TIME FOR T! PART ONE
Sometimes a taste, a smell, a sight or a sound stays in the memory for many years. I was privileged as a young lad of eleven to first hear a sound which has stayed with me for nearly 60 years, a Rolls Royce C6 diesel under heavy load, hoping for a gear change, as it makes one of the toughest climbs in Gateshead.
Our family had recently moved to business premises, with house attached, which was located at the top of one of the steepest hills in Gateshead in the, then, County of Durham. My parents had inherited from my father’s parents, what would now be called a ‘fast food outlet’.
Just before the shop, named after my grandfather, Fred, the road gradient changed to something akin to one in six, past the Atkinson company coal yard. In those days, Atkinsons ran a small fleet of blue-liveried, flat-bed Thames and Bedford coal lorries with new Ford D series autobaggers slowly taking their place. Our shop sat a few hundred yards from the summit before the long downhill coast into the ‘village’ of Felling.
Being a mad-keen lorry spotter, I was in my element living
