by Yvonne Young
Perhaps inevitably, Mam began biting her nails. She tried a preparation called Bitter Alice, but she was so far gone with stress that she simply became immune to the taste. When she developed a rash on her arms which itched, the doctor prescribed a coconut cream, but that didn’t help either – there was no prescription to solve Dad.
He worked for a series of garages. Whenever I think of him, a mop of dark wavy hair being flicked away from his eyes with a shake of the head, bicycle clips and the smell of petrol comes into my head. His nickname was ‘Doddy’ as he resembled the comedian Ken Dodd (without the protruding teeth). Dad would often walk out of a job, swearing at his employers if he had a disagreement about something that didn’t suit him, much to Mam’s great distress. A lad who used to be in my class at school – Charlie (his dad worked at the same garage) – once said that Dad got in trouble for threatening the boss with a screwdriver (Dad’s substitute for Ken Dodd’s tickling stick, perhaps). At this time he was continually being sacked from jobs for one reason or another. He didn’t appreciate being told what to do.
I still have the letter which was delivered to the garage where he worked at the time. It read:
Southern Counties Garages Ltd,
‘Doddy’, Panel Shop, Rossleigh Garage Ltd., Fourth
Street, Newcastle.
Dear Sir,
I must apologise for this address on this envelope, but we have no other way of contacting you. We were informed by Mr Backshall that you would be interested in a job at a garage in this area. We can offer you a job as a fitter in our accident repair shop. Should you prove acceptable, we are prepared to pay the going hourly rate, plus a bonus each week. Most of our staff work about forty-eight hours a week, eight of which are at overtime rate. We could arrange an interview when it would be most suitable to yourself. We would be prepared to refund your travelling expenses after the interview. We await your reply and hope we can come to some mutually agreeable arrangement.
Yours faithfully,
R. Cheeseman
Body-shop Manager
But Dad didn’t attend. He said that the extra working hours put him off. Forty was his limit and no amount of persuasion from Mam convinced him otherwise. She thought that even if he worked extra for a few years, it would set them up. But no.
* * *
There was generally a woman in the street who was ready to organise a trip out. The bus would be booked and everyone paid their share. Once on the beach, a plateau of sand was made and a tablecloth placed over the top. Many families took their own teapot to be filled with boiling water from a nearby café. As I’ve said, the sandwiches were usually egg and tomato. Us kids referred to them as ‘soggies’ – by the time you got there, the tomato had soaked into the egg and bread – or ‘sand sandwiches’.
If I went to plodge at the sea’s edge, my legs got wet and when Mam dried me, it was like little razor blades were cutting my legs from sand, which had stuck to the skin. I liked it far better when Dad was there as he picked me from the water and carried me back to be dried humanely. They both enjoyed singing: ‘Volare’ for Dad and she’d be belting out ‘King Creole’.
Mam was well into her sunbathing routine and so Dad would wander off on a walk – he never went to the pub like the other men. I would either wind up in the Lost Children hut or latch onto someone else’s mother for the day. He would snap an apple in half by prising his thumbs into the top and we shared half each, then he went for his walk. On one occasion he returned and I was nowhere to be found. The tide was coming in and so he scoured the place. Luckily for me, he checked the caves on Cullercoats beach behind the outdoor swimming pool. Unaware of the danger, I was playing inside one of these happily. I remember him having to hold onto me with one arm as he clung on with the other, both of us being bashed against the rocks by the waves. I was about seven or eight years of age.
It was murder when we got back. Mam was still soaking up the sun. She flounced off in her bathing costume, a towel over her shoulder. Dad sat on the slope from the lifeboat station, looking miserable. I didn’t know how to cheer him up so I found a tiny crab in a rock pool and took it to him. This will make him happy, I thought. After taking the crab from me, he picked an empty corned beef tin from a wire bin and placed the creature inside, nipping the edges tightly shut. He then walked slowly down to the edge of the sea, dug a hole and covered over the tin with sand. I continually attempted to dig it up, but each time he prevented me.
