A Yorkshireman in America

CHARLIE STARKEY (1968 - 1975)

Things often look different when viewed from afar.We invite our man in the US to give us his personal perspective on some of the issues and questions of the day

QHere in the UK we’ve just experienced the hottest summer on record. How’s it been over in the States and how does it compare with your memories of Huddersfield weather?

Charlie’s view

Geographically speaking, Great Britain consists of a small clump of islands separated – by more than mere distance –from mainland Europe.Through canny use of naval power, piracy, and plun der, a succession of Britannic rulers created a vast empire which, at its peak, held dominion over a quarter of the planet and its peoples. De scribing the nation's ex panding global reach, in 1773 Earl

George Macartney employed the glowing phrase “this vast empire on which the sun never sets”, yet at its epi centre poor old Albion was likely regarded by its lumendeprived inhabitants as the land on which the sun never shone. Did we pale, spotty Britons seek to colonise the world just to escape the awful weather? “Rule

Britannia, Britannia rules the waves” went the jingoistic refrain, but our formerViking King Canute famously demonstrated that attempting to control the elements was beyond the power of mere mortals... and weather forecasters.

BBC weatherpersons are often ridiculed for the wild inaccuracy of their forecasts. Lately, television meteorologists have been accused of scaremongering and causing public consternation by using the term ‘climate change’ to explain newsworthy, extreme atmospheric events. Like it or not, they’re only telling it like it is.The odds are forever stacked against forecasters because the UK is subject to the largely unpredictable whims of intersecting ocean currents, and maritime and continental winds. It’s a bit like figuring out who has right of way at a yellow box junction.

As a child of the late twentieth century, I remember a time when Oderesfelt was a soot-blackened, thriving northern metropolis where sunshine was considered an ex- pensive luxury that only wealthy southern counties could afford.The sun made a brief appearance in 1966 to celebrate England’s World Cup victory at Wembley and the release of the Beatles’ Revolver LP. (Products of their damp heritage, it felt almost natural for the Beatles to compose titles such as Rain, Here Comes the Sun, and Good Day Sunshine).

Partly due to the town’s topography and latitude it always seemed to be overcast or drizzly, and on any given day a brolly or paca-mac was a necessary fashion accessory.This was especially true for day trippers planning a visit to the seaside. ‘Bracing’ was what grownups liked to call a typically windy day in Bridlington spent squatting in rickety deckchairs with knotted hankies on their heads, eating sugary doughnuts, and watching seagulls divebomb unattended children. When the weather was abysmal the whole family could always go down the pub, which is how as a nation we survived two World Wars and the Thatcher years.

Huddersfield, that sprawling conurbation in the scenic Wapentake of Agbrigg, has experienced its share of extreme weather. History records that, on a particularly stormy day circa 1960, the screams of children accompanied the unusually strong winds that tore the roof off Deighton Junior School’s classroom annexe. Fortunately, the only injury was to a teacher’s pride, when Miss Booth got stuck halfway while climbing through a window during the subsequent evacuation. Old codgers may well remember the freak storm of July 1968 that visited our town: the sky suddenly grew dark, then torrential rain and hail descended, smashing greenhouses, cold frames, and car windows, leaving behind piles of hailstones several feet deep. If that wasn't sufficiently ex- citing, the following March powerful wintry gusts demolished the Emley Moor transmitter mast. Its sturdy, reinforced concrete replacement, completed in 1970, still stands proud atop the moors and can be seen for miles around. On a clear day, at least.

When it’s grey and rainy we get depressed. It’s the Human Condition. Sunshine lifts the spirits, is a mood enhancer, helps our bodies manufacture Vitamin D, and cooks our pasty white skin to a healthy shade of tomato red. Cliff Richard and friends famously commandeered a London double-decker to Europe to escape the rain, singing a few corny tunes along the way. (“We're going where the sun shines brightly, we're going where the sea is blue.”) It’s no wonder that, by the mid-’60s, as passenger flights to warmer climes became more accessible, Brits in their thousands champed at the bit to climb aboard wily en- trepreneur Freddie Laker's popular budget airline and sample some of that Mediterranean sun. Inevitably, when Laker's transatlantic Skytrain venture began to soar, British Airways and several other established competitors who were feeling the pinch successfully conspired to drive the interloper out of business. Fred got the last laugh, though. Knighted in 1978, Sir Freddie successfully filed an antitrust lawsuit against the major airlines and won millions in lost revenue.

