Issue No. 14: FROM THE CRAVEN TO THE GRAVE

The most coveted role (and hated people) in my Junior School were the prefects. These were kids selected by the teachers from the final year pupils, usually ones from the top class. Their principal function was to control the other kids, especially stopping them entering the school at break or dinner (lunch) times. In effect, they were juvenile 'bouncers'.

However, the best job (if not the most prestigious) was to be a milk monitor. This required a couple of the boys counting out the third of a pint milk bottles into the required numbers for each class, loading them into milk crates, carrying them to the classrooms and then carrying back the 'empties' to the collection point.

Making Us Wait

I was lucky enough to be one of the school's two milk monitors, and we roved back and forth to each classroom, ensuring that we took the maximum alloted time to complete our task. Sometimes, when we knocked on the classroom doors, the teachers made us wait ages before letting us in. Maybe they thought that this was a way of showing us who was in charge. In reality, the more time we wasted the better we liked it. One teacher who did this regularly was called Miss Craven. When we were eventually allowed in, one of us would loudly say "Milk straight from the dairy, Miss Craven",which would always make the kids laugh. She could never understand why this remark caused so much mirth, and it increased her annoyance at us. The answer was right in front of her, with 40 odd milk bottles stamped 'Craven Dairies'. It was a kids' silly joke, continually enjoyable because the authoritarian adult it was aimed at didn't get it.

Sad Alvin

The saddest boy in my class was called Alvin Shipman, but his name was not the reason for his condition. We did not know it at the time but Alvin lived a double life. When he left off playing with his boisterous classmates and went home, he entered a world of sectarian and religious zealotry. Alvin's parents were devout Jehovah's Witnesses.

As kids, we did not know much about religion, especially the sects such as the Jehovah's Witnesses. What we did know came from our parents, who regarded them as people to avoid, like the so-called gypsy women who tried to sell them wooden clothes pegs for the washing line. Mam was terrified of being cursed by the 'gypsy women' if she didn't buy their pegs so, when they were about, she would run indoors and hide where she couldn't be seen from either doors or windows. Sometimes this didn't work or she wasn't quick enough to spot the danger. When this happened she reluctantly bought the pegs rather than take on the dreaded curse.

The Jehovah's Witnesses used to knock on doors in our street and, rather than do the sensible thing and run away, they would try to convert the hostile natives. Inevitably, these doorstep conversations (if they could not be avoided) used to turn to the question of blood transfusions (the JWs were against Christians receiving them) and allowing a relative to die because of the lack of them. Doors would be slammed in anger, oaths sworn and remarks passed such as "I should have cut their bloody wrists, then what would they do?"

Alvin, secretly and quietly, belonged to this world. However, even this did not mostly cause his sadness. What did was that Alvin's Dad died suddenly one Friday. That would be cause enough but, for reasons either practical or religious, his Dad was placed in the coffin and the coffin (it was said) was put in Alvin's bedroom until the funeral on the following Tuesday. Rumour has it (as it often does) that Alvin had to sleep in the room with the coffin under his bed. Whatever the true story, it was undoubtedly the case that Alvin emerged from the experience a much changed and sadder boy.

Maybe Alvin had to attend his Dad's funeral, which would also have been an alien and unnerving experience. I cannot recall any school friends being asked to go to a funeral; it was simply not reckoned to be part of a young person's expectations. Of course, it may not have been so bad because there was always the possibility of the dead person being cremated at the town's new, smart crematorium, as opposed to the macabre prospect of crowding around a deep hole in the ground in a vast, damp and mouldy cemetery.

South Shields Crematorium

The crematorium in South Shields was in landscaped grounds and looked rather like a fashionable bungalow. It is an interesting social development in post-war Britain that most modern crematoria are (or would be) pleasant places to visit with their airy design, sense of ordered informality and (in a sense) 'user friendliness'. Perhaps it would be a good idea to scour the country for examples of the best crematoria and to publish the top twelve in a special wall calendar. It could be titled 'Crematorium of the Month' or 'Crème de menthe' as the French would say. 

Postscript

Having presented the Jehovah's Witnesses in a bad light, it's only fair to do the same for the Mormons or, to give them their correct name, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

My encounter with them occurred much later, when I was seventeen, and intellectually flirting with a few diverse ideologies, including existentialism, communism and attaining spiritual enlightenment by lying all day in bed. Two young men, neat, well-dressed, extremely polite and from (I suppose) Salt Lake City in Utah knocked on my door one day and began a diverting conversation. I guess that I was interested in them because they were from the (to me) exotic USA and reminded me of the smooth, smart-suited individuals, like Robert Vaughn, in 'The Man from U.N.C.L.E.' on TV. 