‘Leave it, it’s trapped, like me!’ he told me.
Soon, the tide washed over and I could no longer tell where it was.
CHAPTER TWO
Betting, Break-ups and Blattas
I blamed myself for the death of the crab, but it wasn’t until many years later that Dad was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome. Until then, everyone thought at best, he was a loner or simply childish, at worst, that he was rude and cold. We would go off to Elswick Park together and roll down the hill, which was great fun, but when I got tired, he would go down another few times on his own. When I was given my first two-wheeler bike, he took me to the park to practise riding it. There were stabilisers on the wheels so it was quite easy for the first couple of months until he took them off. He held onto the seat and ran alongside as I continually looked back to make sure that he was still there. Then, one day, he had let go and I was riding on my own.
Of course, because of my new-found confidence, I was pedalling back and forth along my stretch of the lane, but one day, I strayed into the other half and the bike was taken from me. Streets and back lanes were very territorial places in those days and you could be chased or have your possessions confiscated. Luckily for me, the lad rode around on it for a few revolutions and then gave it back. Afterwards, I concentrated on riding in the opposite direction and turned the corner onto St John’s Road, where a sharp dip wasn’t allowed for. My feet slipped from the pedals as the bike picked up speed and the chain fell off the spokes. No brakes! The corner of Hannah Street was right in my path. As my backside rose from the saddle, I went headfirst into the wall. Only half of my face bore the impact and it immediately puffed up purple in colour. For weeks I looked like the Elephant Man. The bruises attracted attention and people commented on the colour as they changed from purple and then blue to yellow and brown.
Ryton Park and Leazes Park were regulars for us as we could take our fishing nets to catch minnows. We would put them in jam jars, but they rarely lasted more than a few days. A pal of mine, Nicky, lived a few doors away and we played together in the lane. I asked if we could take him with us to Ryton Park one Sunday and his mother agreed. We caught the bus along Scotswood Road over the Chain Bridge and settled ourselves at the river’s edge. Now, I have never been enamoured by spiders, but this day, my dad caught one and proceeded to dangle it in front of me. It was then that I discovered that Nicky was scared of them too. We retreated into the river, away from Dad’s taunting. He thought it a huge joke, but this only reinforced my fear. (Today, I have a gun-like catcher with fibres on one end so I can capture spiders humanely and release them into the garden.)
Dad once snapped a seeding plant from a bush and asked me to hold it in my hand. This I did and a tiny explosion erupted inside my closed grip. I was temporarily shocked by this, but quickly recovered and asked if he could find another. This wasn’t of interest to him, but I soon learned that if I could pretend that I enjoyed an experience, it wouldn’t happen again. Pity I didn’t twig before the spider incident!
I can’t remember ever wanting a farm set, but Dad made one for me anyway. I distinctly recall longing for a dolls’ house, but instead I was taken to Fenwick, a large department store in Newcastle, to buy an animal from the toy floor once a week. A duck, or horse, maybe a pig, but only one until I had enough to populate the yard. Dad fixed short fencing around the circumference of a large piece of board: it had a little gate which tied to the post with a leather loop. He created the pigsty, stable and cottage from plywood and there was even a piece of mirror s
urrounded by fake grass. I played with it occasionally, but eventually swapped it for some books from a lad in my class.
Dad also enjoyed board games, so we played Snakes and Ladders. When we became bored, we went up a snake and down a ladder. Card games were popular too and Three-card Brag was his favourite. Ludo was a source of irritation as the cardboard stand which held the cup was always collapsing when I pressed a counter intending it to go into the cup. Dad bought a broom shank and sawed it into little discs, painted half of them black and the other half white. He spent an age plotting and drawing squares onto a smaller board. These were also painted black and white, and so we had a draughts game. This was my favourite.
