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The Devil in Elmet
or
"the Devil in a Helmet"
For most of my life I’ve preferred to use a motorbike as my personal transport. It’s a very efficient way of getting from one place to another, and a great time saver. Best of all, a good bike makes every journey into a bit of an adventure. Sometimes the adventure is more – shall we say, adventurous!
.
My 600cc Norton Dominator 99
It was late in October, and it had been a long day. It was nearly nine o’clock at night and fully dark by the time I was ready to set off home. The shortest journey was a cut through the edge of the city, but after such a long day, I decided to use the Ring Road to give me a chance to open her up and blow away the cobwebs.
Once on the York Road, headed for the Ring Road, I began to wonder if I had made the right decision. There was a thickening fog. “It will be OK”, I thought.” Most of the Ring Road has street lighting”.
A bank of fog drifted across the road. Now it was really thick. I dropped the speed, the headlight picking out the curb as the road curved round to the right as I approached the roundabout at the junction with the Ring Road.
That was when all the streetlights went out.
Muttering to myself about power cuts, I considered turning back at the roundabout and pottering back home through the suburbs. It’s difficult to know exactly where you are in fog, in the dark, and there was no other traffic on the road, but it did seem to be taking a long time to get to the roundabout. Surely, I must be there by now. The high intensity halogen headlight was lighting up a bright beam in the fog, and I could just about keep the bike on the road following the twists and turns of the edge of the road, if I kept the speed down to about 20mph. When something is completely wrong, your brain
often refuses to acknowledge it, so I’d been riding for about another ten
minutes before the thought finally got through to consciousness. “Hang on,
this is a dual carriageway, straight as a die. It doesn’t have and twists
and turns. It doesn’t have grass at the edge either.”
Now Leeds is the town where I grew up. I’d explored every inch of
these roads, many times, so I knew that there was only one road in the area
that that I could be on. I could not understand how I’d gone right past the
roundabout without noticing it, but I was clearly on the Barwick road.
It was the village that my Grandmother’s family came from, and I knew
that if I continued along the road it would join up with the main York road
again on the other side of the village. The fog had thinned a little now and
the road was too narrow to do a U turn anyway.
Then I passed through an open gate, and the bike gave one of those little squirms that you get when you are riding on a muddy, rutted track. Why did I carry on at that point? Maybe it was just that macho thing about not turning back; maybe because I was still in some way sure that I knew where I was. “Anyway,” I said to myself, “ it’s only a couple of hundred yards to the village. If I’m wrong about that, I’ll turn back.”
I could see a lot better now, though everything for miles around was absolutely pitch black. Houses up ahead- I was right.
There were no lights on though. The power cut must be over a large area. I wonder if the electricity will be on at home, when I eventually get there. There was something odd about the houses though. They were tiny, not much bigger than sheds, built right at the edge of the road, and, yes definitely, thatched, their eaves barely shoulder high as I rode past at not much above walking pace. A shiver went through me, and it was not the cold of the night. This was not right. Ahead of me there was a sharp left hand bend, curving around a large grassy area straight ahead.
I pulled the bike to a stop. Ahead of me, in the middle of the village green was a large pole, painted white.There are not many places in Yorkshire where they leave the Maypole up all year. One of them is Barwick in Elmet.
I was standing in the village of Barwick in Elmet, a village of low thatched huts. A village that belonged hundreds of years earlier than me and my Norton, its 600cc twin engine thudding away beneath me.
A few lights were coming on in some of the houses. A hundred horror films started to play in my head. Images of peasants with pitchforks, and witch burnings provided a powerful motivation.
I kicked the bike into first, and launched her towards to road to York, the twin Goldie silencers roaring as the tyre spun on the poor surface. There was an instant of seeing heads rapidly pulled back inside open doors, and then I was out on the short run to the main road. Rounding a curve, I gave a sigh of relief as I saw the orange glow of sodium lights ahead. Moments later I was passing the bright lights of the Fox and Grapes, the pub on the York road junction. A sharp left and I was heading for home.
As I locked up the Dommie for the night, I noticed that my journey home had taken about three quarters an hour instead of the usual twenty minutes or so. I don’t know how many years I’d travelled though.
It was as I was thinking it over later that night that I remembered a story my Grandmother used to tell. Granny spoke Yorkshire dialect, so I’ll translate.
She said that the Devil rode through Barwick on Halloween night.
” A great ugly thing he was, with an all black head like a bucket with one great big eye in the middle of it. He rode a great silver horse that breathed fire and roared like thunder”, she said, and she’d always ended by saying “And mind th'art a good lad or mebbe he’ll come for thee one night!”
Maybe he did, Gran!
Darowyn.
Halloween 2006
Footnotes:-
Like a lot of British place names, the “w” in Barwick is not pronounced. Say it as “Barrick”.
They really do leave the Maypole up all year.
Something very similar really did happen to me. Wierder things than this have happened on bikes too.
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