The Village Wheel-chair

By Kate Pratt

Bessy Fridlington remembers that Bishop Wilton used to have a village wheel-chair, for use by any villager who needed it. It was kept in the ‘hunt boxes’, the buildings in front of the village hall, now used as stables again for the last few years. (The stand and loos for the Show also used to be kept in there.) Her mother, Sally Smith, Butcher Smith’s wife, was disabled – she had thyroid problems - and she and her father used to take her for walks in the wheel-chair, with Butcher pushing, her mother steering with the small wheel at the front, and Bessy riding with one foot either side of this small front wheel, facing backwards.

One day it was just Bessy taking her mother for a walk in the chair – she was aged about 12 or 13 - and as they were going down Braygate, Bessy persuaded her mother that it would be all right for her to ride on the front in the same way as when her father was pushing. Her mother reluctantly agreed, and she leapt on, and immediately they gathered speed as it is quite a steep slope……….. Mrs Smith steered as best she could, saying “Well, we’ll stop when we get to Youlthorpe”, but Bessy began to think that it was no longer safe, so she put out one foot to try and slow them down, and of course this unbalanced the whole contraption, and they both ended upside down in the ditch. Bessy skinned her knee quite badly and scraped all up her leg, but luckily, Mrs Smith, though shaken, was unharmed.