Now in Ebook 'Straight From The Ragman's Horse'

The popular blog, 'Straight From The Ragman's Horse: Tales of Childhood, True and False', is now available as an ebook.

If you enjoyed the blog, you can now download the ebook for yourself, your family or your friends. Just log onto one of the sites below......and Good Reading!

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Thank you.

Robert Fenwick.

Issue No. 25: THE FAMILY - MAM

As you may have gathered from what I’ve written so far, my mother was the ever present factor in mine and Tom’s lives. Dad may have been the eminence grise but she was the one who brought us up, fed us, clothed us and protected us. Why then did she both allow and participate in the radically different treatment of her two sons?


Mam Marries Tom's Dad - 1940

Mam was the middle one of five children and she had lived as a child in the 1920s in the Scotswood Road area of Newcastle – a very tough neighbourhood. She adored her brother, Charlie, who was three years older than her and also worshipped her father. She had a very fractious relationship with her mother. Charlie had tuberculosis and died in 1936, when Mam was 16. That same year her father died. Mam no longer had a buffer to her domineering mother. Just four years later Mam was married and left Newcastle for her new life in South Shields. Tom was born four years later. I knew most of this story when I was growing up. What I didn’t know, until my Dad died in the early 1980s, was that the man she married, Tom’s Dad, wasn’t my Dad as well.

In 1950, Mam’s husband (Tom’s Dad) died. All Mam ever said to me about him (years later) was that he was ‘sickly’. By this time she lived with Tom in a new council house. They lived next door to a slightly older couple and their young daughter. Mam made friends with them. The husband of the next door neighbour was my Dad. They started an affair and Mam became pregnant with me. She moved back to her mother’s house in Newcastle to give birth and then later returned to South Shields. Within a few months Mam, Tom and I moved to the Cleadon Park estate. Then began that strange upbringing and those fleeting but frequent visits from my father and the rather far-fetched ‘cover story’ to explain his absences which, in my dumb-assed way, I swallowed whole for the next 29 years.



Dad at War - 1943

You can look at Mam and Dad’s relationship in a number of ways. It could be viewed as a romantic liaison which continued for over 30 years, and where the welfare of their son was paramount. The bare facts are rather more damning. Mam betrayed her friend next door by having an affair with her husband. He betrayed his wife and daughter. Once their son was born, he continued this affair, even though his wife and daughter were then both aware of it and suffering as a result. Although the relationship was known to most people (including most of our neighbours in Cleadon Park, apparently) he insisted and even threatened violence to ensure that I was not told what was going on. I and not Tom was the ‘bairn’ that musn’t be told the truth. He compounded Tom’s misery at losing his Dad by treating him badly and turning Mam against him too. He ruined the relationship between Tom and me as a consequence. Even when I was older, both Mam and Dad refused to tell me the truth and forbade Tom and his new wife from telling me. I remember that, when I was twelve, I worked out, from the story that Mam had told me, that she had been married 25 years. Tom, his wife and I then went through the ridiculous process of buying Mam and Dad a silver anniversary present, which they accepted; all to preserve a ridiculous lie. The lie extended to my wife and kids. The truth only emerged when Dad was about to die from cancer, and only then because Mam couldn’t explain where he was and why I couldn’t see or contact him.

After his death, Mam became a very bitter and an even angrier woman. She blamed Dad’s wife for hanging onto him, refusing to accept the obvious fact that he had chosen to stay with her all those years, whilst continuing his affair with Mam ‘on the side’. Mam waged her own petty but vicious vendettas against Tom’s wife, her own older sister (whose long-term husband had also just died) and, briefly, against my wife, until I stopped her. When she was not quite 50, and when Dad was still alive, Mam suffered a heart attack, but recovered from it. Twenty odd years later, in the early 1990s, Mam had two strokes, and her mind went with the second one. She died, oblivious to the world around her, in a care home bed in 1993.

The story of my childhood and adolescent family life should end there but, of course, these stories never really end. Mam’s bad temper and volatility have left their mark on both Tom and me. We both developed quick and vicious tempers. Additionally, I have acquired Dad’s authoritarian demeanour and unwillingness to show any feelings other than anger. Taken together, their traits have made me into a highly controlling and manipulative adult and a person given to violent mood swings and abusive behaviour towards my own family. This, over the decades, has dramatically affected their lives in turn. All crimes and misdemeanours have their costs and consequences. Mam’s and Dad’s are still being worked out, I regret to say, long after their deaths.

