As a representive of the Prudential Insurance Company in Heckmanthorpe for forty-eight years(the last three years as area manager until my enforced retirement at the not unsprightly age of fifty seven years) and as co-founder of the Heckmanthorpe Folk Club which ran from its exciting beginnings in 1963 (the year in which sex was invented as Philip Larkin so amusingly observed in a famous poem) until its sad closure in 1993 due to falling attendance, my life has been not without incident which I feel may of some small interest to the general public, and now as I have time to reflect on the intervening years I must perforce take up my pen and record some of the rich tapestry of Yorkshire life before age inevitably clouds the clear colours and richer sounds of memory.
   But to begin at(or perhaps I should qualify that "at" and say a little more precisely"near") the beginning. A small boy, shorts-clad and grazed of knee, strode down the hill to Grimdike Bottom, swinging his satchel and whistling a gay tune of the day, heard perhaps that very morning on the newly-acquired wirelss which graced the sideboard in our front parlour. The factory chimney at Hackbone Mill belched(or perhaps I should rather say "gently emitted") a plume of black smoke, and the hooter emitted its mornful hoot, breaking the calm of that idyllic morning, the sunlit sky however showing signs of impending rain, or least an overcast day, from the west. I whistled blithely enough in all conscience, unware that at Bog Lane School that day a momentous encounter was to take place that would forever turn my life into pathways as yet unforeseen by the enquiring though perhaps sheltered mind of an eight-year old......