Stories Volume 9
Introduction > Stories #200 - #219
Graham Newby - Bonfire Night - #200
Born in Leeds in the 1950’s, I spent some of my early childhood at Welton Mount, in the Hyde Park area of Leeds. One of my most vivid memories is around Bonfire Night. We always celebrated the event with a bonfire in the street and everyone was involved in deciding the location. The street consisted of terraced houses, each with a small yard, with many still having an outside toilet. Each year the bonfire location would move up or down the street, depending on who had last had it outside their house. Sometimes it was hotly contested, but eventually it was always agreed.
There was the traditional ‘Penny for the Guy’ where you annually made a guy of old rags, filled either with old newspaper, rags or straw. We would place him in our homemade buggy and take him down outside Hyde Park Picture House where we’d ask passers-by for a “Penny for the Guy”. The money collected would be used to buy fireworks.
The children in the street would also go ‘chumping’: this was collecting wood and combustible material for the bonfire. Groups of us would go around the area searching for any bits of wood going spare; sometimes asking local residents if they had any, but many a time some privet hedge got ‘shortened’, so to speak. Once collected, we would store them on the flat toilet roofs, but as Bonfire Night drew nearer, they would be stacked together in the location of the bonfire. We would make a small den inside the centre and keep watch there, in case children from other streets with rival bonfires decided to ‘borrow’ some of our wood. This happened on a regular basis and I must admit we did the same, particularly when we needed to bolster the size of our bonfire.
When the day arrived, there was growing excitement as we waited with anticipation for darkness to fall. Once the fire was lit, parents brought out pie and peas and parkin; when the bonfire was well on it’s way, chestnuts and jacket potatoes would be cooked in the embers. Fireworks would be let off in the backyards, children with sparklers would be dancing around the fire, while mums and dads would be seated on discarded old armchairs and rickety broken chairs, which would be put on the fire later.
I remember one year, a rocket which had been placed ready in an empty milk bottle (one of the methods used at the time) had been accidentally knocked and went shooting through our kitchen window, narrowly avoiding my dad, who was walking past it with a tray of parkin. No health and safety in those days!
Robert Hanson - Wortley Tragedy - #201
It was in the mid 1950s, during a school holiday, I would have been twelve or thirteen years old, although I can’t be sure which season of the year it was. The day was not particularly warm, I don’t recall any sunshine, but then again neither was there rain. It just seemed an ordinary weekday morning, with an overcast sky. I realise now that there must have been some snow on the ground, although I don’t recall seeing any that morning.
The news reached us, through word of mouth, that the Police were searching for a young boy missing from his home in Lower Wortley. We didn’t exactly volunteer to help in the search, because I can’t remember seeing any policemen organising us, or even speaking to us, but everyone around my age set out to look for the boy. The crowd I knew and played with all came from the New Blackpool area alongside Cow Close Road, and we took off into the places we knew well, up in Farnley Forge.
In the Forge were two mines owned by Farnley Fireclay. The mines did not drop into the ground vertically. They were called ‘drift’ mines and they ran along a shallow route under the “Black Hills” past Dunlop & Ranken and in the direction of Morley. One of the mines was still functioning and had a narrow gauge railway with very small trucks hauled by a steel rope, used to carry the mined clay, whatever coal, and the miners themselves. The area also held many abandoned full size railway trucks and broken sanitary pottery. At the highest point of the Forge was a huge cylindrical metal tank, which over years had filled with rainwater and rust. We, New Blackpool kids, were very familiar with this place and we searched throughout the morning until word reached us, around lunchtime (dinnertime), that the boy had been found.
He was a 4-year-old from a family living on the Kirkdale Estate. This was situated between Dunlops and the junction of the Ring Road and Whitehall Road near Ringways Garage. In those days Wortley Beck ran alongside the wall next to the Ringway’s Roundabout. It is now buried under the carpark of Evans Halshaw.
Back then traffic was light, life was slower, and it was not as essential to monitor children as it is now. The boy had wandered off and been playing on the Beck Bank when he slipped on the snow, fell into the Beck and was drowned.
If I remember correctly, the Beck was covered in shortly afterwards.
Liz Thomas - Little Miracles - #202
I had always wanted children, for as long as I could remember, but when I started trying for a baby, it just wasn’t happening. I was referred for a laparoscopy operation where they discovered that my fallopian tubes were damaged and blocked. It seems I had had an infection when I was younger and it was unlikely that I would ever get pregnant naturally.
It was suggested that I try IVF. Back in 1990 this was a relatively new procedure – the first ever ‘Test Tube Baby’, Louise Brown, was herself only 11. The odds of getting pregnant from this treatment were pretty poor, so we were amazed to find out that I was pregnant after the first attempt with a very strong positive test result.
