Yorkshire: There And Back
Andrew Martin Corsair €25 ★★★★★
In this funny and touching book Andrew Martin celebrates England’s most charismatic county. The success of television programmes such as Our Yorkshire Farm, The Yorkshire Vet and of course the All Creatures Great And Small remake demonstrate Yorkshire’s pulling power. One writer has put it down to ‘a yearning for stunning scenery, traditional lifestyles and down-to-earth personalities’ arising from Covid-era anxiety. Martin is, thank goodness, unconvinced by this cod-psychology, as he returns from London to his native York.
He describes visits in the region, interlacing the travel writing with memoirs of his childhood. The strongest chapters recall Martin’s youth in York with his father, a British Rail manager widowed when his son was still young. Mr Martin Sr emerges as a dry, original man with some unique rules for living (‘Smokers are the best people; they’ll always look after you,’ he advises little Andrew early on) and the sort of decent, working-class-made-good, job-for-life man that has all but disappeared from modern life. Some writers would have been more sentimental about him and the relationship; the restraint makes this an endearing book about dads and lads, as well as times and places. Martin is a journalist and novelist with splendid observational skills and a warm, comic touch, and he spots regional characteristics others have missed. Rather than harp on the famous bluff manner of speaking, for example, he points out that it has a dreamy twin found in the likes of Alan Bennett, as well as his own father.
Similarly, he contrasts the parsimonious asceticism with a sweet tooth that meant the region had far more confectionary manufacturers than any other, giving the world chocolate oranges, Pontefract cakes (left: a 1923 advertisement) and Kit-Kats. Delightful and unexpected facts abound: who knew that the London Tube map was allegedly inspired by York’s medieval street pattern? There are a few mistakes – the suggestion that Hull is on the southern rather than northern bank of the Humber, which would put it in Lincolnshire. But more memorable is his portrait of a place making the painful transition from a communal, industrial culture to one based on leisure, services and individuals. At one poignant moment, Martin confesses that, as an adult in London, he still wakes in the night to hear the sound of diesel engines shunting truckloads of chocolate, before realising it is an ‘aural hallucination’.
In Martin’s gruff but dreamy Yorkshire, he finds people who are engaging, tolerant and understanding. Which may be why those TV programmes are doing so well.