I’m writing a book and just in case it never gets published, I thought I’d serialise it on the internet so my masterpiece doesn’t get lost in the oblivian of rejection slips. But there is another reason that I want to share it - I want to know if its any good. so all comments are welcome.
For a bit of background, when I was hibernating last winter, I started the write the my memories of all the houses that I’ve lived in - there have been a lot! 42 to be exact plus a Tattie Shed. (for those who have difficulty with English accents, that means Potato Shed). When spring came along, I closed the bok and went back to growing vegetables and making chutney. Now its winter again and I’m about to finish the book, or at least restart it. And, for whatever reason, I want to share it. It begins in the very early 1950’s. There will be pictures soon so you can see what life looked like in Newcastle a long time ago.
So here is Episode 1. Enjoy.
79 Chapman Street, Heaton.
The first house that I lived in isn’t there anymore. I don’t think any others have gone but Chapman Street (1) in Newcastle was pulled down as part of the development of the Metro sometime in the late 70s. It was a long row of Tyneside Flats – front doors in pairs – the first one leading to the downstairs flat which had 2 bedrooms and the next door went upstairs to a 3 bedroom flat. When the women cleaned their doors and their step, they would kneel on the inside and wash a semi circle of the pavement in front of the door as far as they could reach. Grandma Webb reckoned you could tell what kind of house it was by the state of the front door and the clean pavement. It was like a load of transporter pads outside everyone’s front day but of course transporters hadn’t been invented then.
Granda and Grandma Webb lived upstairs with Aunty Maureen. Granda Webb was a fireman on the railway – the main London to Edinburgh line ran just behind the house and they were all steam trains then so someone had to keep the fire stoked up. Imagine going to work everyday and looking at a whole railway truck full of coal and know that you have to shovel all of that into the boiler. He had been on the Flying Scotsman – I always imagined him leaning on one elbow, hanging out the window with one hand and pulling the whistle with the other. Maybe they only do that on the movies. He would be black with the coal dust when he came home and I loved it when he took his cap off – the whole of the top of his head and half his forehead was white, then there was a line and the rest was black. He also had black gums on his false teeth and he would jiggle them up and down to scare us. I loved my Granda but I really wish he’d taken me on the train with him sometime – just once. I didn’t think of it them but that’s a memory I’d have liked to have. I think my love of trains must be genetic but I also love train timetables – is that just geeky?
My parents had moved into number 79 when they got married and my first memory is sitting in a wooden swing between two doors – probably before I could walk. There was a long hallway called the Passage and this was a playroom for us. It would have been unthinkable to play in the bedrooms – they were for sleeping, for being ill and later on, it was a punishment when you’d be sent to bed. Our use of that one space has changed so dramatically in the last 20 years – now kids live in their bedrooms – its their space. Toilets have changed too – in Chapman Street we had an outside toilet. You had to walk through the yard to get to it. It was cold and dark and one of the hard things about growing up, i.e. not being a baby, in that house, was when you got old enough to go to the toilet on your own – scary. I wonder if that’s where I got my fear of spiders from. Next to the toilet was the coal shed and every week the coal man would drive up the back lane and pour a couple of bags of coal into the shed. These guys were black like Granda but they wore different clothes – leather waistcoats and a big sack thing on their heads so they could sling the sacks up on their shoulders.
Coal, ships and football – essential, basic elements of being a Geordie. If you drive east out of Newcastle, but north from the river – along the Coast Road for example, you can look south over The River around Wallsend and Jarrow. There’s a big bend in The Tyne there which was how they were able to build really big ships – there was more room to launch them on the bend. The main thing that you see on that view south are cranes – loads of them in all shapes and sizes looking like flocks of colourful bizarre birds. That’s my heritage. They’re not shipbuilding cranes anymore but they used to be – great huge things dwarfing and defining the view all around and being used to build enormous ships.
As I grew up, ship building was on the wane on Tyneside. There were still a lot of Yards – the main one being Swan Hunter’s. My Uncle Mickey worked there but he was often laid off – between ships I guess. I think his job title was ‘holder upper’ – I think it was about holding things in place for welding but that’s got to be one of the best job titles ever. There was a street in Wallsend called Leslie Street – sadly gone now - two short rows of terraced flats with a wall across the end. Beyond this wall was one of the main slipways at Swan’s and as the ship grew, it dwarfed the houses. They were building some huge tanker once and me mam took us down to Leslie Street – I had never seen anything so big. It towered above the houses and I imagined coming out of those doors everyday and seeing this thing getting bigger and bigger.
People were proud of the ships that had been built on the Tyne – I remember me mam telling me about The Kelly- a warship of some kind that had been a bit smashed up in the war. It – I ought to say ‘she’ I suppose, had limped back to Tyneside where she had been build and hundreds of people had lined The River to cheer and cry and welcome the ship home to be repaired like a lost child. I think me mam always cried when she told that story but the ship was a Geordie – that says it all.
We lived in the east end of the city where the ship yards were and people we knew worked there so it felt like a real connection whereas on the other side of the city, around Scotswood and Benwell, they had Armstrong’s factory and they all got involved in making tanks and other munitions. There were Quaker shipyards too – mostly in Darlington I think (Darlington FC are nicknamed the Quakers – a useful piece of trivia) and they never build warships – sadly they went out of business.
Before I knew that I was a fiercely patriotic Geordie, I used to play in the Passage with my sisters. It was especially fun when we played beyond the Glass Door. Our front door was always open but the Glass Door, which was actually only half glass, was always closed – that’s how you knew someone was in. The space between the two doors was about a metre square and before we were old enough to play out in the street or if it was raining, we’d sit in that square, half of which was taken up with the prickly doormat, and play with our dolls.
I usually made the games up as I was the oldest and we had endless stories and adventures. We had babydolls first. including a black doll that our Jill had – we probably called it The Darkie Doll. But the Teenage Dolls were the best – they had breasts and Marilyn Monroe hair. This was way before Barbie – the dolls were about two foot high – white of course and gorgeous. Even though they were all the same, we could recognise features on our dolls so we always knew whose was who. But we found lots of others things to fight about – three was enough to create 2 uneven sides and it was usually me in charge of the games and the fights. I was the oldest and made up the games so they were my games and when I wanted it to end, it was the end and I took my game away.
Later we were allowed to play out and we had two different worlds to play in. The front street was long, going up to Chilly Road, with a lane cutting across it and a corner shop at the end of our block. Its really interesting exploring these old memories – last week I only had a vague picture of that shop – now I remember that it was called Daisey’s and she was a little thin woman with glasses who of course wore a pinny like the other older women. I was thinking about that woman who invented the wrap around dress and wondered if she got the idea from the Pinny. It was a wrap around dress with no sleeves and it was usually made in some tiny floral print. Very useful and very ugly and not very much of my mother’s generation. She always wore the kind of pinny that you tie around your waist. The women who wore big pinnies also tied scarves around their heads like a turban. I don’t really know why – they looked quite ugly and I can’t imagine those women being bothered by a bad hair day. Me mam never wore a turban.
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