There is something about the familiarity of the countryside around me as the train speeds towards Leeds from Manchester airport. Did I just blink away the last ten years? Did a part of me never leave this place? Time is not a factor that has any relevance here. The hills and valleys do not measure it as we do. I am just a blip in a time-lapse photo.
The hills are still in their winter garb, dark chocolate and coffee cream with the heather, shading to green on the grassy lower slopes, cropped close by the sheep. The trees are bare, but the branches are not brown or even grey. They are that familiar shade of khaki. Made so by the moss and lichen that smothers their northern aspects, cringing from the muted sunlight. And sometimes, as the angle changes and the sun catches, they flash iridescent green. There is a little snow on the tops, just a lacy edging on the northern sunless slopes. I look in vain for the splashes of yellow that herald the gorse and the broom, but there are only bare pale browns, burnt by the cold.
Huge cumulous clouds smother the peeking blue of the sky, in fifty shades of grey. The sun resolutely shines through the thinner patches, a hazy halo of white, trying unsuccessfully to lift the air of drabness that pervades the scene. I am wearing my walking boots, and know that if I were tramping the hills on a day like today, it would appear more to advantage when dressed with a stiff cold breeze, the bleating of the sheep and the plaintive call of the curlew drifting on the wind.
We are rattling through the history of the industrial revolution. Grey stone terraces with regular windows like ranks of soldiers staring out. All built from millstone grit, once uniformly black but now showing its true colour. The remnants of the soot clings like scurvy in little patches. And the old mills slide by, going to ruin, with too many arched windows to let in the light onto the weaving floors that were shrouded in cotton lint floating like snow in the air.
Spinning past Huddersfield, we don’t stop at Batley, where the manufacturers grew rich on mungo and shoddy, now lost and forgotten in the fabric of time. But the words still shine boldly on the old mill wall. Only the odd church spire competes with the factory chimney, no high rise here in these small towns scattered like seed along the industrial canal.
And somewhere deep inside me rejoices – I have come home to my country.
Salatheel 