My own inaugural aerial adventure took the form a fortnight’s package holiday to Majorca, trepidatiously undertaken with college friends on a past-its-prime Dan-Air prop plane. Once boarded, the crate spent the first three hours of its journey on the runway undergoing ‘emergency engine maintenance’ before whisking us up into a lightning storm. Miraculously, we survived both the ordeal of the flight and the shock of seeing our accommodation. Once outside the Hotel BonaVida lobby, however, we soon adjusted to the daily novelty of being bathed in warm breezes and sunshine.The sun cast an almost ethereal glow on the town of Arenal's whitewashed cottages and hotels del sol, and sent us back to London with boastworthy golden tans. l Spring: damp. l Summer: damp. l Autumn: still damp. l Winter: damp and freezing cold.

For those unable to flee Cool Britannia, the changing seasons continued to offer their own particular attributes.

Yorkshire winters were particularly bitter because of the all-pervasive dampness that ate into your bones. My cat Maxie never complained, though. She had a fur coat.The rest of us were required to wrap up warm, put another shilling in the meter and turn the gas oven up to Regulo 9.

If whining about the weather was an Olympic sport Britons would be the gold medal holders. It’s always ‘too’ something or other. “It's too cold”, “too windy”, “too rainy”, “too earthquakey”, “too pints and a packet of crisps”, but rarely “too darned hot”. The first real Huddersfield summer scorcher I can think of was the major drought of 1976. Sprawled on the town centre Piazza steps with fellow sweat-soaked Polytechnic art students, exhausted after doing not very much (come on, we were art students), we would bask in the afternoon rays while thirstily anticipating opening time. Enjoyable as this pursuit was, we nevertheless felt that something was a bit ‘off’. Nearby, inside the modern concrete-and-glass brutalist masterpiece known as Queensgate Marketplace (now Grade II-listed) the unrelenting sun melted chocolate bars in their wrappers and transformed ice cream into a warm beverage. As it happens ’76 was merely a dry run, not to be repeated until 2018, and barely four years later here we are again. Always topical, in 2022 weather talk turned tropical. Coningsby in Lincolnshire boasted a record July high temperature of 104.5°F (40.3°C), while by comparison Huddersfield only managed a paltry 100°F (37.7°C).

Eagle-eyed readers may have noted the deliberate use of the Fahrenheit scale.That’s because my adoptive home, the United States, vanguard of innovation and modernity, stubbornly continues to blow raspberries at the rest of the world by choosing not to adopt the metric standard.Well, what would you expect from a country that can’t spell ‘colour’ or pronounce ‘lieutenant’? Kilos and kilometres are shunned here while even third world countries such as Canada and Australia list petrol prices by the litre. However, we must thank an ingenious American, Willis Haviland Carrier, for coming up with the concept of modern air conditioning and a prolific African-American inventor named Frederick McKinley Jones for developing mobile refrigeration technology.Air conditioning sys- inventor Frederick McKinley Jones developed mobile refrigeration technology in the US tems made living in hot climates bearable and by the 1950s automobile manufacturers were offering AC as a factory-installed option.With these useful innovations came the unpleasant discovery that the chlorofluorocarbon coolants used by said devices were also (a) potent greenhouse gases and (b) gouging a massive hole in the earth’s ozone layer.The ensuing panic led to an international ban on CFCs production in 1987. If you think our current climate problems aren’t bad enough, imagine adding saturation by UV radiation to the mix.

Long before I set foot in America, reading Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn novels and watching Hollywood films with titles like The Long Hot Summer and In The Heat Of The Night had vividly conjured up exotic images of that faraway place. Neither literature nor motion pictures could have prepared me for the real thing. A newcomer to New Jersey soon learns that summer temperatures in the high 80°s F are commonplace. The sultry heat can be annoying enough for humans, without taking into account the presence of another resident that benefits from the seasonal humidity. Colloquially nicknamedThe New Jersey State Bird, it’s the mosquito.

NJ is home to several species, any of which can carry the West Nile Virus, dengue fever, encephalitis, Zika, and other illnesses. Persistently bent on exsanguinating both man and beast, these little blighters became my primary nemeses after I moved into my first

New Jersey property, a ramshackle 1920s fixer-upper farmhouse with equally ramshackle bug protection screens in its windows. Indoors or out, morning and night, those pesky bloodsuckers never let up, testing the patience of the most committed Buddhist. Swatting them away does no good at all and in retaliation for the maddeningly itchy lumps inflicted by the females of the species (the males don't bite) only their violent slaughter will provide satisfaction. Meanwhile inYorkshire screens aren’t really necessary, unwelcome intruders being limited to flies, wasps, and the occasional burglar.We were taught that the purpose of windows was for letting in fresh air and for spying on neighbours through net curtains. Oh, and to get an accurate weather report.

