Issue No. 6: GROWN UPS

Whatever puzzlement small children are to adults, adults are completely bewildering to small children. My association with adults, family and teachers apart, were thankfully minimal.

The Doctor 

One of my first encounters, at the age of six, was with the family GP, Dr Lancelot (or Lance) Boyle. Dr Boyle was a man in his fifties and he was in a GP partnership with his wife. I'm not sure if they had children. If they did, family conversations must have been a strain.

My mother had taken me to the surgery for some now forgotten reason. I remember sitting on a big, wooden, leather-padded chair, my legs dangling a long way from the floor. Dr Boyle silently examined me, listened to my chest and back with his stethoscope, felt the glands in my neck, looked into my ears, peered down my throat, tapped my knees with a small hammer and then faced me and said quietly:

"Now young man, how are your waterworks functioning today?"

I looked uncomprehendingly at him and then at Mam. She took many long minutes, avoiding the (she thought) socially unacceptable "pee" and "wee" words, to convey the meaning of his question. Eventually I cottoned on and replied to him "Alright". For the rest of the consultation he ignored me altogether.

The Oldies

My neighbourhood seemed to consist of three types of adult. First, the parents of kids I played with who, as 'Mams' and 'Dads', were more or less anonymous, unless they were particularly eccentric. There were a few of those. Then there were the old people. In the 1950s and early 1960s, there was no 'grey revolution' or 'energetic, post fifty generation'. Working class people, when they retired, were generally old before their time, clapped out and rarely lived very long afterwards. The notable exceptions were the very old ones, all women, who lived into their eighties and nineties. One was Mrs Timlock, who lived next door to my friend, David Green. She was ancient. She dressed in black, like Queen Victoria, or rather like a black-clad Miss Havisham, and shuffled back and forth from her house to her front gate. I never saw her go beyond that point.

 [ I digress at this point to say that Charles Dickens once stayed at 'Cleadon House' in Front Street in nearby Cleadon Village. This visit inspired him to create the character of Miss Havisham in 'Great Expectations'. The description of her house is a description of Cleadon House. There is also a story that a man who lived there was stood up at the altar, and he subsequently ordered the clocks and reception at the house to be kept exactly the same as that at the moment he was to be married - for one year.] The fact that Mrs Timlock lived in a council house appeared so incongruous; she seemed to belong to a different era altogether. In actuality I suppose she did, as she must have grown up in the 1870s, when our estate was just farmland.

There was a local character, an old man, whose appearance used to terrify and fascinate all of the local kids. He was small and swarthy and used to sit for hours (and for years) in the huge, cavernous bus shelter, handily situated above yet another underground public toilet, in the local shopping area, waiting for the pub across the road to open. He always wore a shiny black jacket and shiny black trousers, a grey flat cap and a white muffler. However, his face was just a mass of folded, greyish flesh, in which one eye and half of his mouth could be distinguished. When I was much older, it was revealed to me that he had progressive skin cancer. As kids, we were unaware of this. He was universally known, to young and old alike, as 'The Man with a Hundred Noses'.

The Teacher

The adults I most encountered were teachers. Some were sympathetic; some were anything but. Miss Doddy was elderly, old-fashioned and generally kind. She was my class teacher in the second year of my time at the Junior School. However, my main memory of her, unfortunately, relates to her causing my classmate, Tommy Blower, some acute embarrassment. Tommy was a tall, clumsy but kind-hearted boy who was graded near the bottom of the top class because he was a bit slower than his peers. He was often puzzled by teacher's questions and tried his best to avoid answering any. He wanted to play the tuba but that wasn't something our school particularly encouraged. He was also mildly incontinent, and in the middle of any lesson, his hand would shoot up so that he could be excused.

One day, for some reason, old Miss Doddy at first seemingly did not see Tommy's raised hand for about ten minutes, and then studiously ignored his subsequent  frantic wavings and the repeated calls of 'Miss!' 'Miss!' At last the din became so loud that she had to stop the lesson, turn to Tommy and angrily ask 'Yes, Thomas, what do you want?'  Unbelievably, when Tommy asked, she refused, and the lesson then proceeded for another quarter of an hour before the hand wavings and pleadings started again. By this time no one was taking any notice of her anyway, so she opened the classroom door and, like a desperate pup, Tommy scampered out.

