2

Out in the Cold

Courtesy of the author

It was a winter’s day in Dunston, mid-1950s, a few years after my ma’s escape attempt. We were now living in a council house of our own on Beech Drive, a ten-minute walk from my grandparents’ place on Oak Avenue. We’d started out at No. 106, which had two bedrooms, before my dad, delivering on his promise to my ma, convinced the council to upgrade us to No. 1, which had an extra room in the back. It was still far too small for a family of six – my two brothers and I had to share a double mattress in one room – but with eleven fewer Johnsons than at my grandparents’ house, it felt like Buckingham Palace.

Just as we were settling in, though, I did something that made me so ill, I was lucky to ever recover.

It all started with a silent documentary called Nanook of the North that I’d watched on our brand-new black-and-white television. The film had been made in the 1920s – you can still find it on the internet today – and it must have been shown on the BBC because the BBC was the only thing that our rooftop aerial could pick up at the time. (The North East didn’t get any television at all until six years after the war.)

Now, usually I wasn’t interested in the television at all. It was all horticultural programmes and church organ recitals and, if you were lucky, re-runs of Gregory Peck films and Mickey Mouse cartoons – boring, awful stuff that you couldn’t have paid me to sit through instead of playing outside with my friends. But Nanook of the North was different. It was gripping. The star of it was this Inuk guy called Nanook who lived in the Canadian Arctic, and you got to see him building an igloo, hunting for seals and eating the blubber and having a fight with a polar bear – all while a blizzard was raging, ice was cracking under his feet and it was twenty below freezing. And he carried around a big hunting knife and had this stunning Inuk wife and a cute little Inuk baby who wore a little fur hat. And because it was winter in Dunston and snowing, my imagination just ran absolutely wild.

The moment the film was over, I ran outside into the snow and said to myself, ‘Right, I’m gonna make an igloo, just like Nanook’s.’ So, I did. And it was fabulous. About five-foot-wide – same in height – with a little hole in the front for crawling in and out.

But the problem with doing something so incredibly exciting in the late afternoon when you’re a kid is that you end up lying in bed, wide awake, mind racing, long after everyone else has gone to sleep. Which is exactly what happened – and why I decided, in the middle of the night, that there’d be no harm in me going outside in the dark to take one more quick look at what I’d built. So, I put a jumper on over my pyjamas, fetched my dad’s torch, then snuck out of the back door and into the garden. And as I crawled into my igloo, I stopped being Brian Johnson in the back garden of his council house in Dunston, and became Brianook of the North East, relaxing after a hard day of seal hunting and a feast of blubber pie. Then I yawned just like Nanook would yawn, which was a big mistake because it made me realize just how knackered I was, and I went out like a light.

When my dad got up for work a few hours later – he was usually out of the house by 6.30 a.m. – he could sense immediately that something was wrong. The house felt like the North Pole because the back door was open, with snow blowing in. Then when he checked on the boys’ room, it was one Johnson short.

But in a huge stroke of luck, the noises coming from the house had woken me up in the igloo, so I rushed back inside just as my dad was coming downstairs. He thought I’d just got up early. He had no idea that I’d been out there for most of the night.

‘You daft bugger, you’ll catch your death!’ he growled at me. ‘Now get yerself dressed . . .’

That was the end of that little adventure, as far as I was concerned.

But something horrible happened later on that morning at school when I was trying to practise my writing. All of this liquid started seeping out of me, like I was a block of ice starting to melt. It went all over my paper and into my inkwell, until the teacher, Mrs. Patterson, came over and said, ‘Brian Johnson! That’s too messy! Start again!’

I was feeling so woozy, I couldn’t even answer.

‘Wake up!’ she barked, clipping me around the ear. ‘You’ve ruined this piece of paper! What’s wrong with you! Get yourself home this minute. Is your mother in?’

I managed to grunt a yes, which was all she needed to know to kick me out into the wind and snow.

Now, being sent home by your teacher was a guarantee of a massive, belt-whipping bollocking, but I was feeling so dreadful that wasn’t even on my mind. As I followed the familiar route from school back to Beech Drive, I kept getting slower and slower . . . until my feet wouldn’t work any more. I had no idea what was happening to me. I mean, usually I ran everywhere at full speed, but now I could barely stand on my own two feet. I ended up just sitting down on the pavement and curling up into a ball. Brianook of the North East was preparing to meet his maker.

That was when I heard the voice of a kindly older lady who’d found me lying there on the street.

‘Can ya tell us your name, dear?’

We still didn’t have a telephone at that point, never mind a car, so when the Good Samaritan of Dunston dropped me off at home, my mother had to leave me alone in front of the fire and run to the nearest phone box to call our local GP – lovely old Dr. Fairbairn. He told her that he’d be over right away, he just needed to get some lunch first, then finish with his surgery patients, which would take, oh, about five hours.

