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National Geographic : 1974 Jul
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There's a good meal waiting along the Llangollen Canal. Mike and Carole Gregory serve up steak-and-kidney pies, spice cakes, and scones to those who moor beside their dairy farm. Here they take a break with their children Helen to the Parsonage, where Charlotte, Emily, and Anne lived their brief, passionate lives. Then we walk the nearby moors. In silence we watch a hawk fluttering delicately in perfect stasis with the wind, a small angel of death seeking prey in the purple heather. d66 -- HESE MOORS give us all a bit of the country that can't be taken away," says cL Bryan Pearce, a 30-year-old Leeds fac tory worker. He lowers his heavy pack and stretches out for a breather on the Pennine Way, which briefly follows the canal towpath near Gargrave. There is a crash behind us, and Bryan's 17-year-old nephew, David Minter, ruefully surveys the wreckage of his pack, fallen from a low wall. "Sounds like scrambled eggs for breakfast," Bryan laughs. "David, here, is a world trav eler-just got back from Spain. Wants to be a scientist, and he'll do it, too. The schools are better now. When I came up, there wasn't much chance to go on." Comparing Bryan's teen-age experience with David's tells much about recent change in England. Money is spent now on things undreamed of in the postwar years of auster ity. But inflation and high taxes are eroding the gains, and British workers are no longer stoic. In the canal towns of Burnley and Wig an, you'll still hear the miners' complaint: "The muck stays north, the money flows south." Bryan's factory produces undercoat ing for automobile bodies. His job is threat ened by the strikes and slowdowns that plague the auto industry-but he also suffers from rising costs. Like millions of other Englishmen, he is caught in the middle. "Ah, but we shall survive," he says. Shoul dering their packs, he and David march off, National Geographic, July 1974 106
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