Two weeks later a sensitive ultrasound scan revealed that I was in fact carrying twins. It felt like we had won the lottery. The following year my two little miracles were born – I had a girl, Megan, and a boy, Joshua – an instant family.
Fast forward to 2022 and my ‘little miracles’ are now 31 and I am very proud of them both.
Now I am wondering – maybe I will have some grandchildren one day?
Pam Jarvis - Keen Genealogist - #203
I’ve been a keen family genealogist for the best part of thirty-five years now, and putting everything I know together, it seems that my ancestral background is Scottish, Flemish and Kentish, with a dash of Irish and Scandinavian. My interest in ancestry began with stories told by my grandmother Jessie, who, from her three Scottish grandparents, provided most of my Scottish DNA.
Jessie’s parents met in England. She told me that her father, John, was a Scot from Renfrew, an engineer who had arrived at the Kentish coast seeking work. Her mother, Sophia, was born in Kent, the daughter of Robert, a Scottish Presbyterian from Edinburgh, who had arrived in Kent as an apprentice jeweller, worked his way up to master craftsman, and married a local girl, eventually purchasing a high street jewellery shop.
Fate determined that Robert became the only father figure that Jessie would remember. She was born in 1891, and her father, John, died from influenza in 1893 at the age of twenty-six. Jessie and Sophia returned to the maternal family home, a flat over Robert’s jewellery shop.
Jessie remembered her grandfather Robert as a stern man. Because Sophia worked away from home for long periods of time, Jessie was principally raised by Robert and an unmarried aunt. She particularly disliked the Presbyterian faith in which the household was immersed, and as long as I knew her, would never voluntarily attend church services apart from family celebrations.
As a little girl, I spent a lot of time with Jessie, and she told me some wonderful stories of her Victorian/Edwardian childhood, but there was a lot of missing detail – for example no pictures of her father John or his family. And because she died when I was 10, I never had the opportunity to question her in depth on these points, which probably drew me to ancestral research in the first instance.
Once I gained access to online archives, I was shocked to find that what I had been told about my paternal great grandfather was not entirely true. Birth records turned up the fact that it was his father who had been the engineer who moved his family to Kent in the 1860s, and the census records indicate that they remained there, living only a few miles from Jessie throughout the whole period of her childhood. The birth/marriage records revealed a hidden story of pre-marital pregnancy, near illegitimacy and, given the culture of the time and religious faith, shame.
Despite my efforts, couldn’t get any further with my research. Eventually, I began thinking about writing Jessie’s story in a novel, which would a weave a wholly fictional story together around events in her childhood, filling in the gaps with imagination– a type of photoshopped ‘ancestral selfie’. And then lockdown gave me the perfect opportunity to get the job done.
The novel that emerged– ‘On Time’ touches upon the concept of historical trauma to tell the story of two women who, when suddenly confronted with an unexpected opportunity to travel in time, wrestle with temptation to ‘fix’ things in their ancestral past to prevent family tragedies that shaped the lives of living relatives. It acted as ‘therapy’ for me to deal with the stresses of lockdown, including 2 deaths in my immediate family, and has received some very positive reviews.
I now have some hope that one day, it may also start a trail that will lead me to a descendant of John’s siblings, and most of all that they may have a photograph of him to show me.
Elizabeth Stanford-Sharpe - Bertha's Story - #204
The time had come to choose our placements. Did I want to work in a nursery, a family group home, or maybe a home for unmarried mothers? I didn’t relish any of the suggestions. I’d read about a place for those who didn’t fit societal norms, just as I didn’t fit societal norms. I was only doing the course because one education welfare officer had courageously fought for my place against a sea of professionals who all said I wasn’t worth educating. And now I’d learned that there was a whole building full of pushed-away, we-don’t-want-you, you-might-scare-the-neighbours’ people, and instinctively knew that that was where I wanted to work. On their own literature, they described it as a ‘colony’ for people with ‘mental deficiency’.
“Oh, you can’t go there”, my teachers said. “Don’t be stupid”, they said. “What on earth would you find to base your study on in a place like that?”, they said. “It’s impossible, they wouldn’t give permission”, they said. So, I wrote to one of the board members myself – a very fancy person who probably hadn’t an inkling of what happened in the place, saying that I wanted to be allowed to gain some voluntary experience as an ‘artist in residence’ (I’d only read the term once, but it seemed to somehow fit what I wanted to achieve and sounded authoritative) There was strong opposition, I was given strict rules about where I could and couldn’t go, but she somehow persuaded them to allow me access to the ‘industrial therapy villa’.
