Stories Our Daddy Did Not Tell Us

By Alan Raine

This is the story of a boy born in a two-room terrace flat who had quite a normal life but struggled with his own weaknesses until he finally got married, had children, and started traveling. He has written down his experiences as a child in the 1940s, as a teenager in the fifties, and as a young man in the sixties and then wrote about his experiences while traveling the world during his working life, which, when read, suggests he did not have such a normal life after all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Oct 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524594954

Alan Raine

Alan Raine was born in 1941 during World War II and went through infant, junior, and grammar school like the majority of children of his age. He left school and started to work seriously at the local iron and steel works and was there for twenty-one years. When the works closed, he moved into a company that was just getting involved with the offshore gas industry. He spent a number of years there, working with other engineers in the offshore oil and gas industry. When the facility that he was working at closed, he started to work for a small company that was involved in the inspection of welded components from subsea to out-in-space structures. Even after he retired from that occupation, he was asked to use his knowledge to act as a consultant and to train engineers to use the equipment that he had been involved with. This was supposed to be short-term but ended up being over ten years. During all of this time, quite a bit of traveling was involved. Several unusual and sometimes funny incidents occurred, and these are recounted here. When he retired again at seventy-four, and as the ukulele classes were not going so good, he decided to write some of these experiences down.

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CHAPTER 1

The early years

The only thing that I knew and could confirm was that when I was born at sometime in the future I would die. What happened in between was anybody’s guess but a lot of it would depend on me.

Although I did not know it at the time I had been born in a very hostile environment. World War II. Food was rationed, a blackout existed and my father was in the army. Not that I remembered much of this apart from the time my mother was taking me down the back streets of our village at night to visit my father’s sister when a bomber came low overhead. According to my mother the bomber had his bomb doors open and dropped a bomb from above them. Of course the bomb did not drop vertically down and fell at a slight angle and fell onto an area known locally as the bogs. So no damage there. The German bombers were in my neighbourhood because of the steelworks located at Consett, of which we will here more later and Newcastle where there was an armaments factory and of course the shipbuilding industry. It was thought that the bomber must have dropped all of its bombs and had one left so that it jettisoned it unfortunately for me overhead. I don’t think that the bombers had much effect on the steelworks but one bomber scored a direct hit onto the steel plant only for the bomb not to go off. It was a dud. But what it did do was dislodge all of the accumulated bird muck and other long term debris that had been there for years and shake it all loose and deposit on the steelworkers working out on the stage. This left them looking like the cast of the Black and White Minstrel show. The only other memories that I had was that my dad often brought home a mate from the army and he would sleep in a bed in the only other room, excluding the bedroom and the kitchen and I was allowed to get into bed with him in the morning. Nothing inappropriate happened as far as I can remember.

The war seemed to end, my dad came back and I started infant’s school. This all seemed to happen in a very short space of time. School starting was a very dramatic time. Nowadays children want to start school, but they have already been to nursery, playschool, reception classes and just want to go to big school. Not so in my days. One day you get up have your breakfast and play with your toys with your friends and next day you would be walked down to this very large austere stone built building, or in my case corrugated iron, thus being called the tin school and put with a number of children who you have never met in a room with an adult who once again you do not know, and horror of horrors, left by your mother. Abandoned, no mother, half of the children including me would be left crying their eyes out, wondering what in the world was happening. The penny soon dropped. This was the start of education, but not as it is known now. You were taught by rote, repeating everything until you knew it and if you didn’t or were naughty out would come the slipper, the belt or the cane depending at which level of education you were at, and you would feel the effect. The message soon came through. No education, bad behaviour equals punishment.

In the majority of cases in the infant school this did not happen and there were mornings of playing in the school yard and being taken to the local park, supposedly to collect wild flowers, but generally ending up larking about with the girls, some of whom I still know today.

