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.