About a dozen ‘patients’ sat hunched on lab-style stools around two benches. The manager of operations there was as institutionalised as the residents, and wary of my presence. Their ‘therapy’ was counting screws into tiny plastic bags and then stapling on cardboard toppers. The completed packets were loaded into a large basket to be delivered to hardware shops they would never visit.
I introduced myself, laid out an array of art materials on the deep windowsills and told them that they could just go and use them whenever they wanted. It took a few visits before anybody felt brave enough to leave the benches and copy the examples I’d made, or to take a clean sheet of paper and experiment, but gradually they grew more confident, came, and talked. They were all seventy-plus and the majority had been there for most of their lives. For most, their ‘mental deficiency’ was that they had struggled with reading or writing, one gentleman had on his file that at the age of twelve he had ‘backchatted’ his teacher, one had epilepsy, but it was a lady I shall call Bertha here (not her real name) that caught my heart the most.
“You’ll not get ‘er ti talk ti yer”, the manager said, and for several weeks it appeared he was right. Bertha sat packing screws into plastic bags, averting my gaze and ignoring the art supplies, totally silent. Then one day, a little switch just clicked in her brain, and Bertha made her way over to the windowsills, picked up a piece of paper, and spent time purposefully sifting the crayons until she found the colours she needed. She carried them over to an empty corner of the room, and kneeling on stiff joints, she began to draw. Bertha was eighty-two years old. Only when she returned her crayons to the tin did I see what was on the paper she had left on the floor in the corner.
It was a flower, but not just any flower. It was a branch of Wisteria, exquisitely executed in just the right colours. Whilst she was at lunch, I had a wander around the outside of the villa to see if there was any Wisteria she might have drawn inspiration from, but there was none.
Slowly, slowly, over months, Bertha’s story emerged. She drew, cried, and eventually spoke of how she came to be in that place, and the release in her was palpable. She became less tense; her beautiful voice was heard, and her body walked taller as she realised that she was believed and validated. At twelve years of age, Bertha was about to start working at a ‘big house’ as a servant. Her bags packed, she knew there was something she must tell her mother before she left home, because she wanted to protect the sister she was leaving behind.
Nervously, stutteringly, she told her mother about her father’s regular visits to her bed and the abuse she was subjected to. Her mother didn’t believe her, and Bertha’s father loaded her on to the cart for the last journey she took. They drove right past the big house with cascades of Wisteria covering its walls, and she was delivered to the ‘colony’, where her father left her in the care of the registrar and turned his back without a word. Bertha’s records were marked, ‘habitual liar and sexual provocateur’.
This dear lady was a joyous bundle of delight, deeply gifted in creativity, but that potential had been locked away for seventy years, and the privilege I feel at having seen Bertha’s story painstakingly unfold, inspires me still.
Preethi Manuel - The Kiss (From Birth to the Aether)- #205
I’m Preethi and, believe it or not, I’m over 65 years old. So quite a granny. Really. But, when I was 30 years old, I received a telephone call I so longed for in my life. It was from the GP’s surgery in Forest Hill in London where I was then living. A woman’s voice said ‘Your results have come back. You are pregnant.’ ‘Oh’ I said breathlessly. Inside, my heart was thumping with joy. ‘Oh please tell me it’s a girl!’ I was tempted to say but of course that would be stupid. Very.
Months later, I found myself waking up alone in a hospital bed, all oozy from the anaesthetic. A black nurse touched me and looked at me with prayerful eyes. ‘You’ve had a baby girl but she’s poorly. She’s been taken to another hospital’. Around me were other new mothers, each of them had a crib next to them with a little one tucked in a cellular white blanket. There was even a baby howling in the far corner. I sighed and drifted back to sleep, I’d had a caesarian and there was a fluid bag draining by my bedside. And a drip attached to my wrist. Not a pleasant site, me.
Walking heavily into an I.C.U. unit in a sterilised dark green gown was like entering a space station. Everything bleeped. A paediatrician had seen me the day before, ‘She’s likely to be handicapped’. ‘Handicapped’ that’s what he’d said. Then I saw her. My baby. Lying fast asleep in a transparent crib, her pale body covered in sensors and tubes. One sky blue tube was puffing oxygen into her tiny lungs. That very moment everything in me melted, every tortured feeling dissolved and alchemized into rapture. Joy. Unbridled joy. I had given birth! She was mine! My baby! All my own to hold. And, gosh, she was beautiful even with her eyes shut. Head of curly hair, shaved on the side to house a miniature drip. A sugar-carton-size of a chest rising and falling softly. Could I, dare I… touch her? I felt something gush in me. It was my breasts, they were leaking. How embarrassing! Honestly!!
