Moveable feast

IF it’s Friday, it must be Reeth. If it’s Midsummer Day, folk must be half-perished to death, chimneys smoking incorrigibly like a fifty-a-day habit.

None is deterred from queuing for fish and chips, few Yorkshire folk tempted beyond the staples, though Richard and Pauline Ramsay sell exotica like luncheon meat fritters, as well.

Ramsay’s fish and chip van – the apostrophe appears optional, like their line-caught haddock a moveable feast – has been feeding the Dales, Tuesday to Friday, for exactly 30 years.

Pauline and Richard take just one week off annually and in those three decades have missed only four runs because of the weather – two of them last winter.

“The vinegar froze, the pop froze, I wore three jumpers and I still froze,” says Pauline. “We even had to use hot water to open the window.

We don’t like to disappoint people, they look forward to us coming.

“There are folk who might hardly get out of the house at all, if it weren’t for the fish and chips.”

Reeth, first stop on the Swaledale run, is 4pm to 6.15pm, the van parked not on the familiarly vertiginous green, but around the back next to some old folks’ bungalows.

There’s no need for Greensleeves, for signs and chimes. Out of sight, but clearly not out of mind, Reeth follows its nose.

I’m there at 5pm, maybe ten queuing, the van’s ventilation shafts like L/Cpl Jones’s van preparing to encounter the enemy.

“Up one-two-three, fire one-twothree, bang….”

Kids sit on the kerb, noses against a metaphorical sweet shop window, awaiting their tea. There’s a lady down from Crackpot, a couple of miles up the hill, a chap who’s biked over from Aysgarth and that’s in the next dale.

Clearly it’s a social occasion, too, a sort of outdoor equivalent of the doctor’s waiting room.

The owners are genial, friendly, anxious to engage and well-known to most of their customers. The enthusiasm isn’t always reciprocated.

“How are you then?” Dick Ramsay asks a regular.

“All right,” the customer concedes.

“What do you know, then?”

“Nowt.”

Dick returns to frying tonight.

There’s an American couple who ask for salt in a bag, another chap who wants fish, chips, mushy peas and curry sauce all in the same tray – clearly a Lancastrian – townies who ask for scraps.

I’m clocked. “Mike Amos is stood there; you’re going to have to be nice to the customers,” someone tells Dick.

“What for,” he replies, “I haven’t been for 30 years.”

The faster they serve, the longer the queue seems to grow, great landlocked shoals of them and – slightly curiously – about three-quarters male. If the North Sea really is being over-fished, they need look no further than Reeth to catch the culprits.

“You should see it when it’s raining, the men turn into hunter gatherers, queuing half way round that hedge,” says Pauline. “In summer it can be really hectic. Someone would ask for fish and chips 16 times and we wouldn’t blink.”

Much of the reported conversation, in truth, is taken out of sequence.

In the 75 minutes before the fry-by-nights move on – Healaugh, Low Row, Gunnerside, Muker, Thwaite – there are precisely 25 seconds in which no one’s waiting to be served.

It’s like trying to talk with a mouthful of scadded haddock, impossible to get a word in edgeways.

Good for trade, not great for joinedup journalism.

THEY were pig farmers originally, devastated when disease hit the herd – “they all had to be shot” – were sitting in the pub one Friday evening, wondering what to do next.

“We were just chatting, decided that there wasn’t much hot food provision in the dales, thought we’d invented the mobile chippy,” says Pauline.

They hadn’t. Next day there was one for sale in the paper. On the Monday they bought it. “We wanted something we could do together,” says Pauline.

“That lasted for about a fortnight,” says Dick.

Within a month they were on the move. “We knew absolutely nothing, but there was no health and safety in those days,” says Pauline. “It was freezing cold, chucking it down and it was like Fred Karno’s circus.

“The chips were burned, the fish probably wasn’t much better, but we took £30 and thought we’d won the Lottery.”

At first they worked around Bedale, near their home. Now they serve the Bedale area villages on Tuesday, Wensleydale on Wednesday, Wensleydale and Coverdale on Thursday and Swaledale every Friday.

Pauline has only twice gone solo. “Richard had a bad back, couldn’t move. The chips were terrible. He soon got better after that.”

One wintry night they couldn’t get past Gunnerside, itself a fair old climb; on another took three hours to get out of Coverdale. This is their eighth van; Dick, also an engineer, converts them himself.

“If at all possible, we’ll attend,” he says. “This is our social life, too, but it’s bloody hard work. Sometimes it can be a killer.”

THE next stop’s Healaugh, stone-built and jolly, where there’s a run on haddock. The lady of this house wants one, too, and with onion rings. “Onion rings?

We’re not that posh,” says Dick.

The haddock is beautiful, hot and succulent, best ever. The chips are good, heart warming, too. “Maybe we’re getting the hang of it,” says Dick.

Low Row, high profile, is a mile further up and a top coat colder. “It’s bloody nitherin’ art ’ere,” someone says. “It’s not much hotter in ’ere,” says Dick.

“I wouldn’t care, they’ll be shuttin’ in eight weeks,” grumbles someone else, by which he means pointing guns at grouse.

For some reason – doubtless to be explained by O-level physicians – someone’s taking away a hot supper in a cool bag.

At Gunnerside the van’s greeted ecstatically, like the Relief of Mafeking (or possibly the Deadwood Stage). The carousing cheer appears to cajole yet more people from their homes, or possibly from the Kings Arms.

Someone asks Pauline for a small cod. “Not a chance,” she says, cheerfully, “we don’t do small in the dales.”

She also reveals that if the price is right, they’ll sell.

The midges are biting, too, first time this summer, the locals reckon.

“I bet I don’t taste as nice as that bit cod,” an old chap says, probably inarguably.

It’s coming up eight o’clock, the temperature barely above single figures, the chimney gently smoking like the train now standing on platform two. Dick and Pauline still have to meander up to Muker, to satiate Thwaite, but for some of us it’s time to head homeward.

Like fish and chips 16 times, another column all wrapped up.