If you are lucky your life will be now and then be enriched by its inclusion of a newcomer who will charm you, humble you and make you smile. This person will remind you there are good people around and, without achieving fame (a questionable label these days), they excel. The central theme of all my blogs is the part a landscape plays in shaping human lives and its counterpoint - how people shape a landscape in which they live. This piece is about a remarkable woman who left her mark on five distinct landscapes and their communities. Born in Bristol she moved steadily further north in England, ending her days in a Yorkshire Dales village.
In 1925, the year Joan Mary Ready was born, the people of Europe were in a state of apprehension. Does this seem familiar? In January Joseph Stalin ousted Leon Trotsky from leadership of the Soviet Communist party. The next month Adolf Hitler spoke at a mass meeting in Munich of his re-launched Nazi party. Four months later he published Mein Kampf in which he called upon the German people to join his party. In October the German Foreign Minister, Gustav Stresemann, met leaders from Great Britain, France, Italy and Belgium in Switzerland where they signed a security agreement. Stresemann also affirmed Germany’s undertaking not to go to war with France. The same month two British Communists were charged with offences under the 1797 Incitement to Mutiny Act. On 16th November Richard and Dorothy Ready of Bristol had a daughter who they named Mary.
Seven years after the Armistice brought the First World War to a close, the society into which Mary was born was finding a way forward despite the machinations of politicians across the English Channel. The Art Deco style became established in Paris. England’s men cricketers finally won a Test Match in Australia, the first for thirteen years. Women installed electric washing machines in their homes. The Charleston, a scandalising dance imported from the United States, was becoming all the rage in Britain. Four days after Mary’s birth there was another significant birth, that of Robert Kennedy, a future Attorney-General of the United States.
I first met Mary in 2011 shortly after she moved into the same village where I live in North Yorkshire. In the ten years that I knew her I became drawn into her world, like everyone else who called her a friend. On first meeting her everyone was attracted to a forthright and crisply spoken woman and we all became part of her universe, with Mary quite definitely at the centre. I learned that the seedbed of her determined character was sown in that uncertain post-war period. It was as if from the start she would have her say in how life was to be reorganised out of the social, economic and political chaos of her parents’ youth.
From her diaries, personal memos and the recollections of her two daughters and her Yorkshire friends I discovered a life that was enhanced by a talent for grasping opportunities, fostering friendships and developing her values. She withstood tragedy, hardship and upheaval which led her to be a resolute and brave hearted person. Brought up in age when young people learned to be self-reliant, she used her common sense. For the rest of her life she expected other people to do likewise. This is a brief account of a very certain life.
Mary’s father, Richard Allen Lloyd Ready, was born in Dallas Texas in 1885. His parents were English and he was educated at Gresham’s School in Norfolk and Ardingly in Sussex. Richard worked for most of his life in Bristol where he was a customs officer. It was here he met his future wife, Dorothy Cook, a Yorkshire lass from Bridlington. The Ready family had already grown when Mary’s elder brother Colin was born. By the time the Second World War started Mary was fourteen, living with her family in the village of Backwell west of Bristol and attending Clifton High School in the city.
Backwell is now in Somerset and three miles north of what has become Bristol Airport. In 1939 the airport was a RAF airfield. Backwell Hill housed an anti-aircraft battery where soldiers helped to protect both the airfield and the city from German bombing raids. Mary remembered a village canteen that was started by residents to cater for the soldiers and airmen. She recalled: “They would come to the canteen for the evening, get hot drinks and sandwiches, play darts, sing around the piano, play billiards and draughts. One soldier from Sunderland with a very broad accent asked me to help him write letters to his wife as he had not learned to read and write. I remember the letters always started ‘Dear, darling Vera…’ I hope he lived through the war and went home to his Vera.”
At the age of fourteen Mary was helping with evacuees from London. They arrived in Backwell in the autumn of 1939. Some were from a secondary school in Hammersmith and came with their teachers. Some were from a Borstal – now known as a Young Offenders Institution – and they came with their warders.
