I grew up in North Derbyshire, on the west side of the Pennine hills which run through the county like a backbone, from the dark millstone grit of the north to the limestone further south
Apart from a few small 19th century mill towns it is an area of dales & moorland, isolated farms, small villages & hamlets. And, a feature which puzzled me even as a small child, here & there a row of not more than a half a dozen houses squeezed at the side of a narrow road, pushed up against the hillside. I guess they were probably built to house the families of men who worked the quarries or the small scale mines
Most of these places now fall inside the National Park & are desirable commuter villages for Manchester or Sheffield
But before the age of mass car ownership they were isolated & lonely, especially in winter when they could be completely cut off
The people were reputedly suspicious & wary of outsiders
Some of the novels of John Buxton Hilton capture this atmosphere & Val McDermid’s A Place of Excecution gives a modern take
And, in the old days, ‘everybody knew’ that incest was common
So we were perhaps less surprised than some by the story about incest in neighbouring South Yorkshire
Even my jaw dropped however, at the thought that 2 women could between them notch up 19 pregnancies without any health professional deciding to intervene
But then we have been living in an age when medical professionals in particular are supposed to be non-judgemental in sexual matters
And so they should be
And if nobody makes a complaint, or owns up, what do we propose? Enforced DNA tests for all possible fathers?