Mam’s passing acted as the guillotine to my relationship with my brother. We last saw one another at her funeral twenty years ago. We have only spoken on the phone twice since then. There is no rancour between us, just an acceptance of the truth – finally.

 



Tom

Me







Postscript

Dear Reader

Thank you for sharing my own and very personal 'Tales of Childhood, True and False'. You have just read, as you may have surmised, the final tale. However, I do intend to gather these tales together and publish them as an ebook. I will, therefore, be in touch with you all one last time to let you know when this happens.

I wish you all peace of mind, health and happiness.....and a good Christmas!

Yours sincerely,

Robert Fenwick.

Issue No. 24: THE FAMILY - MY BROTHER TOM

There was much that divided my brother Tom and me. There was the age gap of seven plus years. This may not seem much to adults but, in effect, it is a generational chasm to children. He left school when I was seven and was married when I was twelve. He was a ‘Teddy Boy’ when I was at Junior School. My adolescent years were the 1960s and all that went with that decade.

I hero-worshipped Tom and, when he grew restless about facing a long apprenticeship in the shipyards and joined the army for a few years for adventure, I was lonely and saddened by his long absences from home, especially when he was posted to West Germany.

Tom had his circle of friends and I was too young to join in. In that brief period of shared childhood and adolescence, between my self-awareness at the age of five and when Tom left school when I was seven and a half, I remember too few incidents that brought his and my worlds together.

When Tom was in his early teens, he declared that he and his mates were going to cycle to Plessey Woods in Northumberland and camp out there for a week. This was miles away and Mam was worried about the distance and his welfare. However, he pointed out that there would be safety in numbers and, eventually, she relented. He then said that they would need lots of food for the week, so he raided the pantry with Mam’s consent and stocked up with a variety of tins, bread, margarine, jam, etc.

I remember being excited by the prospect of the cycle trip and convinced myself that I was going too, although I was only seven and my new bike had stabilisers on the back wheel. The large group of lads set off one morning from our house and Tom pedalled down the path and out into the street to join the others. I frantically tried to follow on my bike, but it unbalanced before I reached the front gate and tipped me into the hedge. I cried with frustration and impotence as the group cycled off into the distance.

All day I wondered how far they had travelled, whether they had reached their destination, where they had pitched their tents and what they had eaten for their meal. I didn’t have long to imagine. Before nightfall, the back door opened and Tom re-appeared. He explained that they had given up on the idea en route and turned back. Mam nodded knowingly.

“Right, put the food back in the pantry”, she said.

Tom replied “Can’t do that, Mam, we got hungry and ate it all!”

Turnips and Bonfires

Halloween and Bonfire Night were the highlights of the dark evenings on our estate. Just before Halloween Night, Tom would appear with a couple of giant ‘snadgies’ or turnips, which he and his mates had pinched from the farmer’s fields near Cleadon Hills. He expertly sliced off the top ‘lid’ of the turnip, gutted it (which was added to the lentils, potatoes and ham shank for Mam’s big pan of soup) and carved out the eyes, nose and mouth for the lantern’s head, before inserting the candle. There was no American-style ‘trick or treat’ in those days, just kids spooking each other with the gruesome lanterns and tales of ghosts and witches.

‘Bonty’ Night (or Bonfire Night or Guy Fawkes Night) on 5th November was a great family occasion – but deadly dangerous. In our back field, on every piece of waste ground on our estate and in every estate and neighbourhood in the town, the kids had been building up massive piles of wood for the big fires for weeks beforehand. Some of the fires were huge, with wood of every description, tarpaulin, old doors and so on. There were often raids on other sites to pinch some of their wood. On Bonty Night, the pyres were set ablaze, surrounded often by whole families. ‘Tatties’ or ‘Chetties’, as we kids called them (aka potatoes) were roasted and fireworks set off. Trying to retrieve charred ‘spuds’ (aka potatoes) from a collapsing fire, whilst bangers were being thrown around, inevitably led to accidents year after year. We didn’t think about this or the terror that our cats and dogs went through. We loved the danger of it all – silly buggers!

Running Away from Home

Tom both loved and resented me at the same time, I guess. I didn’t realise the resentment at the time but, clearly, Dad discriminated between us so blatantly that Tom wouldn’t have been human if he didn’t resent me as the favourite. The fact that Dad also made Mam join in the criticism of Tom, when he was present, could only make matters worse. That’s why he treated Rob Wilding next door more like his little brother than me, and that’s why, one night, he ran away from home.

