On our return from Scotland, there was no cheerful welcome home – there was only the strain of tension in the air. I had hardly been in the house for half an hour when my life once again assumed its repressive tone.
‘Get yourself off somewhere,’ my father barked at me. ‘Me and your mother need to have a talk and I don’t want you listening in.’
I hastened down to my grandmother’s house with relief but I was worried about my mother being left alone with my father. I told my grandmother so and asked her why he was so cruel to us. She said that there were things that I was too young to know and that for the moment they were better left unsaid. Soon I was tucking in to a typical wartime dish of tripe and onions cooked in creamy milk and washed down by a glass of sarsaparilla, which my grandmother said was good for me. Everything seemed better at my grandmother’s home because she was a very loving person. Even the food she cooked, which was necessarily basic because of wartime privations, tasted better than anything served up at home.
‘Why did we have to leave our house at Axwell Park?’ I asked as we sat relaxing after supper, listening to the wireless. This question had been bothering me for some time. I knew that I had been born in a house called Tynedale on the fringe of Axwell Park, but we had moved when I was young.
‘There were things that happened and it was thought best that you all move back into the town.’
‘Whatever happened?’ I asked.
There was no response to my query. I had started to suspect that the move was somehow connected to our troubles as a family. Why else would we have moved from a lovely area to a terraced house in the backstreets of Blaydon-on-Tyne? Something must have happened and I thought that whatever that event was might lie at the heart of the way my father treated me. I decided that I had to wheedle the truth out of my grandmother because she was the only one who cared enough to realize that I needed to understand why my home life was so difficult. For the time being, however, she held her tongue.
Although my childhood and most of my boyhood was spent in and around Blaydon town, I have always felt drawn back to Axwell Park. It lies to the west of Blaydon and a mile inland from the River Tyne. The baronet, Sir Thomas Clavering, built a mansion called Axwell Hall on the estate in the late eighteenth century. After the death of the last family heir in 1893 the area went into decline and later began to be developed for residential purposes. In 1931 a line of very modern semi-detached villas were built adjoining Shibdon Road and backing on to wild parkland. The fourth house along was given the grand name Tynedale, which was arched in large letters in a glass panel above the front door. This was the house where I was born at around 10 a.m. on the 6 June 1934 in a large bed in the front bedroom. I was delivered by a famous general practitioner in the area, Dr Morrison, a landowner and organic food enthusiast. To all intents and purposes I was regarded as a healthy baby and people remarked on my sweet disposition. I am told that I smiled a lot and slept soundly at nights.
I was aware from my earliest recollections that I shared my home life with a large black she-dog called Floss, who was my self-appointed guardian whenever my mother ventured out with me in my pram. If the pram was parked outside a shop or house, Floss would sit by the pram with one paw laid protectively over my body. The other animal companion of my babyhood was a silky-furred cat called Fluffy who would lie alongside me and purr in my ear. Both animals were wedding presents to my parents. Both disappeared within the first two years of my life. Floss went first. Apparently she was often slapped by my father with the sole of his slipper for misbehaving. One day his slippers disappeared and were discovered some weeks later buried in the garden’s potato patch. Such a crime was deemed a capital offence and Floss was taken to be destroyed. Fluffy just left home, disappeared and was never found. This was perhaps a forewarning of things yet to come in my life.
I think I was mostly happy as a very young child but I soon learned to fear my father. I remember how upset I used to be whenever my mother went out in the evening and he had to change my nappy. He would hold me aloft with his hand grasping me by the left ankle whilst he cleaned me off. In the midst of my crying he would be saying things which I didn’t understand but which gave me bad feelings nonetheless. When I was old enough to be able to walk freely without support I developed a distressing tendency of dislocating my left ankle and it required the attention of a doctor’s home visit to reset my ankle. On one such occasion, my grandmother questioned the doctor and he said something about torn ligaments, which caused a terrific row in the house. She must have suspected that the problem was my father’s fault. To this day my ankle has a tendency sometimes to just collapse without warning if my footwear does not offer enough support.
