'The village of the helping hand' (From Gazette & Herald)

'The village of the helping hand'

IT isn't really a village in the normally-accepted meaning of the word and it couldn't lay claim to being called a hamlet, though Birdsall does have a church and a vicar.

The best description that I can think of is a scattering of cottages and a few houses around the big houses and the church.

There is no school (the school now being the village hall), no shop, no inn, no post office. Not that any of that really matters, because we are blessed with good neighbours.

There are families here that are able to trace their ancestry back to the mists of time, and, to listen to some, fogs of time.

If we had a motto, it would be something like "the village of the helping hand" because it seems that someone is always asking "do you need anything in town?"

One fellow senior citizen (he of the red breast) who is well and truly into his retiring years, is usually found pottering about in the church getting ready for the next service, or running an errand for one of the many widowed ladies who seem to outnumber the remainder of us old fogies.

There are few non-natives (for the want of a better description) like ourselves - my wife and I are both in our 80s, so we fit in reasonably well. One finds very little use of first names. It is invariably Mr this or Mrs that, and somehow always sounds right. Difficult to describe it properly, but even at the Yorkshire Countrywomen's meetings, the matriarch is a Miss in her 80s.

She has a brain as sharp as a teenager, and a fund of knowledge that would, I am sure, carry her through most of the quiz games on the box, though I think she would turn a deaf ear to questions on pop music and the like.

The general atmosphere of the area (almost said village) can in some ways be likened to Brigadoon, because sometimes when I am wandering through the woods, away from the sound of the tractors and other farm vehicles, it isn't hard to shed a few decades, and thank one's good fortune for being in Yorkshire.

Updated: 11:43 Wednesday, July 30, 2003