I’VE fallen into a fit of nostalgia for a movable feast. I refer to this coming weekend which used to be called Whitsuntide – a bank holiday before these things were secularised.

In my childhood memories, Whit was always sunny and Yorkshire – either at a packed Headingley or Old Trafford – were piling up the runs in the Roses Match. 1954 will do for an example. There were 20,000 and more at Headingley in shirt sleeves under clear blue skies. It was the last time I saw Len Hutton bat. He stroked 44 while Frank Lowson at the other end made just one.

Then Len got out. It was as if the sky had fallen in.

A great groan went up. I swear even Lancastrians were sorry to see him go – he had batted so beautifully.

Never mind, Vic Wilson, the tall farmer from Malton, joined ginger-haired Willie Watson and the pair made the old enemy toil all afternoon. Cameo of the day was Brian Close’s hitting 62 in fourteen minutes. The remaining two days were washed out. That’s cricket for you.

If we didn’t go to the cricket, we looked for some girlfriends to take for a picnic on Ilkley moor. Or we might get the Sammy Ledgards bus out to Haworth and walk up the steep hill to the Bronte parsonage.

There were never many folk about in the old days, but now – even in icy January – you can’t move for the shoals of tourists. Many of these are Japanese who apparently have a taste for the grim Gothic novels spun by Emily and her sisters.

There was a terrific pork pie shop. And I mean hot pies. We would take these into the parsonage garden, sit on the grass and watch the rooks gather in the tall, melancholy trees.

Of course, Whitsun is a Christian festival too and sometimes our fancy would take us out to Mirfield to the Community of the Resurrection. Monks. Very high church. Mass on the lawn with clouds of incense, then bottles of beer and sandwiches. Mirfield has an open-air theatre, formed naturally in the rock face, and there might be a performance of Benjamin Britten’s children’s opera Noe’s Fludde. Back to Leeds singing on the late bus.

Those were not really the olden days, and I can take you back even further to the shabby streets of Armley between the jail and the gas works with the trains, billowing clouds of white steam as they rattled over Copley Hill.

We would sit and watch them from a vantage point in the recreation ground – a place everybody called the wreck.

There was an annual custom and I wonder if it’s still kept up anywhere? This was Whitsuntide clothes. Whit Sunday was the day when you put your new clothes on for the first time: short trousers, a blazer or sports jacket and always a crisp white shirt – and ask to borrow your dad’s cuff links.

Then you would set off on a great visitation of the grandparents, uncles and aunts who would give you sixpence – two-and-a-half pee in today’s money. One year my granddad bought me a pocket watch with a picture of a footballer who kicked the ball with every tick-tick.

Some years there was a Sunday School outing to Pateley Bridge or Malham Cove and we would walk up the dry limestone valley to the tarn. It nearly always rained – that teeming, really wet, deliberate, drenching stuff which is the trademark of the Yorkshire Pennines. Lovely Whit in its Yorkshire holiness and white blossom.