Oxenhope

I was born in God's Own County (or Yorkshire, as it is known to all off-comed 'uns, or outsiders), in the fair city of Bradford, in the Royal Infirmary to be precise, on 13th June, 1971.

I spent the first 16 years of my life in the beautiful village of Oxenhope in the heart of Brontë Country, West Yorkshire. I attended Church of England First School, then Junior School, both in Oxenhope; Hartington Middle School in nearby Haworth; and to conclude my school education, I went to Oakbank school in the nearby town, Keighley.

I have very fond memories of Oxenhope and more importantly, its people. My mother and father had moved up to Yorkshire from London in the 1960s and I remember them telling me that the friendliness of Yorkshire folk had struck them as soon as they moved up.

Yorkshire people have a reputation for calling a spade a spade (a very germanic trait), and whilst this is true to some extent, Yorkshire people are incredibly welcoming and hospitable once they have warmed to you. Just don't prejudge with typical northern stereotypes and you will get along with them just fine.

The bleak but beautiful landscape around Oxenhope was the ideal place to grow up. In clean air, I could play safely in the village. In the summer, the clouds cast huge shadows over the moors and you really got the sense of going from shade to sunshine within seconds on a windy day on the top of the moors. When it rained, you knew about it, as the rain invariably lashed against you, giving you the feeling that you were being pebble-dashed; a feeling which I always associate with school cross-country runs. And boy, when it snowed, it snowed. Living on the main road out to Hebden Bridge, we often saw the road completely closed through snow, and the snow-drifts were tremendous.

My father was vicar of St Mary The Virgin in Oxenhope from 1970 until his retirement in 1987, when we moved to Frizinghall on the outskirts of Bradford. Unfortunately, the unwritten rule about a vicar moving out of the parish after retirement meant moving away from what felt like (and continues to feel like) my true home. We, both as children, and as a family, made the best friends of our lives in Oxenhope, particularly those who were members of the church congregation. As someone who does not attend church, I do at least very much appreciate the important role it played in my formative years, and its role in binding a community together.

I was back in Oxenhope in early 2004, to celebrate the christening of my younger brother, Peter's, son at St Mary's. We (my brothers and our families) saw the same people we had grown up with for the first time in many years. Fundamentally, things hadn't changed; they were extremely welcoming and treated us, as they had always done, like members of an extended family.

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