Even though I was very young, I started to feel that my father disliked me and missed no opportunity of saying or doing things to hurt me. There was an incident I remember when the coal fire in the sitting room went out. I had been given a large wooden spade from my grandmother so that I could dig in the garden. My father brought this spade out from the cupboard where it was kept, snapped it into pieces in front of me and used it to relight the fire. There were plenty of sticks in a box near the fire so I just could not understand why he needed my spade. When my mother arrived back home I was inconsolable about the loss of the spade. She couldn’t understand what I was crying about since I was just two years old and my baby talk about what happened was incomprehensible. When I was older I began to suspect that there were things about our family that were not normal. The vibrations that underlaid our relationships were disturbingly negative.
It would be a couple of years until grandmother finally told me the truth. It was a Sunday afternoon and we were relaxing in front of the fire after lunch. I once again pleaded with her to tell me about what had happened to make us move from Axwell Park. She looked across at me without smiling and said that I must promise her that I would never ever repeat what she was about to tell me. She began speaking and there was a mournful tone to her voice that I had never heard before.
‘In the time before your parents were married there was a lot of trouble between the families because your father’s family were Catholics and your mother’s wasn’t. They insisted that she converted to Catholicism and even then they were very critical of her. Your dad’s mother has never spoken to your mother to this day nor has she ever seen you. The O’Connors came from Ireland after the big famine when there was no work for them. They are a large family, twelve brothers and sisters, all of them born Irish except your dad and his youngest brother, Daniel.
‘Well, against the wishes of myself and your Uncle John, your mother went ahead and married your father. They got no help from his family, not even a wedding present, and so it fell to us to help them get set up. Your Uncle John loaned them the money to buy the house your mother wanted at Axwell Park. When she first moved there she was lonely when your dad was at work and your father’s brother, Dan, used to call on her. He taught her how to make small wagers, which were taken by illegal bookmakers such as the local milkman. Your mother and Dan grew very close but when you were born everything was fine until the local gossip got going. Suspicions grew out of all proportion until there was an unholy family hullabaloo and the priest was called in. Your mum and dad’s marriage seemed to be in jeopardy for a while. There were many explosions of rage from your father and he called your mother and our side of the family some bad names and accused us of saying all manner of bad things about himself and his family.
‘Now that we’ve talked this far about it, I’ll tell you that he did say in one of his tempers that he was stuck with rearing a little bastard. Your Uncle John intervened at this stage and said that we would be happy to raise you ourselves. But the priest and your father’s family would not allow that, mainly because your Uncle John is a member of the Church of England. I’m telling you this so that you can watch out for yourself and come to us if there is any trouble and particularly if he threatens you. Even if there is no truth in whispers they still linger on and can cause trouble. Nobody knows the truth of the matter but it does put you between the devil and the deep blue sea. Because of the gossip people scrutinized you as a baby with your hazel-coloured eyes and fair hair just like your dad’s brother, Dan, whereas your parents have jet-black hair and blue eyes, as do both of your sisters.
‘There were recriminations galore and then your parents had a long session with the parish priest, a special mass was said and there was some kind of reconciliation. But I’m sure that to this day your father thinks that you are not his son. He was jealous of his brother Dan anyway for getting to grammar school whilst he didn’t, but now it has reached “bad blood” proportions, although on the surface everybody still pretends that all is well.
‘The upshot of it was that your dad sold the Axwell Park house and moved your mother and you into a new place in Mary Street just up from the church where the curate could, some say, keep a check on things.
‘So now you know what you face. You can come here to me anytime you feel threatened.’
After she had unburdened herself to me, I could see that she was visibly drained and soon she excused herself to go and lie on her bed for a Sunday nap.
I was shocked to a degree by what I had heard but intuitively I was relieved because I had long harboured suspicions of that nature and I can recall in later years my mother often saying that she ‘had married the wrong brother’. From that point on, I couldn’t but help noticing that whenever my Uncle Dan visited us he always made a point of hugging me, something my father never ever did. Dan had married a girl called Myrtle and had two sons by her, which everybody said were to someday train as priests, and they eventually did. I had always wanted a brother and often I longed to be part of that family rather than my own.