“As a Girl Guide,” Mary wrote, “I was told to put on my Guide uniform and go to the parish hall. Along with other Guides and adult helpers we served the evacuees with cups of tea and buns, and then helped them with taking them to their billets – the families who were to look after them. I think the Borstal boys all went to a big country house but I don’t remember them doing anything worse than weeing in the street.”
When Mary was about sixteen she became a part-time air raid warden. When the city received a warning of a raid voluntary wardens like Mary would be sent a message with an instruction to ride around on their bikes wearing a tin hat and blowing a whistle. In her typical insouciant and understated way, she wrote “This was quite important as sometimes planes would be fighting overhead and stray bombs were dropped in the countryside – one killed a pony.” A member of Mary’s family recounted a story to me of another incident in Mary’s life at this time. Somerset is the centre of the Scrumpy making industry. (For those unfamiliar with Scrumpy it is a rough form of cider made from a wide selection of apples including fallen fruit from off the ground. The resultant brew is usually cloudy, unrefined and extremely intoxicating.) In the Backwell canteen Scrumpy was sometimes available. Some visiting American GIs were encouraged by Mary to try this local drink. As with most outsiders then and since, including my South African brother-in-law, bravado overtook the GIs who found themselves bested by Mary in Scrumpy drinking contests. After a pint of the concoction the visitors were finished.
It should be remembered that from 1939 male farmworkers were called up into the armed forces and food became in short supply. Young children were asked to help with potato harvesting, fruit picking and tending vegetable crops. Mary and her school friends picked apples at the Long Ashton research station and also helped with the corn harvest in Wiltshire where they were housed at Marlborough College and would sleep on camp beds in the gymnasium.
It was at Clifton High School that Mary studied the life and writings of E.M. Forster – a writer I also studied at school. He was to become a lifelong interest of hers as he is to me. She always had a complete set of Forster’s novels and writings at hand – as I do. She was comfortable with the knowledge that he was homosexual (still a crime at this time) as her liberal views came to the fore. It was probably unusual for an all-girls’ school in the early 1940s to promote and facilitate a discussion of homosexuality – I don’t recall even having that discussion in my school in 1965, we just studied the other themes of Howard’s End. (I had a later brush with Forster’s life and books when I discovered in 1972 that my in-laws holiday house in Crantock had a first edition of Howard’s End signed by the author on 29th October 1910 for Leo Greenwood, a man I have written about elsewhere. I was also delighted to accept from Mary’s daughters a copy of Forster’s biography of his great aunt, Marianne Thornton. This attractive hardback book sits in my Forster collection and acts as an almost daily reminder of Mary.)
Mary left Clifton High School in 1943. She told me that her headmistress was a major influence on her and it was probably due to the head-teacher that Mary went to study economics at the London School of Economics. (This was at a time when women students were a minority and they were not afforded the same opportunities as men.) She completed a BSc in Sociology yet she believed, in her typical forthright way, that she should have been awarded a BA. She really yearned to study English Literature. Throughout her life she read widely and was an enthusiastic contributor to book groups she joined.
For most of the war the LSE was evacuated to the University of Cambridge, a perfect place for a booklover. In 1944 she was starting her second year in Cambridge. In a journal she wrote: “I must have passed the first-year exams, despite life in Cambridge being both busy and great fun. There was certainly hard work to do, including war-work; in my case helping at a Red Cross canteen and night time fire-watching at the Fitzwilliam Museum, wandering around rooms of priceless exhibits watching out for incendiaries.
“Farm workers and farmers’ sons had been called up and some were presumably fighting their way through Europe after the D-Day landings. So, in the university vacations I joined lots of fellow students at farming camps, doing the work which regular farmworkers, away at the war, did in peacetime. We did get paid for this and got extra food rations. The girls were paid one shilling an hour, the boys one shilling and threepence – very unfair as we worked just as hard as the boys and were much more particular about time-keeping, not nicking the fruit from the orchards and not getting drunk in the pubs.” Not for the first time in her life, and indeed in the lives of her female contemporaries, the unfairness and injustices meted out to their sex were clearly recognised.
