Summer in North Yorkshire
Summer in North Yorkshire is never really hot and is rarely even warm, but my childhood memories are dominated by wild swimming. Being so close to the Dales, our summer holidays weren’t spent at the beach but in cool, fresh rivers tinted by earth. These upland rivers are clear but coloured, like amber, and offer a window into the sub-aquatic life of trout and minnows. Unlike rivers in the South these streams are lively and sharp, my bare feet would slide over angular rocks as I played. The energy of these young rivers drill and cut through rock to form deep, smooth gullies, and pools beneath waterfalls.
We knew it was summer when the swallows arrived. They would fill the still evening air with their arching dances and perch in neat lines on telegraph wires. Early summer is nesting season and the swallows would carefully and painstakingly build up layers of their spit and mud to form solid, earthen, rippling tear drops that adorned the eves of abandoned stone barns and old cottages like icing on a gingerbread house.
When the sun was out my mum would drive me, my sister, and often a few of the neighbourhood kids out deeper into the countryside in whatever old banger she was driving at the time. These cars didn’t last long, we would have something like a Vauxhall Cavalier with mismatched doors and wires hanging out of places they shouldn’t be. After a drive down increasingly small country lanes we would park up somewhere and strike out across the fields criss-crossed with dry stone walls and dotted with sheep. No need for maps, these paths were part of my mum.
Me and my sister on one of the many tracks etched in to our mums mental map of the Yorkshire Dales
When we weren’t swimming, we would be at a car boot sale earning the petrol money we needed for our summer adventures. Next to our kitchen we had a tiny store room where we kept our car boot stock. Every weekend we would fill the car to the brim and set off to the nearest car boot sale. I remember setting off particularly early one morning. We drove in silence through the quiet countryside. The sun was so low it hadn’t burned off the morning mist that clung to the ground and lapped around the delicate heads of tall grasses in the overgrown meadows.
Once at the car boot sale we would follow our well-known routine with both me and my sister helping to set up the stall and make it look as professional as possible, though being a car boot there were natural limitations to what we could achieve. After what felt like about an hour (it’s difficult to tell given the child’s time on which my memory is based), our fold-out ply wood stall would be open for business amongst the countless rows of other stalls selling almost anything you can think of. Car boot goers are enterprising and drive a hard bargain and my mum was no exception. She sold her surplus Avon supply on the stall, even selling the sample mini lipsticks, not much bigger than a safety pin, for 10p. Little girls and thrifty women alike loved them.
After a few hours the damp grass would be stamped down, and a sweet smell would rise from the pummelled earth and mixes with the smell of bacon sandwiches from the butty van and freshly burnt petrol of quad bikes. At the end of the day we would count up our earnings to the satisfying metallic slides and clicks of coins being stacked.
And so the cycle went round – swimming and car boots, except for the days when my mum was too ill to get up, then we’d play in the backfields behind the house that stretched unbroken to the angular peaks of the national park. There were no rivers near the house, we’d have to wait for mum.
Now I live in the South and the summers feel hot and lazy. I draw my curtains in the day to stop my room getting too hot and apply sun cream for the commute to work. The hotter, slower air is more fragrant here and I cycle through pools of honey suckle and wild rose scented air. I’ve tried to rediscover wild swimming in Bristol, it’s pleasant enough. The rivers are slower here; they meander lazily through cornfields and cities. My memories of summers spent in upland rivers occupy a part of my memory not fully connected to present day me. Like the geography of the South my life is softer, more forgiving now but I sometimes miss those cool, clear, driving waters of my childhood.
