Gennel's last stand?

ginnel noun. Chiefly dial. Also gennel
[Perh. from French chenel CHANNEL noun.]
2. A long narrow (roofed) passage between buildings; an alley. M17.

There were two gennels on the road where I grew up. The first had been tarmaced for as long as I can remember, the second was for many years but a muddy track and only begrudgingly submitted to a thick black icing of tar and gravel towards the end of the twenty or so years I knew it.

Tarmac's earlier adopter led downhill to the shops. This was where a kindly stranger saved my three year old self from choking on a lollipop (a lolly purchased by my elder sister in contradiction to the express instruction of my mother - intriguingly, just one of my siblings' several apparent attempts on my young life); was where, as a young teenager, I trudged at dawn, luminous ornage bag in hand, to begin my paper round; and which led to our nearest bus stop and the Number 50. The 50 would take you in one direction into town and in the other to the village-cum-conurbation of Dore and the home of my first girlfriend.

The muddier alternative was almost directly opposite, but led uphill and to the fields just beyond. This provided a locus for games involving Action Men; exercised an unfailing gravitational pull over walks with grandparents and great aunts; and was where, on my first "racer", the pedals lodged fast in the rut of the track, stopping the bike dead and launching me headlong over the handlebars. To this day, I rue the absence of video footage of, or a corroborating eye witness to, the ensuing full somersault dismount (possibly with tuck and pike). This disembarkation from two wheel saw me land square on my feet: a move in which Evel Knievel himself would have taken pride.

These and other gennels round about the family home bask, it seems, consistently amongst the sunny memories of my childhood. Perhaps it's for this reason that, from amongst the various snippets of Sheffield dialect I grew up with, I have a particular fondness for the word. But I tarry. Of far greater import than my gooey-eyed nostalgia is the fact that these were unquestionably gennels. They were not "ginnels" as elsewhere in Yorkshire, nor were they the "alleys" referred to by my previously mentioned (and, seemingly, serially ill-informed) Merseyside cousins. Most importantly of all, and in complete and unswerving contradiction to the offending bracketed word in the OED's definition, a gennel was never, ever, roofed.

As you join me amongst the foothills of my exploration of regional dialects and until I reach the basecamp I hope to build from the medium-sized library of relevant-sounding books ordered from Amazon, I tentatively sought a first handhold on the slippery surface of the internet. My fingers, guided by Google, were fortunate to hold fast upon the solid surface of the BBC's Voices project. News (albeit news of 2005 vintage) was here to be found in a Radio Sheffield interview with Professor John Widdowson which led me to focus upon gennels in this posting. I was shicked to learn that the word may under threat! Can this be true? Although apparently more common in Derbyshire than the rest of Yorkshire, the word was ubiquitous in Sheffield in my time.

It seems, however, that the (clearly inferior) "jitty" is, grey squirrel-like, migrating north from Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire and driving out the smaller, cuter, fluffy-tailed, indigenous red squirrel of "gennel" to the extent that its very existence may be under threat. I learnt that the loathsome linguistic interloper already has its furry grey paws in vicious stranglehold round gennels in adjacent Chesterfield! This is alarming news and an unequivocal call to arms for gennel lovers everywhere!

Rise up, rise up! Man the barricades for the gennel's last stand! Though they may take us, they will never take our gennels! Or if they must take them, they'll be safer on foot than on bicycle and may choose a nice walk or to buy a paper at the shops before catching the Number 50 into town. BUT, they will kindly refer to them as gennels!

Those amongst you with a less than complete knowledge of stunt motorcyclists of the mid-twentieth century can find out more than you could ever conceivably wish to know about Evel Knievel in the pages of Wikipedia.