NOSTALGIA: memories stirred after hearing music by Handel

RECENTLY, I attended a piano recital given by Stephen Hitchcock and Charles Edmondson in Arnside Methodist Church.

The first piano duet, Handel's Arrival of the Queen of Sheba, brought back so many memories.

My first teaching post in 1951 was as an infant teacher at Triangle, near Sowerby Bridge, West Yorkshire, where I lodged with Mrs Florence Sugden.

The house was the end of a terrace, three storeys high.

There was no electricity in the house and only gas lighting, with heating from a coal fire in the living room.

As there was no bathroom my only washing facility was a jug of cold water with basin in my top floor bedroom. The water toilet was down the garden.

On Friday evenings a tin bath was placed in the kitchen, filled with water heated by the gas geyser.

Florence Sugden had had a hard life and after her husband Frederick's early death while a company secretary at the local mill. She worked hard to see her only son, Morris, educated at Sowerby Bridge Secondary School, from where he won an Open Scholarship to Jesus College, Cambridge, becoming a physical chemist.

He became a master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge and winner of the Davy Medal.

Florence was extremely proud of her son and had pictures of him and his family around the house. During his school life she worked in a nearby bakery and took in the occasional lodger to help financially.

She was an extremely good cook and I especially enjoyed our Sunday roast beef lunch preceded by a large Yorkshire pudding. During the afternoon we played duets on her piano - always the Arrival of the Queen of Sheba.

Morris Sugden went on to become an eminent scientist. He was awarded a CBE in 1975 and knighted in 1983.

A few years after his death in 1984, aged 65, a plaque was unveiled in his memory in Sowerby Church, which I was privileged to attend with my Halifax friend, Audrey Mitchell.

All these memories were stirred by this one piece of music.