Gloria taught me to tie my laces, no slip on shoes or trainers in those days. Marion had a brother who cooked a goldfish in a frying pan then ate it. Gwyneth, all prim and proper who lived next door to another Armstrong who became a famous actor but used a different spelling to the normal, instead of using Alan used Alun for his Christian name, and one of their mothers who was the Avon Lady who went around the houses selling cosmetics. Then there were the guys, the two Johns who were glamour boys to the girls.

Joe who appeared subnormal and had a zero haircut which was not at all fashionable in those days, who went on to marry Maggie who was also subnormal and then went on to have children who may have inherited the same genes as their parents and there were many more. Moving to the big school meant that we had to work harder, but nobody told us why, but in reality it was to prepare us for the 11+ examinations which if things went well meant a transfer to the Grammar School, Secondary Modern School or what was left and then and onwards or downwards depending on what you did or did not. I remember one of the teachers saying that this was a very important first step on the way to a successful career and away from the choice of working down the pit or working on the topsides of the pit or working for the ministry or the civil service as it was correctly known. This was an obvious con as during my future life either at school or at work or socially as I was always being told that the next stage in life no matter what it was, was always going to be the first important step that had to be taken. Whether it was the first day at work, enrolment at evening further education classes’, the first day at university going out with a girl or passing the driving test. It just never seemed to stop. I always kept thinking that one day I would be about to do something and nobody would trot out that statement that this was once again going to be the most important step, day action etc, etc in my humdrum life until I finally accepted that this would go on until I died. Once I accepted that life seemed generally OK.

During the period between being born and leaving infants school a gypsy came to our door, no this is not pantomime season and seeing me said to my mother. He will grow up to be OK and he shall have letters after his name. The only person who my mother knew who had letters after his name was the local doctor who had the initials MD after his name, so my mother watched me grow up hoping that I was to become a doctor. So sorry that I disappointed her especially as the first job I ever had was as a fill in milkman working for the local grocery store. One of the hardest parts of the job was trying to get the money for the milk from people who had had it delivered during the week. I knew the importance of having letters after your name in later life when I joined a major gas company and found out in the Who’s Who of the gas company was that if you did not have at least four letters after your name you were not worth a bean.

As an aside Carlos Santana in his book says that during ones life you come across angels and miracles but not in the Christian way. These angels will be people who you meet and when you do the combination of cause and effect change your life from then on until maybe you meet another angel and the miracles will be events that you are caught up in and that once again will change the shape of your future. In the first case these angels might be a teacher at school who helps you to decide what you are going to do in the future and which subjects you should study to achieve those goals. A miracle may be choosing a different route to work, school or some meeting and because of this you miss an accident or you see a job opportunity or see a girl who may become your wife. They may all seem like little things but combined have a major effect on your future.

One piece of advice that I was given by the Planned Maintenance Engineer during my time at Consett Iron Company and he was quoting from Mao Tse Tung’s Little Red Book was I hear I forget, I see I remember, I do I understand. And this has always kept me in good stead.

So during this time I appeared to have four years of education but in reality I was only there three years before sitting the 11+examination. It was something to do with my date of birth which if I have not already said was the 4th of July, American Independence Day, which also happened to have an effect on me in later life, but was of little help when I had a problem with American immigration one time in Texas, but of that later. The immediate effect it did have was that I was one of the youngest in my year approximately 8 months behind and I blamed if for me slightly lagging behind every one else for the rest of my life especially around 18th birthdays because by the time it came around for mine the rest of the year had left for college, university or where ever.

The only notable thing that happened when I was at the junior school was that during a PE lesson at the local park when we were playing football by some miracle I amazingly scored a goal from quite a distance from the goal posts, much to my and the teachers surprise. Because of this I was picked to play on the school football team. I played but did not have much of a clue and was so far out of place at one time that I was asked by the Headmaster if I was ill. I suppose he was willing that I was so that he could bring on a substitute as any one would have been better than me.

