Grandfather Newmarch

From time to time I may include the writing of others here … this is an essay my father wrote after he had retired and was taking a Creative Writing course. Parts of something like this may find their way into a projected memoir I am compiling….

Grandfather Newmarch

By John Graham Shaw

You must refer to the register in the old Parish Church of Thornton Curtis, in the county of Humberside, England, for an unbroken succession of Newmarch generations, dating back to 1536 AD in the same village. However, with the passing of my maternal grandfather, Frederick Neville Newmarch, followed by the death of his only sister, my great aunt Ada Mary Newmarch, and predeceased by his only son, Daniel, the family name has ceased in that district.

            For many years this rural community regarded Fred and Ada as characters, among its many other eccentric personages, where he was the village postman and she, a late-married ex-school teacher, owned the only general store on the high street.

            When on duty he wore the official uniform provided by the General Post Office, and, while not frail, he was painfully thin, and the high-necked, navy blue jacket enveloped him too generously, and the red-striped trousers were too baggy at the knees and seat. However both of these garments looked tailor made when he donned his shiny black leather belt, and crowned with his special cap, with its patent leather peaks front and back , and his silver badge of authority, he mounted his once pillar box red bike and made his daily rounds, delivering the mail, in all weathers, throughout the hamlet from the carriers affixed to the handlebars and over the rear wheel.

            It was when he was off duty that this minor government official blossomed into an authentic north-countryman, and the real Fred Newmarch emerged, as a wiry, strong, healthy individual, with irregular, tobacco-stained teeth and a walrus moustache; short, sparse, grey hair, bright blue, humourous eyes behind small much-repaired spectacles; all with a broad Lincolnshire-accented manner of speech.

            The better items of his civilian attire had once belonged to the local squire, and had been given to my grandmother Newmarch by his widow after her husband’s demise. The lord of the manor had been of robust girth, and the jacket, waistcoat and trousers provided their new wearer with more than ample room to wield a scythe, plunge a garden fork, or swing an axe, without restriction or restraint.

            The materials of these cast offs were of the finest weavings of selected pure wools, in the subtle earth tones so favoured by the gentry of England. It was a further tribute to their high quality and durability that they served their quite unimpressed recipient so well through so many more years of hard wear, and total neglect, before he, in turn, discarded them as being tattered beyond the limits of respectability.

            This once new clothing soon took a more comfortable, lived-in aspect, and the earth tones became downright shabby, even when set off by an inexpensive watch chain hanging between the pockets of the once canary yellow waistcoat. The weather beaten, thin face was topped by a battered, shapeless tweed hat, and his feet were encased in enormous, muddy, hob-nailed boots. This picture of elderly rural manhood was always replete with a gnarled, cherry-wood pipe, with a smouldering wad of foul smelling navy shag tobacco.

            In either of his guises he addressed everyone, young or old, male or female, with “Halooo theeer, Bill” and he, in his turn, was affectionately known everywhere in the district as Old Bill.

            At all times he deliberately cultivated the broadest of rural Lincolnshire accents, and enjoyed the farce of being tape recorded by earnest students of dying north country dialects. They were most anxious to capture his archaic speech patterns before the BBC succeeded in inflicting a standard English pronunciation across the land, to almost perfectly emulate its continuous output of radio and television broadcasts.

            During the summer months grandfather Newmarch joined great aunt Ada’s husband, Fred Lacey, and on their bicycles, with ther elderly but able-bodied men, took their hand scythes, sharpening stones, oil cans, homemade bread, sandwiching thick slabs of fat pork bacon, wedges of cheddar cheese, homegrown tomatoes, an apple from their jointly owned tree, accompanied by a dark green bottle filled with refreshing, cold, sweet tea, to augment their meager incomes by cutting and tidying the long grass and edges at the sides of the paved roads throughout the Parish. They each received a miniscule stipend from the local municipality for this strenuous chore; but successfully negotiated an unofficial bonus from a local farmer in exchange for the grass cuttings to supplement his store of cattle fodder for the winter season.

            These roadside maintenance duties were regularly extended by the same team of scythe wielders into the churchyard, where grave visitors admired the high quality of their graveyard maintenance performance.

            Clad in their Sunday best suits of serviceable dark serge, wearing squeaky, black, medium duty boots, and sporting freshly laundered, but tieless shorts, many of these same men, including Old Bill and great-uncle Fred, made up a team of accomplished bell ringers. Each Sunday morning the village of Thornton Curtis was filled with the exquisite sound of differing peals and complex changing sequences from the large number of bells in the tower, all tolled manually by long, tasseled ropes from an upper gallery platform by this modest body of experts.

