WHEN we were at home caring for my dad in the last days of his life, us children would help my mum with the household chores so that she was able to concentrate on spending as much time with Dad as possible while she still could.

Often I would pop upstairs to my mum’s room and make her bed without her knowing, ensuring the sheets were smooth and straight, and the cover neatly arranged with its matching cushions on top, just how she liked it. It was only a very small thing, but I knew my mum appreciated it.

Upon discovering this little surprise, she’d say: “He’s been again.”

“Who?” I asked the first time she said it.

“The hob, he’s been and made my bed.” I said I had no idea who The Hob was, which apparently is quite shameful for a Yorkshire lass born and bred.

She had to explain that hobs were little people who would sneak into your house unseen and help with various jobs, and it must have been our household hob who kept making her bed.

When I went to stay with mum this weekend, she remarked on Sunday that even though the hob had not been visiting over the past few weeks, he’d suddenly been in that morning and made her bed again.

I love the coincidences that keep cropping up when I write these columns and sure enough, in his column from October 9, 1976, which is the nearest to this very week 41 years ago, Dad writes all about a Yorkshire hob who used to reside at Hart Hall Farm in the village of Glaisdale where he grew up.

He repeated the tale in one of his columns from 2015, but I hope readers will indulge me by allowing me to recount the story here for those who may not have heard the tale already.

Hart Hall is a remote, solid farm house up on the North York Moors, and I believe is still a working dairy farm, as well as a popular B&B on the Coast to Coast walking route.

Dad’s childhood friend used to live there and he recalled the fabulous suppers he would eat in the welcoming farm kitchen with its stone-flagged floor and flickering fire in the black-leaded grate.

The Hart Hall hob achieved fame, so the story goes, when a haycart full of the day’s harvest became fast by its wheel between some stones in the farmyard.

As the night was drawing in, and they couldn’t free the wheel, the farmer decided to leave it until morning. And that was when the hob sprang into action.

Despite their diminutive size, these little men were terribly strong, and by the morning he had freed the cart, unloaded the hay, stacked it neatly and left the cart ready to go again.

This was just one of the many good deeds the hob was reported to have done, which included cleaning, threshing, digging, ploughing, sowing and harrowing.

He was only ever spotted once, secretly spied at work through a crack in the barn door, and was described as a tiny brown man covered with hair, naked apart from a ragged old sark (a rough working shirt).

The grateful residents wanted to thank the hob, and left him a new shirt, but he turned it down saying:

“Gin hob mun hae nowght but a hardin hamp,

He’ll cum nae mair, nowther to berry nor stamp.”

Hardin was a type of hessian cloth, while a hamp was a rough working shirt. Berry meant ‘to thresh’, and stamp was to knock off the beards of barley before threshing it.

So the hob was not allowed to accept gifts for his work, and some tales surrounding hobs suggest that they flee if presented with such gifts.

The description of the hob reminds me of Dobby, the house-elf who appears in the Harry Potter stories, and you have to wonder if JK Rowling got her inspiration from our very own North York Moors hob, although I do understand that several parts of the country have their own versions.

In my column from three weeks ago, I wondered if harvest suppers were still being held.

A reader informed me that the North Yorkshire village of Coxwold serves a lunch in the village hall after the harvest festival service in the local St Michael’s church.

The food is cooked by the ladies of the village, although I don’t know if they, like the ones mentioned in my dad’s 1976 Countryman’s Diary, had any differences that needed setting aside.