Posted by John Nichols on April 05, 2005 at 23:46:30 from 165.91.196.105 user Mcneacail.
In Reply to: Re: Some form of assemblage posted by John Nichols on April 05, 2005 at 23:34:03:
Soles in torment
Lake District
Tony Greenbank
Monday April 4, 2005
The Guardian
Coach drivers slow down in Ambleside as couriers extol the tiny house which occupies a bridge across Stock Beck, so built to evade tax. Taxing myself with pain was my lot last week, however, as I followed the beck's course from among the cafes and shops and up to the waterfalls behind the Salutation Hotel.
Oh, the agony as I reached a viewing platform overlooking the cataracts below. New boots at their crippling best! Neither the sight of the thundering falls booming down Stock Ghyll - so power-packed they once drove five mills - nor the vistas of luminous daffodils lighting up still-stark woods, helped alleviate it. I retreated downhill, each step bringing tears to the eyes. My discomfort I realised was nothing to that of Tickle Otway who, working in one of the mills as a young man, suffered a wooden post piercing his stomach - and survived. "Anybody called Cecil was nicknamed Tickle in those days," he tells me in his cobbler's shop.
Here he made boots for the great Jim Birkett, Lakeland rock-climbing pioneer, and often chatted with Howard Somervell who almost climbed Everest in 1924. Approaching 95 and well retired, he puts my offending boots on his special boot stretcher as a favour, and because, "I will always help out anyone who's stuck." He drove Ambleside's first motorised ambulance and became a St John Ambulance superintendent. As we talk, he takes a swig of lemonade, leaving a dimple in the plastic bottle from a grip honed by years of boot-making. He shows me a nailed boot in pristine condition. "Made that for a climber who had lost a foot, but he died in the meantime," he says, recalling stoic, heroic days.