Western Walkabout: 0 to 5
...To celebrate my successful birth, my maternal grandfather, Robert Hughes, the licensee of the Coach and Horses Inn, on the Great North Road, Birtley, brought my mother a bottle of three star Hennessy’s brandy. He left it at her bedside and with it a gold sovereign to begin my road to riches. My mother kept that sovereign for years. But she had a large glass of brandy immediately in the belief that after all the drama of birth she had earned it...
Richard Harris presents the first slice of his autobiography. Great entertainment - and more to follow!
I was born on December 1 1936 in a council house, No 4 Dodds Terrace, Birtley, County Durham, England. It was a home birth, in an upstairs bedroom, and my Mother was glad to have me out of her system as I weighed in at about 8lb 7oz, which was big for a baby in those days and I had apparently put a lot of pressure on her back.
The fact that I appeared at all was because I won my first race against thousands of potential brothers and sisters in the rush to fertilise her egg. There was no prize for second. OK, so I’m ruthless and competitive.
To celebrate my successful birth, my maternal grandfather, Robert Hughes, the licensee of the Coach and Horses Inn, on the Great North Road, Birtley, brought my mother a bottle of three star Hennessy’s brandy. He left it at her bedside and with it a gold sovereign to begin my road to riches. My mother kept that sovereign for years. But she had a large glass of brandy immediately in the belief that after all the drama of birth she had earned it.
Naturally, it all came straight through her milk to me, and to this day I am slightly sensitive to brandy but will always drink it, and have difficulty in taking my eyes off breasts.
Notwithstanding all this, I was announced to the world in the Birtley Parish magazine of the Anglican Church as baptized, a member of Christ, a child of God, and an inheritor of the Kingdom of Heaven.
There was only one snag: Mother had wanted a girl. She already had a boy, Fred, my brother, three years and nine months older than me.
She had great plans to call me Patricia Elizabeth – Elizabeth was the name of my father’s mother, who had died in 1935. My elder brother remembers my father weeping inconsolably for her. Whatever, my mother must have consoled him on my brother’s birthday because I was born nine months later. Father, having planned for a girl, didn’t have a boy’s name at hand so he called me after himself – George Richard Harris –and that’s why I’ve always felt it wasn’t my own name. It doesn’t work for me. He was up in Aberdeen in the hour of my birth, driving a truck for Orrel and Brewster, Northumbrian Transport.
The region where I was born was famous for its coal mines, the Penshaw Monument, the Lambton Worm, the Cad Lad of Hilton – a ghost at Hilton Castle – and in more recent times, the colossal statue The Angel of the North. The butler had murdered the cad lad and buried him under the kitchen flagstones. He was always cold, lying under the stone floor, and haunted the castle telling everybody he was “cad” – the dialect word for cold.
Sir John Lambton slew the worm, which had a great big head, great big lugs (ears) and great big goggly eyes. He tricked it into wrapping itself tightly around his body. Bold Sir John had the foresight to see a local witch before he went worm-hunting. She made a suit for him, carefully armoured with sewn in razor-sharp blades. The worm’s strength cut itself into hundreds of small pieces.
You can still see the furrows round Penshaw Hill where the worm used to coil when resting. Historians will say these are the marks left by an ancient British farming system for growing cereals but all the locals know it was really where the worm squeezed the hill.
When World War 2 broke out, my Mother wanted Father closer at home, so they took over the management of the Queen’s Head Hotel in Lanchester, between Durham and Consett. The Queen’s had been an old coaching house and still had the accommodation for horses out the back. This area was requisitioned by the Army in the early days of the war. One of my early memories was inspecting it with my Father and an Army officer when the floor collapsed. I fell through the rotted boards and landed on a heap of cardboard boxes – giving everybody a good fright, including myself. Nevertheless, this was my first blow in the war effort because it convinced the Army to have all the flooring replaced immediately.
In my first appearance at the Queen’s, in a pusher, the outgoing tenant, an elderly woman, made a great fuss of me. “Isn’t he gorgeous,” she said to Mother, who replied that she would have preferred a girl.
“Nonsense,” said the woman, who added to my alarm “I’ll take him.” Her cat, a Persian queen, had wrapped itself round my leg when I was lifted out of the pusher. “Look,” she said, “even my cat loves him.” The woman looked smilingly at me. “Her name is Ribbentrop. I’m going to give her to you and want you to look after her.” That was my first cat. I remember her well to this day, despite dozens of cats in between.
The government made a further call for volunteers for the armed services, and to the dismay of my mother, my father and his brother both volunteered and were assigned to the Royal Air Force.
One of father’s first duties was in maintaining the barrage balloons in the air for the defence of London against attacks by the Luftwaffe. So Dad went off to the war and Mother and her two boys were left to run the pub.