After that first visit, they came a couple of more times to my door, and then I made the fatal mistake that you should never make with either religious zealots or vampires - I invited them in. Mam was busy in the kitchen, so I took them into the living room. To be honest, by this third visit I was growing bored with them and their insistent and drawling monomania, but I lacked both the experience and 'killer instinct' to tell them to 'bunk off'. At the end of the latest session, and much to my surprise, they stood up and invited me to join them in a prayer. They bowed their heads and closed their eyes as one of them intoned. I bowed my head too but kept my eyes open and then espied Mam entering the room, instantly taking in the scene before her and then silently and swiftly exiting. I recognised the look of awe and fear on her face. I knew what she was thinking: "Get out before they try to sell me some pegs!"

I finally managed to rid myself of them when they next visited. This required no special summoning of courage on my part. Being mere short-term visitors to the UK, they were totally unaware of the powerful subterranean forces driving the culture of the nation. They called on the Saturday afternoon of the FA Cup Final. No contest really.

Issue No. 13: THE MILESTONE MOMENT

Not the Levey Brothers......but like 'em.

The truly malevolent influence in our neighbourhood upon the young kids was the Levey boys.

As the early 1960s progressed, and as 'problem' families were relocated onto our estate by the Council, the estate, and our street in particular, acquired the reputation throughout the town as a violent and crime-ridden area.

The boisterous, yet innocent fun of a group of boys gradually became threatened and subverted by another group of boys who were, simultaneously, outwardly friendly but also intimidating. These boys were from seven families in my part of the street, and the epicentre of this group was the two Levey brothers. The worst was charming, smiling yet chillingly evil. He had an unusual name for those days, and one I had hitherto never come across before - Damien!

Our games were interrupted by the Levey gang and they forced their way into them. They contrived to be insulted so that fights would start. They were threatening and they carried out their threats with beatings. The level of violence increased as they grew into their teens. The crime in the area escalated and the never-before-experienced thieving from working class neighbours began. Eventually, the 'decent' families began a frantic scramble to be re-housed elsewhere. For us, this didn't happen until 1970.

Big Freddie

There was an odd aspect of this sinister development. One of the Levey Boys' gang members was a much older boy - in his mid-teens - called Big Freddie Freeman. He had a much lower mental age than his years and therefore always played with the younger kids. However, he was easily manipulated by the Leveys, who used his superior height, strength and weight to good effect as one of their 'enforcers' of punishments.

This seemed an ideal set up for the Leveys but Big Freddie had one fatal flaw - he was excessively scared of the spirit world or 'Ghostesses' as he would teeth-chatteringly stutter when 'the fear' descended upon him. This weakness did not stop Freddie from bashing other kids, especially in broad daylight. However, if the victims had the presence of mind, they would, in the midst of their pain and humiliation, say something foul and devilish to Freddie (but not terribly original), along the lines of "The Bogeyman will get you tonight!"  They could then nurse their injuries in the certain knowledge that - when darkness descended, and as cats wailed, dogs howled, floorboards creaked, doors slammed, mice scuttled, insects crawled up the walls and bats flew out silently on their nightly mission - Big Freddie would be cowering under the bedclothes, wide-eyed, shaking and twitching (and, we imagined, peeing himself) waiting for The Bogeyman to rip the sheets from his desperate clutches.

Pop Guns and Dustbin Lids

David Green had the first telly (TV) in our street. He was also the first person I knew who ate tinned spaghetti. Up until the time David's Mam rented her TV (no one could afford to buy one) all our entertainment, as kids, was the rumbustious kind we made up ourselves, including: street football and 'shoot-'em-up' games such as Cowboys & Indians, Cops & Robbers and English v Germans or 'Japs', our special re-enactment of World War 2.

All of these games required much imagination and, more often than not, the 'six shooters' were our fingers and the rifles and tommy guns were powerfully visualised and made to sound as authentic as our voices could portray. However, birthdays and Christmases afforded some of us the luxury of acquiring such 'toys' as: Colt 45s and (in my case) a long-barrelled Wyatt Earp 'Buntline Special'; plastic, nerve-jangling machine guns; pop guns and plastic swords of various types. You could, of course, also get plastic bows and arrows, but it was best to make these yourself using bamboo canes from the local hardware shop and twine or string. The arrows were of a varying degree of danger. Swords too could be made from these bamboo canes. So, with makeshift swords, pop guns and bows and arrows in abundance, kids' games on my estate also had a high degree of lethalness about them.

The things that fired our imaginations, pre-TV, were the war stories in comics such as 'The Victor', in the countless pulp heroic war 'libraries' like 'Commando' and in the war films and westerns shown at the local cinema, 'The Palladium', along with the serial 'shorts' such as 'Zorro'. Radio was an interesting diversion and a good laugh on a Sunday, but it didn't spark us into frenzied action.