I remember only fragments of that night but those fragments are seared on my consciousness. It was very late at night. I had been asleep but had awakened and come downstairs because of a commotion. I was six years old. Mam was agitated and worried. Tom had left a note saying that he and his mate, Terry, had run away from home. The commotion had been the police visiting the house. I drifted off to sleep again on the settee. I awoke to find Dad in the room, still wearing his heavy overcoat and flat cap. I heard Mam say “I’ve got to tell the bairn the truth. He must know!” Dad became very, very angry and threatening and clenched his fists. I had never seen him like that before. He never physically punished me; he left all the smacking to Mam. He said in a clear, loud voice “If you do that, I’ll kill you!”

He meant what he said. I was so shocked that I jumped up, hugged both their legs and sobbed. They pretended that nothing had been said. I later wondered what Mam had wanted to tell Tom that had made Dad so angry. I never found out until more than twenty years later.

Dad went away again. In the early hours of the morning a policeman arrived with Tom. He had been found on Cleadon Hills. The helpful copper suggested that Mam should thrash him, and Mam duly obliged, venting all her pent up anger and frustration in the process. I cannot recall any rational conversation between Mam and Tom as to why he ran away, just him crying softly after his punishment behind his closed bedroom door.

Issue No. 23: THE FAMILY - DAD

In my childhood and early adolescent years, children mostly accepted the word of their parents without question. This was the case with me and Mam and Dad.

My recollections of my father are of a large man who was older than most of the other dads in the neighbourhood. For some reason best known to himself, he told me he was born in 1918, making him 34 when I was born. Many years later I discovered that he was, in fact, born 10 years earlier, in 1908. I saw him six days a week (never on a Sunday) but only for half an hour at dinner (lunch) times and for a couple of hours at most at tea times during the week. On Saturdays, he would be there most of the morning. He very rarely stayed the night. Mam explained to me, when I was about five or six, that he worked for the local Council as his main job but he also had a job with the Territorial Army, which meant him being away from home both during the week and at weekends. She showed me the photographs of him, with his Regimental Sergeant Major’s armband on and the three stripes on his sleeve, leading the marching troops from the barracks. Although other kids had their dads at home nearly all of the time, I was proud that mine was different, and that he was in charge of so many soldiers.

Although I saw him fleetingly most days, he still exerted a huge and dominant influence over the family. As you would expect from a ‘RSM’, he was opinionated and used to getting his own way. He was obsessed with timekeeping and hated tardiness. He didn’t expect me to slouch and remarked on many occasions that he had seen me round-shouldered in the street and told me to straighten up, walk briskly with my head up, chest out and swing my arms (I’m not kidding!). He didn’t like foreigners. He had served in the Desert War in the 8^th Army during World War 2 and in Italy, and had a particular dislike of Egyptians, Libyans, (etc), Italians and, for some unknown reason, Chinese waiters. Years before the U.S. Army applied the term in Vietnam, Dad labelled all Chinese ‘Charlie’. I guess this was a reference to the 'Charlie Chan' films.

Dad said that he had had a Grammar School education and, by sheer force of will and apparently superior ‘book knowledge’, he intellectually dominated my mother. She deferred to him in the matter of my education. In this, he spent quite some time (when we were together) ensuring that my spelling and arithmetic were up to scratch, before I sat the 11 plus exams. As I got older, into adolescence and then manhood, he became more strident in his views as to what I should do with my life, what courses I should follow, what career I should choose and what political views I should hold. He had an opinion on everything I did or wanted to do and was quick to tell me I was wrong if he thought otherwise. This lifelong domination caused a dichotomy in my adult life. I rebelled against practically every view or opinion he had on the world, whilst at the same time becoming domineering and overbearing with my own family. Psychologists say that, often, people try to escape from the spectre of a domineering father so fast that they end up morphing into one.

Bats and Boots

He loved sport and urged me to participate. In this, at least, he was successful. However, he had some odd ways of encouraging me. I was 11 and he knew that I was keen on (without being any good at) cricket. One day he brought home a cricket ‘bat’ for me. However, it wasn’t a normal cricket bat. It was handmade, apparently by someone who had never seen a cricket bat before. Butch, the dog next door, could have made a better one. The whole thing had been roughly hewn from a wooden block; you could see the chisel marks. The handle was uncovered and too short, so you couldn’t really get a proper grip on it. The rest of the bat was too long and too narrow. Worst of all, it was about two to three inches thick, which meant that it was unwieldy and that I could hardly lift it. The other kids laughed at it, which didn’t help. I didn’t want to hurt Dad’s feelings, so I said nothing.

