Telling Tales

AUGUST 1998: TELLING TALES

All kids need haunted houses and dead caretakers. I remember all of the
childhood stories. There seems to be an archetypal longing in children
to people their own patch with bogeymen and imagined dangers. When I
was growing up in Newcastle I changed schools a few times for various
reasons and found that every school I attended had its own ghost. For
some it was 'The White Lady' who was the ghost of a girl who had
usually committed suicide in the school or was the ghost of a woman who
had been murdered on the sight before the school was built. Others it
was a caretaker who took his own life or it was the builder who died
during construction and was walled up by his colleagues to avoid
investigation.

As I grew older I forgot about these stories, writing them off as
merely the musings of children influenced by too much bad television
and too many lessons writing boring exercises in the trapped sunlight
of autumnal afternoon classrooms. To be honest I forgot most of my
childhood in the mad rush to achieve adulthood, golden fractured
memories shovelled up and pushed to the side in a welter of exams and
mortgages and relationships and arguments. Two things brought them back
to the surface, moving slowly like bubbles in glue.

Last year, for the first time in my life my Father and I went on a
pub-crawl in Newcastle. I moved away from there before I was
fully-grown and didn't return for years, not really caring for the
memories that Newcastle held. Newcastle was a place of dead roads,
everything I had done there smelt of failure and despair. I found it
easier to observe the life of my family from afar while I eked out an
existence hundreds of miles away.

I hadn't seen my father for years. I had always remembered him as a
strong, masculine presence but one that was distant, indistinct. Even
in childhood memories he appears indistinct and hazy, like it was
impossible to focus on him.

Sitting in the heaving pub with him, the currents and eddies, the
laughter and raucous shouts of a Newcastle Friday hanging around him, I
for the first time perceived him as a person. He looked so fragile, so
eager for love, his shoulders bowed with a lifetime of hard work,
fingers like carrots around his glass, the dull lights of the pub
catching the nicotine in his white hair and the deep lines of his face.
I looked at him, at ease in his world and realised that this man had
everything that I didn't and felt a dull ache for it. This man had
experience and community and memories. He knew people. He belonged. We
started to talk, talking of memories and heritage. He admitted that he
still regretted that his father had never given him the one thing that
he coveted. His father had never shared his tales, the stories and
anecdotes that built him. He knew very little of his father or the
world as he saw it.

The night wore on, lubricated by beer and numerous rollups. My father's
eyes started to look through me, through the revellers and into the
past. He began to talk of things that had happened, things that I only
thought of as lurid fiction. He told me of the brother of a friend he
played childhood football matches with, who he shared his first
Woodbine with in the outside toilet at the bottom of the yard. This
brother had been the victim of Mary Bell, the child murderer that still
incenses the West End of Newcastle. He told of the fear that stalked
the back to back houses and how the back street bookies closed for a
week as a mark of respect. He told of the time that he went to the
toilets at a football match and found a man bleeding to death, his
penis cut off and stuffed in his mouth. He talked of gang war that
ended in a close friend slumped in the doorway of a pub, a knife
gleaming in the cold, smoky winters air.

Listening, I realised that my father had been close to events that
later became incorporated into urban myth, he had experienced the
bogeymen that had kept my generation indoors at night. Around that time
I had become interested in the longevity and transmission of urban
myths, the ability of a story to survive in essence while losing its
details and being modified with each telling. Most times it is
impossible to discern whether there was ever a seed of truth at the
centre of the fabulous fruit. An offshoot of this is ostention, where
some myth or folkloric tale receives a mirror in real life. The story
becomes REAL. Thinking of these two things brought childhood memories
back to the screen of my mind, flickering and grainy yet clear as
day.

It was always cold in childhood. I cannot place a childhood memory
without chill winds or breath hanging like smoke in the air. By all
accounts I was not a remarkable child but I was continually
complemented upon my pale blue eyes and my mature manner. Sieving back
through assorted detached memories I chanced across a narrative of
sorts. Me, Abul, Charley and Ross are standing in the playground
looking up at the sky which is full of swirling black and grey clouds.
The red brick Victorian school is caught in the last gasp of sunlight
behind us. Leaves blow around us and Abul says in his Pakistan English
accent, "I heard it on the news. The storm. Will it get us?"

I look at him and say, "Of course it won't"

"I'm not scared," Charley says with bravery.

"I am," says Ross. "What if it blows our house down?"

"Have you seen 'The Wizard of Oz'," I say. Everyone laughs and Ross
jumps on my back. Somewhere a dinner lady rings the dinner bell and we
all run to be first in the line.

The next scene has we four standing in the toilets. Pale light seeps in
through the frosted windows. The toilet has a few dry brown leaves on
the floor and smells of urine. Someone has stuck faeces on the ceiling.
We all joke and laugh trying to push each other under it. I remember
feeling sick. We all crowd around a mirror on the wall above the wash
basins. Charley puts his hand up for us to be quiet.

"This is what I wanted to tell you, right. Years ago there used to be a
caretaker here who had a daughter, right, and she got
pregnant&;#8230;" Everybody laughs and smans.

Ross says "With somebody's willy!" We all start to collapse with
hilarity. Charley punches Ross on the arm.

"Shut up right! This is important. She got pregnant so he hung her from
a rope in this toilet until she was dead then he got a knife and,"
Charley runs his finger under his neck, "he slit his own throat right
open."

"I remember that I looked at Charley's face and started to get scared
because he looked so serious. Abul and Ross start laughing.

"I'm not scared," Abul says. "Nightmare on Elm Street is much more
scarier."

"Yeah," adds Ross.

"Look shut up, right? That's not the scary bit, right? The scary bit is
that if you put your hands on the mirror and say 'bloody Mary' five
times then she comes behind you and you can see her in the mirror all
covered in blood. Cos she was called Mary. Do you believe me? It's true
you know, right?"

I remember saying that I believed him then hearing shouting. My next
memory is standing in Mr Morgan the deputy head's office, trying not to
cry. He stood in front of the window, the wind beating the trees around
outside, rain pummelling the glass. He looked tall with thick glasses
hanging on a cord around his neck. He had a red nose and big eyebrows
and his cardigan and shirt were peppered with grey hairs from his
balding head. He reminded me of my granddad. He said that I had been
naughty for hiding the toilets when I should have been in class and
that I should be ashamed, but that he wasn't going to tell me off
anymore. He said that I had to come back that night after school and do
a job for him.

I burst into to tears I think and I'm sure he rubbed my back and told
me not to cry.

I remember that afternoon going so slowly, the wind and the rain
getting heavier and heavier. Charley asked me did I want to go to the
toilets to try 'bloody Mary'.

The sky was nearly black by the end of school and the wind was strong
enough to blow you over. Charley and me stood in the toilet. There
wasn't any joking about. I remember feeling scared again.

After that I have an image of my face in the mirror and then me crying,
running through the dark, rain slick night, trees and signs waving
about, me falling and getting back up. Scared.

Next morning me and my Mam picked our way through the remains of the
roofs that off the houses the night before, stepping between slates and
joists that filled the road. In Assembly Mr Medcalfe the head teacher
said that Mr Morgan had suddenly had to leave the school, and that the
storm had been the biggest in history. I felt glad that Mr Morgan had
gone. I remember my Mam saying that Mr Morgan was a 'dirty old man' and
that he'd been taking 'dirty' photos of the kids in the fourth
year.

A week later they took the mirror in the toilets down.