Mary’s diary continues with her observations of others around her at this tough time for the country. People older than her and the Cambridge students did lots of different kinds of voluntary work.
“The Local Defence Volunteers - the LDV - became the Home Guard (think of Dad’s Army), and were trained by retired army officers to defend our land if it were invaded. Lots of adults worked for the Red Cross and the VADs as assistant nurses.
“Proper air raid wardens operated in the big cities such as London and Bristol and were doing very brave and dangerous work during the worst bombing raids. Many ambulance drivers, both men and women, were voluntary workers. Some were pacifists or conscientious objectors who were not willing to fight in the services but were ready to care for those who were fighting and were injured.”
Mary concluded this chapter of her life by recalling: “one of the good things about wartime was the wonderful comradeship between all these people, all knowing their work was very important and that they must work together for victory and peace.” With war in Europe once again in 2022 these comments are evocatively heartfelt and real as I read agonising accounts from Kiev.
In an article Mary published in our village magazine, (made more poignant when I reread it today along with stories of events in Ukraine), she wrote about her love of clematis plants and the varieties she bought for her garden that bear Polish names. One was named after General Sikorski, prime minister of the wartime Polish government and commander-in-chief of the Polish forces. She was reminded of Sikorski when she looked at her blue clematis.
“I think of him and Poland’s many years of struggle for independence, somehow preserving her Catholic faith and her national pride. I also remember dashing young Polish airmen who came to England, making a great contribution to eventual victory in 1945. I remember one whose English wife and baby were tragically killed in a rocket attack on London in the last months of the war”.
I feel that Mary, were she alive today, would have been first in the list of people offering a home to Ukrainians fleeing the horror of war with which Mary was confronted so much in her early life.
Mary was a lover of poetry and in November 1944 bought a copy of Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot when she lived in Cambridge. I wonder, was this bought at Heffers, Bowes and Bowes, Galloway and Porter or Hubert David’s stall in the market? Having worked with the first, attended a job interview at the second and explored the shelves of the third I feel sad I shall never find out which of these famous bookshops supplied Mary.
It was whilst she was living in Cambridge that Mary was playing hockey one day and met George Clarke. George was a Londoner and was educated at Kilburn Grammar School from where he matriculated. His first job was at the St. James’ branch of Lloyds bank. Before the war he joined the RAF (Volunteer Reserve). Mary believed that he had gained his pilot’s licence before the war started. In 1939 he joined Bomber Command with the rank of Warrant Officer. Captaining an Armstrong Whitworth Whitley aircraft in October 1940 the crew were returning from a raid over Berlin when the plane was hit by anti-aircraft fire. George had to take the awful decision for the crew to bale out. They all parachuted successfully and landed safely near the Dutch/German border. They spent the remainder of the war in various POW camps. Clearly a leader and a positive person George took part in steering the POW education programme. Materials were supplied by the Red Cross. Mary recorded: “He seemed to be both lecturing in Maths and also a student; he passed some Institute of Bankers exams.” Being so involved in education his captors must have seen George as no risk to security and left him alone.*
George returned to England in 1945 and promptly gained admission to the London School of Economics which is how he met Mary Ready. After he had graduated he went back to Lloyds bank. Along with many other ex-RAF personnel he also re-joined the RAFVR, this time the London University Air Squadron. He and Mary were married in December 1947. He continued to fly often. In April 1949 whilst flying a Tiger Moth from Fairoaks aerodrome near Woking in Surrey its engine failed. He attempted a forced landing at Newlands Corner near Guildford but a tree split the petrol tank and the plane burst into flames. George was knocked unconscious having hit his head on the instrument panel. To his good fortune two Irishmen happened to witness the accident and dragged George from the burning plane. Mary and George were never able to trace these Irishmen and thank them despite police enquiries and advertisements they placed in the London newspapers.