Knowing that I also loved football (but unaware that I was still crap at it) Dad said that he would bring home a pair of football boots. All of the boys at the senior school had new, lightweight, low-slung boots. I was eager with anticipation. Dad came in one tea time and handed over a large paper bag. This was it! I lifted out a pair of battered brown, high-sided boots, which reached past my ankles and half way up my calves. On the sole, instead of studs, they had hard leather bars across. I looked incredulously at Dad. He was beaming at me. I smiled weakly in return and said thanks. The boots caused gales of laughter in the school dressing room before games lessons. I couldn’t understand why they didn’t have any studs. Why did they have bars instead? Were they Dad’s old footie boots? Is this what they wore after World War 1? Were they footie boots at all? Had he taken them from the corpse of a German or Italian soldier in the desert? It must be a German, I reasoned, no Italian would be seen dead in boots like these. The bars on the soles of the boots accumulated massive clods of mud in between them. I could hardly raise my feet from the mire, never mind run and kick a ball. Nevertheless, the overall effect of this was that I was the only kid to emerge from the field literally head and shoulders above the rest.

The Tooth Fairy

Dad was adamant that everything he said was right. My faith in him (and his opinions) was first shaken when I was twelve, still in short trousers and had to have a tooth out. This was the first time I had ever visited a dentist. Not many of my peers had experienced such a visit either, although there was some unusual speculation concerning a rumour that there was a homosexual dentist in town (‘gay’ wasn’t then part of people’s vocabulary). As with most rumours, everyone attested to his existence but nobody could actually say who he was. His identity took on mythological characteristics and he quickly became dubbed ‘The Tooth Fairy’. Two questions hung over this mystery. First, what did a homosexual dentist do (to patients) that made him different to other dentists? Secondly, how did you find out if your dentist was ‘The Tooth Fairy’? When I visited this particular dentist I pondered these questions (beneath the pain) but wisely (I thought) resolved to keep my mouth shut. However, given the circumstances, that was one resolution I could not possibly keep.

Dad had said that having the tooth out wouldn’t hurt. He was wrong. The needle was excruciating and, furthermore, I yelled with pain when the dentist pulled the tooth out before the anaesthetic had properly taken hold. I came out of the surgery into the waiting room and Dad was there.

‘I said that it wouldn’t hurt, didn’t I?’ he said, too quickly.

‘Ith hurth like hell!’ I shouted back, spitting out blood as I did so.

I refused to speak to him all the way home on the bus. He got the message.

‘Look’, he said, ‘I’ll make you some nice soup to drink. Is that okay?’

I said nothing.

He was smiling and cheery, in an anxious and forced way, when we returned home. Mam hadn’t yet arrived back home from the biscuit factory where she worked. He heated up some canned lentil soup and brought it to me on a tray as I sat beside the living room fire. I took a few spoonfuls, but my jaw was still paralysed by the anaesthetic and I couldn’t move my mouth properly. I dropped some of the soup onto my bare, untrousered knee and yelled as it burned me. Dad hadn’t let the soup cool. When the anaesthetic wore off, the pain from my scalded mouth kicked in and I couldn’t eat anything for days.

The one thing I could never properly comprehend as a child, but still unquestioningly accepted, was Dad’s relationship with my older brother, Tom. They hardly spoke to one another and seemed to keep their distance as much as possible. It was clear that Tom didn’t much like Dad but, more worryingly, Dad never had a good word to say about Tom. Tom hadn’t passed the 11 plus and Dad didn’t help him with any school work and showed no interest in him. For as long as I could remember, Dad disparaged him to his face and was unkind about him behind his back. He encouraged both Mam and me to join in this constant criticism, and this lasted until Dad died. Dad criticised me too, but never in such a cruel and sustained way. It was when Dad died that an explanation for this very odd behaviour was revealed. It brought into question all of my previous life and the childhood certainties upon which it was founded.

Issue No. 22: ESCAPE TO THE HILLS




Atop Cleadon Hills

Looking out of my bedroom window, in the distance I could see the water tower we called ‘Cleadon Chimney’ atop Cleadon Hills, towering above the roofs of our housing estate. This was a strange and compelling object to me, and I looked at it first thing every morning and last thing at night. On a clear, cloudless evening, the moonlight shone down upon its tiled roof and red brick walls, bringing the structure into sharper focus and seemingly (and tantalisingly) almost within reach. It also served, to me, as an early warning of sea fog coming inland and, as I watched, the billowing mist would obscure it at the same time as the doleful foghorn from the Souter Point lighthouse sounded on the coast at Whitburn, on the far side of Cleadon Hills.