It was quite a hike to the toilet block in the school yard. Neverteless, it must have been another half an hour before someone noticed that Tommy had not come back. Again, loud whisperings interrupted Miss Doddy's lesson, so she stopped again and queried the cause of the distraction. Someone told her. She sent out a posse of one to find Tommy. After a while, the deputy returned, rather giving the show away by holding his nose and shouting 'Poo!' and 'Yuk!' and so on. All eyes turned to the classroom door. Tommy eventually, slowly edged into the room, red-faced but, more tellingly, brown- smeared from his thighs to his ankles. He stood alone at the front of the class, head lowered and eyes downcast, the nearest kids theatrically drawing back from him. Miss Doddy was dumbstruck for some minutes (maybe she felt a tad guilty) but eventually managed to ask 'Thomas, what have you done?'

Tommy raised his head and steadily looked Miss Doddy in the eye, recognising a straightforward question he could answer at last. He replied loudly 'Please Miss, I've done my pants!'

Issue No. 5: GIRLS, BOYS AND BALLS

For the purposes of this blog, and in order to rekindle a memory for names, I looked up the electoral registers for the mid 1960s. They confirmed how narrow, yet self-contained, was my neighbourhood 'world' - the families I knew, the houses I visited and the kids I played with.

I lived in the middle section of a long street. These were all 'family' houses consisting of three bedrooms, either semi-detached or in small terraces of four houses. All had small front and large back gardens.

From the ages of five to eleven, I knew twenty one other households in my part of the street. Oddly, these can be exactly grouped into three equal and distinct categories. First, those kids whom I played with most days of the week and in whose houses I was welcome (or gardens if their parents did not let me over the threshold!). Secondly, the other kids whom I didn't play with, some of whom were mortal enemies. Lastly, people who mostly had no young children or who lived so privately that we were excluded from their lives. Of this last group, the most notable were Mr and Mrs Grimm.

The Grimm's kids had grown up and left home long before. Mrs Grimm was an unsmiling and hatchet-faced woman in her late fifties. Her husband was a shipyard worker who, it seemed, always wore a brown corduroy flat (or 'Fred') cap and shirts unbuttoned to his navel. Mr Grimm was a dedicated and passionate gardener, who put most of his leisure time into growing his marrows, leeks, carrots and other vegetables. He was the most foul-tempered man I had then ever encountered, and even the boldest of the local street urchins would quail at the sight of his big, red and purple, bespectacled, angry face.

We saw quite a bit of this particular visage because our favourite collective game was street football, using either our jumpers (pullovers) as the goalposts in the middle of the street or, more usually, various garden gates as goals. Each of our own gates were our goals and, if four or five of us were playing, that meant we were haring up and down the street and crashing the ball back and forward for hours. One of us, little Benny Fenwick (no relation), was unfortunate to live next door to the feared and hated Mr Grimm. Too often, and despite our best efforts not to, we would boot the ball over Benny's gate and into Grimm's front garden.

Mr and Mrs Grimm must have kept permanent sentinel when our footie games were in progress for, no sooner had we drawn a collective sharp breath when the ball landed in their garden, then one or both of them would shoot noisily out of their house.

Mr Grimm was the most fearful of the two. He would hold the ball aloft in one hand and a wicked-looking sheath knife in the other, his face becoming even redder and more purple, his black glasses at an odd angle on his nose and his brown corduroy cap seemingly screwed onto his head. He would instil complete dread into every one of us, even though we had the advantage of a closed gate between us and far swifter legs.

Always he would shout: I told you, you little buggers! I'll put this knife through it. I told you!" And with that he would bear away the ball and we would never see it again. I guess to the Grimms, though, we were like a never-ending biblical plague of flies.

Next day, someone would produce another ball and off we would go again.

Street games and playground games were an essential part of being a kid. In the street we played 'Us versus Them' games, such as Cowboys and Indians, British v the Germans (still popular with the media), Cops and Robbers and Zorro v the Baddies. These were great 'shoot 'em up', noisy games and (if your parents weren't in to stop you) could be extended into the house. Also, it allowed you to fashion deadly weapons from string and bamboo canes, such as swords, spears and bows and arrows, the last with nails tied into the end (I told you they were deadly!). There was also 'Kick the Can', knocking down cigarette cards (by a deft flick of the wrist) and marbles (or 'muggles'), played along the gutters in the street. We also played a limited number of joint games with the girls, such as hopscotch and hide-and-seek.

