Dear Bill...
I won’t write a letter forecasting your future, it will happen anyway and such knowledge may blight our life. Besides, a ten year old boy in 1946 knows there will be good and bad times.
Instead I’m going to talk about your dreams as I am the only person who can. Those Sunday walks with Grandma, they are a bit of a drudge but it’s worth listening to her. She quietly showed us how to tell hemlock from cow parsley, and what belladonna looked like, where to find loads of hazelnuts to say nothing of damsons, big crab apples and a wild pear tree.
There was the ‘secret’ beech tree in Joe Palmer’s farm-yard that actually produced beech nuts. She even provided a drawer in the wash house for the rock collection. Everyone else just said they were nowt but rubbish stones. The view from the bedroom window at Greengarth gives a glimpse of the Solway and the Irish Sea. Some days we could just make out a smudge on the horizon that is the Isle of Man, so faint it may be imagination.
We wonder what it is like there. Is there really the world’s biggest water wheel and the world’s craziest motorbike race. Mam said she knows someone who raced in it; she said that he made his own bike that had a big corned beef tin for a petrol tank. Wouldn’t it be grand to go haring past cheering crowds on something like that? What about the ‘golden fish’ you found in shale on the pit bank? How did it get in there? Pity it went rusty soon after.
Then there was finding the imprint of leaves in the shale too. What was it really like when they were alive? Maybe there is a land somewhere today just like it; mebbe you will find it. Imagine what Bassenthwaite might have looked like thousands of years ago when glaciers carved out those truncated spurs Mr Bottomley told us all about.
If Derwentwater and Bassenthwaite were once one big lake. The road and railway to Keswick would be knackered. Remember all the colours of a wild west desert in that film, now red now purple you could maybe talk to some real ‘injuns’ who lived there before the palefaces came. Uncle Billy Gunson said they weren’t baddies. He says they were lied to and cheated and they have strange and wonderful stories to tell. He says there is a canyon 6000 feet deep, twice as deep as Scafell Pike is high; carved out of the desert by a tremendous river ten times wider than the Derwent.
There must be loads of places to play and have fun. We’d have to live at the bottom though, it would take all day to get there from the top. Gus Risman is starting a new rugby league team in Workington. Uncle Billy Thompson says that if we eat well and don’t start smoking we could play for them one day. If you get stuck in you might lead them out at Wembley.
Better still, score a winning try under the posts and collect the cup from the king. I can tell you that many of your dreams will be realized, not as you first saw them in your mind’s eye, but you will know when they do. I can add that there are more dreams to whet your appetite but they are yet for you to enjoy.
From yourself in 2022
Written to his 10 year old self by Bill, Ramsey and District u3a
Back to Write a Letter to Your Younger Self