One day, Dad came home with a blue budgie in a cage and put it on a stand in the sitting room. He said it was going to be called Johnny. The bird was allowed to fly freely around the room, leaving its little parcels everywhere, but it was easy enough to chisel them off once they went solid. Mam wasn’t exactly house-proud, she was more concerned with the budgie interrupting her lounge-about times by interacting with her mule slippers. After his arrival we noticed that the coleus plant was looking a little bedraggled and Johnny was the culprit. That Christmas, I spent night after night making decorations with crepe paper cut into strips to make chains. There were no such things as glue sticks back then so wallpaper paste was employed, which was very messy. When the chains were dry, Dad fixed them in a circle from the ceiling rose and led each one to the outer edges of the ceiling, which created a lovely web of colour. Johnny, however, looked on this as a playground and jumped from one to the other and snapped each one. Dad just left the room and Mam used the ladders to try and fix them in her fashion – it looked rubbish.
But this bird was the light of Dad’s life: it sat on his finger and repeated everything he said, didn’t answer back and was all he wanted, the budgie equivalent of a Stepford wife. Mam wasn’t so keen as this Johnny was a sex addict. Back then, she wore pink Maribou-covered mules and if she sat with her feet on the pouffe, Johnny liked nothing better than to have a quick shag on the fur. She used to kick her foot up. He would fly off then but immediately clamped back on – he wasn’t about to give up that easily! I quite liked him: he was fun when I propped a mirror up against a box. He chirruped, bobbed and bashed his beak against the glass, then went for a peek behind the mirror as if wondering where the real bird was – probably to pin that down as well.
Dad would sit in his armchair teaching his new pal how to speak: ‘Johnny’s a pretty bird’, ‘Johnny likes his seed’, etc, while Mam gave him withering looks and tried to be out of the house as much as possible.
I even wrote a poem about Johnny while I was at South Benwell School:
I have a little bird and his name is Johnny
I must admit he is rather bonnie.
His nose is yellow, his eyes are blue
He has a little beak that the seed goes through.
I must credit Mam with the last line. As I read the first few lines to her and said that I couldn’t think of how to end the poem, she came up with it.
Unfortunately, after Dad had taught his pet an extensive repertoire and spoken to the bird more than anyone else, there was to be a tragedy. I was in a hurry one day to get out to play with my friends and as I slammed the kitchen door, Johnny was on his way to fly through. I just about decapitated Dad’s little pal. He was in his armchair at the time and when he saw this happen, he was heartbroken. Sobbingly uncontrollably, he held Johnny lovingly in his hand. I was the demon child for a week, until he bought a new bird.
Ronnie joined our family and was given the same attention as his predecessor, but he wasn’t to last long either. This time it wasn’t my fault – Dad left the kitchen door open while fetching in a shovelful of coal for the fire and he escaped, with Dad running after him across the road, oblivious to traffic. The bird made it over the high wall into the graveyard and was never seen again. We didn’t have another bird in the house after that and the cage was given away to some other budgie fancier.
I went along to Scotswood Road swimming pool on my own during Dad’s period of mourning. It was a really dilapidated old place with chipped tiles and two old pools, one of them wasn’t used, and a foot of stagnating water slimed about at the deep end. There was a communal laundry in the building and around the upper floor we could see the coal miners, pitch-black with soot, paying for a cubicle to have a hot bath after a shift, as none of them had a tub at home.
One day, during the six weeks’ summer holiday, the pool was packed with children of all ages. All I remember is the feeling that someone from behind was carrying me towards the deep end. When I looked around, it was a lad a little older than me who I didn’t know. He dropped me and swam away. As I began to sink, there was so much noise. No one noticed as I struggled to stay afloat. I sank further down and the most beautiful rainbow colours began to gently and peacefully float all around, until someone dragged me to the surface. The pain really kicked in then as I struggled for breath and was pulled to the side of the pool. Once I’d regained my breath, the pool attendants got back to their jobs and I’d forgotten all about it by the time I got home. I wasn’t given swimming lessons until much later when I attended secondary school.
