This Sort of Thing - The Childhood Stage

 

Introduction

For several months, I’ve written precisely 100 words each day to create a record of my life whilst simultaneously exercising a brain that shows signs of impaired functional capacity resulting from excessive wear and tear.

On days when there’s little to write about, I reflect upon more interesting times in my past. This has prompted me to write a prequel entitled The Childhood Stage – My First Ten Years. Don’t worry, I haven’t written about every single day. Just the momentous ones.

This bit’s just an introduction but nevertheless it still comprises of exactly 100 words, the 100th one being this.

 

Wednesday 6 November 1957 - The Uterus

Similar to Jack Nicholson’s ‘Little Pigs’ scene in Kubrick’s film ‘The Shining’, a steel blade ripped through the wall triggering a tsunami of escaping amniotic fluid. A stranger dragged me out, announcing that I was a boy; something I’d known for several months.

The woman lying semi-naked and semi-conscious in a bloodstained bed, apparently, was my Ma. Years later she’d complain about the state of my room.

To deepen the despair this all happened in Middlesbrough. It was the worst day of my life. Only learning that Buddy Holly’s ‘That’ll be the Day’ was the number one record cheered me.

 

Sunday 16 February 1958 - The Baptism

They crossed the Irish Sea to see me in my long white dress as a man in similar attire half-drowned me in a dark corner of St Philomena’s church.

I was a survivor. Only a month earlier I howled like an infant Banshee, the victim of an acute ear infection. I hadn’t been sleeping and consequently neither had the family. In mid-January 1958 the term ‘Would you shut the fuck up?’ was introduced to the English language.

My Nan put whiskey in my milk to make me sleep, restoring peace. Irritated people have regularly been giving me whiskey ever since.

 

Friday 1 January 1960 - The Swinging Sixties

In the beginning there was no sign of the Beatles, Twiggy, free love or recreational drugs. With Carnaby Street out of reach, my Ma remained loyal to the nearby Fine Fare shop. Boasting new-fangled supermarket trolleys and a hygiene certificate, it just oozed post-war affluence.

In the town where I was born lived many men who sailed to sea but we didn’t all live in yellow submarines. Instead a red brick terrace house in Kensington Road. Modernity brought the beginning of the end of our heavy industry boom. Decades later free love (or cheap love) and recreational drugs abound there.

 

Tuesday 31 May 1960 - The Sibling

I vaguely remember family discussions about the possibility of acquiring a car, washing machine, budgerigar, living room carpet or other miscellaneous items to improve our lives but I’ve absolutely no recollection of a sister being mentioned, until it was too late.

Whilst sitting on Mary Erskine’s knee (Ma’s cousin) I was asked if I would prefer the impending baby to be a boy or a girl. I really wanted a puppy more than anything else but we got Beverley and we still have her, long after the point at which a domestic pet might have expired. She’s housetrained too, apparently!

 

Wednesday 5 September 1962 - The Black Babies

The first time a nun spoke to me she told a lie. She said I’d love school but I never did, neither at St Philomena’s Primary nor any of my four subsequent seats of learning.

Sister Josephine said if we took in pennies (in multiples of six) for the black babies we’d bring happiness to God, black babies and ultimately ourselves. Each contribution earned a gum-backed picture of a hungry child. The prototype of Panini sticker albums but with images of starving Third World kids where excessively overpaid footballers now gloat.

For fourteen years I endured schools, but not nuns.

 

Wednesday 17 April 1963 - The Strangers in the Night

Staying at my Nan and Grandad’s in York I heard shrieking in the night and the voices of strangers. I was told my Uncle Malcolm was being taken to hospital. Nothing to worry about. Just go back to sleep.

During the day our bus trip to Flamingo Park Zoo was cancelled and my Ma arrived. One afternoon two weeks later there was a family party. Relatives went home with some of Malcolm’s belongings. I was horrified.

Months later I was told he had died. Decades later I was told he had died that night in his bed. An epileptic seizure.

 

Monday 3 June 1963 - The Pope

Sister Josephine sent us all home from school an hour before the lunch bell because Pope John XXIII had died and we’d need to pray for his soul. It was no time to be doing sums.

My Ma was shocked to see me, exclaiming ‘Your dinner’s not ready!’ Kids were normally met at the school gates by parents, but not today.

Confident that the Pope’s soul was saintly pure, I did Lego instead of prayers.

Years later in lessons about cathode ray oscilloscopes or Lady Macbeth I’d wish for a miracle like Pope John XXIII’s demise and an early finish.

 

Saturday 1 August 1964 - The Ethnic Roots

They told me I was Irish but what did they mean? Daily doses of Val Doonican, cabbage and potatoes were administered to ensure I never forgot the roots I didn’t know I had. So we went there on a family holiday, via Scotland, in a Ford Anglia and a British Rail ferry.

The Green Glens of Antrim enchanted but, in comparison to our Teesside home, even post-apocalyptic Hiroshima was beautiful.

Near Cushendall, in a farmyard carpeted with chicken shit, as afternoon sun shone through soft rain, my roots anchored me to Ireland and I began to draw in her goodness.   

