In 1967, when I was 8, I won big on a horse race. The Grand
National is Britain’s most famous and most chaotic race. Anything can happen.
Our household had a tradition of picking a horse (by sticking a pin in the newspaper's
list of runners at random) and betting a small amount—a “flutter”, it was
called. I picked Foinavon, a no-hoper at 100:1 odds, and bet a shilling,
one twentieth of a pound.
Late in the race, all the leading horses fell, or turned to
get out of the carnage at the front of the race, tripped by a riderless horse
ambling around in front of one of the fences. Plucky Foinavon, gamely cantering dozens of yards behind, had plenty of time to select a route through the empty
horses and over the remaining fences. I won five pounds, to me at that time an
unimaginable sum of money, and my mother said I should put it in a bank.
“What will the bank do with it?”
“They’ll put it in a book.”
“Won’t it make the book lumpy?”
“Of course not,” she said, not kindly, assuming my
complete ignorance of book-keeping was an attempt at snark.
My mother was a bookkeeper, the person whose job was to keep
the ledgers of company transactions in order so that they could be certified by
an accountant later. These handwritten, maroon leather-bound books had to be
prepared carefully, legibly, and completely, without crossing-outs or erasures
that could be interpreted as a sign of fraudulent changes, so that the debit
side and credit side totted up to the same amount. Any discrepancies had to be
chased down, notated and signed. I didn’t have any idea this activity took
place, and neither do you, because computers keep accounts up to date
invisibly, behind the scenes these days.
Yorkshire Bank from
Google Street View 2016
I took the five pound note the bookie gave my mother to the
Yorkshire Bank on the main commercial street of Batley, my little hometown.
It’s called Commercial Street, in the thuddingly obvious way that streets are
named when they’ve been there forever. The bank teller took the bill and
entered it into his book—in writing. The bill itself was put in a drawer, so as
not to make the book lumpy. I was given a little ledger of my own to record my
deposits and withdrawals, and a check book, which I don’t believe I ever used.
I do remember that a short time later I came into another small fortune —I
found a pound note in a field, with a sheep-shaped bite out of it. After much
form-filling, the Bank of England replaced it with an unbitten bill, and I
deposited it in the same bank.
Yorkshire Bank
building for sale, Google Street View
On Saturday, wrapped-up in my post-lockdown home in Southern California, where I’ve lived for more than half my life, I read about that town, and about the Yorkshire Bank on Commercial Street. The bank was disused and shuttered, the doors boarded up, and the property had been on the market for four years without a buyer.
The police broke through the boards and entered the property to search
it. They found the body of a bus driver, who had been kidnapped
in nearby Bradford and murdered. His alleged killers were arraigned in
court yesterday, a couple of years after his body was found, and the BBC news article
showed a picture of the boarded-up doors of my bank, where my lucky winnings
had been deposited. Over a gulf of fifty-three years, I recalled walking in
there to entrust my cash to the man behind glass who put it in a
drawer and gave me a book of handwritten numbers in return. Somewhere behind
his counter, a murdered man had lain for almost a week. And then the doors were
sealed again with metal plates replacing the plywood, and there would be no
more Yorkshire Bank memories to come for anyone.
