Snapshot: Fred – an uncommon railwayman
My maternal grandfather, Fred Askew, was presented with a certificate by the London, Midland and Scottish Railway in 1939 in recognition of “the rendering of first aid assistance” at Braithwaite station, near Keswick. Decades later, I learned the full story from my mother: a young man had fallen under a train, and while help was sought, Fred treated him on the tracks, attempting to stem the considerable blood loss, comforted and prayed with him and held him in his arms as he died.
During the 1926 General Strike, Fred, then an assistant stationmaster, had had rather different dealings with the railway company. As he was liked and trusted by his fellow workers, senior managers exerted pressure to make him break the strike and lead the men back to work. Fred refused. As a local preacher and a socialist to his core, he believed in fairness and justice and held fast to his principles, even when threatened with demotion if he did not comply. I suppose they meant it as, after the strike, he was put to shunting trucks in the snow where he contracted tuberculosis.
Once over the worst, he became a signalman until the end of his working life. To make ends meet, my grandmother Mary opened a bed and breakfast despite suffering ill health herself, and with no NHS, Fred spent much of his meagre pay on medicine for her.
Not that my sister and I as children regretted Grandad’s lack of promotion; to us, he had the most exciting job in the world. Despite parental warnings not to pester him, we visited him regularly in his signal box at Keswick station, scrambling up the bank from the children’s playground in Fitz Park. Some of our happiest childhood experiences happened there – drinking mahogany tea from his huge tin mug; wearing his peaked cap; under supervision, waving the red and green flags and passing the single-track token to the train drivers; and with a great sense of responsibility, changing the signals while standing inside his embrace, his large, work-worn hands enclosing ours so that we pulled the lever together. A magical time.
Fred was affectionate, funny and mischievous, always willing to share the Toblerone and pomfret cakes to be found in his capacious pockets, and we adored him. As a child, I didn’t know what he had endured; he never spoke of it. It’s clear to me now that, as a man of deep integrity, he refused to allow the injustices he had experienced to embitter him or dim his delight in life. I only knew then that he was the best grandad any child could have.
Liz Morfoot
Playlist: Our Sunday morning singalong song
The Ferret Song by John Cleese & The 1948 Show Choir
“I’ve got a ferret sticking up my nose / (He’s got a ferret sticking up his nose) / How it got there I can’t tell / But now it’s there it hurts like hell / And what’s more it radically affects my sense of smell”
One day in 1967, when I was still a baby, my parents went out and bought a strange record called The Ferret Song, having heard it sung on the telly. They had been watching At Last The 1948 Show, a precursor to Monty Python starring John Cleese and Tim Brooke-Taylor. On one episode, a very serious church choir starts singing a hymn about an unfortunate gentleman who has got a ferret stuck up his nose. Every so often, usually on Sunday mornings, my sisters would put the single on, at full volume, and we would stop everything and sing along. It brought us together.
For years, I honestly thought the lyrics had some kind of religious significance; either that or it had something to do with the war, or the royal family. Although beginning very quietly, by the end of the record, the orchestra is going at full blast, with cannons firing. It builds and builds to monumental proportions; it was a great wave rolling through our living room. As a toddler, I had no idea what a ferret was, or what it was doing up this poor man’s nose, but the mere fact that such a painful experience had been set to classical music, and with such gusto, meant, to my ears, that this was obviously a deeply solemn matter, that it contained some kind of earnest message directed at my family. I have even seen my mum and dad stand up and salute while singing it.
It was not until I reached my early teens that I realised this was a comedy record. I had heard the thing so often, since before I could even talk, that I simply accepted it without question. Whenever I hear it now, The Ferret Song brings back so much of my childhood home that I actually find it tremendously stirring.
Mark Crees
We love to eat: My gran’s spätzle
Ingredients
13oz (375g) strong plain flour
3oz (75g) fine semolina
4 eggs
Salt
Water
Mix a batter of a sticky consistency with all the ingredients and beat well. Leave to stand overnight or for at least two hours. Bring a large pan of well-salted water to the boil, and drop gobbets of batter into the water. Allow to boil until the cooked spätzle float to the surface, then scoop them out with a slotted spoon and let them drain. Cook them in batches, and bring the water back to the boil for each batch. Finally, reheat all the spätzle in boiling water. Dress with an extra spoonful of semolina browned in butter. For a more luxurious result, or with leftovers, fry the spätzle in butter in a frying pan. The traditional accompaniment is a brown lentil stew, but they take well to the sour-cream sauce of sauerbraten, another traditional dish.
My family came to England from Stuttgart in 1939, just before the start of the second world war. Stuttgart people were Schwaben, a breed comparable to Yorkshiremen, who pride themselves on their thick local dialect, their country ways and their local cooking.
Spätzle are a schwäbische pasta, rough and unregimented like traditional Schwaben. Now they offer spätzle all over Germany and I’ve eaten a superb gourmet version in Kaiserslautern – quite different from the ones my grandmother used to make. With English wartime rationing, eggs were scarce and semolina difficult to find. Having lived through even worse conditions in Germany, Grandmother had a suitably economical recipe to hand.
I remember standing as a girl at the door of the scullery and watching as she flicked gobbets of batter from her spätzlesbrett (a thin wooden board with a handle) with a large knife into an enormous saucepan of boiling water.
A few years ago, swapping recipes with a lady in Stuttgart, I discovered that the technology has moved on, and that she had a new-fangled spätzlesmühle.
I inherited grandmother’s spätzlesbrett, but I don’t have her expertise or patience, and I push the batter through a colander. With an electric mixer to prepare the batter, the recipe becomes quite feasible, so I’ve returned to my roots. The Schwaben knew a thing or two: spätzle are delicious.
Eva Lawrence
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