A Northern Lad

By Graham Sutcliffe

This is the story of a child of the post war baby boom growing up in those far off non-PC days of the fifties and early sixties. The scene is a northern textile town, a town thrown up by the industrial revolution. A town who's seemingly permanent way of life was about to vanish for ever, as the post imperial world arrived. The book ends as the author leaves, tantalisingly close to that threatened day of reckoning that would see the place change forever. He would never return as anything more than a casual visitor.
The tale is told tongue in cheek. It pokes fun at much and embroiders much, rather than keeping to the strict facts and figures. In this way school teachers and the like are often described rather unkindly and their pupils are mostly shown as awkward and uncouth. This is definitely not a story of the swinging sixties; this is about a northern town where the mini-skirt wouldnt appear until long after Londoners abandoned it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Sep 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499089257

Graham Sutcliffe

The author is a retired computer consultant living in the depths of the North Yorkshire countryside with his wife Jo and several animals – an idyllic place and life style that fulfil most of his lifelong ambitions.

Book preview

Copyright © 2014 by Graham Sutcliffe.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2014915646

ISBN:   Hardcover           978-1-4990-8924-0

            Softcover            978-1-4990-8923-3

            eBook                  978-1-4990-8925-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 09/02/2014

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Contents

Introduction

Normal?

Toddling

First Schools

Uprooted

Third School

Long Trousers

Dad

Mum

My Sporting Life

The Boy Scouts

Religion

Work

Work Mates

Night School

Golden Balls

Girls (and Cars)

Leaving

Authors Notes

For Jo, our wonderful children and one Grandchild

(hopefully the first of many).

Introduction

Places change, people change, but our memories usually stay the same – a little embroidered perhaps, but we all carry the flavour of a vanished past within us.

IF YOU LOSE CONTACT with them, people and places become frozen in your memories. When you live alongside them they age and change with you. When I returned to the town I grew up in after more than thirty years away, I could see long forgotten ghosts walking amongst buildings that now had only a strange almost dream like familiarity. These buildings seemed so odd because their old, long lost functions and appearance were still etched into my memories. The local people had watched their long slow evolution and could not see any strangeness in them.

I remembered the town as it was during my childhood and youth. Back then it was quite different and I guess the people were too. For one thing it was a rather dark place in the sense that everything was smoke blackened as befitted its role at the very heart of the Industrial Revolution. As a child I thought the whole town had been a creation of the Victorian era – I even envied places that appeared to have older (and thus to my mind ‘real’) history which is to say history that predated the mid eighteenth century.

I had come to believe the town had somehow been spontaneously created around the time of the Luddites, when the water wheel and then steam power suddenly drove the local woollen industry forwards at a breakneck pace. Indeed that really was when the whole town had suddenly expanded like the cosmic big bang – its final size limited more by the rugged Pennine hills that surrounded it than by any sort development speed limit. When I lived there, the woollen mills were almost all still working and many of the town’s tall chimneys continued to belch out that all pervasive blackening smoke.

Wherever you looked there were buildings built during the nineteenth century. Even the churches, though they appeared to be old, were mostly Victorian – perhaps built by mill owners seeking to appease their God before he took them off to man his great factory in the sky. But here and there, hidden amongst the Victorian Gothic, were a few true gems – though they too were smoke blackened.

The parish church looked like a typical Victorian gothic church, but it was in fact the real thing. Finished in fourteen thirty eight it includes portions of a former building dating back a further three hundred years. It boasts a medieval font cover that is one of the finest in England. Strangely this building, almost alone amongst the town’s buildings, still retains its smoke blackened appearance. I believe it is now a minster rather than a mere parish church though the nuances of this difference elude me – suffice it to say it looks quite unchanged.

There was also the Piece Hall. Built in the eighteenth century it had originally served as a market for cloth sellers. It was and still is a huge and magnificent four sided structure with tiers of colonnaded levels holding the many small rooms that served as the cloth sellers’ shops – built into the side of a hill the down side had three tiers and the up only two, but so skilfully was it designed you somehow don’t seem to notice this. When I was young they no longer sold cloth in small pieces (hence the name of the building); by then it had become the town’s wholesale centre for fruit and veg - my Dad would regularly visit to stock up his shop with potatoes and so on and I would sometimes go with him.