In the boys' school playground - a concreted expanse bordered by a thin strip of grass and trees - we played tig (or 'tug'), 'Kingy' and piggy back jousting tournaments. Some also played 'Who can pee the highest?' in the unheated toilet block, (wisely) set apart from the main school building. This tended to be (I seem to recall) mostly a boys-only sport.

In the girls' playground, the consuming pastimes were skipping games (long rope and short rope) and ball-bouncing games, with two or more balls - all to the accompaniment of repetitive and (sometimes) intricate rhymes, to synchronize either with the skipping jumps or the balls bouncing on the school walls and concrete ground,and under the girls' legs and behind their backs, and being caught, thrown, patted and juggled in a whirl and twirl of co-ordinated action that was far in advance of anything the boys could achieve.

Sometimes the rhymes were simple ones, such as

"One, two, three, O'Leary
Four, five, six, O'Leary
Seven, eight, nine, O'Leary
Ten O'Leary stop."

or more personalised (and ruder) versions, such as

"There goes our Auntie Mary
Doing the necessary
In the outside lavatory
One, two, three."

Talking of 'Auntie Mary', I wonder if it's the same one who featured in the equally rude ditty, part of which is 

"Auntie Mary
Had a canary
Up her knicker leg."

Perhaps it is. Perhaps it isn't. We'll probably never get to the bottom of it. Unlike the canary.

Issue No. 4: LITTLE HEATHENS

As previously stated, I have no recollection of any part of my life before I started school. It is as if I had been assembled, like Frankenstein's monster, and switched on that particular day in the 1950s. It's said that this is a common experience, but I'm not so sure.

I remember standing with my Mam in a crowded playground at Cleadon Park Infants School, she holding my hand. Then she let go, kissed me, said not to worry and she would see me at dinner (i.e. lunch) time, waved and was gone. I wanted to cry; tears were welling up in my eyes and my chest heaved as I deliberately suppressed the sobs. I wanted to go with her, to go back home to - what? At that thunderclap moment I could not recall the previous five years of life for which I uncomprehendingly yearned; nor have I at any time since. That day was the real beginning of my conscious existence.

Life then, I suppose, was rather idyllic (compared to what had gone before) for a child growing up in Britain, even in the North East of England. The country had emerged from World War Two and the years of austerity. Nobody we knew was rich and those who were poor appeared to be considerably less so than before the war, and had some support from the Welfare State. Unemployment was low and, where we lived, local industry, where coal mining, ship building and heavy engineering dominated, seemed to be doing okay. In reality, though, we were at the beginning of the last gasp of these industries and, within thirty years, they would nearly all be gone. Education, following the 1944 Education Act, provided some chances for working class kids, particularly boys, with the possibility of getting onto an apprenticeship at age fifteen straight from the secondary school or, if you were very lucky, passing the 10,11 or 12 plus exams and entering one of the town's two Grammar Schools, one for boys and the other for girls. Girls who didn't make it to the Grammar School had far fewer opportunities in life, beyond working in shops or factories.

There were, of course, also the local Catholic kids, with their parallel education system. There was no obvious religious sectarianism in our neighbourhood or town that I can recall, but the fact remains that the Catholic kids and us were different. I suppose the main difference was that they were 'Catholics' but we were not 'Protestants'. In other words they were church-going (or at least under the sway of the local priests) and we were not. We had morning service in our schools but, other than that, it was a secular and not a church school. We found their knowledge of the Bible both impressive and weird, and their copious domestic iconography, with statues and pictures of Mary and Jesus on walls, windowsills and shelves, quite spooky and unnerving. They undoubtedly regarded us as little heathens, an impression I frequently compounded by revealing my poor knowledge of the Bible and, damningly, mixing up key characters, such as calling Mary Magdalene the mother of Jesus, drawing forth huge disapproving tuts from my friends' parents. Many years later, when I was a teenager, this scant Biblical knowledge came back to haunt me during a school-wide general knowledge quiz. The question was "Who is the Man with the Donkey?" The answer was John Simpson Kirkpatrick, a local hero who saved the lives of many wounded ANZAC soldiers at Gallipoli during the First World War by picking them up and taking them back to safety on his donkey, called Duffy. Sadly, he was killed whilst doing this. I knew nothing of this at the time (showing my wider ignorance of life) but, in an inspired religious moment, I answered the question with "Joseph". The Headmaster read out the top ten 'howlers' from the test and mine was Number 1. So much for the Bible. In the 1980s, a statue was erected, of James and Duffy, outside the town's museum. This was a very belated tribute to a genuine hero. Also, twenty years too late to prevent my ignominy.