Even our gentler games had a hard edge to them, such as catching butterflies in our back field using steel dustbin lids. Surprisingly, these seemed to do little harm to the insects but were a constant danger to the groups of small boys silently creeping through the long grass and simultaneously jumping for the same prey, bin lids to the fore.

All of these games did not disappear overnight with the coming of the telly but, as more families acquired 'the box', inevitably more time spent watching it meant less time  playing outside .

David Green's telly was the milestone moment. The first day he got it, there were a dozen kids in his front room watching 'Champion the Wonder Horse'. He was the most popular kid in the street, at least until other families got their own sets.

During this period of popularity, all the kids were invited to David's birthday party, where we were served up tinned spaghetti on toast. None of us, other than David, had seen tinned spaghetti before. "What's that?" one of the lads asked, rather impolitely. "Worms!" David replied, getting a cuff on the ear from his mother for his response. It was enough to put some of us off, and we sat looking at our plates, waiting for signs of movement. Eventually, they were taken away and replaced by jelly and Bird's custard. We all wolfed this down and then surged from the table to crowd around the 12 inch TV screen. 'The Lone Ranger' was about to make his long-awaited first appearance before us.



'Hey ho Silver.....Away!'

Issue No. 12: THE WILDING BUNCH

We lived next door to the Wilding family. The Dad was James, or ‘Lucky Jim’ Wilding. He was a pitman and worked at the coalface. He had a brilliant, big tool shed. He was always taking wood into it but, strangely, he never brought out any finished article. I imagined he was sinking a deep shaft right there, like in the prisoner of war films or, maybe, just out of habit.

The Mam was ….(well, she had no first name, so was just known as ‘Mrs Wilding’). Their two elder daughters, Iris and Maureen, were both ‘lookers’ (and accomplished piano accordion players). Robert was their son. He was a year older than me. Mary, their youngest, was a year younger than me.

My brother was (and still is) nearly eight years older than me. When I was just twelve, he was already married. As I have no memory whatsoever of my existence before the day I started school, my memory of my brother and me in a shared ‘childhood’ only really lasted from when I was five to when he left school, when I was seven and a bit.

Sadly, (and for reasons I didn’t understand at the time but did many years later) he much preferred young Robert next door to the Robert he lived with. He called him Rob; I called him ‘Willy’, as my personal way of making him sound like he was rude. Willy was my deadly enemy, even if he didn’t realise it. He was always cheerful and smiling…..but in a cunning and evil way, I felt. I wanted to tell him and others what I really thought about him, like I thought he was a pig. The problem was that sort of talk could get you a ‘good hiding’ (a walloping), as it was both a social taboo and a working class convention to never say words like ‘pig’, whether it was in the home or outside. However, it was entirely acceptable to spell out the word in conversation. So, whilst I couldn’t say “Willy is a pig”, I could say “Willy is a P.I.G.” In fact, I would have probably got an extra jam sandwich because I had spelt out the word. I’m not at all sure, though, what I would have got as a reward for the other rude words which described him. Probably nothing as I couldn't spell them.

The Wilding's had a pet dog called Butch. He was a cross between a Boxer and a Dalmatian, with possibly a bit of Great Dane thrown in. He looked like a Boxer, but with black and white spots and patches. He lived in an enormous kennel in the back garden. I never saw Mr Wilding making this kennel in or out of his shed, so maybe Butch built it himself. He was a very self-sufficient and capable dog and no doubt very handy with a hammer and a mouth full of nails. I was terrified of him, but never let on. I’d been told that if you showed fear, a dog would attack you and go for your throat …or maybe it wasn’t a dog but a tiger.…or a ferret.

Butch was not only a resourceful dog but also a born leader, a 'fixer', a manipulator, the sort of dog who, fifty years later (and if he was human) would make millions as a matter of routine. In fact, if he had been human and living in 2013, he would be Simon Cowell. I can imagine him being the Svengali behind erratic and egotistical canine superstars, such as 'The Dog Formerly Known as Prince'.

One day, Butch was out on an important errand; he may even have gone to work. Anyway, when Butch was out, I crawled into his kennel with Mary. I forget the preliminary chat, but soon I blurted out (entirely out of character but driven by childish curiosity rather than infantile lust) “Will you show iz your bum?”

Mary wasn’t a conversationalist. She didn’t even say ‘OK’. She just set about meeting my request.

It was a task never completed. We were interrupted by loud and raucous hootings and catcalls. We crawled - me red-faced - out of the kennel. It was Willy and his gang of pals. They were all smiling… evilly, Willy in particular.

