by Yvonne Young
Bungalows for the elderly were directly opposite Kinross Drive. One day, Kath decided to hold a jumble sale to raise money. We collected old stuff from neighbours and around the district and the sale took place in the laundry drying room. A small amount of cash was raised and Kath divided it up, put it into envelopes, about two shillings each, and delivered it to the bungalows. She also did some ‘babysitting’ for the Hindmarsh family, who had three children and lived nearby. They left for their night out and left her a sixpence and nice things to eat. Afterwards, Kath said she wasn’t really aware of looking after the children, only that she sat in the house eating crisps and sweets until the couple came back.
* * *
Cousin Michael was the black sheep – he has quite a following in North Kenton and is a kind of cult figure. To say that he knew what the inside of a prison looked like will suffice. He took a job as an ice-cream man in the neighbourhood and often allowed us to sit in the van when he parked it outside, much to the annoyance of the local kids, as we kept setting the tune off and they would rush outdoors only to discover it was a false alarm. Michael was a bad influence on Billy as he encouraged him to play the wag off school to work in the van. He hit on an idea to make money on the side by telling the customers there was no squeezy ice cream left, but he could cut a slice from a block – they received the skinniest piece.
Later, when Kath took up employment for a company in town, Michael asked her what her duties were. He became interested when she said that she took money to Barclays Bank.
‘I’ll tell you what to do. I will meet you when you have the money, give it to me and tell them you were pushed over and it was stolen.’
‘No, I can’t do that!’ said Kath – and she didn’t – but Michael went on to greater and more outrageous stuff. He bought an old railway station near Alnmouth in Northumberland. It had two bungalows built on the land, one of which he turned into a gym. There was a fire pit, which he used to destroy old furniture he couldn’t sell at his second-hand shop in Amble. Also, a luxury caravan which never went anywhere and still had the plastic protective covering over the leather seats. A replica Statue of Liberty faced towards the railway line and the village of Alnmouth and a huge set of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves lined the wall.
Michael kept dogs and when he opened huge tins of meat, he tipped them into bowls and threw the cans onto a pyramid of tins. The lane next to his main entrance ran up to the house and lands of a local landowner. There were many disagreements between him and the family and one led to Michael threatening to attend the wedding of this man’s daughter on his motorbike with pals in tow to disrupt proceedings. He’s been featured in the local newspaper quite often too, not one to bow down to convention or to obey orders from pompous folk. So, when he wasn’t off on some adventure or ‘away’ at the pleasure of Her Majesty, he lodged at Kinross Drive. His business card is titled:
Prince Michael The Bastard
‘McNamara of Alnmouth’
Michael held down various jobs, one of them as a seller of peanuts at St James’ Park, Newcastle United’s stadium, on match days. He enlisted the help of Kath and Lil, who were supposed to decant nuts from a huge box into cone-shaped bags to be sold at sixpence each.
‘Hey, pack it in,’ he shouted, ‘you’re eating more than you’re packing!’
The block where they lived had a set of stairs up to a first-floor communal landing: three families on one side and three on the other, with the laundry airing room in the middle. Kath sat on the window ledge in there one day with a ball inside a long sock, singing out her song as she belted it against the outer wall: ‘Above, below, to the left, to the right…’
Dunk, dunk, dunk, dunk.
She went on for what seemed like an age until a lovely old woman who lived below shouted for her to stop. Kath was mortified as she had never known her to be angry, always so friendly. She ran straight indoors.
* * *
The Sampson family consisted of a mother and father, two daughters and two sons. The father was a rag-and-bone man and came home with all sorts. He took the rags to Benny Sheldon, who had a business behind the Co-op near the Dolce Vita nightclub. We went along to the Sampson’s and Kath asked if there was anything we could have and came away with colouring books and the odd toy. He was really generous although the family were poor, like most in the area. Uncle John used to cut the crusts off bread when making sandwiches and he would give them to the grateful family.