It was about 5 p.m. when he finally showed up. By which time I was moaning and sweating and freezing cold at the same time, and starting to have trouble breathing. Dr. Fairbairn announced that I was ‘gravely ill’ and rolled me over to give me an injection in my backside to stabilize me. He stayed with me until well past midnight – which was unheard of. ‘I need you to be a strong soldier tonight, okay Brian?’ I remember him saying, before giving me another injection. Then he asked me if I liked cars.

Well, I didn’t just like cars. I was ‘car daft’, as my dad often said. They were so rare in those days. There was only one on our street – a Morris Minor – which belonged to my dad’s boss. I could stare at it for hours, imagining myself driving, lost in my own never-never land. In fact, my dad got so sick of me talking about cars and trying to find new cars to look at on the street that he eventually went to our local garage and asked them if they would give him a steering wheel. (The only stipulation being that it didn’t come from a German car.) He ended up getting one for sixpence – which was taken out of my pocket money – then he got a large stick, pushed it through our bedhead, attached it to the steering wheel, and piled pillows up around it, like a driving seat. I must have put at least 50,000 miles on that bed.

‘Yes, I like cars,’ I whimpered to Dr. Fairbairn.

‘Well, I’m glad to hear that, son,’ he beamed. ‘Because, between you and me, I just got myself a new Rover. And if you can stay strong and get better, I’ll give you a ride in it.’

Behind him, I could see my parents looking at me and holding hands – which scared the shit out of me because they never held hands. The expression on my dad’s face, in particular, was something that I’d never seen before. It was, well . . . love, I suppose. And fear. Both of which were things that a guy like my dad never let anyone see. There was also a strange kind of resignation. I mean, for my dad’s generation, it wasn’t that unusual to lose a kid or two to the flu or tuberculosis – even to strep throat. Well, there’s the first one to go, he seemed to be thinking.

What my dad should have known, of course, was that a Rover in those days was halfway to a Rolls-Royce. It had chrome dials and a wooden dashboard – with an AM radio built into it. What’s more, its engine was so powerful it could go from zero to sixty mph in under twenty seconds . . . on its way to a top speed of over eighty mph!

So, obviously, there was no way on earth that I was going to let myself die and miss out on that.

Apart from my near-death experience with the igloo, life on Beech Drive was a massive improvement over Oak Avenue. Just a few days after we arrived – this was at No. 106 – I remember waking up to see these flags up everywhere and tables and chairs on the streets, with all this food and drink and everyone throwing a huge party because we had a new Queen. It pissed it down for most of the day, of course, but no one cared. They even slaughtered a pig and roasted it in Dunston Park. And on top of it all, everyone got a free mug. It’s hard to describe just how mind-blowing that was in a time of rationed bacon. I was like, bloody hell, if everyone on our street can get a free mug, then literally anything is possible in this place!

Beech Drive was a brand-new development at that time, I should probably mention – the jewel in the crown of North-East council estates. Everything was new and modern, from the freshly laid red tarmac to the brightly coloured front doors. And people were so proud – especially the mothers and wives. Every front step was immaculate. Every net curtain spotless. And everyone’s living room had a ‘sideboard’ and ‘bureau’ and a fireplace so clean you could have eaten your dinner off it. A lot of mothers even wrapped their settees in plastic to keep them looking new.

The street still had gas lights, mind you, which were lit every night by a guy with a big stick. And we still had a rag-and-bone man – ‘the rag man’ we called him – who had a little cart pulled by a very sad-looking horse with a balloon tied to its reins. I’ll never forget the day when I realized that if you gave the rag man an old jumper or a bedsheet, you got a penny or a balloon. I was like, why has no one ever told me about this before? But, of course, as soon as my ma found out what I was doing, she was chasing the rag man halfway up the street, trying to get back a pair of my dad’s old socks.

The fun we had in those days was unbelievable. In an age when there were no cars, no traffic, no glowing screens and video games to get hopelessly addicted to – and when everyone looked out for everyone else’s kids – we were free in a way that you couldn’t imagine today. And because everyone had tiny houses, kids lived outdoors, made their own entertainment and formed their own little gangs. On Beech Drive, for example, there was the Top Gang and the Bottom Gang, depending on which part of the estate you lived on, and within the Top Gang you had the Big ones (me and my friends) and the Little ones (our younger brothers). This was funny because Maurice was a Little one, even though he was taller than me.

Even school – Dunston Hill infants, followed by juniors – wasn’t all that bad, all things considered.