Of course, not all the Catholic kids were Biblical scholars. Like us, there were better and worse off families. The better off ones, like the Worthingtons or the Sherreys, had 'nicer' houses, carpets in the living room and on the stairs and comfortable chairs and furniture. The boys wore clean shirts, ties and v-neck pullovers. On the other hand, it was impossible to detect, if you did not know them personally, the mass of the scruffy Catholic kids from the scruffy non-Catholics. We played and fought together once school had finished and at weekends.

One odd difference was that most of the Catholic boys joined the Boys' Brigade or the 'Lifeboys', as they were known, even though it was ostensibly an inter-denominational organisation whilst, if we joined anything, it was the Cubs and Boy Scouts. The Boys' Brigade were far more regimented and militaristic and, every so often, on a Sunday afternoon, they would march around our housing estate behind their own band, at the head of which was a group of lads on snare drums and a booming base drummer. One of the main tunes the band would play was "We're in the Army Now". The 'troops' did not sing along to this but, as they marched past, we would delight in shouting out our own lyrics from the sidelines:

"They're in the Boys' Brigade
They fight for lemonade.
They missed their drums
They hit their bums
They're in the Boys' Brigade."

The local 'BB' lads kept military discipline during this mockery and manfully gritted their teeth. However, afterwards, they invariably sought us out and battle would ensue.

Issue No. 3: CARRY ON

Mam was very small but this did not seem to stop her from carrying things far too large and heavy for her - starting with me, I guess.

I have no memories of my life at all until the day I started school, aged five. However, there are a few stories of my prehistory which have passed into family folklore. One concerns my birth weight. Mam insisted (and, therefore, veracity is immediately an issue) that I weighed in at over 13 pounds "or maybe more", as she liked to recount, "but he broke the bloody scales". Given that Mam was only 4' 10'', she must have made up for all those years of rationing and austerity before, during and after World War Two by consuming anything vaguely edible in her path during her pregnancy. She gave birth to me naturally but I'm surprised they didn't prise her open like an ancient Egyptian coffin to let me out. I've only seen one picture of Mam and me just after I was born, and she looked twenty years older than her thirty three years. In fact, I looked so big in that picture that I could easily have cradled her in my arms. A later picture of me as a toddler shows me with an ill-tempered scowl but also indicates that the force of gravity on my too-heavy body is causing bow-leggedness, a condition later proving ideal both for riding my too large wooden rocking horse and perfecting a John Wayne walk.

Another story of my infancy concerns Mam's habit of putting me outside in my pram, in the back garden, very early in the morning. According to Mam, one of our neighbours used to say of my bawling "There goes that Fenwick baby waking the bloody spugs (sparrows) up!"

I suppose that, to summarise these stories, it is fair to say that I was such a fat and bad-tempered baby that my mother banned me from the house before dawn, only then to be reviled by leaden-eyed neighbours, pecked at by sparrows and, no doubt, in a show of collective disapproval, shat upon by blackbirds, starlings and pigeons. 

We didn't have a dining room, so ate all of our meals in the kitchen. When I was five or six, Mam decided that she wanted a new kitchen table, which also had to serve as the ironing 'board'. We were aware that some people were buying 'dinette sets', a formica table with two folding down sides, with four matching chairs. No good for Mam!

One cold winter's evening, just before Christmas, after we had had tea, Mam summoned my brother Tom (aged thirteen) and me, wrapped us up and off we trudged into the night. I kept asking where we were going, but all I got from Mam in reply was "You'll see soon enough!"  We made our way to the top of our street and then turned left, uphill, into The Ridgeway, eventually crossing the main road, Sunderland Road, and entering the big, posh private housing estate, colloquially known as 'Sunniside', which led up to Cleadon Chimney and to the very edge of Cleadon Hills. We kids called it 'Sunniside' because it was adjacent to 'Sunniside Farm' and one of its streets was also called 'Sunniside Drive'. Some of the better off kids in my school lived in these streets but I didn't know where, as I was never invited to visit.

