by Michael Sharpe
I am not by nature or nurture much given to nostalgia. As an historian by profession I have to look at the past dispassionately and to allow myself a sentimental attachment to yesterday would be the equivalent of a hypochondriacal physician: they exist, of course, but they aren't very good at what they do. The flooding in the English Lake District at the beginning of the year, however, caused me to indulge in my least favourite sin.
I was watching the television news when I saw the item reporting that a tranche of the A591 trunk road had been swept away, thus severing the link between the town of Keswick and the village of Grasmere. I was instantly taken back in my imagination to another year and another village.
The year was 1963 and the village was Penousell, a settlement of some 1200 souls situated at the far end of Byrdale, a Lakeland valley running alongside the Langdales with one way in and the same way out. 1963 suffered, of course, in the coldest British winter for 200 years which brought the country to an almost dead stop for two months or more. It seems strange now to think that as recently as 1980 the weather boffins were frightening us with warnings of the new ice age just around the corner.
The bad weather set in for real just after Christmas Day 1962 when the winds howled and the snows fell, not just on the high grounds or the north or easterly regions away from the Gulf Stream, but everywhere in the country. The only road out of Penousell, the B5282 which links the village to the above mentioned A591, was blocked immediately by snow, particularly at Penolpas, a high narrow bend below which Ousell Beck flows at its fastest. But even the swift waters could not prevent the build up of snow.
The people of the Lake District are hardy folk, and with the aid of a snowplough from Westmorland County Council and scores of volunteers with shovels and wheel barrows, including a number of farmers who had managed to get their tractors off the farm, a single track was cleared. Penousell was reconnected to the A591 and via that highway to the railway network. This meant that those children who had to leave the village for their education could now travel daily to their schools, much to the chagrin of many of them.
There was a small primary school in Penousell which catered for thirty or so children from the village and outlying farms. This was headed by Mrs Edith Torney, a sound middle-aged Cumbrian lady, ably assisted by the young Miss Amy Chadwick. From the Lancashire branch of the family, she was a pretty little thing and an unusual mixture of shyness and determination in equal proportions. This was her first post after leaving training college.
Over the age of 11, children had to travel out of the village to school. Other than private schools, there were effectively three options, being Lakeside Grammar School for Boys, Lakeside High School for Girls, or the co-educational Mere Secondary Modern. Of course, since the great egalitarian drive against elitism these three establishments have been merged into a single mega-school, the tautologically named Lakemere Comprehensive.
The snows continued to fall and the Penousell volunteers continued to clear the road until by the middle of January the snow banks were many feet high and Ousell Beck completely invisible. Then disaster struck. There was a minor local thaw. The temperature barely rose by a degree but it was sufficient to destabilise the snow piled high on the slopes of Byrdale, and at Penolpas it began to slip. The ice walls along the road were unsupported and collapsed under the weight of the sliding snow which tumbled down onto the road.
Meanwhile, although covered by snow and out of sight, Ousell Beck had not stopped flowing and by this time had hollowed itself a grotto in the ice through which to run. So when the avalanche plunged over the road it collapsed the roof of the Beck's tunnel. At first this blocked the Beck at Penolpas and snow and river water backed up upstream. The barrier did not hold for long and when it was breached it disappeared almost instantly and thousands of gallons of water spewed down the valley.
The combination of the flood and the avalanche swept away the road around the Penolpas and the village of Penousell was cut off completely. The electricity and telephone connections which were on the other side of the valley remained intact and the War Office and Air Ministry, (now merged as the Ministry of Defence) were called in to keep the village supplied.
At the time, the name of Penousell was on the front page of every newspaper and even the BBC did an outside broadcast feature. The village pub, The Rising Sun, had run out of beer, and as a publicity stunt, Scottish and Newcastle Brewery had arranged to supply it by air. I still have the picture in my mind of the presenter talking to the camera in his rich Scottish burr while over his shoulder a Royal Navy Westland Wessex helicopter was hovering with a keg of beer on a cable below it. By his side was Alice Darlington, the pub landlady, grinning like a loon and delighted to be on TV. Happy days!
I had just turned 14 and was in the third year of Lakeside Grammar. Attending the Grammar School might suggest that I was of an academic bent, and so I was, but not so much to stop me looking forward to an unscheduled break from school. I figured that my schooling would not be too severely affected as long as our isolation did not last more than two weeks... well two or three weeks, probably a month at most.