A nurse with a gentle manner approached me. ‘Would you like to hold her, mum?’ ‘Mum’ she’d called me. I was a mum! Hah! Proudest mum in the world. And then with expert hands, this nurse detached a few sensors and lifted this bundle of my life’s hopes and dreams onto my open arms. Can you believe? In this space age room I was holding my own baby! A warm, breathing six and a half pounds of a cherubic life created through me. I bent down to kiss her forehead. Oh, it felt soft as a sponge. And warm. My life! You’re part of my life! My baby dear! A beloved one. A kiss I will cherish. For life. Till my travels to Estepona and West Hampstead, Harrogate, Alwoodley and Halton Moor cease. Till memories of my first job in Cross Green School fade. Till my body eventually disintegrates. In time this happens you know. Reduced to ashes. Just happens. Only… only the kiss lingers. In the almighty aether. The aether.
Jackie McHale - Cake Is A Treat - #206
Cake is a treat. I was a qualified teacher in English and Maths and then I did business consultancy. I was like a business doctor, going out and finding out what the problems were and finding solutions. And then life changes brought me to this, which I got into by accident, totally by accident. It’s the most rewarding job that I’ve ever had.
I split up with a partner after 20 years and I sold both my house and my business and bought a one way ticket to go travelling in Canada. Then my first love, Paul, contacted me after thirty years and said “Remember me?”. I ended up not going to Canada, marrying Paul and then thinking “what am I going to do now?”
I started making cakes as a hobby, for friends and family, which then went to friends of friends. Then somebody approached me and asked if I wanted a shop, which I didn’t, it was the other side of Leeds. I went to look anyway and fell in love with it. So I went to college for two years full time and learnt how to do cake decorating. To be honest, I’ve learnt more since being in the shop, but it was about taking that leap of faith in myself because it was a huge risk.
I wish I’d found cake decorating when I was at school, I wish they’d encouraged it, because it’s a huge industry, it’s a billion pound industry and it’s so rewarding. I have good qualifications and good grades, but I didn’t necessarily enjoy school and I know now that it was because school didn’t bring out the creative side of me.
The cake shop has gotten busier and busier. We have corporate events, we do cake decorating classes and we’ve worked with schools, with children that want something other than school. I absolutely love being involved in that.
I now have McHales cafe and the cake shop next door. I want to take it slowly to make sure what we’re doing we keep doing.
David Smith - Oh No, The Queen's Coming! - #207
Do you remember coal fires and visits by the chimney sweep?
They’d come and drape some thick cloth over the fireplace, then screw flexible poles together, put a big brush on the end and push it up and down the chimney to clear out all the black soot that had built up. It was necessary because soot is made up of impure carbon particles and there was always a danger that sparks from the fire would set the chimney alight.
Well, on the morning of Friday 17th October 1958, my mam managed to do just that. I remember the evil looking yellow-grey smoke coming out of our chimney pot. The problem was the Queen was due to visit Montague Burton, the founder of Burtons menswear, that very day and would be travelling back into Leeds via Hudson Road and Lupton Avenue. We lived at the bottom of Lupton Avenue. There was a mad panic, but fortunately my mam managed to put out the fire in the chimney just in time.
I still have a childhood memory of a large, gleaming black car gliding down Lupton Avenue, with Her Majesty looking regal and radiant.
Pete Briggs - Christmas Cyclist - #208
I’ve always been a cyclist. I started out as a young kid.
When I passed my 11+ I had to go to Shipley to school and that meant shutting door with me mates. It was like another world going to Bradford, so I lost contact with the folk around me. You become a loner don’t you, so I joined a cycling club. And I found friends. We were like pioneers of cycle cross – climbing over walls and forging streams with our bikes on our backs. Days before traffic on the roads. You’d drive to the coast and back, no problem.
Some years later mates and I are at an all night party on the cycling race course up at Queensbury, the highest part of Pennines around here. It were Christmas Eve and we were all drunk. Someone says “we’ll have a race round here in’t morning. For charity. In fancy dress. And we’ll stop at every pub and have a pint!” We didn’t organise it, didn’t have time for fancy dress, so we went home put some shorts on and off we go. We hadn’t told the pubs. We were racing you see, so you dashed in, pint of bitter, downed it in one and dashed out. No paying. The fourth one coming in, the landlord was like “Just a minute!” But once everyone had got that we were collecting for charity they supported it.
So following year. Right we’ll do it right! We got committed to the dressing up. I went as Santa that year then years following I got more inventive; a holly bush, a Christmas pud, a Christmas tree. One year I was a Christmas card. It was blowing a gale. The card was 6ft by 4ft and I was inside. When my bike stopped, the card swung round vertically and read Merry Christmas. Inside was a verse. I made a right effort with this one. I was driving up Queensway in a gale and wind just took me, like a cigarette packet and I landed over and below a wall in a field. Somehow still upright on the bike!
