Derbyshire

Dad's good friend (long-ago ex-girlfriend, in fact) Annie arrived at our B & B at 9.30 today, and bundled us into her tiny car. Annie is originally French, but has lived in Sheffield for 45 years or so, where she has taught her native language at Sheffield uni (which is where she and dad met). As a result, she has an accent that is a beautiful mix of French and Yorkshire. She is also totally irreverent, swears like a sailor, and is a LOT of fun.

Basically, she's the kind of woman I thought I'd like to be, before I met Pat (go on, laugh) - happily single and defiantly independent. She goes hiking and traveling a lot, when she's not working.


Anyway, today she drove us out of Sheffield and into Derbyshire to take us on a ramble (like a bushwalk, only uniquely English, and involves more mud. The American equivalent is a hike; in Peru it's a trek... you see?). We parked on the side of a highway near Ladybower reserve, and set off up the Derwent valley, along the river. The area is truly beautiful; we followed a public footpath that lead through woodlands and past farms. The ground was carpeted with yellows and oranges because it's the tail-end of autumn... there were beech trees and oak trees lining both sides of the path. Part of me kept expecting to see Aslan peering out of the trees at me... or an entwife.


Part of the trail led past the site where Derwent village was drowned when the dam was constructed. Rather like Jenolan, back home; Derwent's church tower used to stick up above the level of the water until someone knocked the rest of it down.

We kept on, past fields of molehills and sheep until quite suddenly we rounded a corner and could see the Derwent dam. It is enormous, and water was cascading down our side of it. The trail took us around the bottom of the dam, and along to a kiosk and carpark area that on a Sunday (even in winter) is inhabited by hundreds of ducks and even more picnickers, walking their dogs. The picnickers' dogs, not the ducks'.


Pip and I indulged in a jacket potato each - traditional English fare, perhaps. Hers was tuna-filled and mine was topped with cheese and beans. Not bad at all, despite appearances! And very nice to hold in cold hands. We sat and ate while watching tiny birds flitting in the feeders across the road. I only recognised robins, and some sort of bird that was in September's picture on one of our calendars, once. Specific, I know. I keep seeing "Septembers", now.

Around midday we continued up the valley to the top of the dam. This is actually the place where the famous "Dambusters" practised their flightpath in WW2, and one of the dam's towers is set up as part-memorial, part-museum. Brings home how incredibly brave these men were when you see just how low they had to fly to avoid radar detection... and I had had no idea many men died in the attempt. Of course, there is no mention of the German victims, unless you count Squadron 617's motto... "Après moi le déluge". Hmm.

We left the dam, and carried on along the upper part of the valley, where we stopped for a picnic lunch Annie had packed for us all. Sandwiches, bananas and mandarins, and we'd had no idea she was carrying it all in her pack. The five of us sat overlooking the reservoir, through the pine trees.


The walk back down the other side of the valley and river was very muddy, but just as beautiful as the morning's walking. More sheep and more molehills; Annie was bemused by our delight in the molehills, but mum and I are die-hard "Wind in the Willows" fans, and finally had something to relate to Moley.

We arrived back at the long line of parked cars in the late afternoon, as the sun was beginning to dip behind the hills. It is quite remarkable to go on a nature walk with so many other people on the trail; it certainly demonstrates how crowded England is when compared to Australia. Fun fact: England does not actually possess any "wilderness" as internationally defined, because there is nowhere in the entire country that has not been altered by human activity. Even the New Forest was planted by King William. One of dad's friends maintains that there are a few square feet of English wilderness left in a bog somewhere, but I'm unconvinced. It's as though an entire country's landscape had been changed from wolf into dog.

Annie drove us back to her house in Sheffield, by way of the high moors. The hills were russet with the dead bracken in the light of the sunset, and a lot of people had turned out in their cars to see the last sunrays disappear. It was a bleak scene, but marvellous.

Annie's house is a tiny semi-detatched (heck, that type of building is always tiny)... but she has filled it with all her books and "treasures" from her travels. While she was getting dinner ready, she told us an elaborate story about the violin she had inherited from her mother, which had been thought worthless and sat in the attic for decades... but which turned out to be a 1721 Steiner. Annie then produced said violin, and asked me would I play it for her!

It was a beautiful instrument, and once I'd got it tuned relative to itself, the sound it made was gorgeous - even in my hands. The lowest notes in particular were so deep and resonant, they sounded like aural chocolate. (Err... I know what I mean, anyway). Alas, I had no sheet music with me, so I was limited to the short folk pieces I could remember... which really didn't do such a remarkable instrument justice. Nevertheless, it was incredible to be allowed (encouraged!) not only to hold something nearly 300 years old, but also to make music on it. I put it down quite quickly after I realised the varnish was flaking off on my hands!

Dinner was a beef stew, followed by a Breton dessert involving prunes in a sort of custard-y sponge - as Annie said, to "get us used" to the food in Brittany when we borrow her house there after Christmas. We spent the rest of the evening with Annie updating dad on all the people they'd worked with at the uni, and regaling us with tales of her travels, arguments and acquaintances. Annie tells every story with panash, so it was unfortunate that I fell asleep on her couch towards 9.30. She drove us all back to Coniston, and we were asleep by 10 pm.

