I can turn in any direction and tell you what’s where, but I have little idea of the places on the other side of the hills.
That’s the thing with a valley. It traps you. Or does it protect you? Does it restrict you or keep you safe? You want to go over to the other side, but there’s risk involved.
Smells of cordite and wood-burners waft across the fields, and it starts to rain. Light but spiteful. Enough to make you put your hood up. Enough to put most people off from venturing out.
The streets are empty, exuding a sad pleasantry that reminds me of Covid walks. A noise emerges from a tree, housing a congregation of starlings, its choir in fine voice – more ovid than Covid. More singing in that one tree than in the church up the road, I imagine.
The cricket field where dad scored his only century is empty, the bench with his name inscribed on it safe inside the pavilion, protected from the winter to come. The football field where he spent years playing as a no-nonsense defender, is absent of signs of life too.
I stop and picture him scoring from the half-way line against Earby in 1975, only it’s his ghost hitting the back of the net now. A fantastic goal that I alone in the world will remember. Maybe over the years I have exaggerated its greatness, but that’s fine. It stuck with me for a reason, as did his hitting the two runs that took him over 100 against Barrowford two years later.
The wind is picking up, the odd person braving the weather, scarves pulled across faces, offering grim nods as they scuttle on by.
I feel nostalgic. No, sad. This is not a weeping village though. Not one that feels sorry for itself. It has no need. It’s just me.
I walk through the park and look at the war memorial, which lists a Pte J Mosley along the local dead – my dad’s grandad, mum tells me when I arrive back at her house.
I look into the primary school playground and remember when times were good, or at least without worry. For my brother and myself anyway, though maybe not for my mum and dad, on short time at the mill, wondering how they were going to pay for Christmas.
I note that the school doesn’t appear particularly festive - I can see a small tree in the hallway - though it is a Sunday morning and the lights are out. I think of lovely Mrs Baker buying Christmas presents for everyone in the class and teaching us how to make decorations. Sadly, it turned out to be a happier life for us than her back then.
I decide not to take the route along the beckside so I can avoid the dog walkers. I like dogs, just not their walkers. Not today anyway.
Instead I head to the lane end, past Knott Farm, where Steve and Mark Newton gave me my first beer at a party when I was 12 or 13. Their parents, Ken and Judy, had a bar in their living room and it fascinated me. A sign, or a warning, of what was to come perhaps.
There’s a ‘For Sale’ sign at the bottom of Knott Lane and later I Google it and discover it’s on the market at more than £800,000.
I wonder about the buildings that once housed other friends and family and where those people are now. Joan and Geoff are still in their house, the one they bought in the 1960s for less than £1,000, I know that much.
I remember nights out – good and bad – in the pubs I pass, one or two now converted into houses, as are the sweet shops I frequented on an almost daily basis as a child. The fish and chip shops – most of them – still survive, now neighboured by a variety of new bars and restaurants, nail bars and beauty parlours.
There’s the factory where my grandad worked for most of his life but where no one will remember him now. Then the mill in which my dad was employed for 45 years, but those there now will not know of him either. I wonder if the Ruti looms he travelled to Switzerland for are still working.
My secondary school has changed so much and again, there will be little or no evidence that I ever went there. No name scratched on a table, fingerprint on a desk, scuff of football boot on the turf.
I walk by the house in which we lived for half a century and smile as I at least know there will still be something that shows we were once there.
As I head back to mum’s just along the road, the sky is a vast expanse of grey, a dull dome stretched over the valley and clipped to the tops of the hills, sealing in towns and villages, their people and their secrets.
Even if you wanted to, you could never escape. And why would you? I may have gone but I will never really leave, even if soon no-one will know I was ever here.