Day Trip To A Foreign Country
After a couple of days corporate role -play this week , Friday saw me taking a trip up to Doncaster to spend a day with Mum.
South Yorkshire is my past. It’s my childhood, it is deeply ingrained in me and yet these days it seems a very foreign and strange place. The centre of Doncaster has a new state of the art shopping mall, the Frenchgate Centre which links directly to the station and the bus station. It’s ideal for days out with Mum as she can get a bus from outside her house into Doncaster, I can get off at the station and we can meet within yards of where we have both arrived and get the lift straight up into Debenhams. Emerging in perfumery. How nice!
The other great thing about the Frenchgate centre is that from it you can’t see Doncaster. You could be anywhere, except of course for the people. This was the accent of my childhood, but now hearing it spoken loudly in Superdrug, or bellowed across the malls , it bears little recognition to the middle class faux northern camp theatre speak that seems to be my accent now. It’s incomprehensible and slightly threatening – a series of primal grunts of which “reet” is the only thing I can decipher. That of course means "right" for those of you have never had to be Yorkshire bound or done an episode of “Emmerdale”
Doncaster, like Rotherham its near neighbour and between the two of which my childhood village lies, is a town that started its slow death following the miners strike in the eighties and has not found anything to help it redefine itself. No eateries of note in the centre, other than the aptly named, Frenchies Caff which is just that – a caff that’s managed to transport itself to a town high street.
Later as we leave town on the bus, we see petrol stations converted to The Curry Mahal restaurant but still undeniably looking like petrol stations. Large women turn double bus seats into singles, their post childbirth hips slopping over into the aisle. The bus makes a detour round the romantic keep of Conisborough castle, and through the adjacent council estates. It’s probably much more depressing here now than it was when Ivanhoe romped through the nearby fields.
Mum’s village is dead too. They closed the colliery in the mid eighties and it has no reason to exist. Corus the steel works will close shortly too. So it’s a village full of people who have nowhere to go. For Mum’s generation its an endless round of church council meetings, bowls evenings and trips on the pensioner pass buss to get a newspaper – the local newsagent won’t deliver, the kids don’t want newspaper rounds any more, and it’s a quiet dead place. There’s still that sense of a small village – people say hello to each other across the street and of course Mum knows everyone.
Some of them remember me and even though they themselves are in their seventies and eighties, seem surprised that I’m now a grown man of 53.
They remember the small ginger haired boy who lived at the village shop and find it hard to equate that thought with this large portly temple greying man. Just as I find this place hard to recognise as one that I ever found familiar.
Comments
Post a Comment