I`M Sorry I Can't Answer That Question

By Kenny Anderson

The book is based on personal and fictitious experiences and attempts to exhibit how the subjects life evolves from mundane beginnings. It embraces shocking yet humorous events with quite a gentle underlying theme which is designed to make the reader decipher the facts from fiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Apr 9, 2014
• ISBN: 9781496977045

Kenny Anderson

The author was in fact born in the North East of England but has travelled extensively since his late teens.He still maintains a great affiliation with Tyneside and for his family and friends still residing there.

Book preview

37682.png

TIME FLIES WHEN YOU’RE BUSY

The Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House are pretty impressive buildings, granted, and the Hawkesbury River looks like you could swim in it, but it’s not the Tyne Bridge and the Sage and I’d rather be in the Tyne with the empty bottles and full condoms! I’d swap the amber nectar for a bottle of brown and as for Miss Minogue (Kylie or Danii), you’re about my age but I’d still have a crack at Cheryl Cole first.

I’m a fellow of the North East, as the auld aristocrats called us, a Geordie to everyone else in the world and fiercely proud of the fact. Like many thousands sent over to Australia on the penal ships, here I am, but what have I done to find myself here and is it my life sentence? I’ve had a crazy existence but I was brought up normal, so what the fuck happened?

I made my entrance on to planet earth back in 1965 and, as was the norm, took the name of my dad, Kenneth William Anderson, 10lbs of pure wind and shite. Dad was a plater in the shipyards and mam, Lillie, was a nurse. As a kid I saw very little of them but before Social Services track them down for neglect, forget it, I was brought up by the best, Jenny, my grandma.

She was one of the original single parents, you know the type, left alone to bring the kids up alone whilst their husbands donned the Khaki Armani suit and disappeared overseas on the original 18 to 30 holiday, World War II. Ordinary blokes forced to kill or be killed in places they couldn’t even spell. Hard to believe that they relied on guns, tanks, ships and aircraft made by their wives. I was married once and she couldn’t even make a Sunday dinner.

Jenny was one of nine kids; four brothers joined up along with grandpa Billy leaving the girls behind fighting on the home front. Back then families lived in the old terraces within streets of each other. Our lot decided not to have their kids evacuated, as many did, the theory being if we go we all go together. Now that was either brave or dodgy thinking considering the proximity to the shipyards and heavy engineering factories that sprawled over Tyneside back then. Nowadays, a direct hit would take out two call centres and a McDonalds. Now, I’m not sure if it was a testament to their fortitude that they all came through it, or was it just that the Luftwaffe were crap shots? If Hitler had any sense, instead of being a Nazi megalomaniac he should’ve just took us on in a penalty shoot-out.

The Government provided everyone with a corrugated shed buried in soil known as an Anderson Shelter (too late to claim it now) but our lot opted to huddle in a cupboard under the stairs, the idea being that this was the strongest part of the house and could survive a blast, forget about ten tonnes of rubble on top of you. As for a direct hit, goodnight!

One night, grandma and two of her sisters were having a cards and stout night when the sirens went off. Instinctively, everyone headed for the cupboard except grandma who went into the kitchen. Mary, her sister, asked where she was going. Grandma was going for her false teeth.

Bloody Nora, Jenny, the Germans are dropping bombs, not pork pies!

The last time I was back home I drove past where they lived. Some of the old terraces are still there. Loads of little fat lasses wearing track suits with their bellies hanging out, you know the type, the Jeremy Kyle crew discussing yesterday’s Loose Women. I went past one crib that had a banner outside Happy 30th Birthday Grandma. For fuck’s sake!

Mam was born in 1936 and was just getting to know my granddad when he went away to France with the British Expeditionary Force. Billy was one of the lucky ones to get out of Dunkirk on the small ships, back to the relative safety of the south coast and even made it back home for a few weeks’ leave. After that it was away down south again and, seeing he was such a good soldier, he was sent back on D-Day. Truth be known, he wouldn’t have missed it for the world, loved a scrap he did. Mam endured a freaky situation that many kids did after the war; a strange man came home to share their lives and their mothers’ beds. Many kids didn’t have that problem.

If you hadn’t guessed, the numbers of aunties and uncles that mam had was a knock on effect of the family’s roots being Irish and Catholic, no Sky-Plus in those days. Mam was and still is a clever one, attending the local Catholic school. In those days you learned the 3 R’s and, being Catholic, you get a degree in guilt.

She left school at fourteen and started training as a nurse straight away. She became a feared Sergeant Major of the nursing profession, a matron (then a sister which sounded more friendly) and retired when she was sixty. She still worked part-time in health centres to keep her hand in, looking after the elderly - she wasn’t old after all.

Kenny (Snr.) on the other hand was a foreigner, born in York. His dad also went missing for a few years, leaving his mam and the two brothers at home to face the Yorkshire part of Adolf’s force. Dad had to do his compulsory two years’ National Service in the Royal Engineers, Sapper Anderson take a bow! He met mam when he came up to visit a mate he’d made in the Army. Dad and John were best of mates, the sort of friendship that only forms from a military bond, the bond that makes you prepared to fight and, if need be, die for each other. Quite a serious covenant when you consider that these two spent two years keeping the communist masses at bay in Catterick! He met mam at a dance, as you did in those days, and that was it. They married in 1957.

