Imagining ourselves into existence

It’s an unusually warm day in early spring and I’m in Skipton, a beautiful market town at the southern tip of the Yorkshire Dales. I’m revisiting and reconstructing my past.

For a couple of years in the early 1980s I lived here, in a tall terrace house on a road that seemed so much steeper to the younger me. At the top of the road there used to be a number of council office buildings; we would climb onto the roof of the smaller building during the weekends when the site was empty, sit and chat or dare each other to leap to the ground below. The buildings are now gone, replaced by new houses that look over onto the allotments and the Leeds to Liverpool canal below. The old mills that were abandoned and derelict in my youth have been transformed into offices and plush apartments; no longer can the local youths climb the old brickwork to salvage the lead from their roofs.

The canal is still lined with barges, some brightly painted while others are in need of repair. I would walk this way on Saturday mornings on my way into town or cycle along the towpath with my friends. In the opposite direction is the school I attended for two years, still an old style secondary modern, Skipton having retained the system whereby children sit an exam known as the eleven plus at the end of their primary education to determine which school they attended. If you passed you would…