We finished up having to move it to the Sunday before Christmas because it grew to over a hundred riders.
Chris Swales - The Caterpillar Club - #209
11 Little Woodhouse Street, a brick built terrace house with an attic and cellar was where I lived with my mum, grandfather, grandmother (who I called Googie as I couldn’t pronounce grandma) and two elder brothers.This house was my home for the first few years of my life, until it was demolished in the 1960’s to make way for the dental hospital. There was a sweet shop two doors down, Tonks the bakers across the road and next door, ‘Uncle’ Jim and ‘Auntie’ Ruth – lovely kind, gentle, childless neighbours who took me on holidays and let me pretend to smoke Jim’s collection of pipes. Years later Jim got throat cancer and had his voice box removed, his speech becoming a series of rasping whispers almost impossible to decipher.
It’s funny what you remember from when you were a kid. The grandfather clock on the landing. Me, my brothers and 2 cousins all getting bathed together in the attic bathroom. The five of us sleeping top ‘n tail in the double bed. Being allowed to stay up and sit on my grandfather’s knee to watch Alfie Bass and Bill Fraser as Bootsie and Snudge in the Army Game on the black and white tv. My mum buying a pedal car for my birthday from a neighbour and having it repainted cream with bright red wheels, because she thought its silver and metallic green colour was common. In the cellar, home made ginger beer brewing and bottles exploding in the night as it fermented. The weekly wash being put through the mangle. Making a stage coach out of wooden fruit and veg boxes to play cowboys and Indians. Curling up inside an old tyre and rolling round the cellar in it. There was a dirt square at the back of the house where we used to play. Bonfire night families surrounding a huge bonfire in the square; the kids having chumped for weeks, jealously protecting their cache of wood to be burnt. Potatoes and chestnuts roasting in the glowing embers and Googie’s wonderful home made toffee threatening to pull my teeth out. My grandfather being taken away in an ambulance in the dark following a heart attack, never to return home.
My father had joined the RAF during the war, flying Spitfires in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and Italy. He was shot down twice in two days in Italy, his parachute saving his life and earning him membership of the exclusive Caterpillar Club. It was ten years later that my mother returned from Germany to the family home at 11 Little Woodhouse Street, seven months pregnant with me and my two toddler brothers in tow, with the news that my father was listed as missing presumed dead on a training flight over Germany. Neither he nor his plane was ever found.
Lesley Greenfield - What Was Once the Queen's Hotel - #210
From 1961 my parents ran The Queens Hotel on Burley Road. I worked for them in the bar until 1985 when I my first son was born. My parents had always looked out for the community, particularly a family who lived in the house behind the pub.
After my parents left, there were two more landlords and then the brewery put the pub up for sale. After we discovered Tesco’s had bought it me and my sister asked the people who were doing the refurbishment if we could go in and look around. On entering we looked at each other, because our parents would be turning in their graves, it was such a mess. Pulled up floorboards, stripped wires. The papers came and took our photograph with the pub in the background. I went back one more time, after it had become a Tesco’s.
A member of staff took me upstairs and it felt so weird. I told them “this is making me feel queasy, you’re coming up into what was our living room with a staircase that wasn’t there.”
What was my bedroom and my parents bedroom had been turned into a staff dining room and office space. Another room, was now a kitchen for baking the bread. There was a great space downstairs in the cellar, that would have been ideal for their freezers and storage. As children we’d learnt that if it was going to rain we had to run to the cellar and put buckets down, because it leaked. Tesco’s had blocked it off.
Helen Hallam - An Old Queer Woman - #211
This story is about an old, queer woman… Me.
Well I always knew, always sure, but it’s other people you see. They don’t see – or maybe they do. Well they do, of course, but best not to say.
Fourteen, having decided all the shouting, emotional stuff wasn’t going to affect me any more. My father came back from the war. I think we would call it post traumatic stress now – that was the shouting. Being a bit different… not quite… well…
Born and labeled “Boy”, but I knew this didn’t work, head and body not in sync.
I said this is who I am. Girl. “You will grow out of it, it’s a phase”. But it didn’t and it wouldn’t.
Fifteen, this is who I am. Girl. The swinging sixties had yet to begin. They said “if you keep saying these things we must see the doctor, the doctor will send you to a mental hospital.” This was 1960, read psychiatric hospital now. “Do you know what they do there? It’s electric shock, don’t think you want that!”
No I didn’t, so I manage the best I can being different. It’s the Sixties, anything goes. Long hair, long nails, unisex dressing. It was a Wow moment. I knew who I was.