‘Cleadon Hills’ is a ridge of high ground rising above the coast between Marsden Bay and Whitburn, and standing between Cleadon Park estate, Cleadon Village and the North Sea. Apparently, Cleadon Hills and other hills in the region were once small islands in a tropical lagoon known as the Zechstein Sea. The name suggests that it was named after a rock star but knowledgeable readers will know that this is not the case, not least because this occurred 260 million years ago, which is even older than the cumulative ages of the Rolling Stones. Incidentally, the name ‘Cleadon’ evolved from the original ‘Cliffa-dun’ (or a hill with a cliff) and then progressively became Clevendona, Clyvedon, Clevedon and then, in the 1600s, Cleydon (I knew you would be interested in that!).

I had to wait an eternity (well, six years actually) before Mam’s ban on me going to Cleadon Hills could be set aside. This coincided with me going to the Grammar School and also getting a ‘grown up’ bike. Having the bike meant that I could get to the bottom of Cleadon Hills, beside the waterworks and Cleadon Chimney, but not onto the Hills proper, as they were too steep and rugged. So, on the days I wanted to climb onto the Hills, I had to leave the bike at home and walk there. This meant a long trek up the steep bank of Quarry Lane (where the incontinent Tommy Blower lived – see Issue No. 6) and then through the neatly laid out lawns, flower beds and bowling greens of Cleadon Park, past the playing fields and rocky outcrop of ‘Crow Island’ in ‘The Quarry’ (formerly a quarry, believe it or not), and then out of the park, past the ‘Special School’ (where I once saw Alfie Agnew’s sister staring wildly at me through the wire fence) before following a steep track to Cleadon Chimney, and then (in a moment) clambering up onto the top of the Hills.

However, let me pause (slightly out of breath) at Cleadon Chimney before we resume that scramble to the summit. At one time I had no idea of why it was known as ‘Cleadon Chimney’ when, supposedly, it was a water tower. It didn't look like a chimney. It had a viewing platform near the top and it had a tiled roof. In fact the water tower, part of a pumping station which opened in 1863 (making it younger than the combined ages of The Rolling Stones), is a chimney. It was designed by the Victorian engineer, Thomas Hawksley, to resemble an Italian campanile bell tower. It was placed on the highest point of the site, above the other waterworks buildings, so that it could vent the smoke and steam from the original steam-powered pumps. I never saw that when I was young because the pumps were converted from steam to electricity in 1930. The chimney is 100 feet tall, and the viewing platform I mentioned, reached by a square spiral staircase of 141 steps, is 82 feet above ground level. This pumping station was one of a number in the area constructed to tap the reserves of clean, fresh water trapped in the permeable limestone. Cleadon Chimney also had an unforeseen and unwanted purpose, as it was used as a navigational landmark by the Luftwaffe’s bombers in World War 2. As you will see if you click on this hyperlink,  Wartime bombing in South Shields was devastating, particularly the air raid on 2nd October 1941, when the market place and town centre, which were adjacent to the shipyards, were hit. The market place had an underground shelter but, unfortunately, a bomb careered off the cobbles and crashed through the wooden shelter door, killing many inside.

Irrespective of its original purpose and its past and present usage, Cleadon Chimney is both a local landmark and one which, by its very visible presence, dominated my early life. It drew me away from the houses and streets below up to a different world above. And what a different world! Up on top of Cleadon Hills, at its northernmost edge, you can look down upon the whole town below and far beyond, over the river Tyne and right up the Northumberland coast, to the Cheviot Hills, which mark the border with Scotland. Walk a little way along the ridge of the Hills, past Cleadon Chimney, and you can gaze upon Sunderland and its seaside playgrounds at Seaburn and Roker, and down the Durham coastline towards Hartlepool and the Tees estuary. Face west and you view the hills of Gateshead and beyond, and also the whole conurbation of Tyneside.

Up on the Hills all is quiet. When I was a kid, you could hear the skylarks in summer, rising from the wheat fields of the farm at the top of the Hills. With the magnificent views in every direction, I walked, as a child of 11, along the whole length of the ridge of the Hills, dropping down to the old village of Whitburn on the coast, and then walking, very tired but exhilarated, all the way back again. As a man, married with young children, we made that same happy journey many times.

