Stars and stripes

TIME was when all chefs played the whites man, and no matter that their trousers were probably grey. Chefs wore whites; once-whites, anyway.

Today, the preferred fashion is a blue and white-striped apron, and no matter whether the guy wears blue and white stripes like West Bromwich Albion – the West Brom of the 1950s, at any rate – or like, say, Willington.

Alistair Dean, the blue and whiteclad figure who sticks his head through the hatch, is chef/patron of the Board Inn at Lealholm, where we’d just enjoyed a thoroughly good Sunday lunch.

Though still cooking – for the place is greatly in demand – he volunteers the information that the pork had been reared in the village, that the beef and lamb are every bit as locally well connected and that the haddock had been caught off Whitby by the waitress’s dad.

Yet more remarkably, he’s smiling cheerfully. Miserable beggars, chefs.

Locally pronounced Laylum – perhaps a nod to Sir Francis Ley, a 19th- Century landowner after whom the village hall is named – Lealholm is half-hidden on the North York Moors, off the Guisborough to Whitby road. It’s one of the most delightful villages, and seemingly the most God-fearing, in the region.

Though the population may barely top 500, there are Roman Catholic, Methodist and Anglican churches in weekly use, the latter dedicated to St James the Greater, who probably never sought his own elevation but is thus not confused with poor St James the Less.

There’s a friendly village shop, a post office which sells other essentials like fishing nets and inflatable dinghies – man can’t not live by penny stamps alone – the Shepherds’ Hall tea room in the Victorian former headquarters of the Ancient Order of Shepherds and, through the middle, the babbling, burbling, bounteous Esk.

The village’s other joys include a wonderful little Esk Valley line railway station, film-set floribundant, which were such things still in bloom would probably win the bestkept station award this year and every other.

The station has a little gate leading to nowhere in particular and an incongruous sign warning of a £1,000 fine for failing to shut it. By way of compensation, several notice boards offer more helpful local information.

The stepping stones, says one, have provided hours of fun to generations of children; the chapel walls bear the mark of the great floods of 1840 and 1930 and the masonry of John Castillo, a Lealholm legend.

Known thereabouts as the Bard of the Dales, he was also one of the Lantern Saints – zealous Methodists who found their way around with the aid of lanterns made from cow horns – and who is credited with helping preserve the local dialect. His cottage, Poet’s Corner, is now a plant nursery.

Castillo had moved to Pickering before his death in 1845 and is buried in the Methodist churchyard, the stone bearing a somewhat immodest epitaph – “an original and successful local preacher” – of his own composing.

Bud noo his eean’s geean dim t’ death Nee mare a pilgrim here on earch; His soul flits fra’ her shell beneath Tee recalms o’ day.

Whoor carpin’ care an’ pain an’ death Are deean away Alistair Dean was a butcher, had a pub in Sheringham, Norfolk, moved north two years ago with his wife, Karen. We’d tried to book one winter’s evening, failed save for the offer – better-late but impractical – of a table about 9.30pm.

Now it was early doors, the pub and the weather warming up nicely.

The bar, a little local treasury, offered four or five real ales; the cosy little dining room had fishing rods slung from the ceiling. The pub, Esk alongside, has fishing rights, too.

Sunday lunch courses are individually priced, so that three are unlikely to bring much change from £20. It proved, however, to be the biggest – and one of the very best – in memory.

I’d started with a plate of assorted cold meat – salami and things – thickly cut, generous and with good, fresh bread. In France they call it charcuterie, in Laylum they call it meat platter.

The Boss had begun with roasted tomatoes and goats’ cheese, thought it a superb combination, followed – for those still at the end of this particular line – with the waitress’s dad’s haddock.

It arrived with two Yorkshire puddings.

“Bizarre,” said The Boss. In truth (and it had better be said) the rather vapid Yorkshires didn’t do much for the belly pork – but what pork – much less for the haddock.

Some pig, some pork. There were great luscious, lavish chunks of the stuff, almost falling off the plate in its eagerness to be eaten. The animal may not have come far, but its journey wasn’t in vain.

Roast potatoes and parsnips, cooked in something aromatic but unidentifiable, overflowed a separate bowl. Greens crowded another, locally grown, too. Roots with roots, and full of flavour.

I’d finished with four or five profiteroles – yes, four or five – with a bitter chocolate sauce, she with what the blackboard called “rubarb fool”.

It’s zingy excellence notwithstanding, were this a column which awarded points out of ten, they’d drop half a mark for spelling.

Service is friendly and informal, background music low – Christine Haddon-Rice, the vicar, had written in the parish magazine of the near impossibility of finding real quiet, even in the countryside – riverside location magnificent.

By train or car, Lealholm is a village richly worth seeking out – and Alistair Dean a man who’s earned his stripes.

■ The Board Inn, Lealholm, near Whitby, telephone 01947- 897279.

Best to book.

I’M in Tow Law, awaiting the next bus down, when a smiling chap walks past. “Typical Mike Amos,”

he says, “the moment you turn up, the sun goes in.” So it has.

Inner compensation is available at Dobson’s butcher’s, alongside the A68, where huge and freshly-made pork and stuffing buns – peas pudding optional extra – are just £1.20.

“Watch you don’t spill it down your shirt,” says the affable assistant.

Sunny side up, I buy two. They’ve vanished, appreciatively, before the No. 1 reaches Stanley Hill Top.

THE following day – for truly there is no end to the excitement – to Alnmouth, on the Northumberland coast, where five main street pubs and hotels vie for what little custom there appears to be.

A sign outside the Schooner adds the dubious attraction that it’s haunted, perhaps by a peripatetic journalist (or ghost writer, as the case may be).

The Red Lion, long in the Good Pub Guide, has mixed blessings. There’s a distinctive, almost chocolatey pint of Farne from the Northumberland Brewery but no hot food because they’re doing something to the cooker (or, possibly, the cook).

A crab baguette is half-decent but costs £5.95. Another shilling and you could get five Dobson’s pork and stuffing butties for that. Cold calling, Tow Law may have to become a regular haunt.

RALPH Daykin, 50-odd years at the Victoria at Worton and surely the region’s longest-serving licensee, is at the Askrigg Friendly Society’s 200th anniversary church service the day after that. Ever-idiosyncratic, the pub’s on the main road through Wensleydale, generations of Daykins around it since Adam’s ale. Though Plan A was to look in on the way back, Ralph – reckoned 85 – is stopping for the supper at the Kings. Plan B, just for once, is straight home.

...and finally, the bairns wondered if we knew what’s purple and 4,000 miles long. The grape wall of China, of course.