Chaos rising

STARTING from scratch – and in a church magazine, so it must be true – The Messenger, the mag of St Margaret’s in Brookfield, Middlesbrough, reports that the average railway carriage is “home to as many as 1,000 cockroaches, 200 bed bugs and 200 fleas”.

Where, for heaven’s sake? “The cockroaches are hiding behind the lighting and ceiling panels while the bed bugs lurk in the seating fabric.

“The fleas jump about wherever they like, particularly down your leg.”

Years of spraying have proved ineffective, the report adds. Now the train operators have approached Rentokil in a bid to find a “more drastic”

solution.

Shooting the Messenger, I read it two weeks ago on a train from Darlington to Teesside. I swear I’ve been itching ever since.

STILL with the flying squad, recent columns have touched upon malaria – the pharmacy in Tow Law, Switzerland of the North, advertises treatment. It may not be so improbable after all.

The Stainmore Railway Company’s quarterly magazine recalls the incident during the great winter of 1947 when workmen struggling to clear the line at Stainmore Summit – between Barnard Castle and Cumbria – were summoned to help a sick lorry driver on the nearby A66.

Though doctors were unable to get through, the Barney station master passed details to the local GP who correctly read the symptoms and sent medication on a special breakdown train.

The magazine acknowledges the improbability of a malaria case in six feet of Stainmore snow. It’s likely the poor chap had served in the Far East during the Second World War, it says. It may all make Tow Law seem quite clement by comparison.

T HE Daily Mail, incidentally, devotes a page to the irresistible spread of Blandford fly, a pest said – like Mr Norman Hunter – to bite your legs. Pop singer Mollie King had to abandon a show after being attacked by one (or, perhaps, more). The insect takes its name from the Dorset town of Blandford Forum, where first it was identified and, as ever, it’s the female which is the pesky trouble. The males are vegetarian.

FOR Gadfly readers, nothing flies like time. Several have responded to last week’s note recalling the Bishop Auckland (boys) Grammar School train trip to the Royal Show on Newcastle Town Moor, July 1962.

We’d been foolish fourth formers, should never have been let out, marked the return journey by tipping thousands of agricultural leaflets – flyers, maybe, but they fell quickly enough to earth – from Durham viaduct onto the streets below.

It sent Christine Armstrong – now in Nunthorpe, Middlesbrough – searching for her diary of the 1961 school trip when she attended the Girls Grammar School in Bishop.

The two didn’t merge until 1963, kept apart by a football field – a sort of green chastity belt – and, truth to tell, by the fact that we probably preferred football in the first place.

Christine, at any rate, remembers that theirs was a train trip, too – from Bishop Auckland for three days in Venice and thence to Lugano.

“With hindsight we were very lucky to have teachers like Miss Curry and Mrs Walker (and her husband) who were prepared to give up their time to lead us,” she says. With hindsight, they were also quite lucky to be girls.

PETE Sixsmith, at Bishop Grammar a few years later, recalls a school trip down the coaly Tyne – “as then it was” – when Swan Hunter was building the Southern Cross, a luxury liner.

It may not have been as educational, however, as the Ferryhill School leavers’ outing to Scarborough in 1977 – Pete, then as now, a teacher at the school.

Initially disinclined to allow it, the head relented after being assured that they’d take in Rievaulx Abbey on the way.

After refreshments in Helmsley – “read into that what you will” – the party left on the Rievaulx road.

“Stand up, look over the wall and tell Mr Bowman you’ve seen Rievaulx Abbey,” the demob mob were instructed.

They spent the rest of the day by the sea – sampling, as Pete perhaps euphemistically puts it, the delights of the Queen of the Yorkshire Coast.

BOTH Phil Steele in Crook and John Vasey in France remember that the Royal Show group disgorged at West Jesmond station. We’d been steam hauled by a V2, says Phil, but a “snotty first year” at the time.

“We didn’t fancy a load of tractors very much, but a trip to Newcastle was wonderful for a fanatical train spotter like me.”

John remembers two separate queues – male and female crocodiles.

“The thing that really sticks in my mind, however, is the first sighting of a colour television. It was experimental, and I remember it being a bit wishy-washy.”

The memory, of course, is strictly black and white – but maybe more about colour telly next week.

THE same note acknowledged Denis Weatherley, the Bishop Auckland headmaster, a wonderful singer and (as later I learned) a great man.

It was Denis, encountered in Darlington in 1997, to whom I’d suggested that he looked well. “There are three ages of man,” he replied.

“Youth, middle age and ‘By God you do look well’.”

It was Denis who died a few weeks later while singing Swing Low Sweet Chariot in his son’s choir. They’d just got to the line about coming for to carry me home.

Mary Hawgood in Durham recalls singing with him in the Palatine Opera Group – “a brilliant principal, his wit and unflappable humour made rehearsals a joy” – and the “truly memorable” last night parties hosted by Denis and his wife Eleanor.

Since Mary is also a former mayor of Durham, we’ve asked if the Bishop boys are forgiven for depositing so much agricultural waste over her serene city.

Sadly, ominously, there hasn’t been a reply.

FINALLY, back to church magazines and the Reverend Barry Pyke, vicar of the Mulgrave group of parishes near Whitby, is commendably brief in his August letter.

Barry simply tells the story, said to have been related during a clergy retreat, of the surgeon, the civil engineer and the politician discussing which of the three professions was the oldest. The surgeon claims seniority because when God created woman, he took his scalpel to remove a rib from Adam to make Eve.

The engineer retorts. “When God divided the Chaos into Earth and Sea, that must have been the first and greatest civil engineering project of all time.”

The politician says he can beat both of them.

“Who do you think created the Chaos in the first place?”

Once bitten or otherwise, the column returns next week.