“Welcome to God’s Own County!” our host broke into a huge grin, crushing me, then Darren, into fierce hugs, on the platform. She is quite tall, dressed in boots, flannel and sensible trousers, topped by a Barbour, looking as if she just stepped out of the pages of Horse and Hound. As this is only my second time in England, having only made a mad 5-day trip to London and Brighton last fall (on a lark which deserves its own column space), she already exceeds my every fantasy of proper British country lady. Added to which, she is a cranial-sacral therapist – very modern indeed, and on the hip side of hippie-dippy; with her lightning-quick intuition, she sized us up, decided she liked what she’d seen, then — whoosh — we were off!
North Yorkshire in early spring is indescribable. Everywhere you look are miles and miles of lush, green, undulating meadows, polka-dotted by thousands of sheep, and their newly born lambs. The landscape is separated by steep hedgerows that rise overhead in sharp verticals, guarding either side of the narrow alleyways they call roads. The drive is fairly terrifying from my crouch in the back of the 4×4, but she and Darren are chatting away like mad, cheerfully undeterred by the half dozen near-misses on lanes that no one could have intended for two cars at the same time, everyone racing headlong at top speed.
The English are duly famous for their proper gardens, and these flash by us in bursts of pink and white; what’s impossible for even Darren’s photos to capture is the sight of yellow daffodils, blooming by the millions, in every direction. There must be a silent vow to add 1000 bulbs per year per person to the effort…every bit of ground bursts with the floral popcorn.
Lulu is talking a blue streak, wildly gesturing left and right, pointing out things we’ve no hope of remembering. “‘That’s where mum lives, you’ll meet her tomorrow’, and ‘this is where my sister lives, her husband owns half the village, but she’s away, her son lost his leg in Australia, a dreadful business, they whisked him to Darwin in a helicopter, but we’ll tell you all about that’ (this detail is casually shared several times by everyone Darren meets, their shared Aussie tidbit) , or, ‘this is the butcher you will probably use’, and ‘here is a market where you can pick up the odd bit…you’d never do your weekly shopping here, though how my sister does I simply cannot imagine,’ and ‘this way to the Henges….you’re incredibly lucky as you’ll be here for a very important lunar cycle….very spiritual, ‘” while Darren winks at me from the front seat, desperately trying to fasten my buckle.
He’s clearly in his element, having spent long previous stretches in England, but I can’t shake the feeling that we’ve been kidnapped by a modern Mary Poppins, and I’m breathless when we finally jerk off the lane into the beautiful little manor where we’ll make our home for the next five weeks. It’s like really falling down the looking glass, into a magical snow globe of Spring. God’s Own County, indeed, and no wonder.
For the second time since the station, she grimaces at my cases (I say ‘my’ for reasons which will, thematically, unfortunately, be repeated for some time to come), shrugs, and welcomes us in. I resist the temptation to tell her that these are literally all of our possessions for however long this adventure will last. I sense I’ll garner no more sympathy here than I do from Darren, already tired of dragging my cases up and down the railways and off baggage carousels. Her husband greets us warmly, firm handshake, half hug. Richard is not tall, but somehow takes up the entirety of the mudroom with his Mayor-of-the Land-of-Oz presence. We only knew that he is in the “events and entertainment business”; a few moments later, on the grand tour, we enter the formal living room to find about a dozen pictures of him with musicians whose names I’d gladly drop if it wouldn’t be so completely tacky and American (DM me, though); I’m a patriot, but I’ve seen enough Downton Abbey not to wish to be referred to as a brassy Yankee. It turns out Richard was quite a sought-after sound man in the British music scene, and was in on the heyday of Raffles, which if you don’t know the reference, please google (you’ll feel much hipper this way, trust me).
Writing this months later, it’s been an embarrassment of riches, these many wondrous people and their cherished animals, each special in their own way, each offering their own lessons and gifts. But, it must be said, it’s very hard to imagine any will ever measure up to Taxi and Pemba.
In keeping with the regional postcard that is to be our lives for this next bit, the dogs are, of course, both labs; Taxi is an inky, graceful black and Pemba, gold with a wide snout that makes her look like she’s grinning all the time. She probably was, as both our hosts solemnly asked us to forgive how poorly-trained she still is, explaining ‘she’s their daughter’s and stays with them only on the weekend, so really who could expect anything but mischief from the poor little pup’? It’s a hilarious admission, given that they are, in fact, the most well-behaved perfect little soldiers you could possibly meet. Trained to the heel and whistle, attentive to our every glance or gesture, you could easily enroll them in a New England prep school and no one would notice they were in fact, a lovely pair of Labradors.
We have a whirlwind couple of days, the Mad-Hatter-style driving and walking tours continue, maps are produced, dogs march us through pastures, past ponds, into woods. I’ve come to trust that Darren’s keen sense of geography will get us home if we’re ever stuck, be it a Yorkshire village, the Italian countryside, the jungles of Mexico, or the Michelin-starred brasseries of Bordeaux. But these early-hours tours from our hosts are always high comedy, each assuming we’ll be able to remember this petrol station, that boulangerie, this pub or café once we’ve shut the door behind them.