George was immediately taken to Guildford County Hospital but after a couple of days he was moved to the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead. He was in a serious condition with severe burns to his hands and face. During the Second World War this hospital had become a specialist burns centre under the control of Sir Archibald McIndoe. It became renowned across the world for pioneering care for RAF and Allied airmen who, like George Clarke in 1949, were badly burned and required reconstructive plastic surgery.
Mary recalled: “George was in the care of Robin Dale, one of Archibald McIndoe’s plastic surgery team. McIndoe was often mentioned by George but I cannot remember whether he was actually working there or just remembered with considerable respect.”
Mary’s notes continue: “Eighteen months of treatment followed, complicated by toxaemia and by hepatitis from infected blood plasma. Many operations on his hands followed. Facial disfigurement, less severe for George than for many others, was not too bad – a rebuilt nose, and much attention to getting his eyelids to close normally. Saline baths were a regular part of his early treatment. George’s fingers were reduced to one joint, but his thumbs were more or less intact, and the vital flexion was restored by tendon grafts.”
It was whilst reading Mary’s memories of this shocking time in her life that I came to understand that if she had had resilience ingrained in her during her teenage years, stoicism by the bucket load was added in the early 1950s. As George lay in hospital Mary visited him daily, spending long hours travelling to and from the hospital. Most patients being treated here joined the ‘Guinea Pigs’, a social club for the inmates and their families. Allegedly it was set up by McIndoe and others over a bottle of sherry. George became part of the Guinea Pig club observing blind patients and others with awful injuries. (I think of the character played by the handsome Christopher Plummer in the 1969 film The Battle of Britain and the terrifying injuries he sustained, and you get some idea of the effect such burns had on not only the victim but their loved ones too.)
Mary remembered the East Grinstead people as being “marvellous – in the shops, cafes and on the buses – everyone took a pride in treating the QVH chaps as normal, even the very disfigured ones. I think McIndoe and others put in a lot of work at promoting these vital positive attitudes”.
Here again we see Mary embracing values that came to typify many of her generation and that were the very essence of her.
There was another significant accomplishment emanating from QVH. Mary wrote about the work of a consultant anaesthetist named Russell Davies. “He took on the task of getting adequate and rational disability pensions from the War Office for the injured servicemen and their widows – no small task; a remarkable achievement and much needed. The burn injuries so frequent with RAF personnel had not previously been assessed adequately and compensated.” It was not just military casualties who were treated at QVH. Mary writes about Jimmy Wright, a RAF Film Unit cameraman, who in the 1950s became a successful independent film maker after being left blind following an air crash in 1945. He is quoted as saying ‘You can't talk to a Guinea-Pig without a pint'. Sadly, there were also civilians being treated and dying; “one, a fish and chip shop owner whose mobile van had caught fire; another a forestry worker.”
I smiled at an incident that Mary recalled from her time in East Grinstead. She went to dances and other social events organised by the Guinea Pig Club, with patients from the hospital and local people and VIPs.
“I danced with an Indian prince who tried it on, but he was deflected by a diligent attendant and maybe persuaded that it was the patients he was there to encourage.” I am certain that Mary was quite capable of taking care of herself when being propositioned, even if her admirer was part of the aristocracy.
Having been set up in 1941 with just thirty-nine members, the Guinea Pig Club, primarily a social club for the rehabilitated, was closed in 2007. Clearly in its early years it became very important to many members and a central part of their lives. As with such English clubs, reunions would occur regularly. George Clarke was, according to Mary, not a very clubbable person and although he attended early reunions he lost interest. What George did do was to take a firm hold of his life and he decided to re-build it. Mary said: “He announced ‘I am lucky, I can earn my living with my brains’. Lloyds Bank had guaranteed him employment but he applied to Cambridge University to do a postgraduate diploma in agriculture. With this under his belt he began his career as an agricultural economist and later Senior Lecturer in Economics.”