 

Saturday 13 March 1965 - The Toy Shop

Maiden great aunts Annie and Maggie owned a cat and a toy shop. The downside to their utopian lifestyle was that they lived in South Shields and they didn’t have an indoor toilet. Sometimes we’d stay there overnight, sleeping in an attic room which entailed weeing into a receptacle that looked like a giant china teacup in front of other family members or making the journey down four flights of stairs to a draughty brick-built facility in the back yard. The fact that they thought that cider was the apple equivalent of lemonade compounded the problem for this unsuspecting seven-year-old.

 

Monday 18 October 1965 - The Monochrome Set

Nowadays Rediffusion sounds like a word you might associate with that Oppenheimer fella, but back then it was Britain’s first stab at cable television.

Apparently we could only enjoy this pleasure if all households in our street subscribed. Terrified that everyone would know what they were watching, our next door neighbours rarely tuned in.

On day one I was forced to watch the Woodentops. Unimpressed I imposed a boycott ceasing only for the 1972 FA Cup Final, which remains my favourite telly programme.

Decades later I’d watch Channel Five News because I was hopelessly in love with presenter Kirstie Young.  

 

Friday 25 December 1965 - The Dog

Before dawn, in our posh front room with a proper fireplace, to our delight we discovered a Golden Labrador pup. On its face was a little soot to fit in with the Father Christmas chimney tradition but which resembled the Lenten Cross put on our foreheads by Father Crawley each Ash Wednesday. Were Fathers Christmas and Crawley the same person, I wondered.

We named the dog Bruce, much to the irritation and confusion of Uncle Brooks and Bob the Australian speedway rider lodger.

Previously we’d had two pet white mice housed in a budgie cage and which had mysteriously disappeared.

 

Tuesday 19 July 1966 - The World Cup

Middlesbrough FC’s Ayresome Park stadium was a mere 200 metres from our house. Walking past one day I noticed great construction work being undertaken. I asked my Da why. Without explaining the concept of a World Cup tournament he told me it was because the best footballers in the world were coming to play. Why on Earth would they come to Middlesbrough, I pondered.

On our doorstep North Korean unknowns beat Italian superstars and sent them home. In hindsight I’d have loved to have gone but I was on a school trip to see a production of Rumpelstiltskin that evening.

 

Friday 12 August 1966 - The Great Escape

York is a great wondrous city but it was the things it didn’t have that appealed to me when we moved there to live. There were no petro-chemical plants or steel works, purple and green sunsets or schools run by ferocious nuns.

Ma’s family lived there so we’d plenty of people to visit when requiring tea, cake and long conversations about Auntie Maude’s new ironing board. But I knew that if I sat in silence and agreed to kiss an elderly lady I’d get a shiny shilling.

‘You’ve never had it so good’ said Uncle Alec, and he was right.

 

Sunday 6 November 1966 - The Ageing

My ninth birthday. In accordance with fatalistic family tradition I was informed that I’d entered my tenth year so dotage beckoned. Rattling on towards the big one-oh I should anticipate false teeth, memory loss and weekly steeping of the feet in a washing-up bowl of luxurious Radox.

Next door neighbour Susan Lancaster also hit nine today. I didn’t like her. She played two recorders both of which were even more shrill than her voice. The boys, including Susan’s brother John, came to my party and the girls went to hers. Perfect! A premonition, perhaps, of school discos six years hence.

 

Saturday 10 December 1966 - The Bay Leaf

As black as a badger’s black bits on the outside and as raw as a badger’s sunburnt bits on the inside. Perhaps my Da cooked our sausages with his blowtorch on the Saturdays my Ma worked in Stead & Simpson’s shoe shop in Coney Street.

My sister and I complained until a replacement shepherd’s pie service was introduced. Prepared by the real chef on Friday evenings whilst chanting shoe polish prices, then reheated and served by her sidekick on Saturday dinnertimes. I always got the bay leaf. ‘If it’s in there it’s to be eaten’ he snapped as I gagged.

 

Saturday 1 April 1967 - The Arctic Wedding

In Sunderland we saw Mary Erskine (Ma’s cousin) marry Geordie Jim Fleming. A lovely man but six decades later I still struggle with his half-Anglo Saxon half-Pingu accent.

Wearing her silk bridesmaid’s dress my sister shivered in the North Sea wind while polar bears perished. Later I discovered that even posh hotel meals came with cabbage and potatoes. We were given wedding cake in small boxes to take home. Stored that way it keeps forever, apparently. Too tempting, I ate mine in 2012.

At weddings the reward for kissing elderly ladies was two shillings, so it wasn’t a bad day.

 

Monday 14 August 1967 - The Emigration

My Da had been selling Pyrene fire extinguishers to earn a crust and a bay leaf but he was so successful in his work that within a year everybody in York had bought one, so it was time to move on.

Donegal Quay in Belfast became our Ellis Island and a white Morris 1000 van bearing the legend ‘Glover Site Investigation, Ballymoney’ became our covered wagon.

Settled in our homestead in the Garry Bog, my Da was home (or within twenty miles of it) and I felt I too had arrived home at long last… until the bullets started flying.

 

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Image:

A photograph taken by my Nan on a family fishing trip to Rowntree’s Park in York, circa 1962. Lining up are father Danny with the Mohican haircut, sister Beverley in the perambulator, mother Grace hiding at the back and me at the front doing all the work.