There’s a clever little machine across the lane that dispenses a liter of farm fresh milk from the local cows for a quid (I confess I often visited in my pajamas and robe, seemingly undetected). There is a tiny little pond at the bottom of the hill, marked by signs that read, “Slooow Ducks” and “Fresh Eggs”. Later, walking with the girls, we meet a gentleman with a walking stick who seems to be in charge of the poor, slow ducks; he’s muttering, fist raised, railing at the breakneck speed of passing cars. Taxi and Pemba tense, straining at their leads slightly, then recover themselves, and turn away, as if ashamed by their lapse in manners.
Eventually one, then both, set off for Thailand to celebrate Lulu’s 60th in grand style. We missed them instantly; truth be told, we miss them still. But the funny thing about this arrangement, and especially our time in Grewelthorpe, was that we were too busy being Lulu and Richard to miss them. Friends, friends of friends, parents of friends, and even the butcher became immediate fixtures in our lives, and, inexplicably, we in theirs. Everyone seemed to think it was the most natural thing in the world that we would play the roles of our departed hosts until they returned. (Oh, you’re Lulu and Richard whilst they’re gone, etc.)
It would take an entire book to detail everything that happened in those short weeks. No small amount of credit for constant entertainment goes to Lulu’s mum, Doreen. Every inch the matriarch, of her four girls and their families, sure, but really of the entire area. Everyone knows Doreen, and with good reason. She’d recently moved from the vast estate she’d lived on for decades until her husband passed; complaining that she was still adjusting to the “hustle and bustle” of village life. Doreen saw all, heard all, knew all.
If Lulu was intuitive, Doreen was a plain-old mind reader. I cannot for the life of me imagine trying to slip any mischief past her as a teenager. She had that inimitable combination of seeing everything, knowing everything, saying precisely what she liked, and not bothering to sugar coat a bit of it. I found it delicious…in the words of the immortal Alice Roosevelt Longworth, ‘ If you don’t have anything nice to say, come and sit by me.’ We were asked often to tea, and once, she even took the dogs to spend the evening with her own lab, Pepper, while we explored the rambling streets of York. If we never pass that way again, the mark she left on our souls won’t soon be forgotten.
It was the Lenten season, so, ever the devoted pair, we attended services on both Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday. Moreover, we actually joined a Monday evening bell ringing class with the church elders, and one dubious teen – let me tell you, it’s not simply tugging on the line. It takes incredible strength, timing, and patience; none of which I possess, but which, luckily, Darren has in spades. Now, whenever we hear the peal of church bells in the distance, we smile, channeling that frigid April evening, when we climbed the impossibly steep belfry steps to our very, very serious bell ringing lesson.
We were invited to the point-to-point in Bedale, which is the height of Yorkshire society…Taxi and Pemba were among the thousands of well-behaved north country dogs that day at a race where no one actually sees a horse; they’re all too busy eating fancy bits of potted shrimp and Yorkshire cheese, drinking like mad, complaining about the PM, chatting about the coronation, and drawing straws to see who’ll be left to pilot the sea of Land Rovers home along the winding chutes of country roads.
We walked on the marshy grass at the Thornborough Henges under the blood moon at midnight. We went to opening day at the races — very distinct from the point-to-point, in that people actually seemed to have a racing form, and spent the day in their mate, JC’s horse trailer (amusingly, Lulu and Richard had left word that if we had trouble with the TV channels or wifi, we should call JC – turns out that his firm is in charge of network security for a great many institutions including the race track!), which was more like a fancy flat on wheels…more on our day at the races one day soon, and the most extraordinary conversation we had with a twenty-something that day; hope for the future generation sprang eternal after that chance encounter.
We were treated to dinner in JC’s gorgeous restoration, where Barry, his 92-year-old father-in-law (proud papa of JC’s lovely wife, SJ) recounted actually attending Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, having won the chance in a lottery for soldiers just returned from the Great War — he’d brought his own mum that day, which I thought was priceless! We went to the York Air Museum, the utterly Dickensian Workhouse in Ripon (where our sense of the impoverished and discarded in Portland began to stretch into centuries past), dozens of cemeteries and monuments to both World Wars (much, much more on that in future). We visited the pump house in Harrogate, where the inimitable Agatha Christie famously hid at the Old Swan Inn, from her philandering husband, in disguise and disgust, while an eleven-day manhunt ensued. I haggled over tea towels and used cookbooks on market days, treated ourselves to a proper Sunday roast every weekend, toured the grand estates of the National Trust and English Heritage, briefly lost Pemba as she disappeared into a hedgerow at Fountains Abbey (there actually was that one moment of mischief, lol), and walked miles, backwards through centuries, with the beautiful girls ever at our side. Everywhere we went, we received accolades on their demeanor, grace and behavior…I confess, it wasn’t long before we stopped explaining they were only borrowed.
At night, exhausted from fresh air and wet romps, and astounded by the living history all around us, we cozied by the fire with our girls, and I read them “Make Way for Ducklings,” soothing them to sleep with stories of “slow ducks” in a faraway town called Boston.
If we talk about it every day, we may never be able to fully recount the magic of Being Richard and Lulu, in that gorgeous Yorkshire spring marked by understated elegance and incomparable hospitality. If you ever decide to do a stint as house-sitters, our wish for you is to find a couple, and their incredible dogs, who will insist you completely take over their lives and the extraordinary people in them, if only for the briefest snapshot in time.
Have the sweetest puppy dreams, dear Taxi and Pemba…the slow ducks will be there in the morning.