Digging through the archives of Scarfolk
&quot;Littler grew up in the 1970s, in suburban Manchester, where he remembers being “always scared, always frightened of what I was faced with.”&quot;<p>I lived in Manc in 1977 - Wythenshawe to be a bit more precise.  I was seven so a little young to be scared about much that I could articulate coherently.  It was the Queen&#x27;s Silver Jubilee year and summer seemed to last forever.  I loved going to school (!) &quot;Button Lane Infant&#x27;s&quot;.  The mums in our area organised a rota of four mums at a time to walk around 20-30 odd kids to school - about three miles or so for me and my brother.  On the walk we whittered on endlessly and I remember we played a game where the world was made of sweets and discussed it.  You&#x27;d be surprised what interests a seven year old to the point they can recall it aged 52.<p>Manc in the 1970s was a bit of a grey place.  I do remember a lot of concrete and a lot of dog shit.  However, where we lived there was lots of impromptu footie on the field near the allotments, behind some really crappy concrete garages, lots of bike riding and generally having a great time.  I spent a few days in Wythenshawe hospital, to have the grommits removed from inside my ears that were put in by army surgeons in Rinteln (West Germany).  Forty odd years later, I read in New Scientist article that &quot;glue ear&quot; is a bit of a dodgy diagnosis.  I do have tinnitus probably due to surgery but it isn&#x27;t that bad.  I recall a smell of boiled cabbages and the walls being green.  The nurses were lovely.<p>I could go on but that&#x27;s more than enough.<p>Anyway, Scarfolk isn&#x27;t really that much of a pastiche.  My main complaint is with the name!  It combines two English town naming parts but Scar- is mostly seen in the north and -folk is mainly seen in the south.  Scarfield, Scarthorpe or Grenfolk or do the job properly and go for a really weird English name:  Ryme Intrinsica, Hatch Beauchamp, Chew Magna and Curry Rivel are all near me.  The name Scarfolk is quite obviously wrong  Even so I can tell you how to pronounce it, if you are not too familiar with English place names.  It is a bit like &quot;Skaffuck&quot; - you run both syllables into each other and folk loses the l sound.  The final k sound is softened too - I put fuck in because it is a fairly well understood syllable.