Two weeks after my 15th birthday, working in a factory. The factory manager saw a bright young thing and took advantage. Raped. No place of safety. Police not interested, did nothing. Well, it was an educated middle class manager and a kid mixing with the wrong kind. No case. No prosecution, no support. Get on with it. That’s what you do.
My mother knew a man in Fashion. I have a new job. End of factory – a new more creative experience. I was good. The man sent me to do design at the local Further Education college, part time after work.
Mixing with young artists. “Would you like to be our life model?” “Is the money good?” Oh yes.
This gave me confidence to be and helped the hang-ups.
No photos available; body and mind not in sync. Photos pre-transition destroyed, torn up, burnt. Well, why would I need them?
This old, queer woman is remembering the help from the LGBT community in Malaga, Spain.
Franco dead, everyone being who they want to be, no restrictions, my lesbian friends suggested a doctor. A German, he worked with transfolk at the university… he had a practice in Marbella.
To begin the begine.
David Blakeley - Discovering Art - #212
Hi, my name is David and I’m 69. Luckily I didn’t feel my age, my wife says I don’t look my age or act like a 69 year old.
When I was as school I was always good at art. Once our children left home, it gave us both an opportunity to go to evening classes. Here I rediscovered my love of art. I did drawing, watercolour, acrylic and oil paint classes. I had written lots of poetry over the years. I discovered from my wife, that I was dyslexic, and my spelling was pretty bad.
With the help of “Spell checker computer software”, and that my job at the time involved me typing 39 hours a week, my spelling and writing improved.
Once I retired I started volunteering at Leeds Art Gallery. Here I learned more about art and was interested to find out how “The old masters” discovered techniques to help create their work. I had written a few poems about the artworks in Leeds Art Gallery. With the encouragement of “The Art Doctors” I performed some of them live in the gallery. Yes it was a bit scary, but I quit enjoyed it. On a Friday at The art gallery I joined The Meet and Make group. Here we discuss a piece of art, then make something relating to it. We made a Peace Banner as part of The Leeds double century celebration. I wrote a poem about the banner. I was then invited to perform this poem at Leeds Museum in front of 200+ people. I only knew 2 people there, so that was quite scary. I managed my performance very well and got a round of applause. As I left the stage a staff member asked if I had heard of “Heydays”, run by the West Yorkshire Playhouse. I hadn’t, but went there the following week to find out more.
I have attended quite a few courses at Leeds Art Gallery where I learn stitch craft. I really fell in love with this. It’s difficult but I love the end result and find it very theriomorphic. At Heydays I joined the creative writing group. This has help my writing ability to improve and given me enough confidence to enter some of my writing into various other writing groups. I’ve been lucky enough to have some of my writing published in The Adle parish magazine. Heyday has also helped me to be a better performer. I have used this skill at Leeds Art Gallery to tell the visitors about the artworks that I have researched. I also sold some of my artwork recently to a local bakery. I keep fit by being the only guy to attend Zumba Fitness for the last 12+ years. I My wife and I sing in a community Chior. So you could say that being retired as been a great experience so far. I hope to continue writing, performing and hopefully selling more of my artwork.
Jackie - Babysham and Brandy - #213
I was at my friend Marie’s wedding. She was marrying a kind-hearted man called Jim.
As I stood watching everyone walk up the aisle to take their places, I felt my heart jump as I noticed a good-looking man. I turned to my friend and said “Who is that?” She whispered “Jim’s brother, Howard.” When Marie found out I liked Howard, she set us up on a blind date.
He was already there when I arrived at the pub so I walked straight toward himI had the advantage of having seen him at the wedding. He asked if I wanted a drink, and as I sat down, I replied a babysham and brandy. My family had always run pubs, and I knew all the posh women always ordered that drink, so I knew that was my drink. He returned with his pint and set mine down first, as he was a true gentleman, but before he had even put his down, I had drank mine in one. I must have been more nervous than I thought, and as he was a gentleman, he didn’t comment, put his drink down and went to the bar to buy me another. When he returned and sat down, he turned to me and said, “Take your time with this one; they’re expensive.”
We had a fantastic night. I remind him that I couldn’t have been that expensive as in 1970 we married. We ended up having two children and three grandchildren.
Keith Murfitt - On A Lighter Note - #214
It was a hospital appointment that ended with:
“I have good news and bad news. The good news is we found something. It’s a one-in-a-million chance of finding it this early. The bad news is we found something, and it’s cancer.”
I carried on as normal. I was never one to give in. I love going to the gym and having the younger lads spot me. They look up to me.
“When I am your age, I want to be doing these kinds of heavyweights.” I turned round to him and said:
“My age, my age, how dare you! How old do you think I am?!” His eyes grew large, as he stuttered. Stepping back, he replied:
“I meant no offence. I thought you were in your fifties.” I threw my head back, as if in dismay.