But it was not to be. That is to say that although we were actually cut off for a couple of months, our education was not suspended. Mrs Pilsbury, amongst others, saw to that. Mrs Pilsbury, a large wobbly lady in her late 50's, was the Chairwoman of the Parish Council and stood for the 'something must be done' party. The something to be done on this occasion was to dragoon the stranded secondary school pupils on to Edith Turney's primary school. Unfortunately Mrs Turney lived down the valley and was cut off from Penousell, leaving the young, inexperienced Miss Amy Chadwick in charge - and alone. This concerned Mrs Pilsbury not one jot. Unlike many large wobbly ladies, Mrs Pilsbury was not laid back and affable, she was dynamic, interfering, and one hundred and one percent confident in her own abilities. She was also utterly incompetent, but this did not stop her offering her services to Miss Chadwick, which in practice meant that she took charge and left all the work to the younger woman.
It did not have to be like this for there was another resource in the village so far untapped. Sometime during last summer a visitor had appeared and taken a small cottage on a twelve-month lease. She kept herself to herself but she was no timid recluse running away from the world, she simply wanted some time alone. Otherwise she proved herself a very capable young woman particularly when dealing with those, such as Mrs Pilsbury, who sought to invade her privacy on the pretext of giving a helping hand.
Inevitably, details leaked out. She was Constance Blanch, a high flying academic who had been making a reputation for herself as an educator in a prestigious school in Oxford. Then we discovered that she had taken time out to complete her great work on the role of women in the formal education of the male, after which she would return to teaching as Deputy Headmistress of Lakeside High School for Girls. This was news to the incumbent Deputy as she had no idea that she was retiring in the foreseeable future.
More news leaked out. It appeared that Dr Blanch had been involved in an affair of a certain notoriety and she had retired to the Lakes to sit out the scandal it had provoked. You see, one pair of village lips would whisper into a village ear, she had enjoyed a liaison with a certain Oxford academic of note: one who regularly sent spinning the hearts of ladies of a certain age when they viewed his intellectual discussion programme broadcast late in the evening on the BBC.
Tongues and ears wagged even more when it was discovered that Professor Beecham had left the City of Dreaming Spires to take up a new post as Chair of Philosophy at Galton University, our nearest university. It was the first time an avant-garde thinker had ever been appointed to this venerable office.
It is unlikely that Mrs Pilsbury would have sanctioned any involvement by Dr Blanch in the emergency schooling arrangements no matter what her history: her competence alone would have seen to that. But the hint of scandal gave Mrs Pilsbury the moral hook on which she could hang her case against Dr Blanch, and consequently the most experienced educator in the village was ignored.
The new arrangements began on the first Monday after the landslide. The school house, a traditional lakeland stone and slate building, had two classrooms, the larger of which also served as the hall for morning assembly and had an old upright piano in one corner. There was a staff room which doubled as the school office and infirmary if necessary, a small kitchen, the staff toilets and girls' toilets. The boys' toilets were separate, unroofed and situated across the playground.
The student body was not in full complement. Many of them were farm children and were absent either because the farms in which they lived were cut off, or their parents had kept them back to help with the farm work. Some secondary school children had been sent down the valley to stay with friends or relations when the bad weather had first set in.
In attendance was a gang of twenty-two primary school children and seventeen secondary school pupils, seven boys and ten girls, one of whom, I was delighted to see, was Louise Brindley, a seventeen-year-old on whom I had developed a mighty crush. She was the daughter of my mother's best friend in the village so I had known her since I had arrived at Penousell at the age of twelve. As my teenage hormones kicked in so did my infatuation with Louise.
At a couple of inches over 5 feet tall she was already shorter than me. She was a brunette with naturally sleek wavy hair and she used on it none of the artificial setting or perming devices which were common in those days. She had warm brown eyes, and beautifully sculpted lips with dimples which appeared at the corners when she smiled. It was that smile that I had noticed first and which sent my heart soaring with joy whenever I saw it. To be ultra critical, perhaps she still retained a little adolescent plumpness, and her legs, shapely as they were, might have been longer, but I thought her the most beautiful girl in the world: and, joy of joys, I was to spend the next few weeks in her company.
Mrs Pilsbury took charge. The school would be split between the primary and secondary children. Thinking that the primary children would be less challenging than the older group, Mrs Pilsbury took charge of these. The younger children, she explained to anyone who would listen, required such careful handling that it would be unfair to expect the inexperienced Miss Chadwick to cope with them on her own. Miss Chadwick would have charge of the less demanding secondary school pupils who could look after themselves. Besides, she could use Louise Brindley as her teaching assistant.
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