‘We were all a bit thick, but we knew how to lift heavy things.’
KIRMINGTON. KIRMO. A one-pub village over the A18 from Humberside Airport. A couple of miles from Immingham, one of the busiest docks in Europe, and a bit further from Grimsby. Kirmington, a former World War II prisoner-of-war camp. Oh, and the centre of the universe.
I moved there when I was one, in 1983, and eventually left Kirmington, to move to Caistor, seven miles away, in 2010. For the last few of those 26 years I had lived with my girlfriend, Kate, on her parents’ farm in the village.
The house on Gravel Pit Lane, where the four Martin kids did most, or all, of their growing up, is a three-bedroom bungalow. My mum and dad always talked about having a loft conversion, but never got around to it. I suppose they never had the money, and then when they did, there was no need, because we’d all left home.
There is 13-month age difference between Sally and me. My brother Stuart is four years younger than me, and then there’s a two-year gap between him and Kate. So that made Sally six when Kate arrived.
I had my own room until Stu was born, then we shared, but we rarely got in each other’s way. Given the choice to do it all again, he probably wouldn’t choose the bottom bunk, but he got away lightly compared to how some big brothers treat their younger siblings. I honked on him one New Year’s Eve, after a skinful at the local pub. That night, after sorting me out, my mum, Big Rita, went to see the landlord and gave him a mouthful for selling beer to her under-age son.
There was a time, during those bunk-bed years, when I brought a girlfriend back to our room. When I look back now, I wonder if she only wanted me for my GSX-R600. We ended up shagging in the top bunk, with Stu in the bunk below. What was I doing? He never mentioned it. Character-building, I reckon. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
There was very little friction between Stu and me when we were young. Most of the time I’d be in the shed, taking something to bits or reassembling it, while he was more into football, something I’ve never been bothered about. We didn’t have the same friends, and because our hobbies were so different we never did what most brothers do: squabble because we wanted the same thing at the same time. Only years later, when we were both working together for Dad – all the male side of the Martin family working in the same truck yard – did we stop seeing eye to eye for a while. We were all living together and working together and it was too much. Back when we were little, though, as soon as we got the Transformers wallpaper we wanted so badly, we were happy.
One of my earliest memories is when Sal and I were given an old but tidy Yamaha TY80 kids dirt bike one Christmas.
After we went to bed on Christmas Eve, Dad would always take the handle off the front room door so we couldn’t get in early to see the presents. The year we were given the little TY80 it was literally like every Christmas had come at once. The first time I ever rode it, that Christmas morning, I went straight through the rose bushes in our garden and cut myself to rags on the thorns. My mum was telling anyone who’d listen that I was never going on that motorbike again.
Clearly, I wasn’t a natural on the motorcycle. I hear of some racers who got on their first bike, before they could walk, and knew exactly what to do, instinctively; they won their first race and then never lost another until they joined the world championship ranks. Well, that wasn’t me. I’m not blessed in the natural talent department when it comes to bikes, but I’ve loved them since I first sat on that miniature Yamaha and I don’t give up.
Sally and I were supposed to share the TY80, but I didn’t like the idea of that. I get on a treat with my older sister now, but we didn’t then, because of the bike problem: one seat, two backsides wanting to be on it.
Though we were only nippers we had the run of Kirmington. We’d rush home from school to go straight out on the motorbike. We would take it over to Mr Lancaster’s farm (where I’d end up living with his daughter, years later) and tear up the fields. He’d chase us in his Land Rover, not happy. It must have driven him mad.
The little Yamaha would do 40 mph or more and we’d never wear helmets. We’d slide off it, but never hurt ourselves too badly. While other Kirmington kids would lose fingers in go-kart chains or slice the backs off their feet in BMX sprockets, we survived countless motorcycle accidents.