Once George had taken up his position at St. Catherine’s College Cambridge life for Mary settled down after the uncertainties of the war and George’s partial recovery from his accident. In 1951 the first of their three children, Richenda, was born followed by Robin and Annabel. Then in 1955 George was offered a lectureship at the University of Leeds and the family upsticked to Yorkshire. They bought a house in the Harehills district of Leeds and Mary studied for her PGCE at the Hunslet Lane School. They had moved into a very different landscape; multi-racial, multi-cultural and northern.
After George’s recovery from his serious injuries, he was advised not to live in an industrial environment which Leeds certainly was in the mid 1950s. All of us with memories of that time remember the urban winter smogs. Mary and George were dismayed by the city’s pollution. So, they found and purchased a small primitive cottage high on the Stainmore fells in what was Westmorland. (The county of Westmorland - a beautiful county of sheep, hill farmers, dry stone walls and fells – became absorbed into the larger and new county of Cumbria, a name that I have always disliked. Due to the English regional administrators’ propensity for changing their minds over place names once or twice a century, Westmorland will again become a district of the Lake District in 2024.)
Mary and George’s cottage had no electricity nor mains water. Every weekend they loaded up their canvas topped Landrover with three children, two dogs and basic supplies and headed up to their cottage. They developed quickly a great affection for the wild, rugged scenery and the gentle spirit of the Upper Eden Valley and its people. They explored the local area as well as the fells and lakes of Ullswater and Derwentwater. Oh, what joy it must have been. Being a lover of these fells and lakes myself I can conjure up some sense of what they experienced. Whilst on some fellside ramble they once met the legendary Alfred Wainwright who at this time was just starting to research and publish his unique series of walking guides - multiple copies of which sit, dogeared from use, on my shelves. Having no regard for the fame he went on to garner, Mary was not impressed. She later described him as a bigoted misogynist. I do not argue with this judgement – he was also grumpy and rude. But I value his legacy of the walking guides which have guided me, and countless others, expertly on my tramping of his 214 ‘Wainwrights’.
Mary took a keen interest in the local people that included John Percival who was born in Brough in the Eden district in 1834. Percival was a notable educator and amongst his many appointments was as the first headmaster of Clifton College in Bristol which is close to Mary’s school. In 1998 Mary wrote a letter to the Cumberland & Westmorland Herald (thankfully still so named and going strong today) responding to an article about Percival published previously in the same newspaper. She commented that she often walked along Percival Road, named in his honour when she was at Clifton High School. She wrote that one of her granddaughters was at the High School and another granddaughter and grandson were at Clifton College. What she said in her letter next reveals the true Mary Clarke, reminding us of her belief in equality for all women and men, and showing the inner soul of a very modern woman. She said: “It is interesting to read that John Percival was concerned about the dearth of female companionship in public schools, but I wonder if he visualised the day when they would nearly all be co-educational. With his well-known radical and enlightened views, I think this modern development would have pleased him.” As one of Mary’s daughters says of her letter; “Very Mary!”
Mary didn’t tolerate any form of prejudice or discrimination. A Kirkby Overblow book group member recalls: “When discussing a book about displaced refugees during the Second World War she told us about the Jewish refugee girls (she even remembered their names!) who came to her school and the trouble they had adapting and fitting in. She shared memories of her days as a student at the LSE. Once when reading a book which included a theme of racial discrimination – I think it was The Light between Oceans by M L Steadman – she told us about the time when she and her husband were living in Leeds. Casual racism was common place at that time and when a neighbour came round to welcome them, he informed them that there was an agreement in the street that when moving on ‘we don’t sell to Blacks’. Rather than stay silent, as perhaps many would have done not wishing to fall out with neighbours, Mary spoke up and told the neighbour exactly what she thought of their agreement!”
