Racing the Wind: A Cumbrian Childhood

by Patricia Nolan

Overview

This powerful and beautifully-written account is the memoir of Patricia Nolan who lived in a tiny community in Cumbria and it captures the end of an era in the 1950s.
'When the first organ-transplant was taking place, when computers were starting to revolutionise our lives and television was arriving in the sitting-rooms of Britain, in my house we were still dipping buckets into a stream to make a cup of tea and going to bed by candlelight,' she writes.
The tale covers three years of the author's life, made particularly vivid by a traumatic event which opens the book, but which goes on to depict a poor but close rural community with its village school, its annual country show, its Christmas celebrations and its local characters - all set against the dramatic back-drop of Scafell and the surrounding hills and moors on which she and her friends ran free.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781913159139
Publisher:	Merlin Unwin Books
Publication date:	11/15/2019
Sold by:	Bookwire
Format:	eBook
Pages:	144
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Patricia Nolan, published poet and novelist, was born in Cumbria and attended her local village school of Boot before being awarded a scholarship to Keswick School. Her mother ran the little Boot post office.
Patricia's career was in teaching and she now lives in Belsize Park, London. She served as a Justice of the Peace for a decade at Willesden Magistrates Court.

Read an Excerpt

Unless it snowed, or froze so hard we could skate on small ponds and tarns, we were not too keen on winter, and seemed to be perpetually cold. Normally a house had only one source of heat which was an open fire in the main room. Our cottage had a black Victorian range, with grate, oven, a small boiler for heating water (which did not work) and a hob at the side for a kettle or pan. With no electricity, most of the cooking and baking took place here, with a primus stove as a back-up.
By the evening the heat had built up, and these were the cosiest times for me. The curtains would be drawn, the Tilley lamp lit, fuelled by paraffin and pumped to give a strong light, then placed on the table. An oil lamp would sit in the corner behind what used to be my father's chair, and a shovel of coal and a couple of logs were thrown on to the fire. I would be at the table in the pool of light reading or doing a crossword in my comic, Mum knitting or working on a rag rug. Occasionally cinders dropped from the fire into the ash underneath, the most comforting sound you could ever imagine.
At bedtime, it was a cold wash in the kitchen or possibly a sluice down in a zinc bath in front of the fire, using kettles of hot water. Then a candle was lit and carried upstairs to a freezing bedroom, where, amidst the quivering shadows, the nightly check for witches and wolves took place, and then into an icy bed, with a stone hot water bottle if the weather was particularly raw.
Sometimes friends would arrive later and make up a four for whist, after which my mother made a hot drink and they sat talking for hours. I used to listen to the rise and fall of voices and the occasional burst of laughter, and wonder how they found enough to talk about. But in those days topics were discussed and sifted, old times revisited and amusing incidents related. Conversation was an art and an entertainment which everyone had to learn, or they made poor company. There was no competition from television, and the radio was only switched on for certain programmes, the news, a comedy show or music for my mother, who in the mornings sang along to the latest songs in a dreadful voice.

Table of Contents

1 Dark Days, Silver Threads 7

2 Guided by the Moon 19

3 Village School 29

4 Elderlies, Family and The Old Ways 39

5 A Grand Day 63

6 Moving On 75

7 Jack's Bus 85

8 An Abundance of Holly 97

9 A Quarter of Bulls' Eyes 107

10 Last Days 119

Eskdale Recipes 131