For a while, Dad had an old Yamaha trail bike just to muck about on, a field bike really and a full-size thing, three times the size of our TY. He would take me and Sally for rides around the village and surrounding areas on it. One of us would sit in front of him on the petrol tank, the other behind him on the seat. None of us would wear a helmet, obviously. He was a skilful racer, so it was surprising the scrapes he would get in when he was just pootling about, three-up with his two little kids on board. Once, on a pre-Sunday lunch ride-out, we crashed and Sally burned her leg on the red-hot exhaust. Needless to say, Mum wasn’t happy and it’s hard to blame her. By now you should be getting the picture that the Martins weren’t a family that rated the health and safety side of things very highly.
The family is all Lincolnshire born and bred. My dad’s a proud Lincolnshire man and I am too. Though I’ve travelled to Asia, Australia, New Zealand, the Middle East and America, I still think Kirmington is the centre of the universe.
The village has hardly grown since I first moved there in 1984. There can’t be many places in the whole of England that have developed less. Only about six houses have been built in Kirmo in all the time I can remember. We let a few in. We don’t want to weaken the breed by bringing any outsiders in.
Kirmington is a village of 400 people, and I get the feeling I’ll end up living back there. I think we all feel that way. Me, my sister Sally and our friends Sally Harris, Mark Nichols, Simon Thorpe, Andrew Thorpe, Aaron Ash, Kate Lancaster, Craig Nichols – there are only a handful of us born within a few years of each other, but ask any of us and we’d all say Kirmington was the centre of the universe, and I think that’s down to one bloke: Mr Acum.
Bert Acum was Kirmington Church of England Primary School’s head teacher in the late 1980s and early nineties. He was the man. The younger generation, including my younger brother and sister, aren’t as Kirmo-biased as me, because they had a different headmaster. I was the last of the pure Mr Acum breed. His wife, Norma, was also a teacher at the school. Back then, the pair lived in Kirmington too, with their son, and we’d sometimes go to his house to play golf on his own personal putting green. In school time, of course.
When I was attending Kirmington Primary, just a quarter of a mile from home, I could not get to school fast enough. There were only 18 kids in the whole junior school and we all did the same lessons at the same time, but obviously at different levels. Thinking back, we used to have maths and spelling tests on Friday, but that was about it, as far as I can remember, when it came to traditional school-type lessons. The school gave a very different type of education to the one had by most people I know these days.
It was a very hands-on environment. We made loads of stuff, papier mâché Toby jugs being a favourite. Before a sports day we, the pupils, would mark the pitches out with the push-roller. Most schools would rely on a caretaker for jobs like this, and any general maintenance, but at Kirmington there was no need for one. The kids did it all.
In autumn we’d have the thrill of getting the leaf machine out. It was like a lawn-mower, but with spikes instead of blades, that would flick the fallen leaves into a bin on the back. That was another job for the pupils.
I have vivid memories of those early school years. The school building dated from the end of the nineteenth century, but Kirmington was a bomber base in World War II, home to 166 Squadron, and the air raid shelters were still standing. We’d have bonfires in one of them. In school-time!
I feel lucky to have gone to such a quirky school. The stuff we thought of as 100-per-cent normal sounds like I’ve made it up. It’s like we were on a desert island, after a plane crash or a shipwreck, and the only surviving adults took it upon themselves to teach the children whatever they could remember from their own childhoods, with some essential survival techniques thrown in for good measure.
Once a week, all the kids would tie rags around their feet and shuffle around to polish the school’s varnished wooden floor. I’m not making this up. I even have a scar on my hand from assembling the school Black & Decker Workmate at the age of six or seven.
We thought the school was haunted, by Mr Painter the School Ghost, and our headmaster wouldn’t say a word to make the junior and infant children believe anything different. In fact, he’d even tell stories about Mr Painter that would scare us rigid.
A supply teacher would visit the school for a week or two every year to get us prepared for the Christmas play. She was a 50-a-day smoker and would send a pupil to the shop to pick up her Benson & Hedges. Primary school kids! You’d get locked up for that now.