The game was at South Moor one of the neighbouring villages to Annfield Plain which you could actually walk to along the black path as it was known, don’t ask me why, in about twenty minutes. Located beside the football ground was a local Miners Institute locally called the Miners Hall, which my granddad, who had been a soldier in World War 1, and could have been exempt, as he was a miner, was the local caretaker. This was locally called the Miners Hall and had been built for the miners to spend their leisure time when the local working men’s clubs were closed. In it the miners could play snooker or billiards and read all of the newspapers and magazines. Some such as the Saturday Evening Post came from America and had drawings and paintings by Norman Rockwell on the front cover, depicting all sorts of American Life as it was then. This was far removed from our post war way of life. Houses with white picket fences, large cars with white wall tyres and large rear fins, housewives with large brown bags filled with an assortment of interesting food and of course television sets, which at that time were few and far between especially in coal mining villages like mine. I think this gave me my first interest in all things American and did direct my future way of life. All something to dream about and never found until recently when I took a three week trip down the PCH(Pacific Coast Highway-Route 1) going off the main highways and through some of those still existing small townships.

Back to the Miners Hall. One facility was a large bathroom, but this bath was no ordinary bath. It was long and deep and at one end there appeared to be an upturned bath placed on edge as part of the bath itself. This area of the bath had lots of sprays both horizontal and vertical and was the first shower that I had ever seen. If the miners did not have the facility of having a bath in front of the fire in a zinc bath they could come down to the miner’s hall and have a bath. There was always plenty of hot water as in the cellar was a large draconian looking coke fuelled furnace fed through double doors through which large shovels full of coke were thrown in, and this furnace never went out, even during the weekend when the hall was closed on Sunday. One of my granddads daughters who had returned home after being in Service fuelled the fire and on Sundays I would go with her to load up the furnace. It also gave me the opportunity to play as much snooker and billiards on full size tables as I wanted. As expected I was rubbish at that as well and my granddad gave up on teaching me the rudiments of back spins, canons off the cush and snookers and other such technical terms for potting the various coloured balls into the pockets. My other cousins of which there were many as my grandparents had seven daughters and one son all were better than me even the girls.

Back to the bath again. After the match me and one of my mates went back to my grandma’s house and we were covered with mud, so much so that my grandma put us in the big bath with lots of soap. The room like the hall was centrally heated from the furnace in the cellar so it was real cosy getting out of the bath and getting dried. Of course we tried every combination of shower jets and ended up with water and foam every where, which reminded me of a weekend I spent in a very posh hotel when the Jacuzzi went slightly mad, possibly due to the addition of bubble bath and the whole bathroom was filled with foam up to the height of the bath and a naked Wyn and myself had to try to bail it out any way we could. Great fun at the time and Wyn never looked lovelier with armfuls of foam covering and then uncovering some of my favourite parts of her body.

After the bath, grandma gave us something to eat and drink and then we had to get home. We had the choice of walking up the path called The black road from South Moor to New Kyo or two buses from South Moor to Stanley and then to New Kyo. We were both under 11 years of age ands we walked. Could you imagine that today.

After my only experience of playing for the school I was never picked again for any sort of team event or games at any school

Because the catchment area for the school was quite small a lot of us walked home for lunch or dinner as we called it and I would walk home via the allotments while practicing my John Wayne walk. During one winter the snow was extra deep and you could not see the boundaries of the allotments when all of a sudden my left leg plus chaffing wellington disappeared under the snow and I began to go down on one leg. I got hold of a length of old fencing and pulled my now full of water wellington out of a well that had been obscured by the snow. My leg had gone into one of the many wells that were scattered throughout the allotments. How easily I could have disappeared down the well and not been discovered until the spring when the snow had melted. So easily done.

Going up and down to school every day you would see the same people doing the same things Harold’s mother used to live at the end of one street and she was always cleaning her windows and the front step. In those days you did not always have a window cleaner, and yes there were some, some with very dry leathers, who would be shouted at in the street to put more water on their leathers so that they could actually clean the windows instead of just spreading the dirt around.