These latter walks were not even spoilt by my experiences in between times, as Cleadon Hills, or at least part of them, were the chosen venue for my senior school’s cross country championships. These were a wheezing, spluttering, lung-searing, eye-watering, side-stitching, phlegm-spitting, snot-snorting hell. They would have been more so for the smokers, but they had both the gall and the local knowledge to find hiding places lower down the route, where they could have a drag, a gossip and a pee, letting the rest of us slog it up to the summit, before they merrily re-joined the race just after the leading group had passed by, on the way back downhill. Like in so many other school pursuits, I was useless at cross country running. Not only was it pointless but it was painful. The lowest point of the run, for me, was the last lap around the school playing fields where, despite re-entering the school gates knock-kneed and arms flailing, me and another idiot would try to sprint for the honour of finishing third or fourth last, both collapsing into a heap of sweating breathlessness, completely ignored by the straggling remnants of the crowd who had previously cheered those first home (including the smokers) seemingly an hour or so beforehand.

Issue No. 21: THE WEEKEND

SATURDAYS

Before we got our telly (TV), Saturdays were a mixture of a bit of a ‘lie in’, playing in the street or football (or cricket in the summer) on the playing fields at Temple Park, and sometimes accompanying Mam to the shops at The Nook.

However, there was one golden rule after 5pm – no interruptions when Mam checked the football pools against the scores announced on the radio. This particular ritual carried on for years, even after we got the telly. My brother Tom and I had to sit mute until a deep sigh from Mam signalled another week’s disappointment; except for one Saturday, when she jumped up from her chair, whooping and clapping, shouting “We’ve won the pools!” “We’ve won the jackpot!” It was the highlight of her life, justification for all the years of diligent checking. The winnings arrived soon afterwards – 17s and 6d.

Once we had acquired the TV, my outdoor play on Saturdays was punctuated by frequent trips indoors to watch the sport on ‘Grandstand’ on BBC. The blight, though, was that every fourth Saturday I had to go with Mam on a (to me) epic journey to see my Auntie Annie.

The Journey

Auntie Annie was Mam’s younger sister. Mam came from a family of five children. Her beloved brother, Charlie, died in his teenage years. In the 1930s, Annie had been classed as ‘mentally retarded’, and she was eventually sent away from home to the residential mental hospital at Northgate, just north of Morpeth, in Northumberland. When Annie’s mother could no longer visit her, Annie’s brother and two sisters (including Mam) took it in turns to visit, on different weeks, on a monthly basis. Mam’s brother and sister lived in Newcastle and it was relatively easy to travel to Morpeth from there. We, on the other hand, lived on the coast, making it a journey of double the length and time because we first had to travel by bus into Newcastle.

This journey, every fourth Saturday, was my own personal nightmare. More often than not it began badly because Mam usually contrived to miss the ‘quick’ bus (number 86) which meant that we had to catch the ‘slow’ one (number 87). The latter was a red Northern Omnibus Company double decker, with a jump on/off platform at the rear, like the London Routemasters. We never went upstairs because there was a danger of getting lost in the smokers’ smog. The bus left its terminus at Marsden, picked us up at The Nook and then chugged its way through the dreary railway arches of Tyne Dock and then followed the riverside roads of the south bank of the Tyne, via Jarrow, Hebburn and Pelaw, before re-joining the route of the quicker 86 at Heworth, and going on via Felling and Gateshead to Newcastle.

Jarrow



The Venerable Bede (allegedly)

Whoa! Stop the bus! Back up a bit! Before we go on our merry way, let’s tarry awhile in Jarrow. In the 1930s, Jarrow became infamous for its mass unemployment, which led to the poignant but ultimately unsuccessful ‘Jarrow March’ or 'Jarrow Crusade' to London. However, Jarrow had an even greater claim to fame, dating from centuries before. The Monastery of Saint Paul in Jarrow was once the home of the learned monk who became known as The Venerable Bede. When it was founded, it was said to have been the only centre of learning in Europe north of Rome. Bede is most famous for his work ‘Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum’, translated as ‘The Ecclesiastical History of the English People’, and he is recognised as the father of English history. Bede died in AD 735 and, less than 60 years later, in AD 794, the Monastery at Jarrow became the second target of Viking raiders in England, after they had sacked and plundered Lindisfarne Priory a year earlier.