Even though the town had not so long ago been subjected to a sustained period of massive change and growth; it somehow managed to have the feel of stability about it. Peoples’ fathers and grandfathers had worked in the same mills and this mere two or three generations of continuity had given the illusion that change had now stopped and the whole place would somehow just carry on in the same way forever. We were all destined to follow our parents into the same niches that they had so easily slotted into, not so very long before us. Indeed many of my peer group did exactly that.

Of course the stability was only an illusion and one that would very soon be shattered. The woollen mills would all close. By the time I left many of the tiny blackened stone houses had been torn down and been replaced by brick and concrete warrens many miles away from the town centre. All too soon the mills would be abandoned to take on a new life as ‘posh’ apartments, museums as well as places where people made new products better suited to the modern marketplaces.

Within a very small number of years, my peers who went into the ‘jobs for life’ woollen mills were all doomed to the trauma of redundancy and upheaval. I should point out that for the bulk of the population lifetime job security no longer exists anywhere in Britain, so my old home town was by no means unique. Where it was different was that it had put almost all its eggs into just the one (woollen industry) jobs basket and so the change came all at once and it hit the town very hard.

Other smaller things were also changing - cumulatively these would make the texture of the old world slide into the obscurity that is the past. They were at first mostly little things like Italian coffee bars, where coffee was the real thing - though pandering to the local taste it came laced with plenty of milk - it was served in Pyrex glass cups and saucers that we all thought the epitome of the modern world! I suppose those coffee bars spelled the death knell for the famous Lyons coffee houses - every town had at least one and we were no exception.

The Italians were also moving in on the old barbers’ shops replacing ‘short back and sides’ at half a crown a time with six shillings worth of Italian style! I rather think the Italian attempt on the hairdressing business has now gone, but so too have most of the old back street barbers.

There were bigger gastronomic changes in the air than coffee. The first Chinese restaurant appeared in my youth and began to challenge the ubiquitous fish and chip shops, if not the greasy spoon cafes which catered for an older clientele who were most unlikely to risk eating anything so radically different to good old honest Yorkshire fare.

Even my beloved fish and chips were changing. In the fifties all the fish in my town came from the east coast meaning that fish was always haddock or very, very occasionally a bit of plaice. But it was round about the time I left that exotic offerings like cod began to appear – cod was something normally only eaten on holiday in Blackpool! Even the wet fish sellers began to sell things that weren’t haddock and horror of horrors some weird people no longer wanted the skin taking off! Fish skin was something local people only gave to their cat – and a lot of us didn’t even think it good enough for that!

You did your shopping at the corner shop (or the co-op which was simply a chain of corner shops in those days). But the first supermarkets were not very far into the future and they would lower prices and make a wider selection of good available, whilst driving a lot of self-employed shop keepers out of business – my father included.

Even the people themselves were changing. During the Second World War a lot of eastern Europeans had arrived and stayed on, but they had blended in amazingly well; I suppose looking much the same as us and having a European culture they didn’t stand out a lot – although I do recall a few strange Polish sounding names in my classroom. A large number of Asians would arrive in the late sixties and they obviously had a different appearance and culture; but that would mostly be after my time and I was to be quite unaware of the impact they had on the town.

Even though a few changes had already arrived when I was still at school, they had yet to greatly change the overall flavour and feel of the place. As I left the town, I doubt that it was unrecognisably different from the town my father had grown up in. But the rate of change was set to accelerate and within a decade the comfortable timeworn feel of the place would be largely gone.

Of course I mostly missed the arrival of the modern world and what lingers in my mind is a seemingly unchanging place weirdly, yet permanently, stuck in the embryonic stages of a massive transition.

Normal?

It was only after I left my home town that I came to realise that normal might not be quite what I had been brought up to believe!

I GREW UP IN a northern industrial town that was a bit of a backwater. I say backwater mostly in the sense that we didn’t live like the people you saw on the TV, rather we gave the impression that we lived in an earlier decade - one whose moral outlook was in many ways quite Victorian. But it was a strange quirky, northern sort of Victorian and was most definitely not as starched and wholesome as the term might elsewhere imply, nor was it as Dickensian dark as the modern reader might assume. Incidentally it was only in later life that I came to realise that no one lived like the people on TV.