So, me and Dad returned to our usual haunts of the park and Whitley Bay. My brother David was born when I was much older and he was taken to the same places. He later summed it up:
‘At first, I thought it was great to be going out, but when I wanted to go somewhere different, he refused and went to his favourite haunts without me.’
We also compared notes on story time. There wasn’t a children’s book in the house, only Dad’s Reader’s Digest magazines, Charles Atlas fitness routines and a couple of medical books, so he made up his own. In Foxy and the Chickens, the chickens never escaped, Foxy always managed to get past the farmer, tear the wire, break down the door to the hen house and they all ‘had their chips’.
Another memory we shared was that Dad had a nickname for us: I was ‘Fatty Buster’ and my brother David was ‘Fatty Lumper’. Dad always had a curious dislike of overweight people and it was very uncomfortable to be around him when a stout person came into his orbit. Even the names of local villages were changed to become the butt of his jokes. As we passed through Percy Main railway station on the way to the coast he always shouted out, ‘We are now passing the Porky Man!’
One winter, we were walking along Elswick Road. It was very icy and a large man slipped and thudded onto the path. No thought was given to helping the poor soul up.
‘See that? That’s because he’s fat, he wouldn’t have gone over if he had been slim!’
The winters in Benwell were usually severe, but none more so than when the snow of 1963 arrived. As the homes had no central heating, snow blankets a foot thick covered the rooftops. From this, huge icicles up to a couple of feet long spiked down. I was very aware of those big buggers staring down at me as I knocked on a friend’s door.
‘Are yi comin’ oot ter play?’
‘Nah, me Mam says the snow’s too bad.’ (Other parents seemed to show more concern for the effects of adverse weather conditions than mine. I was never expected to ask their permission to go out, or agree what time to be back. I was generally the last one playing out in the dark whilst others were long since by the fire.)
Sometimes the slam of the door was enough to send the whole lot thundering down. But it wasn’t so bad then as I had a free ice lolly, even though it tasted of soot. Of course, if my friend had been allowed out, we could have had a sword fight, an icicle each as our weapons, or even a game of snowball fights. Also, if a bucket of water had frozen solid, it could be released from its galvanised steel base to be smashed into smithereens. Our hands would be numb from the cold.
As I made my way back home, I walked through the trenches of snow which had been dug out by all of the neighbours – they were so high, I couldn’t see over the top. This was in no way a traditional white snowy scene from the Christmas c
ards as soot covered the surface. I always found it very pleasing to press my foot through to reveal the pristine white glow beneath.
Lads could be seen rolling snow into a giant ball from Buddle Road towards Frank Street. When it was around eight feet tall, it would be set loose down one of the steep streets. What a sight to behold as it picked up more height as it went. Heaven help anyone who got in the way!
Back home, it was as cold inside as out and the net curtains stuck to the glass on the windows. I once got my tongue stuck as I tried to lick the snowflake patterns. Trying to shout ‘Mam’ for help without the use of your tongue to pronounce a word came out as ‘AAA’. But the most exciting thing was if my mother forgot to bring the washing in and it came in frozen solid. I wondered what would have happened if I crashed a jumper against the wall, would it have just melted the ice or would the garment have snapped in two? Of course, I was never allowed to find out.
A bucket was kept next to the back door so that ash could be sprinkled to guide the way to the outside toilet. Pipes were always bursting so they would be wrapped in old rags to keep them warm – not a pretty sight. The seat would be covered in ice, so unless you wanted to slide about mid-pee, the surface needed to be scraped off. In summer, however, the danger was sitting on the woodworm holes: the preparation to kill them was very smelly indeed and this would be transferred to the backs of your legs. I discovered that if I banged on the seat with my fist, little worms would pop their heads out and then I was waiting with a pin to try and stick one. Nowadays, there is a fairground game with lots of holes on a huge board. Once money has been paid, random worm heads pop up and the skill of the game is to bash as many as you can with a hammer. I often wonder if the person who invented this entertainment also used a toilet seat with woodworm as a kid.