The Moorbird

Nowadays I can barely remember what happened two minutes ago, though I’ll never forget my having to run the gauntlet of hissing steam and coal smoke, to cross the soot-grimed roof-bridge to our railway platform. Now, oh so long ago, Winston Churchill had decreed that little boys should wear short trousers for The War Effort – and we were told, repeatedly, that fuel cost lives. With that in mind, I hoped that having my emergent marriage tackle serendipitously steam-cleaned, by a blast up the pants leg, would save some of the precious coal which was vital for powering the ships of the Atlantic convoys which fed us.

Maggie hadn’t been my grandma for long – her having only just replaced my dead one – and I was now on my way to Nawton to meet her. Thomas the Tank Engine, like so much else in colour, wasn’t created until after the war, so my journey took place in black and white. However, and with the benefit of hindsight, it may have been in the then-more fashionable black and black, thanks to the blackout – whilst the eternity I spent in the cold train compartment gave me a lifelong understanding of what ‘forever’ meant.

My having overheard the adults referring to ‘Maggie the Moorbird’, and having seen several pantomimes, I assumed that Mother Goose – who suffered from being enormous, fluffy, and yellow, and having legs which bent the wrong way – must have been a ‘moorbird’ too. Maggie didn’t actually live at Nawton, but several fields away in my mam’s native village of Wombleton so, after getting off our train, we then had to struggle ankle-deep through ‘organic’ mud in the suffocating country darkness. Nowadays you may ask: “Why didn’t you take a torch?” – But then, show a light during the blackout, & Hitler’s Stuka dive-bombers would have descended upon us like a swarm of hornets.

Modern ‘wild-life’ is fine when it’s safely tucked away behind a telly screen. However, for a shivering, frightened little city kid with a barely-visible mam, the hooting of owls, the shrieking of foxes & the ominous rustling of things unseen & threatening in the hedge bottoms became, for me, the very stuffing of the psychiatrist’s couch.

Remarkably, we reached our destination – which in the Stygian blackness proved to be Wombleton’s version of R. L. Stevenson’s Shaws House. After ‘me mam’ located the heavy iron door knocker by feel, and then hammered upon it, the door creaked open. With my night-vision pupils as big as gob-stoppers, I was blinded by the brilliance of the pale patch of candle light which leaked out reluctantly to greet us.

“Coom in” rasped a detached androgyne voice which was a perfect match for the half-lit face that I was too young to place… for it was the face of Ebenezer Balfour. However, it wasn’t until I saw The Moorbird revealed in her full plumage, in the glow of the paraffin table-lamp, that the realisation hit me: She wasn’t a bird at all; she wasn’t even yellow. Instead she stood proud on wrinkled, lisle-clad lady-legs, when Nora Batty was still in ankle-socks. The lamp also revealed what was causing the strange smell. My shoes weren’t just caked in mud; they were also plastered in poo-cow s**t (shit).

Though it was well past my bedtime, there was yet another gauntlet to be run before reaching my anticipated sanctuary. The stub of candle I was given was a mixed blessing, for it showed my staircase to be guarded by The Horned One – & that he was waiting for me. His severed head, which hung on the wall, boasted huge twisted horns – & I had to pass right under him. Parliament’s ‘The Ayes have it’ took on a new meaning, as The Swaledale Tup had enormous yellow ones, which glinted malevolently in the thin, flickering candlelight as they followed me up the stairs: All the way into my ice-cold coffin-bed, which had been squeezed under the eaves of a claustrophobic roof-space. When, all too soon, the candle sputtered & died, those big evil eyes grew into a full sized nightmare.

It was during breakfast though, that I became a family legend.

In the era of Woolton Pie, powdered egg and snoek, the rich yolk of my real egg was a delight. The bacon, however, made me squirm. This was because I had to watch it being hand-carved from an odd-shaped, discoloured lump of dismembered pig-corpse, several of which dangled from the low ceiling, like charnel-house chandeliers. The slice which finally graced my plate tasted of paraffin and contained more salt than the Dead Sea. So, to take my mind off the salty mouth-burn, and to settle the moorbird question once and for all, I asked my new grandma where her wings were.

“What wings would they be honey?” she rasped.

“Well” I stuttered – more than a little intimidated by her escalating facial twitch,

“I thought you were a moorbird.”

The sharp pain in my leg hinted that something was wrong. It was a kick from my mam – vicious enough to have earned her a spell in Holloway today.

“Who’s bin tellin’ y’ that honey?” she enquired in her sweetest croak.

“Me mam” said I, honestly.

So what is a ‘moorbird’?

Maggie was called a moor-‘bod’ in the local dialect for, as well as meaning bird, ‘bod’ also meant ‘person’ in the vernacular. It may be hard for we electronically-separated strangers in our global village to grasp, but people once took pride in their home village – simply being from another village made one a stranger.

Maggie’s wasn’t from just any other village. Her village was on the moor – and this made her into an alien. Fadmoor was a full five miles away, and to add insult to injury, it towered 300 feet over Wombleton. The family didn’t think much to elevated folk anyway, but they liked even less the idea of their father’s re-marriage to an ethnic moor-bod.