We boys were all put into a category at some point during our teenage years. Of course what we all wanted was to be thought of as normal, to fit in and be accepted. Only after being accepted could we move on and begin to aspire to be better in some way. Everyone knew about this categorising process including our parents, they knew because this had been going on for a very, very long time, it went back into the deepest darkest corner of the northern mind set.

Don’t get the idea that putting people into slots was a formal thing. It certainly wasn’t, but it was a process that everyone somehow understood. It lay deep down somewhere inside our heads in that peculiar bit of grey matter that made us into locals. We are all far more politically correct today (I’d go further and suggest that back then we were blissfully unaware of any sense of political correctness!) and the modern reader might not understand such an odd old fashioned way of thinking, so I suppose I should try to explain.

Normal wasn’t easy to define because it had a fairly broad spectrum, the boundaries were quite wide, at least in some directions, in others they were astoundingly narrow.

You very definitely could never be seen as normal if you didn’t like football both watching and playing. It didn’t matter at all how crap you were; it was enough that you tried and looked as if you enjoyed it. This was much more important than you might imagine, football being the prime topic for almost all male conversations including those with your father. In fact it was almost certainly the one and only thing you and your Dad really could ever talk about with any degree of mutual understanding and passion.

You very probably wouldn’t be seen as normal if you had a tendency to look smart, as in regularly wearing a clean shirt (rich toffs would be allowed to get away with this one but then they would never be seen as normal anyway). Normal boys mostly wore a school blazer that looked like it had been stolen from the rag and bone man’s cart (note it was quite easy to make a brand new blazer look like this within minutes of first wearing it – but this antiquing process was a serious skill that could only be acquired by considerable practice; first form schoolboys often had decent blazers for a whole term or more, but then they were very easy to spot whatever the state of their blazers, since theirs’ were always at least eight sizes too big for them – the same went for second year lads who’s blazers were by then only some six sizes too big, and so on).

On the subject of looking smart, one absolute and clear no, no was having clean and shiny shoes; normal boys never had scuff free shoes that were quite obviously strangers to a football!

Normal boys were aware of the opposite sex and could talk a good story whilst not actually ever being brave enough to talk to girls. In this way we would all say vociferously that we lusted after Sandra (of course none of us ever said anything when she was within earshot, but that wasn’t the point, we talked about her, not to her) - oh yes you do know Sandra, she’s the one with the big chest (oh come on, there was a Sandra in every mixed sex school, only the name changed with location and generation – same sex schoolboy’s think of those dirty magazines you used to stare at, someone just like Sandra was in one of them somewhere).

On the subject of talking to girls, only weird lads could manage it without any obvious signs of embarrassment. Normal lads could only manage monosyllabic cave man like grunts delivered whilst gaping at the floor, except when they had been drinking - in which case they tended to put out an unintelligible, non-stop, load of complete nonsense, delivered very loudly, whilst looking the object of their desires directly in the eye (or more likely in the chest depending on the amount consumed).

I need to mention that you probably wouldn’t be classed as normal if peoples’ mothers described you as a ‘nice lad’ - a word of warning they quite probably didn’t really mean what you might imagine from those words, it was very probably some sort of secret enigmatic mothers’ only code, used to hint that the lad in question might be a bit ‘dubious’ in some way or other – in much the same way, they would almost always refer to really big fat girls as ‘bonny lasses’.

You would definitely be seen as weird if you were too wholesome, by which I include studious, religious, or even just clean (in the hygienic and not smelling of dirty socks, sense of the word). Mind, weird lads did tend to cause annoyance out of all proportion to their importance in the world of the lads, because our mothers would often berate us repeatedly saying things like ‘why can’t you be more like X? He always does his homework on time without complaining! And so on.’

All in all a normal lad was more or less an embryonic Andy Cap. Normal boys were very easy to spot, they came with their shirt tails hanging out and a football glued to the end of their foot (either foot it didn’t matter, two footed boys were rare and greatly envied by their peers).

The truth is normal boys kicked a ball most of the time, it was what God gave them legs and feet for – hands were reserved for goalkeepers of course, but goalies were very definitely not at all normal, in fact they were really a category all on their own. I guess you could describe them as being almost normal but with strange and very powerful masochistic tendencies accompanied by an absolute and total lack of any common sense – that is with the notable exception of Paul Hill who was a goalkeeper and also our very own dangerous psychopath he couldn’t even remotely be mistaken for a masochist.

