SEPTEMBER’S guest speaker at the Airedale Writers’ Circle was prolific author Stephen Wade.

He was born and brought up in Morley but now – as he puts it – is exiled to Scunthorpe. He was talking about and reading from his new collection of short stories, Uncle Albert.

He was also talking about how we can all take a splinter of real-life experience and grow fictional characters and situations from it.

Stephen really did have an Uncle Albert, he says – but only five per cent of the one in the book is real, and the remaining 95 per cent is made up. This doesn’t mean that he’s unreal, of course; sometimes fiction is more convincing than reality.

The fictional Albert is canny and streetwise, but warm-hearted: the sort of man who is generous enough to take in three orphans and give them a home, but who could also poison a stray dog if it was being too much of a nuisance.

Everyone has an Uncle Albert – as Stephen puts it – somewhere in their family tree, and he’s usually the one having a quick smoke around the back while trying to think up a new get-rich-quick scheme that doesn’t actually involve work.

The sort of uncle who is wonderful to talk about unless he actually turns up on your doorstep carrying a still-moving sack and wearing a furtive look.

Stephen’s stories are set well into the past; most of them take place in the decade or so just after the end of World War 2, from 1945 to 1955.

It was a different Yorkshire then: a place where you might be sent to get a pudding-basin hair-cut from an amateur barber who had set up a high stool on a piece of bomb-damaged waste ground on a street corner.

A place where few people had refrigerators and food was kept fresh in a cold dark cellar – a scary place for a small boy to go looking for a pint of milk or a piece of cheese.

So the tall tales that Uncle Albert tells from his usual seat in Working Men’s Club are little nuggets of social history, as well as nicely-crafted pieces of short fiction.

Although Gorepam, the town where Albert lives, doesn’t actually exist it bears an uncanny resemblance to Morley and Churwell in Leeds in the middle years of last century.

That’s the Yorkshire of the Imagination: start with a few people and a special occasion that you remember from your childhood and begin to embroider and embellish from there – and remember: the funny little things that seem so everyday right now may well be fascinating bits of historical curiosity in just a few years’ time.

Stephen writes fiction, but has also published books in other genres including true crime, biography, literary criticism and appreciation.

At the moment he’s working on another collection of Uncle Albert stories and researching works of oral history on World War 2. Visit his website stephen-wade.com to find out more.