In 1972 Mary and George wanted to move out of the city. They bought a plot of land in Sicklinghall near Wetherby. According to a friend of theirs in this village, they had been looking at houses for some time when a building plot on the edge of the village became available. “George, who was a notorious procrastinator, hummed and hawed as to whether to submit a tender to buy the land. Eventually, on the day before the bids were submitted, he decided to bid and Mary had to run to the post box in heavy snow to post the bid. They won the auction, built their house and moved in; their three children having left home by then.”
Her many talents and interests included horse riding and Mary and her new friends attended a nearby riding school and rode out into the countryside. I don’t think George was enamoured of horses so to ensure he too got out into the Yorkshire Dales he and Mary would walk. They walked a lot, being members of the Wetherby Footpath Club. They wrote books on the paths around Wetherby. They ventured out to explore the Yorkshire Moors. All her life she remained a keen rambler and was always anxious to protect public access rights by writing to local councils about missing signposts and blocked public footpaths. I can imagine those letters brought terror to the lives of the recipients who knew they had fresh work to do. They would have recognised the letter writer as someone not to be ignored.
Mary retained a keen work ethic that was not compromised by managing her family life. She was a keen and active supporter of the Liberal Party. She had full days outside her home with a career in both counselling and social work. She worked with children with special needs. Mary was concerned that everyone should have the best chance in life. As the result of a talk with the chaplain of the Young Offenders Institution at Wetherby she became a volunteer there visiting the young men weekly. She was able to see the good in them and believed that what they lacked was a granny to give them time and love in their childhood. One young man was a father. Mary asked him if he and his girlfriend had thought about any birth control suggesting that condoms were easily available and inexpensive. Mary wrote “I was forced to smile and agree with the young man when he said that they felt rather like paddling in socks and he thought it spoiled the experience”.
For many years Mary and George coped magnificently overcoming his disabilities until his death in 1990 aged seventy-one. Mary and her children may have feared his life would not be a long one, for he, and they, had had to endure the after effects of his appalling injuries for forty years. Mary threw herself into the multiple tasks of overseeing her children’s careers and lives, managing the family home and continuing her own outside work. As one of her Sicklinghall friends recorded: “Mary was never outfaced by difficulties and took the challenges in her life with fortitude and never complained. She turned from riding to swimming and dog walking – she became a passionate dog lover, especially of border terriers. She even grew to enjoying managing her own affairs.”
Writing around 2001 Mary looked back on her experiences in the war: “War damaged both my husband and my brother. In 1992 we had a family service at the tiny Culbone church on Exmoor, a favourite place, to dedicate a bench in their memory. During the service I was deeply touched when my nephew read these lines from T.S. Eliot: -
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Mary shared her love of poetry and words one evening in 2015 at a memorable outdoor gathering of village folk. Members of the now world-famous Kirkby Overblow Dramatic Society, known to all as KODS, met to present a review made up of sketches, songs and poems. Mary recited from memory one of her favourite poems, perhaps recalling her discovery of her Stainmore cottage. Rereading this yet again I can see why she identified with this poignant pastoral poem. The young, idealistic W.B. Yeats as narrator longs to build a simple life on Innisfree, finding peace through communion with nature. However, it becomes clear that ties to city life prevent the speaker from realizing this dream.
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
In 1987 Mary met Bridget Bennett, another incomer to Yorkshire whose long and deep commitment to the community is eminent. A close friendship was formed or was it rekindled? They discovered that they may have met in 1947 on Exmoor when they holidayed with their respective families, the girls riding on the moor and rock-jumping in the river. Mary attributed her sure footedness to those days spent rock-jumping and swimming at Sillery Sands on the north coast of Devon east of Lynmouth. Bridget recalls that back then they had to walk everywhere in Devon because petrol was rationed.
