Beyond the Vale: A North Saga — Out Now on Amazon and Kindle!
I began sharing Creating History at the start of the summer.
It grew from the grains of a family story, with direct links to my own West family, into the Norths — a family with strong bonds, stubbornness, powerful emotions and strong characters. A family struck by hardship, challenge and decisions that would shape all of their futures.
Set in Cragside Vale, a village overshadowed by the colliery wheel, where the days were ordered by the blowing of the pit horn and the chiming of St Michael’s Church clock, the story gradually filled with a broad cast of local characters and a community rooted in the foothills of the Pennines.
At first, Creating History was intended simply to give me a vehicle through which to explore assisted migration in the mid-twentieth century.
Instead, it became a place to explore family, relationships, hopes, fears and belonging.
It became a story about the people who leave, the people who stay, and the ways one decision can change the course of an entire family.
And somewhere along the way, Creating History became Beyond the Vale.
Cragside Vale has everything a reasonably sized Yorkshire village needs: the shop, the pub, the school, the church and its parish hall — and, at the heart of village life, the Welfare.
Beyond the Vale lies Whitford, a larger town with department stores, secondary modern and grammar schools, and St Barbara’s Hospital. Travel a little further and you reach Ashwick, with its hotels and rather posher tea rooms.
Together, they form the small fictional corner of Yorkshire in which the North family’s story unfolds.
In a world of outside netties, wash houses and temperamental coal-fired ranges that have to be lovingly coaxed into complying with the simplest of everyday tasks, Beyond the Vale opens a window onto the social history of 1955.
It is there in the family meals around the table, the weekly shop and the trip to the Welfare; in schooldays, shift patterns and pit life; in what people wear, eat and drink, and in the expectations that govern how they behave. It is also there in the morals and attitudes of the time — ideas about marriage, class, respectability, family and community that can seem very different from our own.
This is the world in which the North family live. History isn’t happening somewhere beyond them. It is in their kitchen, their street and their conversations; in the choices available to them and, just as importantly, in the choices that aren’t.
Beyond the Vale is their story, but it is also a glimpse through the window into an ordinary Yorkshire community on the cusp of change.
Leave a Reply