These are memories from two magical Christmases spent in the Yorkshire Dales—1981 and 1982. They’ve blurred together a bit over time, so I couldn’t tell you exactly what happened in which year. But one thing I do remember, clearly: there was snow. Proper, deep snow.
The first time we went, we arrived by train from London, and the taxi could only get us as far as the top of the lane into Newbiggin. The road was buried, completely impassable, so we ended up trudging down through knee-deep drifts, dragging our bags behind us like a couple of frozen pack mules, until we reached the Grange—Uncle Bernard and Aunt Dilys’s beautifully restored seventeenth-century farmhouse.
I’d been there once before, during the Mallorca days, but that trip had been a strange one. I was anxious, for reasons that weren’t entirely clear to me at the time, though I now understand a lot of it had to do with my parents, and the general feeling that things were starting to unravel. Looking back, I’d probably inherited a bit of that anxious wiring myself. But this time, things felt different. For one, I had my SKB shotgun with me—transported legally in a wooden case I’d made myself—and the plan was simple: get up early, head out with my mum, and see if we could bag a pheasant.
I couldn’t sleep the night before. Never could before a shoot.
We headed out at first light, walking down the snow-covered lane, and we hadn’t gone far when we rounded a bend and startled a cock pheasant that burst into flight right in front of us. I didn’t hesitate. One clean shot and it dropped. I was beside myself. We took it back to Uncle Bernard—who I pretty much idolised—and he was genuinely impressed. We hung it by the neck in the larder, just like you’re meant to.
Over the next few days I also managed to shoot a hare and a rabbit. For Christmas, Sally gave me a copy of Come Dawn, Come Dusk by Norman Mercell—a gamekeeper’s diary that I read cover to cover—and Uncle Bernard and Aunty Dilys gave me a small leather-bound logbook for recording my kills, which I still have. I filled it with pencil drawings of pheasants and rabbits copied from the book, and in between long board game sessions, I wandered around the house in a kind of quiet teenage bliss. My crush on Sally was growing stronger, of course, but I was still pretending I hadn’t noticed.
The next Christmas I would’ve been about fourteen, and while it was just as magical in many ways, the highlight this time wasn’t a pheasant—it was alcohol. Bernard had a selection of homemade country wines—thistle, elderberry, things like that—and I’d been allowed the odd small glass here and there. But the big event was when my cousin Bill decided to take me to the Street Head Inn. Bill is about 10 years my senior.
It was just down the road from the Grange—maybe 150 metres—and there was a pool night on. Bill ordered me a pint, which I accepted while trying to act like it was the most normal thing in the world. I played surprisingly well, so he bought me another. Then another. I’ve got no idea how many I had in the end, but by the time we left—well after closing time, blinds drawn so the local bobby wouldn’t see—we were both completely smashed.
The cold outside hit me like a punch to the chest and I started to realise how drunk I actually was.
We made it back to the Grange, and just as Bill was opening the front door, Uncle Bernard appeared. He looked at me—wobbling, flushed, obviously plastered—and said, very quietly, “You get upstairs.” Then he turned to Bill and absolutely tore strips off him.
I crept upstairs while the shouting continued below. My mum and I were sharing a room—two single beds with a little table in between—and as I stumbled in, she looked up from her book, took one look at me, and said, “You’re pissed.”
She was right, of course.
I climbed into bed, and the moment I lay down the room started spinning. I lunged for the wastepaper basket—metal, mercifully—and threw up everything. No style, no mystery. Just a fourteen-year-old with too much Yorkshire Bitter in his bloodstream and no idea how to hide it.
The next morning I begged her not to tell anyone. Swore it was just a blip. But when I came downstairs for breakfast, it was obvious they all knew. Everyone was grinning. Not unkindly—just the sort of laughter that families reserve for the moments when you’ve made a complete fool of yourself and they’re too pleased to let it go quietly.
A few days later, Bill insisted on taking me out again—this time to a another pub, some distance away, that served Marston’s Pedigree, which he swore was in a league of its own. And to be fair, it was.
I still love the Dales. I was back there just last year, in June, staying with Aunty Dilys, who’s well into her nineties now, and Bill was there looking after her. I went back to the Street Head, which has changed hands of course, but not its bones. I ended up telling the new landlord all these stories—he laughed out loud. That’s the thing about places like that. The paint changes, the faces change, but the spirit of the place holds.
That first pheasant. That first real hangover. That first feeling that the Dales weren’t just somewhere we visited—they were stitched into something much deeper. At the time, I didn’t know I’d remember it all in such detail. But here I am, nearly forty years later, still seeing it in my mind as clearly as the day it happened.