Open Writing

I started school at the Lanchester Elementary School, which was just past the Cottage Homes for orphans. The headmaster was called Jonty Lee and the kids used to chant “Jonty Lee is a very good man, he goes to Church each Sunday, and prays to God to give him strength to whack the kids on Monday.”

That was the first thing I learnt at school, before the alphabet and the tables. Jonty was an older man with a red face and wore a dark beret.

I didn’t like the school. I remember chanting tables in the classroom and singing the alphabet, and writing with a quill pen dipped in an inkwell. On some very cold mornings, the ink would be frozen, which is why the financial year traditionally starts on July 1 – almost midsummer.

I learnt to read in the playground, taking my comic there, the Dandy, and another kid whose name escapes me read it to me as we sat against the wall in the playground during breaks from lessons. I was most impressed and was thus spurred to read.

There was a school board man who used to check on attendances. What he did, I don’t know because whenever I played truant, Jonty Lee used to send for my brother Fred and instruct him to find me. Fred never did. The school board man wore a white shirt and a black military style cap. We used to sing, “Paddy the school board man. He found half a dollar and put it in his collar, Paddy the school board man.”

There were some vicious fights in the elementary school. The kids from the nearby Catholic school used to waylay us after school and challenge us and they were especially brutal to the Cottage Homes kids, who were readily identifiable by their grey clothes and black boots and close shaved hair. The cottage homes kids did their best but the Catholic kids were usually a little older and a lot stronger. This was my first lesson that life isn’t always fair. You’re an orphan, you’ve got nothing going for you, nobody standing behind you, and you get bashed.

My close friends included Billy Brown, his older brother Plonky, Vincent Doran and the McGovern kids. We used to play a lot together – Monty, kitty finger, thumb or little gannie. This was where we all bent over in a cro0uch while the other team vaulted over our backs holding up a closed fist, a thumb, or a little finger. Guess wrong and the other team has to go down. At night in autumn and winter we’d play “Jack shine the maggie,” which was where we chased each other and called out, and if spotted, you had to show your maggie, a lit candle in a jar.

My Mother decided to remove me from the elementary school after I’d played truant a few times, and after a school teacher had drummed into my head with a pencil, leaving a mark. I was sent to a private school in Durham City, Western Hill, which was run by a Mr and Mrs Porter. Mrs Jackson was the French teacher and we all had to learn French. The school grounds contained lots of trees and an Egyptian obelisk. I loved that school. From Lanchester, it was eight miles to Durham on the Whitbank bus. It was on this trip that I met my first love, a girl called Beryl Short, from Whitton Gilbert. She was a tall, serious girl with spectacles, a year older than me. I never told her that I loved her. Never even touched her. Whatever, she was the first girl that registered with me as such. I was about eight years old.

Sometimes the old Whitbank bus was overfilled and would stop on the hill. We’d all get out and help to push the bus up the hill. At the top, we’d reboard the bus and continue the journey. Coming home from school one afternoon, about two months before my tenth birthday, Billy Brown was waiting for me at the bus stop. “You’ve got a little brother,” he said. “John Robert.”

I was astonished. “How do you know that?”

“I was outside the phone cubicle when I heard your Dad ring your Aunt Sadie to tell her the news.”

We left Lanchester to take over the West Wylam Inn at Prudhoe, where we lived in an upstairs flat and I had to attend the government elementary school more or less next door. The living room window of our flat looked down on a row of dunnies, across the service lane from the row of colliery cottages. The mining families used the outside dunnies as lavatories, and also to dump vegetable peelings and the ash from their coal fires. Unmarketable low quality cola was delivered free to the miners. If you were walking home and were caught short, you could duck into some one else’s dunny but you had to be careful: the housewife might throw in a bucket of hot ashes while you were sitting there, which could lead to unfortunate frights or burns. Also, sometimes there’d be a rat in the dunny, foraging among the fruit and vegetable peelings thrown in with the ashes.

The living room window also overlooked the Tyne valley.

The local people spoke a dialect of English and when I spoke in class at school, all the kids used to laugh. The teacher would frown and make me read aloud again. The class would roar.

“What’s funny?” I asked one boy. “You talk so posh,” he replied.

The locals would greet you with “what cheer, bonnie lad? Hoo’s tha gannin on?” Roughly, hello, how are you? A suitable reply might be “Canny.” Very near was rendered “var nigh.”

I joined the boy scouts and we went camping on the Derwent River at Blanchland. That was a great holiday.