The Deakins family was made up of a mother, father, daughter and two sons. They were the first to have a TV on the landing and always invited the McNamara kids in to watch Children’s Hour. One of Kath’s friends, Susan, called for her and noticed that the kitchen window was open to the Deakins’ home.
‘I’m going to get in there and take a look.’
‘No, you can’t do that.’
‘I’m not going to do anything, I just want to nose around.’
Susan climbed inside then returned to open the front door. Kath just stood there in shock.
‘C’mon in, do you want a sandwich? No? Well, I’m having one!’
She went back in and came out with a jam sandwich, which Kath again refused.
‘Right, well, I’ll eat it myself. Come in, man, we’re not doing anything wrong!’
Kath was relieved when the door was closed and she could go home. She thought that was the end of it, but later that night, a little Dinky car came through the letterbox. Billy picked it up and was ‘brumming’ it along the floor when another arrived. It was then that Kath twigged: this girl had stolen some of Thomas Deakins’s toy cars. She began to panic and terror-stricken, burst into tears and it all came out. There was murders on! Beattie alerted the family next door and the cars were returned. In some ways, it was probably a good thing as any burglar could have easily entered that house, so maybe it was a lesson learned.
Mrs Deakins called one day to offer Kath a blue Airtex shirt – her daughter had a new one. To Kath, this was like gold as every week before the school games lesson, the teacher would ask, ‘Where is your PE shirt?’
‘I haven’t got one, Miss.’
‘Stand there and hold your hand out!’
Poor Kath was given the belt every Tuesday and all because her family couldn’t afford a bloody blue shirt! She was in the last year of school life and had endured this barbaric practice for most of senior school.
Lil had a scholarship to attend La Sagesse School and after the first day, she asked, ‘Mam, what’s lunch?’
We referred to ‘breakfast’, ‘dinner’ and ‘supper’ whereas the girls at this school were from privileged backgrounds. Lil felt out of place so she hung around with other scholarship lasses.
During her time there, Lil was never belted for minor things as Kath was at St Thomas More secondary. She was looking forward to cookery lessons and was disappointed that the school didn’t offer this. Instead, she was taught Latin, which she hated and never took to. In her first test she got four marks out of one hundred, then eight, progressing to sixteen. Her best friend Janice got the hundred all correct.
Beattie was astounded: ‘What’s the bloody use of Latin?’
When Lil pronounced the word ‘garage’ as in ‘barrage’, Uncle John shouted, ‘Here, don’t start that in this house!’ (In the Northeast we say ‘garage’ as in ‘carriage’. Similarly, there’s a saying that if you pronounce ‘Newcastle’ as if it were spelled ‘NewcaRstle’, you aren’t from round here.)
* * *
The Lackenby twins, Mary and Irene, who lived across the road were our favourite port of call for swapping our meagre possessions with. They had good stuff and we drove a hard bargain. This wasn’t the case on one swap, though. Kath had a black doll with long hair and Irene owned a Barbie, which was quite new at the time, but she longed for Kath’s doll, winged on and on, and eventually Kath parted with it. Much to everyone’s horror, Irene cut all of the hair off and played with it for a while, then said, ‘I’m sick of this now, I want
my Barbie back.’
So, Kath, always unable to upset folks, accepted the baldy one back!
Mr Lackenby always went up the shortcut towards a local pub on Sunday afternoons, so we waited until he came back, hoping he would be a little worse for wear. He took one look at Kath and Lil sitting there in their matching dresses and said, ‘Ah, hello, two sisters,’ and gave them a tanner each.
We got into swapping jewellery with the twins. Now, when I say ‘jewellery’, I mean poppets and bits of broken brooch and bracelets from our side. They also picked up the cut-outs from lids on Andrews Liver Salts to make bracelets, but these scratched their arms. The twins owned little silver metal trinket boxes to keep their ‘jewels’ in. They also collected rosehips from bushes in the surrounding fields and sold them to Winthrop Laboratory in exchange for cash (they were used for the rosehip syrup made in the factory). When they weren’t collecting berries, they enjoyed climbing over the fence to a nearby farm to ride the horses. They were always ready to hold a jumble sale or a concert, for which they charged a small admission fee. When I was sixty-six, I met them again at my cousin Michael’s seventy-ninth birthday party at the Kenton Social Club. I was surprised they weren’t running a multinational company, so enterprising were they as kids.