Much as we all loved Mr Acum, he wasn’t shy about serving out some corporal punishment. If you were naughty, but not naughty enough to deserve a spanking, you would be sent out to pick up a hundred stones off the grass so they didn’t go into the lawn-mower. Yes, the pupils cut the grass that surrounded the school, and Mr Acum’s personal putting green, too. If we were naughty enough to deserve a worse punishment, Mr Acum would give us the slipper, after warming it on the old, cast-iron radiator. I don’t know if he went through that part of the routine to make the ordeal last longer, so the children would have longer to think about what was coming and then remember the whole ritual more, or if he’d somehow worked out, or been told, that an old slipper hurt more when it was warm, but it definitely became a deterrent.
Every memory of the time is a good one, and school trips were a highlight. A memorable outing was when the whole school cycled five miles through the woods from Kirmington to Brocklesby, all of us on pushbikes. One of the kids’ granddads was the master of the local fox-hunt, so we went to visit the kennels where the hounds lived.
We would also have an annual school trip to Skegness, just before we broke up for the summer holidays. On the bus to the coast, Mr Acum would be throwing sweets out at us, like Willy Wonka.
For those of us who knew little more than the Kirmington bubble, Skegness would make us gasp. It was amazing. We’d play on the playground, then go on the donkeys, and finally visit the fairground. Mr Acum would take an old Silver Cross pram that he’d fill with a container, like a miniature water butt with a tap on the bottom, to keep the whole school watered. An essential for a Kirmington pupil going on any school trip was a spare pair of trousers. That was the rule. Mr Acum must have learnt the hard way.
After a round of funding cuts, or a when a hole appeared in the budget, the school’s minibus used to get taken off the road, and then my mum would volunteer to help. When it came time for swimming, all the juniors, probably a dozen kids, would pile in the back of the Martin family’s VW LT35. It was a large panel van, bigger than a Ford Transit, that Dad would proudly remind us had a Porsche engine, as it had a similar four-cylinder motor to the Porsche 924. Mum would drive, with the pupils rattling around the back. At this time, Sally and I were mad about the TV show called The A-Team. Dad would come home from work on a Saturday in time for us to all sit down and watch it together. We all loved it so much that Dad painted our van black with a red stripe on the side to make it look like the one driven by Mr T. That’s how it looked when we used it as school transport. Big Rita would go off to do the weekly shop in Immingham while we were swimming and collect us all afterwards.
Looking back, the children of Kirmington Church of England Primary School were an innocent and easily pleased bunch. One of the most exciting and memorable times ever, for both me and Sally, was when one school summer party coincided with the introduction of wheelie bins to the area. Seeing the first wheelie bin in Kirmington was an ‘Oooh’ moment. For this summer party the teachers filled the brand-new wheelie bins with water to make two-man plunge pools for the kids to jump in. Later in the day we had wheelie bin races.
School life was mega, up until I was 12 years old, when I left for senior school. The Vale of Ancholme School in Brigg had over 500 kids, so it was a contrast, like black and white. Because Kirmington Primary was such a practical and laidback place, when we went to senior school we were all a bit thick, but we knew how to lift heavy things.
My sister Sally left Kirmington Primary the year before me, along with Wayne Czartowski. Sally now says her first day, walking into the Vale of Ancholme School, felt like she’d arrived in New York City. We were clearly a bit backward.
The following year, Kirmington sent another two victims to the school in Brigg: it was the turn of me and fellow Kirmo resident Rebecca Andrews. I was so nervous going there, and I was right to be. We were under-prepared, like fish out of water. We were green. My dad was still cutting my hair, and I was happily wearing what I soon came to realise were cheap Hi-Tec trainers that few of the other kids would be seen dead in. I hadn’t been bothered about either of those things till I went to senior school. I had been happily living in the Kirmington bubble, insulated from the rest of the UK and all the stuff the country and its sons worried about. At home I lived in my welly boots, with the tops turned over, and blue one-piece overalls. In Kirmo, no one thought anything of it because it was all I’d ever done, but now at school I was different. And not in a good way. I’d get picked on a bit, because of my corduroy school trousers or whatever. I didn’t have any school friends until the last couple of years.
