Published at 11:36, Friday, 13 November 2009

They didn’t look as though they were especially wayward. But they did look like the kind of girls who soon could be – should they choose to set their minds to it.

Brampton Town Club. All women together in suppressed, hidden or perhaps controlled waywardness, were gathered for their weekly meeting.

Snuggled in hats, scarves, coats and woollies against a forming hoarfrost outside, they had kettle on, biscuit tin open and were in possession of enough sizzling gossip to illuminate night skies with a late, explosive Guy Fawkes display, should touch-paper inadvertently be ignited.

I was their guest. And a nervous one at that.

All were lovely, warm, chatty, friendly ladies of course and their chosen venue of Methodist Church Hall was certainly innocent enough.

It should be said also that two verses of The Lord Is My Shepherd, as an opening mark of fellowship would, under normal circumstances, have been snoozily seductive.

I mean, you don’t get much more tranquilly reassuring than that. But I’m not nearly so green as I was cabbage-looking when I first arrived in Cumbria.

I’ve learned in the years since then that women are bred strong, tough and single-minded in Brampton. Their menfolk might be allowed to think otherwise – on birthdays and anniversaries only – but women rule the roost there.

And most of the roost-rulers are in the Town Club.

“You’ll not be a proper Bramptonian until you’ve had your feet in Gelt Beck,” Florence, roost-ruler in charge, informed me by way of warm welcome.

“Oh dear, I’m sorry.

“I don’t think I know where that is. I should – er, look it up.”

Someone else had once advised me similarly but only now was I realising where I’d made my mistake. I felt bound to apologise for failure to paddle, as required, in an important local landmark.

To be truthful, I’d imagined I’d done all dutiful initiation stuff when I’d sunk a pint (actually, more like three) of Geltsdale’s Hell Beck in the White Lion’s lounge bar with girlfriends visiting from Leeds.

There had been the error. I’d had my becks and Gelts mixed up. Easily done – especially after the second glass.

Just then, as memory was drifting involuntarily back towards local ale, Florence and her retired post-lady friend Nanette revealed their surprising reputations as dangerous floozies. Naturally I began to feel at home.

The club had been founded between the two world wars – around the time the Royal British Legion formed – as a way of preventing wayward girls from going off the rails. Or more specifically, to prevent women from crossing the threshold of any one of the town’s 70-odd pubs – when, presumably, they should have been wading in the beck.

“And has it?”

“Has it what?” asked Nanette.

“Kept you all out of pubs?”

“Goodness, no! That was some upper-class teetotaller’s idea for keeping girls and women in their place,” she said. “I don’t think it ever really caught on.”

How times and ideas have altered. In a week of remembrance, women of strength and substance, were doing together what Brampton’s townswomen had done in fellowship since the 1920s, when the Legion was formed to honour and support their fighting men.

Wearing poppies with pride – though one lady did wonder whether the pins might nowadays be considered health and safety risks – none spoke of the cruelly tragic irony now contained in that little lapel badge’s symbolism.

A flower synonymous with treasured, respectful tributes to our fallen, now also starkly reminded of opiate harvests, grown for deadly sale on our streets by an enemy determined to fell our young men and women – with guns bombs and drugs.

All things change – even that which stays the same. In a week of remembrance two constants were clear at a gathering of poppy-wearing townswomen, who’d kept faith in fellowship for more than 80 years.

They would remember the fallen, the injured, the dutifully serving, the tirelessly fighting, all of the bereaved and their worried families.

And being perhaps just a little wayward, on occasion, they might even go a little further. When done paddling, they might raise a respectful glass of Hell Beck to those serving men and women, in thankful tribute and solidarity.

Published by http://www.newsandstar.co.uk