Westoe Colliery

Willy was always smiling, except once. One night I was woken up in the early hours of the morning and a tearful Willy and a distraught Mary were ushered into my bedroom by my Mam. I was embarrassed because I was wearing pyjamas, so coyly pulled the blankets up to my chin. Their dad, ‘Lucky Jim’, was so called because he’d survived two cave-ins at Westoe Colliery, which went out for miles under the North Sea. He hadn’t survived the third cave-in that night.

Childhood - for the Wilding's if not for me - seemed to end that night. Mrs Wilding turned to drink. The two elder daughters soon got married. The eldest, Iris, had four kids and an unhappy marriage. Maureen entered into a long courtship with a bus driver. He parked his blue and yellow Corporation double- decker bus outside of her house every dinner time. Luckily, there were no passengers on board.

Willy converted his Dad’s magnificent tool shed into a pigeon cree. The pigeons thanked him by depositing huge mounds of guano on top of it and on all the surrounding house roofs. They were always falling down our chimney, and had to be rescued, sometimes dead, sometimes alive. I’ve no idea of what became of Mary.

Issue No. 11: HAND TO MOUTH

Stephen Starkie and Fred Collins were both bright kids. Stephen was from a middle class household, Fred was from a Council house.

Stephen was marked down as 'different' or 'apart' from the rest of us in a number of respects. We had no uniform in our school, but Stephen's parents insisted on dressing him in polished brogues, nice thick, good quality socks, pressed short trousers, ironed shirts, knotted ties and a black overcoat. Atop this, though, was his trademark, a bright red school cap. The cap apart, it's fair to say that the other kids from middle class homes, as you would expect, were better turned out than the rest of us. Fred Collins, like most of the working class kids, wore generally clean clothes, although not as neat, pressed or co-ordinated as his better off school chums.

The main difference between Stephen and Fred was that Fred was popular but Stephen was not. Stephen's disposition was argumentative and sullen; Fred's was optimistic and cheeky. They became rivals but didn't fight much physically, relying mostly on insults. Stephen was far superior at this game and was always quicker by seconds to land the verbal blows, outwitting, outthinking and outpunching Fred. Whenever I now picture Stephen, it is seeing his face set in a bad-tempered frown, his brows crossly knitted together and his mouth open, ready to spit out some insult. If this had been a long-running boxing match, Fred would have been losing heavily on points and desperate for a lucky knock out punch.

The Ragman's Horse

This arrived one day as we were going home for dinner - in the unlikely form of the ragman's horse. I won't bore you with details of the ragman (or rag & bone man), let's just say that he was a local 'Steptoe' and collected junk as he toured the estate's streets, loudly announcing his presence. Stephen and Fred had been trading insults all morning and, as usual, Stephen was in the ascendancy. The argument continued on through the school gates and out into Park Avenue. Stephen was unstoppable, Fred was in retreat. Then Fred, no doubt driven to the point of desperation, espied the ragman's horse, or rather what it had left behind. In one movement he had (we didn't know how he could!) scooped up a clump of horse dung, spun round and flung it at Stephen. As luck would have it, Stephen was opening his mouth for another tirade and the dung found a hole in one. He choked, spat and then poked out bits of the turd with his fingers. That one act turned the tables irrevocably. Stephen would, forever onwards, be known as 'Gobshite Starkie'.

Mad Alfie

Alfie Agnew was the oddest and most frightening boy I ever met (you have encountered him already in Issue No. 11 in the Burmese jungle).

He looked exactly like a fair-headed 'Dennis the Menace', with his staring eyes, shock of straw-coloured hair and air of single-minded yet warped determination. He wasn't really evil, just plain crackers. He did really bad things because he couldn't help himself. Unfortunately, it appeared that his Mam, Dad and younger sister were equally barmy. All four of them were marked by wild, staring eyes, which were surrounded by deep, dark rings of - what? Sadness? Despair? Hopelessness? Madness?

Alfie was a natural loner, but nevertheless his strangeness acted as a magnet on the other kids, who were drawn to witness his insane acts. I was in his back garden one day. He said that he didn't want to go to school anymore. I said that they would make him and he would have to go, or his parents would be put in prison. (Why I would venture this opinion, aged 8 or 9, is a mystery). He asked if there was a way of not going to school which would avoid this (I'm paraphrasing here). I said only if he was very sick. Thereupon, he knelt down, looked around and then picked up a half brick. Gripping it tightly, he suddenly brought it down full force on the back of his other hand - again and again. He didn't cry out as he mangled his bloody hand, he just looked up, grinned the theatrically wicked Dennis grin, and said 'That'll do it!"

After just two years the Agnews moved away. Neighbours said that they had done a 'moonlight flit', moved home in the middle of the night owing the rent. I never saw Alfie again.

However, there was one good thing that came out of my brief encounter with Alfie and his kin folk. Mam rescued our second cat, Tinker, from them, as the family were cheerfully engaged in the collective act of drowning him and all of his sibling kittens.