“Fifties! Get it, right lad. I am in my seventies.” I laughed, as his mouth fell open.
The doctors started another wave of treatments, and I started the first round of medications. They were happy I was carrying on walking and going to the gym and said it would keep me going. After the first round was finished, I went back for more tests. The room felt like a spaceship, and every machine seemed to have its own orbit and noise. “I’m spending more time travelling to the hospital than sitting at home” I thought, as I listened to them discuss the next treatment.
“We will have to start you on oestrogen, as your bones will be affected by the treatment.”
I began to laugh. They looked surprised and hesitated, before speaking:
“Most men cry when hearing this; why, are you laughing?”
I looked at them sheepishly. Then a half smile curled into a reply.
“My eldest daughter is transitioning to male and has started taking testosterone so they can be who they are, to live. Now I need oestrogen, so I can live.”
I don’t know if that is funny or not, but I think it is.
Tracy Abbott - On The Bench Outside Morrisons - #215
Each week I sit on the benches outside Morrisons waiting for my taxi home. While I wait, without fail, people come and sit next to me for a chat. I wrote this poem as I often have an hour before the taxi comes!
Morrisons Bench
I could sit here all day long
Watching people going by
I wonder where they’re going
What they do, and why…
There are so many people
Whose paths will never cross
Whilst they go about their business
And daily dose of dross
I wonder where she’s going
With her nose stuck in the air
Obviously, an important person to herself
But do people really care?
A little old man comes sits with me
And tells me of his life
Carers go in apparently
As he lost his beloved wife
I wonder if I’m the only one
Who he’s spoken to today
How long he’ll live with his broken heart
I hope I see him another day
Now Ron is here to annoy me
Roy is learning disabled
Not when he’s chatting to me he’s not!
Hes a cheeky sod enabled
I say “bugger off Ron, you’re boring me”
And he collapses in fits of laughter
Treated as any other human being
Hes happy ever after
The alcoholic in his usual seat
Asking for money for ‘food’
I offer him a Morrisons sandwich
He says “I aren’t eating that muck” (how rude)
My taxi arrives, and to the counselling seats
I wave them all goodbye
And wonder who the chats benefit the most
Is it them, or is it I?
Fiona Manners - First Night Centre - #216
On one particular 13-hour shift, a young man of 21 arrived from the courts, who had been accused of a sexual offence. It was clear from the moment I met him that this was his first time in prison; he looked extremely vulnerable and scared. I assessed him, talked to him about the offence, explained the basics of the prison, what would happen on his first night and how he needed to ensure he would stay safe. I discussed “Taking the Rule”, for his own safety, which is a prisoner request to the Governor to be removed from association with other prisoners and he agreed. This enabled him to be housed safely on a wing that was allocated to vulnerable prisoners and keep him away from the general population. He was then placed on an ACCT, which is a support plan for prisoners who are at risk of self-harm or suicide. This would ensure that during his first few days he would be supported by prison officers, mental health teams, and all other agencies that were relevant to his needs.
Due to the overcrowding situation at the prison during that time, he was unable to be placed on to the vulnerable wing. Instead he remained in the First Night Centre for a couple of weeks until he was moved on to the overflow wing, where he stayed for 4 weeks. Throughout this time, I ensured that his needs were met to the best of my abilities. I don’t prejudge people, I just knew that he needed my support. After talking to him, I came to understand that he was in a terrible position and hadn’t done what he had been accused of.
He told me that he still had his key for his student accommodation and needed to hand it to his mum so she could gain access to his belongings and clear his flat. It was at this point I became involved with his family. I made numerous phone calls to his mum to keep her in the picture and met with her and his grandma for a handover of his property.
When he was finally moved from the overflow wing to the vulnerable wing he felt safer, became calmer and I felt he didn’t need me quite as much. However, I still maintained a weekly visit to see him, just to make sure he was ok. He was finally found not guilty at court, and I didn’t see him again. However, I received a letter from him thanking me for everything that I had done. That same year I received a Christmas card from his family thanking me. I think I was just an older female that he felt safe with in his mum’s absence, and I was glad that I was able to support him during such a difficult time.
Steph - Correct Plumbing - #217
When I was around four or five, my mum gave me a yellow a-line skirt with a big lacy petticoat underneath. It was much too big for me, but my mum went into the kitchen and got safety pins to pin it around me. It had tiny bluebells on and I used to love to dance in it. Looking back, this was the fifties, it must have been pretty revolutionary because the norm of that era was conversion therapy. The parents of one trans woman I know sat her in an old tin bath, poured cold water and ice over her and then forced her to drink a concoction that made her vomit while forcing her to look in a mirror.