It was up that same street we now trekked, passing the brightly lit festive windows of the capacious middle class detached houses and bungalows, climbing uphill all of the time. We followed the course of Sunniside Drive before turning left into Cleadon Hill Drive. Near the top we suddenly stopped, and Mam yanked me into the dark driveway of a large house.

Our ring on the doorbell was answered by a big, grey, perm-headed lady who quickly ushered us through the thickly fitted carpet and oak panelled hallway into the kitchen area, to confront an enormous oblong table. It was made of heavy, light-coloured wood, with four high and stout rounded legs. It was so high that, as she examined it, I fully expected Mam to walk right underneath it. It had a long drawer at one of its narrow ends for cutlery and, crucially, from Mam's point of view, a hidden shelf underneath, where she said she would keep the ironing blanket. Along its whole length, on the top, a piece of thick leather or leather-like material had been carefully tacked over the wooden boards, simultaneously adding to its durability, weight and attractiveness to Mam. Money was discreetly paid over. We looked at the huge table and then we looked at each other. We looked at the lady of the house who, calculating the damage we might do to her paintwork, panelling and carpets, helpfully opened the outside kitchen door which led onto the side of the house. Tom tentatively lifted one end of the table and Mam the other end. They huffed and puffed as they manoeuvred the monster and edged it into the cold night air. I helped by getting stuck between the table and the door frame and then tripping over the step on the way outside.

At this point, I should like to write that we re-traced our steps back home, but that would be a gross distortion of the truth. We certainly followed the same route, but it was a painfully plodding progress amid much groaning, grunting, wheezing and cursing, and stopping for frequent rests. Mam's forced cheery comment at the outset "Well, it's down hill all the way" now had a sinister double meaning. And it began to snow.

What people thought of us as they saw two small people stagger across a main road with a huge table, with an even smaller child walking underneath to shelter from the snow, wouldn't be recorded as, luckily, we saw no one on the way. Eventually, it seemed like hours later, we arrived home. As our front door was on the side of a narrow path, and we couldn't get the table in that way, Mam had to go into the house, unlock the back door and come out of the front door again and help carry the table round the back. There was a repeat of the frantic manoeuvrings to get the table to its final resting place, although we were less concerned about chipping the paintwork, scratching the oak panelling or damaging the fitted carpets. The table was very handsome, with its rugged, rustic wooden aspect and, amazingly, it fitted into the kitchen perfectly. When it was in place, Mam inspected it again, leant over it and rubbed the smooth top up and down lovingly. "Just a few final touches", she said quietly to herself. Within a few weeks she repainted all of the kitchen with a dazzling sky blue gloss. She painted the table to match. 

Issue No. 2: THE LION, THE BITCH AND THE WARDROBE

When I was six years old I saw a lion in my bedroom.

It was breakfast time on a school day, about half past seven. It was a fine spring

morning and the sun was shining brightly through my bedroom window. I got up, got

half dressed (prior to my morning wash) and was making my way downstairs to the kitchen, where Mam was making breakfast for my brother and me. I happened to glance back into the bedroom through the stair railings and there it was – a huge lion in full mane.

I was so shocked that I lost both the power of movement and speech. I stood transfixed as the lion gazed majestically and disdainfully around my bedroom. It sniffed at my ruffled bedclothes, bent to look under the bed and then (rather rudely I thought later) nudged open my wardrobe door and looked into it. It then turned around, away from me, and stared intently out of my bedroom window into the back garden and beyond. I somehow managed to sit down on the stairs but was still unable to cry out to Mam.

The surveying of the lie of the land outside my house went on for about three or four minutes and then the lion turned away from the window and saw me sitting on the stairs. It just stared at me with its big yellow eyes. It seemed that its massive head was growing even bigger. I soon realised it wasn’t, it was that the lion was getting closer and moving towards me, very slowly.  

I could not make a single muscle in my small body move. I was petrified with fear. Then the lion moved to the bottom of my bed, near the open bedroom door and crouched down ready to leap. It wiggled its backside just like our cat, Toots. At this point all my senses returned and I catapulted forward, screaming ‘Mam!’ ‘Mam!’ taking the stairs two at a time.