            In addition to these daily, weekly, and seasonal activities, “Old Bill” panted and dug up all the vegetables and fruit needed by his large family. At the end of a long, narrow, cultivated garden stood, next to the outhouse and chicken run, a well-kept pig sty with its well-fed occupant; bought as a piglet, and brought to an impressive size by a regular diet of swill and kitchen scraps. At the proper time, the fully grown pig was taken to the village butcher who, for a small fee, processed it humanely into hams, roasts, bacon, pies, and sausages in sufficient quantities to serve as meals for several months to come; during which time the next piglet was installed and nurtured towards a similar future fate; but always addressed by my grandfather with “Halo theeer, Bill”, with the utmost courtesy.

            His post office route, garden, chickens and pig-keeping chores, gossiping with his cronies, quaffing an occasional pint of ale, were interrupted at regular intervals by the need to fetch drinking water from the single pump, which served the whole village. The imposing edifice of weathered, unpainted wood, with its shiny, well-used timber handle worked surprisingly well, considering the total lack of any systematic, authorized maintenance of its mysterious working parts, and its constant year round use. The water, brought to the surface from an inexhaustible subterranean spring was copious, cold and crystal clear at all times. Conveying the water from this pump to the large clay urns in the cool, stone floored kitchen larders of each household, depended on a variety of means; ranging from two buckets suspended and balanced from a wooden shoulder yoke to a quite sophisticated vertical, open-topped, cylindrical vessel of galvanized iron, pivoted from the trunnions of a two-wheeled trolley of cast-iron, propelled manually by two handles and equipped with a floating, circular, wooden board to control wave action and to prevent spillage during its travel over rough terrain. Because of their cost these mobile water tanks were jointly owned and shared by several families, and my grandfather subscribed to one of these mutual arrangements.

            Water for laundry, ablutions and gardening were separately supplied from rain barrels, replenished by rainfall drained from the tiled roof slopes of the individual cottages.

            Although a man of amiable disposition, popular with all those on his postal route; especially with babies and school children, who all loved to be greeted by the uniformed postman with “Haloooo theeer, Bill”, he nevertheless had a short explosive temper. This manifested itself most often against his faithful old bike, whenever it gave trouble through a breakdown of its elderly moving parts, or when the oft-mended tires sprang yet another leak. At such times he has been known to kick the offending steed, throw it at the nearest wall, and at times of extreme provocation to lay it down and jump on it, while filling the air with loud blasphemous oaths peculiar to that part of Lincolnshire.

            As was usual with north country folk, the meals were always regular, ample and nourishing. The only unusual arrangement at the Newmarch table concerned the mid-day dinner, at which the dessert was served and eaten before the main course of meat and vegetables. As my grandfather explained to me: “…sithee, Bill lud, tha doesn’t neard soo mooch meart ufta thy pudd’n…” which one of the forementioned students of country dialects might have translated as: “…see here, after a great helping of inexpensive suet pudding and custard sauce, even an active ditch digger has a reduced appetite, satisfied by much less of the expensive meat course to follow…”

            The effective economics of this unusual meal sequence had been necessary to sustain his large family on a small weekly wage from the Post Office, and with other unusual practices became his lifelong pattern for the stringent management of his very limited resources. His supper, before retiring to bed, never varied from a large bowl of cubed, stale bread, soaked in hot milk, with sugar, accompanied by a huge mug of strong tea.

            Notwithstanding his normally frugal attitude to material needs, he had an ungovernable passion for old, non-functioning clocks. Each year he would visit the annual Brigg Fair in search of yet another one of these to add to his large collection, with nary a “tick” or a “tock” between them. His avowed intention was to repair each and every one, one of these days; but like all true procrastinators, together with his lack of patience, and absence of manual dexterity, that day never dawned; and the ever growing collection of dormant old clocks became an ongoing family joke, and a progressive strain on available, suitable storage space in his small cottage.

            His peaceful passing, the result of old age, came after keeping intact his lifelong avoidance of the medical profession and its related institutions. Attesting to his popularity a great number of people attended his funeral, where only a few hundred feet separated his cottage, with his surviving widow, from the well-tended churchyard, where he lays in a modest grave, with a small granite headstone, the last male of a long respected lineage.

            The Newmarch surname has been continued as a Christian name in the person of my eldest granddaughter, Florence Newmarch Shaw, of Toronto, Canada. She will likely travel to England one day, curious to pursue the Lincolnshire source and ancestry associated with her middle name; and to explore the village of her great-great-grandfather, “Old Bill”.