Paul was born ten times as big as anyone else and liked to barge into other footballers, elbows and knees flailing, leaving a trail of bruises and broken bones. His own bones were apparently made of high quality steel and he never broke anything. Of course Paul didn’t play for a proper team, well never more than the once at any rate. None of the proper coaches would risk playing Paul; you see he had a tendency to beat up those coaches (and school teachers) who tried to change his approach to the game.

So it was that most of his victims were injured on patches of waste ground or on one of the Town’s many narrow cobbled streets. After leaving school Paul found his niche working as a bouncer, not so very long before he moved into new accommodation in Armley Jail. And that was where he spent the bulk of his adult life - in stretches of varying length; the length usually being determined by the severity of his many victims’ injuries.

Thinking back, Paul probably accounted for the strange local preponderance for boys who wanted to be defenders in my generation - attackers and midfielders inevitably found themselves facing Paul at some point in their football lives, not something to be recommended - I was rather fond of right back myself.

I seem to have wandered off topic – something you will get used to if you have the stamina to read the rest of this little book – but to try to get back on course - what else can I say about normal boys, well they washed only when compelled to do so by vicious and unreasonable mothers. Mind you, that wasn’t as bad as it sounds; those were still the days of the old tin bath in front of the fire.

For me this was a regular Tuesday night job, my mother filled it with hot water and then had a bath, followed by my Dad, then my big brother and then me, the dog went in last of all – in fact as I recall it, the dog often got in at the same time as me; of all of us the dog was the only one who seemed to enjoy getting into the bath and he didn’t like to be kept waiting! The point being that the water was so dirty by the time I got into it, it didn’t wash much off and as for removing body odour, it was more a case of picking up a few extra ‘scents’ and flavours from everyone else – especially the dog! Those big families with half a dozen kids must have been pretty mucky most of the time.

Speaking of scents in the perfume sense of the word, there were none, Mum might have had a bottle of something very cheap and nasty from Boots for Christmas every year or two. But real men and normal boys didn’t cover their natural eaux d’armpit with any ‘poncy French rubbish’. But since we were all the same, no one seemed to notice the smell – today we are much, much cleaner and were we to meet our old selves, I’m sure we would be truly horrified by the way we smelled.

I still recall the shock when my older brother was given a bottle of aftershave for Christmas; he would have been perhaps sixteen. He unwrapped the thing, took it out of its fancy little cardboard box and set it carefully on the table as if it were some precious bit of porcelain that could ruin his life should he open it (or break it) and release that sweet smelling genie with the power to emasculate; in short he behaved as if it was an unexploded bomb.

He just sat staring at it, his eyes wide with fear and confusion. My Dad appeared to be too badly affected by its presence to make one of his usual one liner, caustic comments, and had to make do with the rather feeble ‘nay, I never thought I’d see the day when a lad of mine wore Nancy-boy bloody scent’.

Mum tried to redeem the situation by saying ‘it’s all the rage now, I saw it on Pearl and Dean at the cinema (they did the adverts between films at the cinema back then) all the lads down in London are using it, that’s why I bought it for him’. She looked around at the white staring faces and tried another tack ‘I bet the girls will all go for you with some of that dabbed on you!’

My brother’s mouth took on just a hint of a smile at those words and he ventured, though still somewhat feebly, ‘right Brenda here I come’. But then he was only a year or two away from going off to University and that definitely branded him as being a bit weird (in the studious sense of the word), so it was just possibly alright for him to smell of flowers or whatever they put into aftershave back then. Note he was nine years older than me and Brenda was the Sandra of his generation.

We were also complete strangers to tins of shoe polish, mothers would on occasion shine our shoes when we were asleep and therefore unable to complain about it - but it didn’t do much good, since we would very soon spot the difference and scuff them up before being seen by any mates.

Despite our aversion to shoe polish, we would, with a regularity bordering on real religious fervour, put copious amounts of dubbin on our football boots (and rub gallons of linseed oil onto our cricket bats), but, of course, that was something altogether different and absolutely nothing to do with our appearance. It was, of course, ‘sport’ and was not only allowed but was in fact, mandatory behaviour for normal lads. For the modern reader dubbin was a sort of thick grease that you larded onto your boots to make the leather supple and also to make them waterproof; cricket bats didn’t come ready to be used with a hard plastic sealing embedded into the surface of the wood - you had to rub linseed oil into them to get the willow ready to smite the red leather. It didn’t really matter if you never actually used your bat in anger, you still had to oil it every season.