I burst into the kitchen. Before Mam could ask, I shouted out ‘There’s a lion in my bedroom and it chased me down the stairs!’ This last bit was a fib, as I had not actually seen it do that. Mam was unphased. ‘Right. Sit down and eat your toast.’

‘What about the lion?’ I urged, looking fearfully back up the stairs. ‘He can have his later, if he likes’ she retorted, straight faced. The lion didn’t bother. I never saw him again; although for years to come I would run down the stairs full tilt as soon as I left the bedroom, taking the steps two at a time and never looking back.

I was not the only person in the family with a powerful imagination. I lived twenty years with my mother and the myths she created. I accepted most of them at the time, swallowed them whole, and it was only long afterwards that I thought about and questioned them.

Some were stories about her, things that she did or were done to her. Others were about the family, including me. I’m sure that some of these stories contained a large element of truth but, like most families’ tales, became exaggerated and more glamorous in the telling and re-telling. Other stories were less plausible. Most of Mam’s tales had those dual elements of a core of truth and obvious embellishment. They reminded me of the story of the impoverished Tyneside family in the 1930s who were so hungry that they walked three miles in each direction to a posh suburb, just so that they could lick the steam off a butcher’s window.

I remember a very early anecdote of Mam’s. She said that, when she was little and growing up in Newcastle, her Mam had bought some sausages cheaply at the local butcher’s. When she fried them for tea, they started to jump around in the pan because, Mam said, they had maggots in them. I always believed that story implicitly.

When I was a teenager, Mam went to the dentist and had all her teeth removed. She said that this had to be done because of ‘bad seeds’ in a tomato she had eaten. I believed her at the time. She said that she’d had gas and, when she woke up, her concerned doctor was in the surgery with the dentist because they were frightened she wouldn’t come round. I had no reason to doubt her. Just a few years later, she had a heart attack and swore she must have also had an earlier one in the dentist’s chair. How could I disagree? Later still, she claimed that the dentist had worked in a concentration camp during the war; he had a German name. I was sceptical about this, but not wholly so. Later still, she insisted that it was a miracle that her teeth had all come out in one go – ‘on strips’ – top row and bottom row, as if they were stuck to two pieces of sellotape. All the dentist had to do was tug them free and pull the strips, and out they all came together. Interestingly, she told this story as part of the wider tale about the heart attack and waking up with the doctor in attendance. She saw no contradiction within the story. It was an exaggeration too ridiculous to be believed but this did not deter her from constantly repeating it over the years.

There was the story of how she had saved a child who had fallen into the big fire in our back field on ‘Bonfire Night’, the 5^th of November. This story was true. However, no tale of my Mam’s was without elaboration. We had a long back garden sloping gently uphill away from the house to the back field. Separating garden from field was a fence about four feet high with barbed wire on top. According to Mam, she had heard the screams from the bonfire and had bounded out of the house, raced up the back garden with increasing speed and leapt over the back fence like an Olympic hurdler. I had read about people lifting cars and pianos in extreme situations, but Mam was only four feet ten tall and even I couldn’t vault that fence when I was an athletic six footer. But….maybe…?

I suppose that these tales of Mam’s can be ‘topped’ by one my wife told me about her childhood.

A neighbour of theirs, a young married woman, lived alone as her husband was away at sea. She took in a lodger, a young black man. Within a year, she had given birth to a black baby. This was the late 1950s; tongues wagged.

To counter the rumours she had a scientific explanation for this occurrence –Jaffa oranges. She maintained that both the conception and the colour of the baby were down to eating too many of the new oranges suddenly available in post-war Britain. The older women smiled knowingly and, no doubt, looked forward to the homecoming of her husband and how he would weigh the evidence. However, a substantial number of others believed her story. The sale of Jaffa oranges at the local greengrocer’s dipped alarmingly.

The Bitch and The Wardrobe

One of Mam’s grander tales, at least in its main parts, was true. I know because I was there.

I was about seven years old and, one Saturday afternoon, Mam said (in a loud voice) that she was taking me to the pictures. She’d never done that before. In fact, I’d never been to the cinema that I could recall. I was excited. Mam had the local paper from the previous night and made great show of asking my brother, Tom (aged fourteen) what films he thought were good. She made me get washed, put on clean clothes and an overcoat, and she too dressed for a winter afternoon. All the preparations for going out were done with an unusual amount of noise and fuss – even for Mam!

