You can learn a lot about someone from the pile of books that accumulates next to them. Amongst Barbara’s current reading is The Blackbird Diaries: A Year with Wildlife by Karen Lloyd, who is based in the limestone country of the Southern Lake District.
I’m trying out one of the ‘Realistic Watercolor’ brushes in the latest version of Clip Studio Paint; after quickly sketching with the pencil tool, I go for the Real G-Pen then try the new Rough Wash brush. In the real world, I’d never try for such a rugged effect in my ink or watercolour washes, but perhaps I should give it a go. After forty-odd years in the business, trying something different is one of the reasons that I keep experimenting with drawing on the iPad.
For the tall, folksy hand-lettering, I took my cue from Andrew Forteath’s striking, friendly cover design for the paperback.
The Travel Club
Back row: Ian Morley (like me, a member of the Great I-SPY Tribe), Trevor Wales, Marshall Coates
Boy on rock: unknown
Middle row: Remember him, but can’t remember his name, Peter Coates, Stephen Downing, Robert Bishop
Front: Richard Bell, Adrian Littlewood
Photograph, Derek Harker (or possibly Mr Lindley).
Horbury Carnegie Free Library, last Saturday, 11.45 a.m.
“Let’s see, is there anything I’d be interested in?”
It’s my teacher from junior school, Derek Harker, who’s interested in the books that Barbara is packing away in her bag.
“The Blackbird Diaries: A Year with Nature, by Karen Lloyd, that should be right up your street,” I suggest, reading the blurb, “and she won the Striding Edge award for the Lakeland Book of the Year.”
“Put my name down for it! Have you ever walked along Striding Edge?”
“No, that’s far too dangerous for me!”
“Striding Edge isn’t dangerous, I’ve walked it several times. Sharp Edge on Blencathra is the dangerous one.”
In my second year at St Peter’s Junior School, Horbury, 1959-1960, Derek organised a Travel Club for our class. We’d contribute sixpence a week and sometimes the walk would start from the school on a Saturday morning and cost nothing but, when enough sixpences had accumulated, we’d go further afield, for instance taking the train from Horbury Station to Hebden Bridge for an evening walk to Hardcastle Crags.
The photograph of us in Honister Pass was a couple of years later, in our final term at the school, taking things one stage further and setting off for a week’s Youth Hostelling, walking from Keswick to Buttermere, with a couple of nights at Borrowdale along the way.
Barbara started at the same school a few years later but she never got the opportunity to head for the hills. So why was St Peter’s so focussed on hill-walking in the early 1960s? A lot of it was down to the headmaster, Mr Douglas, who was a keen fell-walker but the Travel Club was Mr Harker’s initiative. I’d often wondered how it all started and on Saturday he told me that his enthusiasm for the great outdoors started during his school days.
In the final months of World War II, Derek and other boys from his school, Thornes House, Wakefield, went off on the first of several annual camps, a kind of boys’ version of the Land Girls, to help with forestry in North Wales. He was sixteen at the time, so he and his classmates were capable of helping out with tasks such as clearing debris.
One of his friends had built himself a battery-powered radio, which was about the size of a shoe-box.
“One evening he rushed from his tent shouting ‘They’ve dropped the A-bomb!’ I didn’t even know what the A-bomb was.
“My brother, who was older than me, had been serving on an aircraft carrier in the North Sea, protecting convoys, but by the end of the war they were sent to join the effort to defeat the Japanese. They’d just arrived when news came that the bomb had been dropped. The Japanese in New Guinea surrendered immediately.”
Links
Karen Lloyd, award winning writer and environmental activist
Andrew Forteath, Glasgow-based designer