Irene and Mary once visited a house in Rochester Dwellings, where it was reported that a family had a statue of the Weeping Madonna – they were charging a few pennies for folks to come in to witness the tears streaming down the face of the Holy Mother. It turned out to be a severe case of condensation, nothing miraculous about it at all. Another family kept a horse in their flat – Lord knows how they got it up and down the stone stairs!
In the flat below Kath’s pal Susan lived an elderly man called Mr Cain, who was noted for inviting children into his home to give them sweets. I went along with Kath and Lil to sample some butterscotch, but when we got inside we were expected to sit on his knee before the sweets were handed over. Back at Beattie’s, my mam was chatting and Beattie asked, ‘Where have you been?’
‘To Mr Cain’s house for sweets,’ I said, unaware that he was out of bounds. ‘He tried to put his tongue in my mouth.’
‘WHAT!’ they echoed.
There was hell on and it was stated in no uncertain terms that we had done wrong. Looking back, one of the adults should have reported him to the authorities, but no one did that in those days. Once outside again, Lil said, ‘You shouldn’t have said that, we won’t get any sweets now.’
Susan’s bedroom window was above Mr Cain’s flat and she used to fix a button onto a length of string to continually bash it against his window.
Not being one to give in to boredom, Kath announced that we would call in to the children’s section of the local library to play ‘Hide the Book’. She chose an Enid Blyton and hid it among countless others.
‘Right, go find it!’
When we got fed up with this, unable to locate the copy, she set up another activity. Between the six of us she assigned a shelf each.
‘Sort the books into size order. You have this shelf, Irene, you can have this one, Mary, over here.’
The librarians would have had a task and a half after we left.
When Kath was given a bike, she went out riding with Susan. Her sister Nina lived in Whitley Bay and she suggested a ride – over twelve miles away – on their bikes to visit. It was around teatime, five-ish, when they set off and Kath hadn’t a clue how to get there. This was not all that surprising, considering she had never been anywhere but round the block on her bike, she simply followed Susan. Nina served beans on toast, which Kath had never tasted before. She thought it was wonderful and ate them every night for ages thereafter. Afterwards, she described to me how the butter melted in with the bean juice.
By the time they left it was pitch-black outside and halfway home, a police car stopped them to say they had no lights on. Instead of waiting until they drove away then getting back on their bikes, the lasses took this to mean they had to push them all the way back. It was almost ten when they returned and Kath’s deadline was nine, so she received a clip round the back of the head from Uncle John for that one.
Kath told us stories of her times at school. A girl in her class was called Antoinette, a very grand-sounding name it seemed to us for a North Kenton Secondary pupil. This girl was an expert in the cookery room, making puff pastry, which Kath demonstrated for us and she explained how lots of butter was dotted around, then folded over. She used a fork to make impressions around the edges and we waited impatiently for it to cook. I had never tasted anything like it, amazing!
* * *
We took a trip to the Hoppings, a huge travelling funfair which still takes place every year on the Town Moor, around 1,000 acres of land protected by the Freemen of the City of Newcastle. It originally began as a temperance festival with games and sports, and the fair took up about thirty acres of that space. There were endless rides and stalls, shooting ranges, boxing matches, strip shows and illusion mirrors. As we walked past each ride, a different song was playing: ‘It’s My Party’, ‘Walk Like A Man’, ‘Heat Wave’. People stood against the wall of a cylindrical structure: when it picked up enough speed, the floor moved downwards and folks were sticking like flies against the sides. No, thanks! The cake walk was enough for me. Today, fleets of parked cars take up a huge space, but when we were kids, there was only the odd one or two.