After George’s death Mary - with her friends Bridget, Margaret Harcourt, Catherine Catton and others - started a weekly walking expedition that pulled in visits to the Yorkshire Dales and North York Moors. Then they ventured further afield to Mull, Arran, Northumberland and walked the mule tracks of Mallorca. Each of Mary’s friends tells comic stories of walking with Mary. They complained that whilst Mary could climb over stiles quickly and easily the rest of them had to work out where to place their feet and hands. She was an enthusiastic rambler and her companions had trouble keeping up with her. She had an uncompromising attitude to personal responsibility and self-reliance. She gently admonished one of the ‘girls’ who fell badly when climbing a stile late in life. Upon hearing of the misfortune Mary sent a note expressing not her sympathy but surprise and her firm advice when climbing stiles: “one must concentrate”.
I shared a love of walking and maps with Mary, particularly Ordnance Survey maps. When she discovered I had worked closely in a business capacity with OS for over forty years she articulated her detailed appreciation of their maps with enthusiasm. As I do, Mary Clarke also loved books and a good story. She was a core member of first the Sicklinghall book group and afterwards the group in Kirkby Overblow. A book’s story that involved travelling or movement around a particular country, city or landscape required a map, and she was always very disappointed if the author had not supplied one. On several occasions she and I would reflect on the intellectual connection between a particular place and its people. Throughout her life she had a joy of travelling and becoming involved in any local community in which she found herself.
At the age of eighty-five Mary was up for a new adventure in her life. She decided to move house. She heard about a single storey house in Kirkby Overblow with sublime views over the Wharfe valley that was on the market and she acquired it. It is a quirky house with steep steps up from the house to the street. They are so steep and uneven everyone feared for her safety. “I shan’t fall”, she would say. “It is important to plan for dangerous situations, I don’t need any help thank you”. On frosty mornings she would clear the ice from the steps herself, starting at the bottom step “so I don’t have to put a foot on the ice. It’s quite simple and straightforward”.
Long before her arrival in Kirkby Overblow Mary was an active member of the church community. The Rev Stuart Lewis, rector of the benefice of Lower Wharfedale, writes: “I first met Mary as a parishioner in Sicklinghall, a member of the Parochial Church Council and a benefice supporter. She appeared to be doing exactly what a community minded person ought to be doing at that stage of her life. There came a reference request from HM Young Offenders Prison at Wetherby and in discussion with Mary, I gained an insight into a hitherto unrealised background in her social work in some of the more difficult parts of Leeds.”
Indeed, as we in Kirkby Overblow discovered, she was a devout Christian. She held bible readings in her homes in Yorkshire and attended church services every week. Right up until a month before her death, she bravely climbed her steps and up the hill to the village church aided by her ‘walking buggy’. This buggy was fitted with reflective tape to enable her to be out and about at night. She shunned all offers of a supporting arm. At church she led prayers on a number of occasions at the Celtic worship service when she would give a memorable reflection on her chosen topic. She loved the simplicity of Celtic worship, she had little time for what she considered to be unnecessary church ceremony.
For all the positivity that her personality exhibited Mary was forthright too about what she did not
like. She was not a baker. “I don’t bake,” she said. “Buy a cake instead. It’s much easier than
spending two hours on your feet in the kitchen before visitors arrive for coffee.” She was not
computer literate and got cross with bank staff who instructed her to do things online.
She was prophetic when it came to considering the internet. She told us she “had a lot to recall and read about throughout my life especially most recently my pretty blue clematis. Being an internet illiterate, I do mean read, including pages of information my daughter sent me, from something called Wikipedia. Poor old Encyclopaedia Britannica, you’ll soon be forgotten - or maybe someone will breed a new flower and call it ‘Britannica’; sounds a whole lot better than ‘Wikipedia’”. Only this week as I write this I see that reference books are no longer listed by the Office for National Statistics as essential items for consumers.
In 2021 Mary was advised by her friends and family to get the covid jabs. She had an instant response; she had clearly thought about this invasion in all our lives. She replied: “It’s not me who should be vaccinated, it’s the young folk. If I were to get covid I don’t want to take up a hospital bed and I certainly don’t want one of Boris’s vibrators. Save those for the younger people.” We think we know what she meant.