The Big ones would walk the Little ones there and back every day, all of us in short trousers – rain, drizzle, sleet, hail, snow, whatever. I would add ‘shine’, but I could count the times that I glimpsed the sun in Dunston during my childhood on one hand.

Part of the reason why I liked infants’ school so much was the classroom, which had a seesaw and a little roundabout in it, both of which would make the kids vomit. Mr. Graham, the caretaker, would always be standing there, mop and bucket at the ready.

When playtime was over, Mrs. Patterson would give us each a little blackboard and a piece of chalk to practise writing our ABCs. Then we’d have music lessons, and all the girls would get recorders, and all the boys would get triangles and tambourines.

That was the beginning of a lifelong love of music for me because I loved tingling my triangle. I could do it for hours. And we’d sing songs while Mrs. Patterson played the piano. Awful stuff like ‘Underneath the Spreading Chestnut Tree’. But I didn’t care. As long as I could tingle my triangle, I’d sing whatever Mrs. Patterson wanted.

English was my best subject. I loved writing and I always got top marks for my stories and essays – and when I got a gold star, I’d take it home to show my ma and dad.

But it was after school when life really began.

Every night, no matter how hard it was raining, we’d put our jumpers in the middle of the street as goalposts and have a game of football. And when it snowed, the street would become a battlefield and we’d have snowball fights that would go on for hours.

I was always at a disadvantage in the snowball fights, though, thanks to the mittens that my mother would knit for me. To make sure that I didn’t lose them, she would sew a piece of elastic into one glove, then run the elastic up the arm of my jacket, and down the other arm to the other glove. This worked brilliantly when it came to stopping the gloves falling off. But the problem was that whenever I reached back to throw a snowball, the elastic would yank up my other hand – and I’d end up smacking myself in the mouth. But I’d be so excited, I’d keep forgetting – no matter how many fat lips I gave myself. ‘Look! Brian Johnson just punched himself in the face again!’ the other kids would shout, as blood ran down my chin and I cried for my ma. ‘Dee it again, Brian! Dee it again!’

These were also the days when I first really discovered football and music.

It was my dad who took me to see my first footie match. It wasn’t a Newcastle United game though, because the tickets would have cost an arm and a leg and St. James’s Park was at least a thirty-minute bus ride away. Instead, we walked to nearby Redheugh Park to see United’s poor relatives, Gateshead AFC, which charged only tuppence at the gate and attracted a crowd of a couple of thousand on a good day.

My dad brought along a ‘cracket’ – a small wooden stool with wickerwork on top – which he put beside the wall at the side of the pitch so I could stand on it and see over.

What I remember most is staring at all the faded and peeling old adverts from the 1930s that were still on the wall. Things like, ‘You know it’s wise to use Bovril to keep away pneumonia and chills!’ Some of them had been painted onto metal backing, and the paint had slowly chipped away and rust was showing through. But they were the only hints of colour in our otherwise grey world, and that fascinated me.

Beyond the stands, meanwhile, you could see the five massive iron-framed gas holders of the Redheugh Gas Works – the gas in those days was made by heating up coal in a sealed furnace* – and the Dunston flour mill.

I didn’t really understand or care what was happening on the pitch. It wasn’t like there were any Match of the Day moments going on. The Gateshead players weren’t even all that fit – and of course they’d light up tabs while eating their orange slices at half-time.

Like most boys, I was just happy to be doing something – anything, really – with my dad.

That didn’t apply to listening to our family’s record collection, mind you, which had been donated to us by an older couple – Mr. and Mrs. Adams – who lived in one of the ‘OAP cottages’ up the street. (OAP meaning Old Age Pensioner, of course.)

We had one of those old gramophones back then with a steel needle that you wound up with a crank handle, and every so often my dad would decide to put on one of these ancient 78s – although, to be honest, he never really cared about music. The only one I remember was ‘A Bird in a Gilded Cage’ by Harry Anthony, who had this ridiculous, warbly, strangled-sounding tenor voice. Not that you could hear much over the wall of hiss. I couldn’t abide it. In fact, my brothers and I ended up taking the records and throwing them one by one over the fence in our back garden, which was a lot more fun than it sounds because if you flicked your wrist when you threw them, the 78s would spin around and kind of float for a bit in the air before coming down gently. We basically turned Harry Anthony into a Frisbee, which was pretty impressive since the Frisbee hadn’t even been invented yet.

As for my own taste in music, it was being formed entirely by the BBC Radio show Children’s Favourites, hosted by the very stiff and Victorian-sounding ‘Uncle Mac’. Every episode would start with him saying, ‘Hello children, everywhere,’ followed by one of the greatest BBC theme tunes of all time – ‘Puffin’ Billy’ by the Melodi Light Orchestra.