If you did not have the luxury of a window cleaner and you lived in an upstairs flat or had upstairs windows you would clean the windows by opening the bottom window getting through and perching yourself on the window ledge and cleaning them from the outside. My auntie Olive who lived in the flat above us used to do this all the time, usually with a lot of cheek thrown out at the passers by. Some of the housewives preferred to use old newspapers to clean the window as the lead in the print used to act as a lubricant.

One young guy, about 18 years of age used to pass me every day on his bike when I was going to school and when he passed by asked if I would like a lift on his bike. So quite often I used to climb on his crossbar and off we went. I quite enjoyed this but this was reported back to my mother and dad stopped it at once. Possibly this could have been the start of grooming, if people knew what that was then, possibly known as some other slang word such as kiddie fiddling.

We had an assortment of teachers at the school. Mr Harris was interested in model and real trains and often the class would go to the local railway station which was over the road and spend the mornings drawing the platforms and the pedestrian bridge from platform to platform as he sat and enjoyed watching the passenger and goods trains passing by. He once took the whole class to Chester -le-Street where we walked out of the town to a place which overlooked the main line from London to Newcastle and beyond and sat there until one particular train flew past. Once this train plus carriages went past we all went back into town and caught the bus back to school.

But as well as being pretty good at taking us for trips he had a nasty side especially with a belt that he would use on any of us if we got out of control. Remember we were all still under the age of 11.

There was Miss Jones, a red head who had a son, who later in life sold me, a car when he was showroom manager at the Austin/Morris main dealer in Newcastle. We always wondered if he was illegitimate as we always knew her as Miss Jones, and he had the same surname and we never heard of a Mr Jones.

Mr Golightly’s class was the one you ended up if you were thought good enough for the Grammar School or Alderman Wood School as it was known in those days. He loved mental arithmetic and would teach us simple ways to work out the answers to a long period of adding subtracting dividing and multiplying. I could never catch up using all of these tools and just hoped one of the quick methods would turn up before he came to the end of the problem otherwise I was a dead duck. When he first started these sessions I would always feel faint or sick and be excused. It was a real faint and a neat solution to miss the mental arithmetic session but as I discovered as I was excused and I admit it became a pattern until as soon as the session started Mr Golightly would send me out of the classroom. The headmaster heard about this and wanted to cure me of the problem and would make me drink cups of very salty water to make me be sick but to no avail He also sent another boy out with me to the toilets to see what I did. But a bribe of a sticky sweet covered in fluff from inside my pocket soon sorted that problem

Then one day when Mr Golightly started his mental arithmetic session I stayed in and did OK and never had to be excused again.

Mental arithmetic is still not my forte.

My arithmetic and knowledge of the other subjects must have been OK as I managed to pass the 11+ examination and I went off to the local Grammar School

CHAPTER 2

The Grammar School years, an uplifting experience the effect of strong drink and other memories

I joined Stanley Grammar School, as it was then, in 1952, having just changed its name from The Alderman Wood School; the name was still on the front of some of the exercise books. A new gym, assembly hall and biology laboratory had just been completed. But just as important new bicycle sheds had been installed on the back wall of the boy’s playground. (Before that there had been nowhere to go behind for illicit pleasures.) This wall backed on to a field, which is now a car park. There were two of them separated by a telegraph pole. I was quite a lightweight and during break time a few others and myself would hang around the bike sheds. On one particular day the wind was very strong and I was holding on to one of the uprights when a strong gust upended the shed. The next thing I knew was that I was in the air heading for the wall. The top of the corrugated iron roof of the shed, and then the telegraph pole, which I then slid down like a cartoon character ending up on the wall, hindered my progress. These two objects helped stopped me being propelled over the wall and possibly being injured mores seriously than I was.

As it was a sixth former took me to, I believe what was the sick room, and I was sent home and advised to see my local doctor. He said that I was lucky just to have severe bruising and gave me a sick note or the equivalent for schools for a week.

It was the practice in those days that if you had been off school the previous week that you had to stay behind in the hall after assembly and see the headmaster. The headmaster in those days was slightly eccentric and after asking me why I had been absent said well he was glad that I was back at school. He also said that I would be happy to know that the bike sheds were now securely bolted to the ground and sent me off to my form.