Although our two families seemed dominated by the hightoned moral principles of the Roman Catholic Church, on two occasions, when he thought no one was looking, I saw Uncle Dan pulling my mother into the hallway and kissing her passionately. Little boys sometimes see things they are not supposed to see, and they can have a lasting effect. The last time I saw my Uncle Dan I was in my forties and had two boys of my own. He hugged me affectionately, as he always did, and said he was sorry that he had not seen more of me over the years. When I looked at his face, I saw that he was crying.
Having been born there, Axwell Park became a place of refuge as I grew into a young lad and felt the need to get away from the backstreets of Blaydon. The wild wood of mature trees and bushes became my haven where I could keep in contact with nature. The park itself bordered on the wood and was overgrown with saplings and gorse. Most of it was impenetrable to anybody except small boys and animals. I frequently lost myself in this parkland as an antidote to the uptight atmosphere of tension and rigid rules at home.
School was no better for me and I continued to dodge it whenever I could. On one occasion when my Uncle John, who was away working in Doncaster, learned that I had played truant from school, he sent me a pound note and declared that I was ‘a real lad at last’. At school, the children were almost afraid to blink because of the suffocating religious conditioning. I would steal English and Maths exercise books to work on alone at my grandmother’s because I felt deprived of proper instruction – the school’s priority was the rote-learning of the Catholic catechism and the all-important academic subjects were neglected. Poetry books and adventure readers also disappeared into my possession from the class library and joined my secret hoard at my grandmother’s house. These types of books never seemed to be missed at school because they just weren’t deemed important. I justified my stealing because I thought I would never be equipped to pass the eleven-plus examination and escape from this dreadful school if I didn’t take matters into my own hands. I would return the books once I had achieved this precious goal.
In the meantime, on sunny days I would sit in the woods or by the lake at Axwell Park, reading poetry and extracts from classical books for children by authors such as Robert Louis Stevenson and John Buchan. A poem that I especially took to heart was ‘Daffodils’ by William Wordsworth because it aroused my own sense of wonder at all things natural. I longed to visit the Lake District to see the countryside that inspired Wordsworth. Lines from another famous writer, Sir Walter Scott, precisely expressed the way I felt about Axwell Park: ‘Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, that never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land!’
At school any misdemeanour or misbehaviour in class was deemed a sin and therefore an offence against God, which necessitated punishment by switches from a wooden cane against the palm of the hand. Some of the male teachers appeared to take a sadistic delight in administering a caning. Most of the women teachers were similarly disposed, and as well as the cane they enjoyed dispensing a hefty diet of moral righteousness. Unfortunately, due to a terrible administrative error at County Hall in Durham, myself and many local children had to spend another year at elementary school before we could take up our places in secondary school – it seems that there was a bureaucratic problem concerning eleven-plus entrants from independent church schools.
One teacher, a thin, middle-aged woman, habitually wore a pained expression as if nothing in this world ever pleased her. On one particular Monday morning in my final year, she stood sternly watching her class march into the classroom. When the class was assembled she said, ‘Do not sit down. I have something extremely important to tell you before we begin to say our morning prayers.’
Then she embarked on a tirade of invective against our chief form of entertainment, the cinema. She began, ‘It has come to my notice that there is an awfully bad film showing at the Plaza Picture House this week. It is called Duel in the Sun and it is not a fit film for children or indeed anybody to see who is a Christian. So I do not want anyone in my class going to see that film and I shall ask the priest, Father O’Hara, to speak the same message for your parents to hear at Mass tomorrow morning. Now sit down and get out you prayer cards.’
