THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

A year or two my senior, Sibby Smith was a shapely lass, having soft hazel eyes and a wealth of dark hair crowning an olive-tinted face.  Lissom as whalebone, she had a pretty way of capering along the lanes with hedgerow berries or leaves of autumn’s painting in her hair.  She expressed the out-of-door spirit in her very gait, and as she pirouetted along the causeway, you caught from her flying figure the smell of wood smoke and the mossy odour of deep dingles.

*

Whimsical as the wind, and brimful of mischief as an elf of the wilds, Sibby was to me the embodiment of bewitching mystery.  From a hillock by the hedge I have watched her seize a skittish pony by the mane and, leaping astride its back, gallop madly along a lane, to return a few moments later, breathless and dishevelled. This was her frolicsome mood.

Hall/Parson, 1915