Gainsborough

We got up extremely early this morning (5am or so) and breakfasted so as to be in time to be in Gainsborough to see the tidal bore at 7 am. Even though we waved goodbye to Macolm and Barbara around 5.30, we managed to miss the tide, probably only by around 10 minutes or so. Mum was rather disappointed, but Pip and I thought that seeing the sun rise over the river Trent more than made up for missing the tide.

We discovered we had several hours before anywhere opened, so we drove around Gainsborough and snooped. For most of mum's side of the family (through her grandfather - my great-grandfather), Gainsborough is the ancestral stomping-ground. Only one Kirkby seems ever to have left Gainsborough, and then only to pursue his love to Australia. Well, we drove past what we think was the same house said great-grandfather lived in, though it's been fancied-up since. A tiny semi-detatched, and yet he lived there with 5 other family members.


We also saw Marshall's Yards where world-famous tractors were made, and where my great-grandfather served his apprenticeship as a boilermaker. Today it's a large carpark, and the old sheds have been converted into cosmetics shops and hairdressing salons. Interesting irony, there.

By this stage it had passed 9 o'clock, and we visited The Canute for "second breakfast", to Pip's hobbity delight. There's an idea among some historians that king Canute made a show of trying to stop the Trent's tidal bore, and not the ocean at all, despite the way legend has it.

At 10, Gainsborough Old Hall was open for admission. It's a building that's been on the site since Medieval times, and all the subsequent owners have merely added their own architectural quirks to the place, instead of knocking it down and rebuilding. Thus there are half-timbered Tudor rooms grafted onto stone towers that date from hundreds of years before. The most fascinating rooms were the kitchens - Medieval period, and some of the best-preserved in the country. The chimneys were enormous, and I was amused to see that the kitchenhands' sleeping quarters were nestled in close to the main chimney for warmth.


We left the hall and set out for Sheffield before midday; luckily there was no trouble with the Gainsborough longing, and we didn't have to blindfold mum, or tie her to the mast. The drive went well until we actually reached Sheffield city itself. We got rather hopelessly lost (I suspect this comes of "saving money" by using a 30-year-old street directory, ho-hum) - and matters were not improved by Sheffield's roads. The city is really just a town that got too big for its boots, far too quickly, when the steel industry took off. As a result the houses are crammed even closer together than in some of the older towns we've visited... and every second street in this suburb seems to be one-way. (Pat? Sunbury has nothing on this place.)


We did find our B & B, though... "Coniston", which is a nice place run apparently singlehandedly by Deborah, our hostess. The room Pip and I are in has a bay window that looks right out across Hillsborough (our suburb of Sheffield). Sheffield seems an unbeautiful city - the hill we face is covered in slate-roofed houses that make it look scaly, or armoured.

Dad lived here for three years or so in his twenties, when he was a lecturer in Sheffield university's engineering department. Around midday he took mum and I by car to show us the grounds of the uni and where he used to live; all while we waited for our clothes to finish at the laundromat. The sightseeing was interesting (having worked at home's uni for a year, I like comparing campuses)... but the drive to and from was an entirely different matter.

It started off a little nervewracking, as mum was helping navigate a place she'd not even studied on the map; and because of the aforementioned problems with Sheffield's streets. What I haven't mentioned is that these streets were never built for cars. You're lucky if the road you're on has two car-sized lanes - and even then, parked cars have nowhere but the middle of a lane to sit. This results in a lot of instances of having to drive in the wrong lane, with careful gestural negotiations between you and any oncoming traffic. A dip of the headlights can mean anything from "you stay there, I'm coming through", or "no, you first"... to "what in God's name possessed you to buy a Landrover, you tosser?" To top it off, Sheffield is built across five rivers, which makes for a LOT of hills. And a place name like "Hag Hill" sounds like bad news to begin with, no? Try hill-starting on it, in a heavily-laden manual. The clutch nearly burned out.

The stress became greater and greater, particularly on the trip back to the laundromat. I couldn't decide whether it was better to keep my eyes open or closed. I must admit, I wasn't thinking "dear God, we're going to DIE", because that would have required rational thought processes in place of blind white panic. By the time dad stopped illegally and left the two of us so he could find somewhere to park, it was a choice for me between kissing the solid ground I was at last standing on, or bursting into bemused tears. I'm sorry to say I took the latter course, but at least I managed NOT to be sick. Believe me, that was a substantial achievement.

After retrieving the washing we returned to Coniston, where the shower had run out of hot water. Nothing can reduce me to homicidal rage quite like a cold shower does, and with that on top of everything else, I fear I threw a tantrum. A quiet one, but a heartfelt one. Whoops. Pip was wonderful, and cheered me up with hot chocolate.

I recovered after a short while, and we all went out for dinner with my uncle Ray and his partner Sheila. Sheila told us all about her work at the uni, and Ray told us about how difficult life is for an agnostic organ player (think about it). Believe it or not, he has his own pipe organ installed in his apartment.

Dinner was lovely, but went late, and by the time we'd caught the tram back to Hillsborough and climbed the hill, Pip and I fell into bed almost comatose.