When broadcast TV was king, by timehonoured tradition American viewers would tune into the last six minutes of local news broadcasts to catch the day's sporting results, closely followed by the weather report which was often presented by a comely lass with a winning smile.The BBC equivalent was Michael Fish. Deftly manoeuvring his magnetic clouds and arrows around the studio's weather map, each evening he was tasked to explain to the public how tomorrow could definitively deliver a fifty-fifty chance of either clouds or more clouds. In October 1987 Michael predicted that the approach of a particularly threatening Atlantic storm would not impact Great Britain. It did, causing widespread damage and multiple deaths. Notwithstanding that minor faux pas, his tenure at the BBC lasted 30 years. May 1982 saw the launch of TheWeather Channel in the U.S.Thrilling pluviophiles and heliophiles alike, within a decade it was carried by almost every cable TV provider in the country. (A UK sister channel didn’t fare so well, only lasting a couple of years.) Initially the channel simply focused on national and regional forecasting but it wasn’t long before producers felt the need to jazz up the broadcasts with state-of-the-art graphics and specials, sometimes airing appropriately-themed movies like The Perfect Storm. TWC presenters such as Jim Cantore unexpectedly achieved celebrity status – and high ratings – by recklessly placing themselves in harm’s way on camera. Reporting live from disasters and danger zones (hurricanes, tornadoes, forest fires), they could be seen leaning into 100 mph winds while dodging airborne debris and holding onto their toupees.

Hurricane Sandy got nonstop media coverage when it swamped the northeast in 2012, flooding New York City subway stations and transportation tunnels into Manhattan. Hurricane Ida caused more flash floods, deaths, and damage in 2021, sweep- ing through New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania. Last year brought more violent storms to parts of New Jersey, producing flooding and the occasional tornado, but this summer our parched lawns cooked under sustained temperatures in the high 90s° F (45°C). Even so, we fared better than Mississippi and California in the flood and fire stakes.Those who’d been paying attention to scientists concluded that human activity was screwing up the climate, so I resolved to reduce my carbon footprint.

A switch to telecommuting significantly reduced work-related travel to short strolls from the iMac to the kitchen and/or the wine cellar. (Okay, it’s not a wine cellar, just a basement with a few bottles of red and a six pack of Belgian ales.) I also realised that I might cut my water usage by being less fastidious about daily showering. And anyway, why would I want to loofah away my skin’s essential microbiome? Showers are more efficient than baths at sloughing scalps but they were a rarity growing up. For most kids Sunday night was Bath Night, the weekly ritual before school on Monday. Of course, by Tuesday we already needed another scrub.

Then I concluded having a grass lawn wasn’t much helping the declining bee population. To my chagrin I found the white clover I planted in its place was listed as an invasive weed in NJ – but try telling that to the hundreds of honeybees visiting every day. The new flora thrived until this summer when the usually hardy groundcover gasped in dismay, crisped up, and withered. Bummer. A sustained drought sets in motion a chain of events that has negative consequences for crops, animals, and even insects.The skies seemed noticeably quieter in my neighbourhood this season and birdsong didn’t return to its usual volume until mid-September. We all take water on demand for granted until standpipes start to appear on street corners.

Back in Blighty, by the 1980s the regional water authorities were in trouble, thanks to decades of underfunding, declining quality, environmental accidents (such as the Camelford poisoning disaster) and ageing subterranean pipes. Coming under pressure to comply with EU quality rules, in 1989 the reigning Conservative government’s solution was to opt for privatisation. This was about as effective – and popular – as their later decision to privatise British Rail.The resulting glut of new agencies promised to implement infrastructure repairs but in the main failed to invest nearly enough to fix the nation's leaky Victorian-era systems. A massive amount of water, possibly three billion litres per year, continues to be lost while company profits soar and private shareholders reap the benefits. Few believed then that clean, safe-todrink water would soon prove to be a finite commodity, almost as indispensable as beer.

The Industrial Revolution has made living more comfortable for many but burning fossil fuels comes with a high price tag. Some climate researchers are predicting that we have already passed the point of no return and that the next generation will face a more extreme and hostile world than the one you and I enjoyed. Not to worry, though, we’re British! Keep Calm and Carry On and we’ll leave it for someone else to fix. n