Tommy was a kind and gentle man. He bought me my first pair of football boots, Playfair Pigskins, the best you could get, I always believed fondly. He took me to the shop to get them and I’ll never forget putting my feet into the boots and thinking, ‘This has got to be the best day of my life.’
Uncle Dave had a little boat moored on Wansbeck River. He was a character who I once heard described as a knave, which I thought was putting it a little strongly because as far as I was aware he never did anything illegal. However, he had a certain talent for getting into scrapes and on a day of high family drama he entangled his brother Tommy and me.
We met in the street one Saturday morning when Tommy was dressed for a wedding. His hair was slicked down and he wore his best clothes, including a pair of baggy trousers which were fashionable at the time. Dave said to Tommy, ‘I’m just going to throw out a few lines, why don’t you join us?’ Tommy replied, ‘We can’t, man. Can’t you see I’m dressed for the wedding?’ Dave was unimpressed by the importance of the ceremony, saying, ‘You’ll be fine, boys, I’m not going out to sea – we’ll just put out the lines at the mouth of the river.’ Tommy thought about it for a little while, then shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘Aye, all right.’
Unfortunately, the boat became grounded in the mouth of the river and Dave said we would have to wait for the tide to lift us off the sand. Tommy was upset, pointing out that he was going to be late for the wedding. Dave assured him that we would be off soon enough but Tommy was not placated. ‘We can’t wait for ever until the tide comes in, man, I’m never going to get there in time.’
Dave was impatient with his brother now, saying, ‘For heaven’s sake, Tommy lad, the water is only shallow, three or four feet deep, I’ll carry you to the bank.’ He told me to wait in the boat, he would be back in a few minutes. However, almost as soon as he started wading into the water with Tommy’s arms around his neck, the boat started drifting off the sand. I cried out to Dave and he promptly made it quite clear where his priorities lay. He dumped Tommy into the water in his haste to save the boat, and possibly me.
I loved the sea and the rivers and especially those trips down to Newbiggin to the promenade and the dunes, where the wind could be so wild and I could sit for hours on the rocks looking at the changing sky. I cannot argue with Jack’s recollection that he was much more of an outdoors man, but I would challenge his memory that I was always happiest in the house near my mother when I wasn’t playing football. Maybe Jack prefers to remember it so because, like most older brothers, he wasn’t always thrilled to have ‘Our Kid’ tagging along, getting caught in hedges and other traps, diverting him from the primary quest for rabbits or birds’ nests.
My father wasn’t a football man, which was probably just as well considering the weight of my mother’s attachment to the game through her own family. He had other pastimes: pigeons, ducks, geese and rabbits, and, most valuably for the family income, a little horse. He used to take it down to the seashore to collect coal. Some of the coal came from ships which, when hit by heavy weather after putting out from Blyth, shed some of their cargo. I used to say to my dad, ‘Well, you’re never going to get that happening on a regular basis.’ I thought about it a lot and it concerned me, but my father explained that the seam he worked on went right under the sea and after the shot-firing inevitably some of it would float to the surface and come in with the tide. My father would glean the coal and sell it cheaply to the pensioners.
As the family expanded we moved from Hawthorne Road to Chestnut Avenue and then to Beatrice Street, all mining company houses, all dependent on a man’s health holding sufficiently for him to go underground for the coal. Another concession was that the company would dump coal outside your house, a benefit we most appreciated in the terrible winter of ’46, when the snow piled so heavily against the doors and the windows. The coal would be loose, and there was a lad down the street called Walter who would shovel it into each of the ‘coal holes’. If anyone tried to muscle in on the job, Walter would fight hard for his ‘pitch’ – sometimes to the point of fisticuffs.
In that way Walter summed up the toughness of the life we all faced. Whatever you got, even if it was only subsistence, you had to work for it, and then defend that right to work so hard.
The men went about their jobs out of need and also pride, and women like my mother were obsessed with the idea that their children do well at school so that they might have more of a chance of gaining something better, something easier in their lives than that which faced them and their menfolk every day. Such pressures no doubt brought strains on marriages, including that of my parents. However, they stuck it out, surviving their difficulties as so many couples did in those days, and if there were times later in my life when I became – as it has sometimes been,
