Mr Rudi Leavor, of Heaton Park Drive, Bradford, recently sent us some pages from newspapers and journals in the 1950s.

Among them was an entire number of the review section of The New Statesman and Nation, price ninepence (about 4p), dated March 29, 1952.

Of special interest is an article entitled Number Nine Rock, by Bradford-born John Braine.

Five years before his first novel Room At The Top propelled him to fame and fortune, Braine was in his 30th year, a librarian who worked in Bingley and Newbiggin-by-the-Sea in Northumberland, desperate to make his name as a writer, principally as a poet in those days.

The piece is a lyrical account of being happy in and around Saltaire and Shipley Glen, which he calls Ripley Glen, in the textile manufacturing town of Blackersford – his version of what Bradford’s other universally-acclaimed writer J B Priestley called Bruddersford.

“Ripley,” Braine says, clearly meaning the village of Saltaire, “was built for human beings to live in; it was designed as a village, a living community; it’s not just a sprawl of mean houses, a huddle of rent books.”

The Glen, with its popular, working tram and its fairground tea-garden, is the place where textile workers go at the weekend for fresh air, the view and the food they bring with them. Braine describes an old couple and a young couple, contrasting them with an incipient novelist’s eye.

The old man’s wife, “mountainous in flowered cretonne and a red hat with a green feather, sits with her hands folded in her lap, a look of quiet enjoyment on her face.” Whereas the young man’s prospective fiancee has make-up “applied with such odd, frightened discreetness that it makes her look ten years older…”

The Glen itself is more than a symbol of liberation: it is liberation. “It’s a combination of space and warmth, a room that is exactly the size you want…the Glen is freedom and space, claustrophobia is abolished.”

As for Number Nine Rock, Braine says there is no signpost to it; it is simply the place where “you take your girl; for a hundred years it’s been a joke in Blackersford, the reality behind the teasing and blushing and clock-watching and dreaming at the loom…”

Real, or imaginary, like The Moon Under Water – author George Orwell’s ideal but non-existent pub – Number Nine Rock is for working people a place of romance and hoped-for happiness.