By 2021 her body had begun to lose much of its strength and she had a period of time in hospital. In the final weeks of her life, in typical fashion, she discharged herself from hospital to return to her home. She announced she wanted a party. Treasured friends were invited. Wine and refreshments were ordered in. Margaret Harcourt recalls: “we sat out in her garden so she could enjoy the company of a few of us. Mary was, for an hour, her old self, chatting away as we enjoyed wine and canapés.” Margaret, by now well recovered from her argument with the stile and back tramping the fields in the Wharfe valley, was again advised by Mary to concentrate.
In writing this short life about a very certain woman I knew I wanted to conclude with a description of the essence of Mary Clarke. Stuart Lewis set me off with a perceptive start.
“The biggest mistake one could make with regard to Mary was to make assumptions on the basis of her being the sort of person you expected her to be. Her intelligent and informed conversation, her interest in the arts, her joy of travelling and involvement in the local community were firmly rooted in an understanding of the bricks life could throw and the mess they could make of people’s lives.” She did indeed surprise people with her acute observations of human nature.
Despite the terrors and hardship life threw at her earlier in life Mary loved the world and its people. She had an ease and friendship with all people. She could see the potential in situations that might challenge others. Her quiet inner strength and confidence - laced with a healthy humour - are characteristics of people who are comfortable with themselves. She was a woman of considerable intelligence and possessed of a sharp brain. When she perceived a friend experiencing trouble in their life she was a good listener and offered wise advice. Sometimes, as one friend recalls, “that advice could be quite bracing.”
I had the good fortune to meet Mary Clarke in her landscape of later life. It enriched mine and those of the friends she made. Yet these landscapes are also shifting sands. Mary lived for almost a century during which the world changed immeasurably. She had witnessed others around her living through tragedy and experiencing hardship. She herself withstood very hard times early in her marriage. Because of these experiences, or maybe despite them, she was resolute and brave hearted. Perhaps one of the reasons she loved the poetry of T.S. Eliot was that they had a common experience of having been air raid wardens in war time. I shall select for Mary some last words from Little Gidding she may have chosen herself:
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
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| Mary and family c. 1953 |
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* An article written by George Clarke was printed in the Summer 1946 issue of Clare Market Review, the student journal of the London School of Economics. He had arrived there in October 1945 having spent 4½ years as a prisoner -of-war in Germany. In this intriguing article, entitled The Experiment, George writes “If it be agreed that a definition of Economics which lays stress on the scarcity of the means of satisfying wants is no less acceptable than definitions which stress other aspects of the subject, then there should be no difficulty in appreciating that Prisoners-of-War are very favoured people. Was it not their good fortune to be privileged to study Economics in a society where scarcity was their very tutor?” This is an interesting hypothesis. I can quite understand why Mary was so attracted to George. She lived her life expressing similar, original challenges to situations you and I might find ordinary and unquestionable. George’s description of his time as a prisoner-of-war includes an enlightening account of the humble cigarette acting as hard currency for internal trade; and his sociological digression into “community-consciousness”. Both are very relevant today when we consider how prisoners-of-war in Ukraine and Russia are coping with captivity.
Acknowledgements:
In 2021 I wrote a shortened version of the life of Mary Clarke for publication in the Kirkby Overblow village magazine. These two pieces could not have been written without a collection of memories from Mary’s daughters and her friends in Yorkshire. I am indebted to them all; particularly, to her daughters Richenda Appleyard and Annabel Watkinson. They not only shared their memories and reflections of their mother’s life but provided copies of Mary’s and George’s notes and published letters and articles. Mary’s Yorkshire friends have contributed much material and I have included some of their loving comments. I thank them all: Bridget Bennett, Catherine Catton, Margaret Harcourt, Stuart Lewis, Vanda McKenzie, Derek and Lois Plows, Carol Simmonds and Ann Wroe.