Not long after reaching senior school, peer pressure began to play a part in my life. For a while at least. I started trying to toe the line, by wearing the right trainers and clothes, listening to the same music as other people in class, and having my hair cut like the other lads. Two or three years later I realised fitting in wasn’t for me, so I stopped trying, and that’s how it’s been ever since.
Compared to my time at Kirmington Primary, secondary school is far less memorable. I got on with a few teachers, but there was one I had more of a connection with, Mr Frank. He taught a class called Resistant Materials. Metalwork, basically. He had a job on the side putting up marquees. Sometimes he’d wear a T-shirt to school, with the slogan ‘Frank’s Marquees – The Erection Specialists’. To us he was a legend. He raced 50-cc Kriedler motorbikes, too.
I liked Geography, but I failed the GCSE, which was a bit of a disappointment. Chemistry was all right. Mr Hutchinson, my form teacher through the whole of senior school, took us for it. I learnt some stuff, but most remember blowing down the gas feed to extinguish the flames of the rest of the class’s Bunsen burners. I didn’t get on particularly well with any other lessons, like English or Maths. I felt that for kids like me who couldn’t wait to get out of the door, there wasn’t any real direction. The school just had to keep us off the streets from 9am till 3.15pm.
I was a misfit at school. I don’t have any friends from my time at the Vale of Ancholme, except for one, Johnny Ellis, and that’s only because we became apprentices together after leaving. I would do enough to get by at school, but I was just waiting to get home and escape into the shed.
Back in Kirmington, things were like they’d always been. There was a gang of us and we’d meet up most nights. If I wasn’t working in the shed, I would sit with the rest of them on the corner near our house. This was the meeting spot from where we would go roaming around the area. At the other end of the village was the Kings’ House. The Kings were brothers who were older than our group, and they were rebels. There were three of them, Andrew, Nigel and Jason. They had motorbikes and cars we thought were cool, like Ford Fiesta XR2s. They were rum lads. Good people, not wrong ’uns. They were in their late teens when we were 11 or 12, so they obviously didn’t hang around with us.
Rum is a description I use a lot, so perhaps I should explain what I mean by it. If you’re a rum lad it doesn’t mean you’re going out robbing grannies. If you did that, you’d be a wrong ’un. A rum lad isn’t a wrong ’un, but he is always looking for an angle, a ‘better’ way of doing something, a way of earning a few extra bob without working too hard for it.
I wouldn’t be out on the street as often as Sally. My mates would come and hang around in my shed. Mark ‘Shorty’ Nichols’s family was chucking out an old comfy chair, so we salvaged it for the shed and friends would sit around while I worked on old lawn-mowers with their guts spread all over the work-bench.
Working in the shed would take up a lot of my childhood nights, but our gang would get up to other things. If it was a slow night and we’d seen a car’s lights drive up the local lover’s lane, Habrough Lane, we’d tip-toe through the woods, creep up on the car and knock on the windows to scare the life out of the humping couple inside.
Around that time we did a bit of experimenting with Ouija boards. Don’t ask me how a group of kids from the back end of rural Lincolnshire get hold of a Ouija board, but one turned up and we hid it in our shed. Somehow Mum found it and warned us off it, telling us we were messing with stuff we shouldn’t be messing with. We didn’t listen, though. In fact, it made us even more determined to try it. Sally Harris was the ring leader. We’d follow her to the football changing rooms on the local playing fields. At the far end of them was an old Portakabin and we’d sit on the bench outside. We did it half a dozen times. The gang would be me, both Sallys, Aaron Ash, Shorty …
By then Sally Harris and Aaron were smoking – it was the cool thing to do, though I never did. One of them blew smoke in the upturned glass, placed it on the board and we watched as the smoke disappeared. As we placed our fingers on the glass and started the ritual, that someone must have learnt from a horror film or from hearsay, the glass started skating around the board. We all had one finger on the glass, but it didn’t feel like anyone was pushing it. Then we tried contacting someone’s relation, and it started coming up with some strange answers – to this day I swear we weren’t moving the glass – and we panicked, starting screaming like girls and smashed the board to smithereens. We never did it again. I’m getting a shiver down my spine just thinking about it.
