PICTURE me as a fresh-faced (well, not that fresh-faced actually as I had a bushy beard that made me look like I was in ZZ Top) youth on my first day at North Staffordshire Polytechnic in 1975.
There I was, in my old army greatcoat and my jeans and my trainers with the Stars and Stripes on, trying to look casual and worldly in front of all these people from all over the country who all had one thing in common: they were all more confident than I was. Or at least I thought so at the time. Maybe, with the hindsight of decades, they weren’t.
I tried to stand near some people who were doing the same course as I was – modern studies, which consisted of English, history, politics and sociology.
I guess if I went to university these days I’d do creative writing but that disciple didn’t exist then.
Somebody came up to me and introduced themselves. I don’t remember their name but I recall that they had a broad Liverpool accent.
“And where are you from?” he said, his accent slicing through the Midland air. I went tomato-red because somebody I didn’t know had spoken to me. I hesitated. He said it again: “Where are you from, la?”
“Barnsley,” I said, my voice almost cracking under the strain of delivering the word. Then I tried to qualify that, which maybe I shouldn’t have.
“Well, Darfield actually. It’s near Wombwell and not far from Goldthorpe.”
I didn’t realise that I was falling into the trap of thinking that everybody knew the villages in the Dearne Valley. Turns out they didn’t. His eyes widened. He grinned with delight. He beckoned to somebody else, who turned out to be a fellow Scouser who was wearing a badge that said STAMP OUT REALITY.
“Just say that again,” he said, his voice brittle with excitement. “Just say where you come from again.”
I swallowed hard. I knew that the exchanges of the next few minutes could cement my social standing for the next three years. I swallowed hard again. It’s funny, but at school, in the sixth form, I’d been known for my outrageous wit and my claver gags in class. Now I just felt daft.
“Barnsley,” I said. “Well, Darfield, actually. It’s near Wombwell and not far from Goldthorpe.”
The lad from Liverpool and his mate couldn’t believe their luck. They waved other people over. A small and anticipatory crowd gathered. I should have walked away but I didn’t.
“Say it again, mate. Tell us all where you come from.”
Was there an edge of menace in his voice? Possibly. I said my little speech; I was like a broken record.
“Barnsley. Well Darfield actually. It’s near Wombwell and not far from Goldthorpe.”
There was a moment of silence that seemed to last for decades, seemed to last almost from then until now, when I’m writing this. Then the crowd exploded.
“Baaaaaaaarnsley!” somebody shouted. “Wooooooombwell!” somebody else said, wiping tears of undergraduate mirth away.
They continued to say the names of the towns with even more vowels until they could hardly speak for laughing. One or two were using inhalers and some had to sit down. Oddly, nobody took the mickey out of Goldthorpe or Darfield, although a few days later somebody said to me in the bar that they’d thought I’d said Driffield and they were going to strike up a conversation with me because they were from Market Weighton.
And, readers of the Baaaaaarnsley Chronicle, at that moment I did a bad thing. I made a shameful decision. I decided never to say that I was from Barnsley again, or that it was near Wombwell, because I didn’t want to spend three years being chortled at. And, if I dig more deeply than that, I realise now that I felt embarrassed, not just about the way I spoke but, by extension, about the place I was from.
Let me tell you something else: I did an even badder thing. I exorcised Barnsley and Wombwell from my mental map. For the first year of Polytechnic life I told my fellow students that I was from Darfield near Doncaster or, worse, that I was from Darfield near Sheffield. I’m so sorry. Forgive me.
Luckily, by the second year of my studies I realised that I was proud of my home town, and I always would be. Baaaaaarnsley’s the place for me, tha knows!