Every Saturday morning, starting at 9.10 a.m., Uncle Mac would play things like ‘The Laughing Policeman’ or ‘I Taut I Taw a Puddy Tat’ by Mel Blanc – the guy who voiced most of the Looney Tunes characters – with a bit of Bing Crosby and Max Bygraves mixed in. And if you were lucky and Uncle Mac was in a daring mood, you might even get to hear one of the tamer hits of Frank Sinatra or Doris Day.

It was the highlight of my week.

Some of my most vivid and magical memories of growing up in Dunston are of our Christmases, even though in the early days we couldn’t afford a turkey, never mind proper presents.

My dad, bless his heart, would always take a trip out into the woods somewhere and find us a tree. And because he’d grown up without electricity, and was a man who valued tradition, he’d light up the tree with candles – real candles, with real flames – which he insisted was totally safe because the Johnsons had been doing it for generations, and not a single one of us had ever been lost in a house fire.

Then would come Christmas Eve – the longest night in any kid’s life. Every year, without fail, my dad would put out a biscuit and a glass of milk for Santa Claus, and once we were all tucked up in bed, he’d take a bite out of the biscuit and gulp down the milk – making sure to leave sooty fingerprints everywhere from the coal in the fireplace. This just goes to show that for all his toughness, Sergeant Johnson was a gigantic softy at heart. And, of course, my brothers and I would be lying awake for what felt like an eternity, calling out, ‘Dad?! Has he been yet!’ at fifteen-minute intervals from about 3 a.m. onwards. ‘Go to bed!’ would come the muffled reply . . . until my dad finally broke and led us downstairs at the crack of dawn.

As for the presents, you’d never fail to get an orange covered in tinfoil at the bottom of your stocking (to make it look ‘Christmassy’) and a bar of Fry’s Five Boys milk chocolate or, if you were really lucky, a Cadbury’s Chocolate Selection Box, which looked incredibly exciting when it was covered in wrapping paper, just because it was so big.

The trick was to make the chocolates last as long as possible, which, in my case, was never beyond noon the next day. My little brother Victor, on the other hand, could make his last for months, a feat of self-discipline that seemed almost superhuman to me.

But it wasn’t all good. Somewhere amongst the presents there would always be The Curse of Christmas – a wooden box filled with shrivelled figs that looked like camel’s testicles, and a little plastic spoon to eat them with. Every year, one of us would be unlucky enough to get this awful present – and if you got caught throwing out the spoon and feeding the figs to the sparrows, you’d get a bloody good hiding, even though everyone hated the figs – especially my ma, who knew what real ones tasted like.

As the years went by, the presents got better (including a gorgeous, very grown-up Raleigh bicycle) until one Christmas, Santa Claus delivered a ‘family present’ that changed my life – an Elizabethan reel-to-reel tape recorder with a little plug-in microphone.

It was a game-changer, that tape recorder. All of a sudden, I could put the microphone up against the speaker of the radio and record Children’s Favourites, so I could listen to the songs whenever I wanted to. As usual, though, there was a problem . . . which came in the form of our pet budgerigar, whose name was either Bobby or Peter, I can’t remember which. Everyone had a budgie in those days, and they were all called Bobby or Peter. People loved them because you could teach them to say things like ‘Whey aye, man’ and ‘Alreet pet’ and all they ate was seeds, so they were one of the cheapest forms of entertainment that you could get.*

Anyway, this budgie got into the habit of breaking into song every time the radio came on. He loved Children’s Favourites almost as much as I did. And he was really, really loud.

It didn’t help that the little microphone could only pick up high tones and had no bass qualities whatsoever. So, when I played back my first recording of Uncle Mac’s show, all I could hear was a very distant and muffled James Baskett singing ‘Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah’ with this awful high-pitched whistling over the top.

Moving the budgie to another room didn’t help because that just made him upset – and when he was upset, the little fella would start squawking at twice the usual volume.

I gave up after a while and just started singing into the microphone myself, which for some reason didn’t set the budgie off in the same way. The only songs I could think to sing at first were the same corny ones we did at school. But recording myself was so much fun, I couldn’t stop doing it. Adding to the entertainment, I realized that I could slow the tape down or speed it up, making me sound like a deep-voiced old man or Alvin the Chipmunk. I spent most of that Christmas in the bedroom I shared with my brothers, singing into the microphone while watching the tape reels go around, then rewinding, playing it back, and starting over – or adding something else – until my dad must have started to regret ever buying the bloody thing. ‘Like the sound of your own voice, do you?’ he huffed at one point.

I turned bright red and mumbled something. But the correct answer – which of course I was far too embarrassed to admit – was yes, I do. It was the novelty of it that got me, the feeling of creating something new, of being the first to hear it.

I just never got bored of it.

I’m still not bored of it today.