Dad found work in the shipyards and gave me my first career advice when I was still a puppy. I so wanted to be like him.

Stick in son, don’t do what I do, the job is shit!

37682.png

TIME TO LEARN SOMETHING

1969 was a big year for us. Mam and dad had the foresight to put a deposit on a house a few miles from the masses. This was a real big deal back then and considered a real gamble. I was young enough to hate it, leaving my little mates behind and, even worse, my grandma although she would still be taking care of me whilst the folks made the mortgage money.

Everything was put on its arse a few weeks before the move when my grandma found her husband dead in his chair. It’s sad and pains me to say that I really don’t remember too much about the frail old man who aged prematurely. He never really was ever the same man again after his war days. He drank a lot and had a short temper, sitting staring into space; these days he might have been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress but back then it was the war thing.

The move went ahead after his funeral, a day I remember for dozens of men wearing shiny medals on the chest of their Sunday suits. Dozens of men came back to grandma’s house, had a few bottles of beer, gave her a kiss, patted me on the head, then buggered off to the Blue Bell for a proper send off. As for the move there was one change that shaped me to this day, grandma came too. I was too young to appreciate it, but that was a smart move to make, granddad’s death was devastating for her and bringing us all under the same, new roof was the dog’s bollocks. I was one lucky boy, a mam and dad grafting away and my own guru bringing me up!

Hard to believe now, but I was painfully shy back then and add to that my new surroundings were a nightmare. Everyone in the street took to my grandma and that gave me my introduction to my little pre-school gang. The bogey was that my new mates weren’t worth a toss when it came to starting school. I was the only left footer so it was a Catholic school for me, so my first day was to be a full on ordeal.

The folks were up and away to work when I was woken up and taken to my first day. I still remember the teacher trying to prise my grip away from grandma’s hand, but I wasn’t having any of it. Then I fell for the ultimate line - let your grandma go to the shops for half an hour while you have a bottle of milk and paint a picture.

1. My grandma went home

2. I didn’t know how long half an hour was

3. I met a monster

That’s what I learned on my first day!

I was sat down next to a little ginger kid painting the usual house with a chimney. He was so close to the paper his nose was getting paint on it. Introducing my life-long mate Malcom McKenzie (Skippy). He stopped painting and sat back. I nearly shit myself, got up and ran for the door but my teacher got there first. She took me back and sat me next to him and actually he wasn’t so bad for a freak. In later years I became his best man and Godfather to his kids (well, two of them, I missed the third).

Was young Malcolm to be known as Skippy because he skipped school or because he was a bit light on his Clarke’s sandals? Definitely not. He was a good lad and for some reason the lasses liked him. Remember Skippy the bush kangaroo? My best made had the look of him. Not a big nose or little ears, more the short arms. He was a Thalidomide!

He got picked on for obvious reasons and I got picked on because I lived in a posh house so we stuck together like shit on a blanket. What made matters worse was that we were both quite clever and not too bad on the football pitch. Mind you, he never took a throw-in and he would never have been able to appeal for offside, if we knew what it meant. We were the Spacka and the Poshie but we didn’t care, sticks and stones etc. That would change when we went into the Junior School.

Enter the Busby twins, Shaun and Michael, the pre-pubescent Geordie answer to the Krays. For weeks they made our lives a misery with their mouths having a go at us and threatening to kick our heads in. We used to shy away from them and when it was dinner-time or home-time run like hell to avoid a kicking.

Grandma was one wise bird, she knew something was up and interrogated us over a home-made lemon meringue pie, I swear the Gestapo missed out on here, bollocks to the thumb screws and the electrodes! She hated bullies but some people won’t change as you can’t educate pork.

A bully is a silly person that tries to frighten good people and they have to be put in their place but if that doesn’t work son, put them on their bloody arse! There endeth the lesson according to Jenny, but I could take the world on now.

The next day was our worst nightmare, pissing down with rain and an indoor break which meant nowhere to hide. We tried to shrink into the corner of the cloakrooms, eating our crisps, when our torturers came in. Shaun made a grab for Skippy’s so he put them behind his back, so Michael pushed him over. That was it. I hit him with the best bitch slap you’ve ever seen or heard. He was in tears so I went for his brother but he started sobbing before I got a chance. I don’t know who felt the biggest shock! It felt good and it changed me with that one pathetic flat of my right hand and now Kenny, Skippy, Mick and Shaun were in the same gang, all the way through to big school and another overhaul.

I was the main man, top of the class, in the football team and watch it or I’ll drop you! I also sussed ‘catchy kissy’, no point in running after all. I even became an altar boy! Once you got over looking like a twat it was a doddle. Two late starts at school each week, a £1 dropper from grieving families for serving a Requiem Mass and as much communion wine as you could sneak. I must’ve been an ugly bugger even then though. I can’t remember a priest trying it on with me unless he’d heard about the big right and he’d meet the Big Man earlier than he wanted.

Our gang split up, well, I left when I passed my Eleven Plus. I was destined for an all-boys grammar school and a different class of bullies. Bring it on!

No matter where you’re educated, everybody’s shit stinks!

37682.png

GREY VEST AND UNDERPANTS

My mam and dad were so proud when I passed that poxy Eleven Plus exam,