Fortunately, my parents were not like that. When I was six or seven, I started stealing my sister’s clothes and stuffed them under the floorboards. I was playing netball with the girls at playtime in primary school. After school, I used to go to my grandparents with my sister. I was good at reading, and used to read The Sunday People and The News of the World and saw how they exposed gay MPs. I could also read the agony aunts column where people wrote in for advice. Letters from women saying they had caught their husbands in bras and panties and they didn’t know what to do, appeared regularly.
When I was in secondary school, I did attempt to play football and cricket, but I wasn’t good. I loved rounders and talking to the girls. I asked them what they thought I should do after we left school, and they told me I would make a fantastic hairdresser. I went to Southampton technical college, but didn’t enjoy it much as the other girls were really bitchy. After college I continued worked on the technical side, going into salons and showing them the new products. I ended up working for a global company and did quite well.
At twenty I met and married my wife. She accepted I was different and even let me dress female with her. She didn’t mind. I was always lucky to pass as a man or a woman and not have any trouble. My legs and feet have always been womanly, and I never grew an Adam’s apple. I have always wondered if there was a degree of intersex in me. We had three children. My wife used to operate a cross-dressing agency under the alias Marie; men could go shopping with her and dress as women, and she would do their make-up and hair. I wasn’t involved in that business; she continued it for several years. We were married for 27 years, but in 1998 I heard her on the phone with her new partner. Within four days, she was gone. I lost my marriage and my best friend. I was a single parent for a year and a half. I remarried, gained two more stepchildren, and then adopted another. I also changed careers. I have worked with pregnant women for close to forty years, mainly researching sudden infant death syndrome. I worked as a consultant with a major UK organisation and two charities. My consultancy led me to working with celebrities during their pregnancy. I could tell you some stories, but I am not going to!
I started my transition when I was fifty-eight. My second wife and daughter came with me to complete my last hospital surgery in 2019. I am very aware of people asking what is a woman. Gender-critical people are pushing it into the media. But they focus on the biology. Another way to look at it is to understand what we mean when ask what is a parent? There are biological parents, but not all parents are biological. Parents can be step-parents, adoptive parents, but we still consider them parents. I think we need to use a similar analogy for transgender men and women. They may not have all the correct plumbing, but it doesn’t stop who they are.
Stuart - Twelve Months at Her Majesty's Pleasure - #218
April – I get COVID and have a terrible headache. I ask for paracetamol. Nurse refuses because her computer is not working.
May – I am served, a small tub of grated cheese, on a plate at lunch time. I politely ask where my bap is, to be told, “We’ve run out.”
June – I walk into the office to see a female officer applying her lipstick.
She stops and asks, “What do you think of that?”
I reply “You should have been a doctor, Miss, you’ve cured me!”
“What was wrong?” she asks.
“I was impotent until I met you, Miss.”
July – Our English teacher rings over to the wing to ask where all her K Wing students are. The officer tells her we have all refused to attend. The reality is that the new officer has forgotten to unlock us.
September – I overhear the screws praying for another lockdown, so they can sit in the office and do nothing for another six months
October – I hear rumours that I am being transferred, even though I am on medical hold at the prison. A nice screw tells me, “Just say you have taken an overdose, then they can’t move you.”
November – One week in my life totally lost, due to the Moderna vaccine nearly killing me!
December – Best Christmas dinner I’ve had for a long time.
January – One of the other prisoners on my wing sets fire to himself and his cell. Halfway through this process he decides it’s not such a good idea. Due to staff shortages, no one answers his calls for ten minutes.
February – I receive a Valentine’s card. I still have no idea who from.
March – I’m waiting in the meds queue, minding my own business, when I hear gates being slammed. I look up to see an officer, running past me, crying and slamming all the gates, having a full on breakdown.
Jonny - Forty Seven Seconds - #219
Forty Seven Seconds
That’s all it took.
Lives shattered and changed forever. No one won, everyone lost.
This isn’t a tale of self pity, I am deservedly here – even after eighteen years
If only. If only I’d been five minutes late our paths would not have crossed, but they did.
This could happen to almost anyone I think. Call it a tragic fate. Don’t think so. I am a father, son, brother, uncle, cousin to many.
I have an academic and business background I was a professional in my field. I had a beautiful house with my wife in Alwoodley
I used to drop into The Roundhay Fox for a bite, then walk around Tropical World. I`d call into San Carlo’s, then shop on Street Lane. I’d buy some snacks from Sainsbury’s then picnic by the lake.
These were my weekends bookending the Monday to Friday monotony. Except for the forty seven seconds how different was my life to yours?