All of this time my brother was uncharacteristically solicitous, keen to help and reminding us of the time in case we were late for the show. As we were leaving, he was in the kitchen, behind a closed door.

"We're off, take care!" shouted Mam, opening the front door and then bizarrely, with us still on the inside, she clashed it shut.

She clapped a hand over my mouth. "Shush!" she commanded in a harsh whisper. "Be quiet! Come with me. No noise!" With that, she led me, tippy-toeing, up the stairs and into her bedroom. She left the bedroom door ajar. "Quick, get into the wardrobe", she ordered. The wardrobe was (to me) a huge wooden, free-standing affair, full of Mam's clothes and shoes. She pushed me into it then stepped in too. She closed the door from the inside.

It was black inside and smelled of - well, clothes - and mothballs. Mostly mothballs. Mam was big on mothballs and you could encounter them in all the wardrobes, cupboards and drawers. I never saw a moth in the house but I guess it was a bit like hanging up garlic to ward off vampires. "I've never seen a vampire round here." "No, not since I hung the garlic up!"

We were in the wardrobe for what seemed like hours (Mam would later say it was hours) and she would occasionally open the wardrobe door and stick her head out, straining to hear - what?

I was trapped between two heavy coats and was trying not to stand on Mam's tiny court shoes (size 3). After a while I whispered "When are we going to the pictures?"

"Shush!" she replied.

"We'll miss the start", I said....and she clipped me round the ear.

After more precious time had elapsed it finally dawned on my dim and naive brain that we were never going to go to the pictures. But why?

"I want a wee!" Another clip and "Shush".

Then we both heard it. Loud voices from downstairs.

"When are they coming back?" I heard someone ask.

"Not for ages", I heard Tom reply.

"Great!" another said.....a girl's voice.

Suddenly I was grabbed by the collar and tugged out of the wardrobe by Mam. "Shhh", she said, rather needlessly, as the excitement gripped me and chased both words from my mouth and thoughts of the toilet from my brain.

We crept out of the bedroom and inched down the stairs, avoiding the creaky bits. We stopped outside of the kitchen door, now ajar. We could hear voices, Tom's, another boy's and two girls - vaguely familiar.

"A bit of luck her going to the pictures", said the other boy.

"Yes, and she never offered to take me. Bitch!" said Tom, to a chorus of giggles.

"I know what they're up to", Mam whispered to me, seething angrily through clenched teeth. "I know what he's been planning for weeks. He must think I'm stupid. I'll fix him!"

With that she leapt down the last stair and crashed into the kitchen, throwing the door wide open. I followed behind her, genuinely not knowing what to expect.

The scene was a tableau. Tom was sitting at the kitchen table with one of the Williams sisters, Iris, on his knee. His mate, Jimmy Riddell (honestly!) was on the other chair, with Maureen, the other Williams girl, on his knee. However, that wasn't the surprising part. The surprise was that the kitchen was a fug of cheap tobacco smoke (Capstan, Senior Service and Woodbine).

I'll not bore you with the subsequent exchanges. The denouement (or double denouement) wasn't anything to do with the sexual larks that may have or were about to happen, but rather that Tom had broken one of Mam's golden rules - no smoking in the house.

Mam was a woman capable of little subtlety and believed in simple (if extreme) solutions to life's problems. In this case her logic was "I'll show him that smoking is no fun. I'll make him as sick as a dog!" So, she commanded Tom to smoke the packet of ten Woodbines one after the other and stood over him with arms folded and assumed a grim, knowing air, absolutely sure of the outcome.

What she hadn't reckoned on was that Tom was a secret yet experienced smoker and you could see (and smell) his triumph as he lit one fag after another and puffed perfect rings, other geometric shapes and even likenesses of Elvis and Buddy Holly into the kitchen air (I made this last bit up for dramatic effect).

At the end of his performance, Mam erupted, thumping him, throwing out Jimmy and the girls and chucking the remaining ciggies away in a whirlwind of shouting, cuffing and slapping. The pictures would never have been as exciting as this.

However, later that night, and in quiet moments when I've recalled this memory decades afterwards, I've always wondered about one thing........why did we have to hide in the wardrobe?