What little spending money we had was soon gone and Lil, Kath and Billy planned on returning to Kenton. I was supposed to be staying there overnight, but as I was in the queue for the fortune teller, decided to stay at the fair for a while longer on my own. Stupidly, I spent my bus fare. I remembered a friend of the McNamara’s, Geordie, worked on the Big Wheel, so asked him if I could borrow the fare (I could give it back the next day). Instead, he took me to the Lost Children hut. At midnight, me and one other lad about my age were the only children left.
Neither family had a phone, so when I turned up at home in a police car there was hell on. Mam stumbled downstairs to open the front door, half-asleep. The officer who dropped me off was highly annoyed and said this was clearly a case of severe neglect. At the time, my dad worked with Alan, Beattie’s son, and he was on the other end of Dad’s temper the next day. It was a stupid thing for me to do, and now, as an adult, when I think of those years – 1963 to 1965, the same time as the Moors murderers, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley – I didn’t realise how vulnerable I could have been to any person of their ilk. The annoying thing was that after an hour or two in the hut, Thomas Deakins, the son of the family next door to the McNamara’s, popped his head inside and asked if I wanted to go home with him. I was so shy, I said no – I could have avoided all that hassle to the family.
One year, a lass called Joan had an older sister who was a stripper at the fair. We asked her to show us her routine. She flopped about a bit, pretending to take her clothes off, but we weren’t impressed. Later, we went to watch her perform, but were turned away:
‘You kids can’t come in here, you’re too young.’
Kath and Lil argued we knew her and were neighbours but that didn’t cut it and we were again turned away. However, there was still candyfloss to be had and it was fascinating to see it swirling around in the steel drum to be circled round a stick. You don’t see that now, everything is presented in plastic bags. The flea circus was another amazing sight. We totally believed the fella when he said it took months to train them – we had no idea of the life cycle of a flea. It was all done with mirrors and some of the poor little things had feathers glued to their backs, giving the impression they were performing. Then there was the strongman, the lady with the beard, the funny illusion mirrors and the sheep with five legs, finishing off with greasy chips.
We went home and busied ourselves exchanging stuff on the landing of another pal’s flat. I was aware that a song was being played over and over – ‘It Might As Well Rain Until September’ by Helen Shapiro.
‘Who’s playing that song
all the time?’ I asked.
‘Oh, it’s my sister. Her boyfriend’s in the army in Aden and she’s missing him.’
‘Well, what’s all the fuss? She’s only got a few months to go!’
‘She listens to BFBS as well.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s the Forces Radio and families can send requests for songs to their lads in the army.’
* * *
Billy acquired a tent from somewhere and he and his mates set it up on the green outside the block. Uncle John was concerned when he asked if they could sleep in it overnight, but came round after much cajoling. But he couldn’t stay away from the window, checking and rechecking they were OK, especially around closing time. Some drunken lads came past and one of them jumped on the tent, sending it flopping to the grass. My uncle was in a complete panic and went racing down the flights of stairs to chase them off.
‘You stupid buggers, you could have killed someone!’
But when the police came, they found dozens of chocolate bars, pop, crisps, empty wrappers and lots of milk tokens in the tent. They put two and two together as there had been a break-in at Hedley’s corner shop that night and so the tokens were returned to the doorsteps. Billy was sent to Borstal for three weeks and though Beattie visited him regularly, Uncle John never went. This had a deep effect on Billy in later years. He returned to school after his stint away and his teacher called him a criminal and a thief. Billy blew up and told her where to go, then rushed from the building. Aunt Beattie was summoned to the Education Committee and it was decided that Billy would be transferred to Kenton Secondary School. This disturbs me: why were steps not taken to help him? He was a good kid, but needed more guidance than his own father could give him. ‘Let’s just wash our hands of him and pass him over for some other teachers to deal with’ seemed to be the attitude. It also impacted on Lil.