Now take two giant steps forward, first to the 1960s and then to the 1990s. The good burghers of Jarrow, with all that ancient and modern history on their doorstep, are about to commission (in the 1960s) first a statue, and then (in the 1990s) to re-name their new town shopping centre. Who would YOU put your money on? That’s right, in a double fit of masochistic sentimentality; they chose to commission a Viking statue and then re-named their retail hub ‘The Viking Centre’. Murder, mayhem, robbery, rape, destruction. Now there’s a legacy to look up to!

The Journey Continues

I had (and still have) a weak stomach when it comes to long distance travel, and I dreaded the trip on the number 87 particularly because I was always sick on that bus. Mam was ever alert to the tell tale signs - my skin turning yellow, the slumping forward on the seat, the hair falling out and limbs dropping off – and she would yank me up from the seat and push me down the aisle to the rear, open platform of the bus and hold on to me as I leaned outwards to be sick. As I got older and bigger, she kindly let me hang onto the handrail myself as I threw up. All this took place as the bus sped along the road, with the conductor not even alerting the driver as to what was going on behind him but, no doubt, hoping that I wouldn’t fall off as he would have to report it and, no doubt, miss his tea break at Newcastle as a result.



The Tatler Cinema

After an hour or so, when we arrived at the terminus at Worswick Street Bus Station at Newcastle, Mam would clasp my hand and drag me along the busy roads of Pilgrim Street and Northumberland Street (which were then part of the route of the A1 or 'Great North Road' which ran through the centre of Newcastle) to another bus station at The Haymarket, where buses left for destinations northward. She was careful to circumvent the odd looking men in brown raincoats and trilby hats who were queuing to get into The Tatler Cinema (just renamed 'The Classic' in the early 1960s) which was once a news cinema but, I discovered later, now showed ‘adult’ films.

Without a break, I would be bundled onto another bus that would take us on through Morpeth and drop us off on the A1 outside Northgate hospital. This was another hour-long, uncomfortable ride and, sometimes, I would have to get off the bus in Morpeth Bus Station to be sick again in the station toilets. This would annoy Mam, as it meant that we would have to wait for yet another bus to take us out of town to the hospital.

Auntie Annie

Northgate Hospital, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, was an alien world to a small boy. This was just simply because nobody talked openly about mental illness. It was something you kept quiet about and, if someone in your family was ‘backward’, ‘retarded’ or ‘loony’, you locked them away from view. Thus, as I walked through the grounds of the hospital and into the block where Auntie Annie lived, I was both puzzled and alarmed by the behaviour and demeanour of the patients.

Auntie Annie herself was a sweet, kind and innocent woman, who lived an uncomplicated if regimented life at a place she regarded as her home. She looked forward to her weekend visitors and always greeted Mam and me with affection. Mam, as the nearest in age to her, had had to look after her at home before she was sent away, and they had a close bond. In later years, when I was in my teens and twenties, Mam would arrange to take her out on holiday to stay with her for one or two weeks. The first few days were fine but, as the holiday progressed, Auntie Annie would become more anxious and overwrought, and would become terribly homesick for the known sureties of her hospital home. These holidays became less frequent as the years progressed.

When I was about 14, I refused to go with Mam to visit Auntie Annie, I’m rather ashamed to say, with the selfish interests of youth taking precedence. Auntie Annie outlived Mam by a few years. Her demise was very sad. The only place she felt safe was at the hospital, with her fellow patient and staff friends and following her routine. She may have become institutionalised, but that was a process that had happened over many decades. She fell victim to a change in government policy and conventional wisdom which said that mental health hospital patients would fare better ‘out in the community’. After more than 50 years at Northgate Hospital, she was transferred to a smaller unit in Newcastle. Within a very few years she became ill and died. I had not seen her for many years and had not visited her at all since Mam had died. I was no longer a self-absorbed schoolboy. Auntie Annie deserved better from me.   

SUNDAYS

Sunday evoked ambivalent feelings caused by it simultaneously being part of the weekend but also, particularly in the latter part of the day, as the beginning of preparations for the next working week.

The day usually began with a quick read through the two Sunday papers, ‘The People’ and ‘The News of the World’, which was our rather low-brow way of acquiring a perspective on the wider world. Mam, in common with all the other mams, would have been up early and, after she cleaned out, made up and lit the fire in the living room, she would prepare the Sunday dinner. A particular family favourite, to go with the potatoes and veg, was tinned Fray Bentos Steak and Kidney Pie. This was such a favourite (and handy) working class meal throughout the country that, by the early 1970s, everyone understood the joke about the break-up of the former great but now ageing Manchester United football team: ‘They’re going to sell George Best to Juventus and the rest to Fray Bentos’.