Well, for the rest of the morning we could think of nothing else. At playtime I got together with a group of boys and we made plans to see the film that evening. We were intrigued as to why she should want to ban us from seeing the film. Eddie Robertson had seen it already with his older brother in a Newcastle cinema. Adopting a man-of-the-world demeanour, he told us that the film had sex in it. This made us all the more determined to see it, although one of the girls told her brother that if he went with us she would tell the teacher. He told her that he would thump her if she did and decided to come with us.
That night most of the boys and a few of the girls from our class were in the queue waiting for the cinema doors to open. The film proved a popular success with all of us since it was a decent Western starring popular actors (including Gregory Peck), and it had lots of action scenes and fighting. There was a girl in the film who was very beautiful and there was a scene where she was cuddling and kissing the hero. The door then closed, suggestively, leading the newspapers to nickname the film ‘Lust in the Dust’. In fact, this was lost on us. We tended to ignore such scenes and were usually either talking or throwing paper missiles at each other while they were going on. We went to the pictures for the action scenes; we were not yet really interested in that mysterious thing called sex.
The next morning in the playground a few of us were discussing why our teacher should have wanted to ban us from watching such an enjoyable film. We could only suspect that something to do with the relationship between the man and woman had offended our teacher’s strict religious beliefs, but as none of us shared them, in the end we decided that she was an oddball. However, as we did not quite understand what had gone on, we did feel a sort of shame at having watched the film.
Some days later my father demanded to know if I had seen ‘that film’ as he called it. With my heart thumping wildly I lied and denied that I had seen it, which only made matters worse. Now I felt the fear of being exposed as a liar as well as the vestiges of shame. I don’t think he believed me but on this occasion he didn’t beat me. I think it gave him enough satisfaction to know that his questioning had frightened me.
One thing I did learn from going to such a cold, unfriendly elementary school was to fight back against bullying, which was rife. We couldn’t report any bullying to a teacher, especially the male teachers, without being labelled as an effete cry-baby, a funker. So, thanks to one of my friends, Billy Murphy, I learned how to fight. Billy’s father had worked as a boxer in fairground booths and he had passed his skills on to his son. Billy taught me the hard way, spending sessions boxing with me. He showed me how and where to punch an opponent to have the greatest effect.
My first confrontation was with an arch bully called Brian Byers, an older boy who delighted in striking boys from behind, knocking them down and then kicking them. One day I saw him coming at me out of the corner of my eye and so I turned and moved in close enough to land a thumping uppercut to his face. Taken totally by surprise he fell back, bleeding profusely from the nose. To seal my triumph he began to cry. He never tried to hit me again.
However, I was still frequently punched by a boy called Frank McNally who sat behind me in class. He was careful to only strike me when the teacher had her back turned. One afternoon when he punched me yet again I decided that enough was enough. I stood up from my bench desk, turned around, grabbed him by the hair and proceeded to hit him a rain of blows without stopping to let him recover. Suddenly I was grabbed from behind by the teacher, a burly woman called Miss Scott, who dragged me in front of the class and caned me several times while calling me a thug. I didn’t care. I didn’t even feel the thwacks of the cane because I was glowing with elation at having overcome a sneak bully. He was so battered by my onslaught that he had to spend the rest of the afternoon recuperating with the school nurse in the medical room. Billy said that he was delighted at my performance and took me to see his dad, a huge man with cauliflower ears and a twisted nose who shook hands with me and advised me to always ‘hit them in the bread basket’ – the stomach.
I escaped my own personal school of hard knocks that year when the administrative error at County Hall was cleared up and I was finally judged to have passed the eleven-plus, largely due to the extra work I had done myself. I was so glad to be free at last from St Joseph’s Elementary School. My father tried to insist that I should go to the Roman Catholic grammar school, St Cuthbert’s in Newcastle upon Tyne, but I protested that I’d had enough of religious instruction. I wanted to learn real knowledge. Surprisingly he gave way and, even more surprisingly, he didn’t beat me. My mother said it was because if I’d gone to St Cuthbert’s he would have had to pay the money for my fares to Newcastle each day. It satisfied his mean streak that I could walk to Blaydon Grammar School. This suited me just fine because the school was opposite Axwell Park.