Thinking back about those old football boots always tends to make me raise a smile. Back then boots really were boots. For those of you under about fifty five, think of a pair of Doc Martins with studs on the heels and soles. Today they wear slippers in comparison to us, no wonder they get broken bones in their feet all the time. Mind I bet they don’t get anything like as many blisters! Despite the best softening effect of all that dubbin they did really mess your feet.

Normal boys only ever did homework for the psychopath teachers, you know, the ones with a sadistic love of whipping anyone who breathed more than the once during their forty minute lesson – depending on the teacher involved, failing to hand homework in on time could be a capital offence; mind even for the toughest teachers we only did the absolute minimum required to escape corporal punishment – detention was fine, we normal boys spent every Wednesday between four and five thirty in detention, my school had to use the massive main hall; even two or three normal sized classrooms would have been much too small to accommodate all the so called rogues.

So what did our parents want of us and for us? I can only speak for my own parents and it was different for my father and mother.

Mostly my father just wanted to be left alone, which meant he wanted me to behave in such a manner that ensured that his wife (i.e. my mother) wouldn’t spend half her life berating him about the failure of his child ‘who was turning out to be a useless good for nothing, just like his father’.

Our dads were really a bit like the butterfly that emerged from the caterpillar of the boy, which is a whole lot better sounding than the sad reality - fathers had to work all week just to feed and clothe us and all they got in return was the chance to watch the Town lose the odd football match in the rain and then drown their disappointment at the pub. The heady promise of their youth brought down to a wet and cold afternoon once every two weeks, watching a rotten football team, followed by enough beer to dim down reality – truly the boy is father to the man.

Town did always seem to lose too; our team held the record for finishing bottom of the old fourth division, though they didn’t have relegation from the nether regions of the league in those days, so every football season tended to be much the same as the one before it. It just went on for generation after generation – yes we still had sporting continuity back in those days. On the up-side the local beer was something very special indeed and quite probably more than made up for the football team.

If asked what they wanted for us, our mothers would all say that they wanted us to be medical doctors, but what they really meant was that they wanted was for us to escape the awful reality of their world and life. But there was one thing that all mothers truly feared, what if their son was a homosexual (note there was no such thing as gay pride back then, homosexuals were locked up in prison and were universally vilified by everyone. In general they all pretended that they were heterosexuals and hoped for the best).

I well recall the first time I came home drunk – which was what normal lads did as soon as they had half a chance; it was also what most of our fathers seemed to do too, perhaps my long cherished theory that most Northern lads all carry an innate drinkers gene in our DNA is wrong; maybe we just copy our fathers.

That fateful night in my befuddled mind, I expected the worst, a full scale speech from my mother followed by a good hiding from her, just to let me know that drinking at sixteen, not to mention arriving home drunk, simply wasn’t respectable enough (the lecture would contain the much repeated phrase ‘what will the neighbours say’ followed by a good five minutes about how I should be more like my brother – incidentally he did drink, quite probably more than I did but he had a later curfew than me and would wait until he knew my parents were in bed before he came home).

My only consolation was that the alcohol would act as an anaesthetic and render the blows less painful. Instead of a tirade I got to see a woman with real tears of joy in her eyes - her boy was just another drunken sot, in other words I was a normal product of my town, which to her mind, was a whole lot better than being one of those ‘soft’ lads.

Toddling

I was born in the post war baby boom. It was only a boom in the sense that there were a lot of us about. It was definitely not some sort of golden era.

I WAS BORN IN February nineteen forty seven. This was right in the middle of the worst winter in living memory – these days bad winters are always described using those words, but trust me, nineteen forty seven was something very special in the annals of bad winters. I was supposed to have been born in the local hospital, but instead I was born in an ambulance that was on its way to the hospital. The crew were stuck in the middle of an especially heavy snow storm. I was born around six in the morning, the ambulance had left my home at two thirty and had managed to go a mere two and a half miles in those three and a half hours! When I arrived on the scene my transport had managed to get within a