We didn’t have to make our own entertainment all the time, because for a while a double-decker bus, that had been converted into a youth club on wheels, would come to Kirmington once a week. The driver, Ian, wore a handknitted jumper and a tie. He was a geek, but a lovely bloke, and he volunteered his time to give kids in villages too small to have their own youth club something else to do.
The bus was kitted out with games, a TV, a Sega Megadrive and a shop that sold sweets. Aaron Ash, who was three years older than me and a rum lad at the time, would keep giving Ian cheek. Word of this got back to my dad, who marched down our drive, got Aaron by the neck and put some manners in him.
As I got older, the draw of the youth club was replaced by booze – but only for a short time. Where a lot of British people seem to live for the pub or weekend drinking, whether it be at a festival, a bike event, a back garden barbecue or whatever, I don’t share the enthusiasm. I used to think that one day I would wake up and all I’d want to do would be to go get drunk and shag, but I’ve never had the urge to go shagging anything that moved – I didn’t lose my virginity till I was 19 – and rarely had the desire to get smashed.
I did most of my binge-drinking in my mid-teens, at the tail end of the period of my life when I wanted to fit in and be cool. The place to be was the disco in Broughton – simply called Broughton Disco. It was a bit out of my Kirmington comfort zone. You risked getting in a fight by being a stranger, but there weren’t many alternatives in our area. In fact, there weren’t any. We would drink out the back of the disco, then go inside to rave all night and try, with little success, to get off with some bird. Even now I can’t hear 2 Unlimited’s song ‘No Limit’ and not be taken back to Broughton Disco.
For me serious boozing took place in a very small window of my youth, apart from a few exceptional occasions dotted through the rest of my life. It started at 15 and ended a year or so later. We couldn’t get served in Kirmington’s pub, The Marrowbone and Cleaver, except on very exceptional days, because we were all known, the landlord had seen us grow up, or knew some of our parents. Big Rita even worked there for a while, but my dad, being quite jealous, didn’t like the idea of that. So there’d be a weekly mass exodus from Kirmington to Brigg, where we could get served. Our mates Shorty and Si Thorpe could drive. They both had Nissan Micras. E436 TOH was Si Thorpe’s blue Micra. (I don’t have a memory any better or much worse than anyone else, except when it comes to vehicle registrations. Ones from decades ago still stick in my mind. In the haulage industry, the registration is how we refer to the trucks. Now I know that if CV57 EVE is in the diary to come in next week it’s not going to be fun, because I saw that the discs would need changing last time I worked on that truck, and they’re a right job on that model; but BD57 EBG will be all right because it was only in last month for an MoT and it’s mint. Because a haulage firm’s fleet are usually painted the same colour and have lots of trucks the same model, knowing their registrations is the only way to tell one from the other, so they all stick in my mind.)
Si was four years older than me. If we’d lived in a town, I reckon it would have been very unusual for someone as old as him to hang around with a lad of my age, but we were all Kirmington lads and because there were so few of us, it’s just what we did. We’d go to The White Hart or The Nelson in Brigg and get wankered. I had a spate of drinking cider, but it didn’t sit so well and I can’t drink it now.
I didn’t turn teetotal or anything that extreme, that’ll be clear as you read on. In fact, binge-drinking would help shape the rest of my life. It’s just that the small town treadmill of work, pay day, then stop at the pub and piss it all up the wall that a lot of British folk find themselves on was never for me. There would always be too many Snap-On tools that needed buying.