In that year the sixth formers produced a performance of 1066 and all that. Which I believe was the last time that the sixth formers did a Xmas show as after that a new headmaster, The Doc or Len as Doctor Sharpe was called arrived and with it a new level of discipline. There were boy’s stairs and girl stairs and the boys were not supposed to use the girl’s stairs but would often do when the stairs were closest to the next classroom they were heading for. They would travel down them as fast as possible by holding onto the rail and hurling themselves down the six or so stairs on each level trying not to touch the stairs. This was another thing that was not allowed, as some mighty collisions had occurred previously.

There are lots of other memories, such as the sadistic teacher who was a dead shot with a piece of chalk or a board rubber. He who could remove tufts of hair with a single twist, and stop the blood circulation in the ear, with the same practised movement. Kenny Cousins the younger, at the time and more popular chemistry teacher who was one of the batch, who started their teaching career at the same time as I started the Grammar School and ran the photographic club which went on a great trip to the Lake District one year. One of this batch of teachers was a young Mrs. Johnson who taught scripture and became pregnant during her second term and left never to return after the third term only to re-appear as deputy head of Dame Allan’s Girls School a few years later. She said that the year at Stanley Grammar was her bête noir of teaching, as she had attended an all girls school, was trained at an all girls teaching college and that Stanley was her first experience of a mixed school. Never again she said.

The year I started was also the year that the education authority in all its wisdom decided to start a programme of integration between the Stanley area and Consett area and the number 7 bus would deliver a number of children from that area. These pupils all had funny accents compared to ours and came from a sophisticated town that had traffic lights. If that had not been done Alun Armstrong that well-known actor would have attended Stanley instead of Consett. That bus was supposed to be for people living in the Consett area only but because it was only half full until it arrived at Annfield Plain Secondary Modern School there was always the temptation to use it especially if you lived beside that school. John and myself did, living only one street away and we used that bus as everybody on it was our age and as the years went by we were always the eldest on the bus. I later married a girl who attended Annfield Modern and we probably passed as I got off that bus and she got on hers.

There are also the memories of sports days, which seemed to be hot and cross country runs which always seemed to be in six inches of snow following the long legs of six foot plus Eggo King.

There were also some other great guys Andy, Brian (Jazz musician) who I still see, John and another John all of who started school the same day as me in Annfield Plain. Les, Bill, Eric. The guys from Consett. Willy, sometime bully who was always making people do dares, like walking across a concrete pole over the stream outside the boy’s playground and lots more with many tales attached.

One such tale happened to me one winter, in the times that winter meant snow. After one gym lesson we were all walking back to the main school building and I was with a bunch of guys that I used to knock around with when a snowball launched by Willie hit my ear and filled it with snow. Most unlike me I turned walked up to him and put my hand around his throat and lifted him up against the gymnasium wall. I didn’t really know what I should do next so just held him there until he was gasping for breath and told him never to do that again. He slid down the wall into the snow and there we left him. Of course it all went around the school with the addition that we were going to fight after school. Neither I nor Willie turned up but he never bothered me again.

And then there were the girls!!! Jo, who wanted to polish my prefect’s badge and I still don’t know why I didn’t let her as she was very beautiful with a long black pony tail, which was very fashionable at the time. Kit, or was it the younger sister who was called that, Katy, Elsie, and Joan. There were a lot more but as the song says I wish I knew then what I know now and like the boys, all have stories to tell.

I probably should mention education because everything I hated I ended up getting involved in. I remember being greatly humiliated by Mr. Gee in a Physics lesson in the first year because I would not describe a black pen. Mainly because I thought it was a trick question and vowing never to get involved in the subject again but ended up getting a MSc. from Durham University in the same subject. I got the same mark in my GCE French as I did in my first ever exam but managed to pass it after a re-sit and used the knowledge a lot when I attended EEC technical committee