The Great Ken Dodd

After or during the meal we would listen  to ‘Two Way Family Favourites’ on the radio and also the genuinely hilarious comedy shows, such as ‘Beyond Our Ken’, ‘Round the Horne’ and ‘The Ken Dodd Show’. Ken Dodd, in his later life, may have revealed himself to be a rabid Thatcherite with unreasonable fears about the trade unions, but he was, and remains, Britain’s greatest living clown. He had many catchphrases over the years, but the one I remember from my childhood was ‘Where’s me shirt?’ delivered in a thick Liverpudlian accent, and he used to weave it into all types of  sketches and punch lines in his radio shows, such as:

‘The boy stood on the burning deck
The flames began to hurt.
He said ‘If they get much higher, lads’

‘I’ll be shouting – Where’s me shirt?’

The afternoon would be a final opportunity for a bit of play in the street with the other kids before tea and an early bath. Freshly scrubbed, I would settle down to watch ‘Rawhide’ or ‘The Saint’ or whatever else was on before the last TV programme I was allowed to stay up for, which was announced as ‘Val Parnell’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium’. This was magical, live, variety entertainment and it skipped by too quickly before I was packed off to bed. The end of the weekend.

Issue No. 20: FRIDAYS

Before I was eleven, my weekend really began on Friday dinner (lunch) time, when I queued for fish and chips.

I would run out of school and meet Mam at the corner of our street and Park Avenue, and we would hurry up to the fish and chip shop. After a few years, Mam got a job packing biscuits at Wright’s Biscuit Factory across town. She would come home by bus to see to me at dinner times, before hurrying to work again. On Fridays, this meant that I would keep her place in the queue for either (the preferred) cod and chips or haddock and chips. I always feared getting to the front of this long queue and then confessing that I had no money for the order, relegating me to the back of the queue again. Luckily, Mam always arrived in the nick of time from her bus, purse at the ready. The queuing  seemed to last for ages, and I’ve no idea of how we managed to wait in line, scurry home, unpack the fish and chips from the outer wrappings of newspapers and inner wrapping of (wrongly-named) greaseproof paper, eat the large meal and then get back, respectively, to school and work.

Joe Loss

The radio was turned on at dinner times, tuned to the BBC’s ‘Light Programme’ and we chomped away, accompanied by the likes of Wilfred Pickles, hosting ‘Have a Go’, Workers’ Playtime’ or, in the pre-Radio 1 days on Fridays, the Northern Dance Orchestra or ‘The Joe Loss Pop Show’, where Joe Loss and His Orchestra and his singers would ‘cover’ the Top 10 hits. Even though there were really decent singers doing these ‘covers’, such as Ross McManus (father of Elvis Costello), the demanding public wanted to hear the real McCoy. We cruelly dubbed this last programme ‘The Dead Loss Flop Show’, in retrospect a thoroughly unfair and undeserved criticism.

Friday afternoons at school, after the big meal, were merely an irksome interlude before the weekend arrived, more so if we were given homework to complete before Monday.

I was allowed to stay up a bit later on Friday and Saturday nights, which was especially great when we eventually rented our first telly, a 12 inch, black, ‘Bakelite’ Morphy Richards, with the controls on top, inside a pop-up panel (super cool, eh?). The advent of the telly meant that by myself, throughout the week, I could now watch ‘The Lone Ranger’, ‘Champion the Wonder Horse’ and, later, other programmes, such as Richard Greene in ‘Robin Hood’, ‘William Tell’, ‘Ivanhoe’ (with Roger Moore) and a whole host of American shows, like ‘Highway Patrol’ (with Broderick Crawford), ‘Casey Jones’, ‘I Love Lucy’, ‘Popeye’, ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show’, ‘Gunsmoke’ (with James Arness), ’77 Sunset Strip’, with Effram Zimbalist Junior (a great name!) and the character ‘Kookie’...AND, later still, ‘Bonanza’, ‘Rawhide’ (with Clint Eastwood) and, my favourite, ‘The Saint’ (with Roger Moore again), on Sunday, before ‘Sunday Night at

Roger Moore as The Saint

the London Palladium’.

To be honest, staying up wasn’t a particularly big deal when, at about 10pm, both BBC and ITV shut down for the night. On the ITV channel, the local Tyne Tees Television would close the night with a religious slot, ‘The Epilogue’, which was the TV company’s way of blessing you and telling you to get to bed because you had a long day’s work ahead of you tomorrow.