5

A Ruff Business

Courtesy of the author

While I was in the Sea Scouts, Warren Young knew I was a Catholic in a Church of England and Catholics Scout Troop, then again, so was he. We were known as left footers in the North East.

He’d produced the Dunston Scout Gang Shows and he’d heard me sing, so he asked me if I would like to sing in The St. Joseph’s Church Choir. I really wasn’t interested until he mentioned that I would be paid one shilling and sixpence every week.

‘I would love to,’ I said.

And God had nothing to do with it, this was a cash deal.

He took me along to the choir practice on Wednesday night, and there were around sixteen youngsters like myself, about thirteen years old and upwards, and about twenty adults.

He asked me to sing for him and handed me a hymn sheet. I took a look and realized it was in Latin. Bye-bye one shilling and sixpence.

I said I couldn’t understand it and he smiled and said, ‘Neither does anyone else.’

Then he handed me a phonetically written one, ahh, this was better.

Dominus vobiscum and such, this made you sound really holy. Latin was a language only spoken by public school boys and priests.

It wasn’t a hymn I learned first, but something one of the older boys taught me, which goes:

Nil carborundum illegitimi.

Which, roughly translated, means ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down.’ A very important lesson in later life.

Everything in Latin or Italian sounds dignified and posh. Take, for instance, a Ferrari Testa Rossa, which means ‘Red Head’, but you just can’t call a Ferrari that. Or, how about a Quattroporte. It’s a beautiful name for a car, but it just means ‘Four Doors’. See what I mean?

Getting back to the choir practice, I sang ‘Oh Come, All Ye Faithful’ and the choirmaster must have been impressed because he handed me a hassock or a cassock, which, when you put it on, made you even holier. All I needed was the wings.

After about two weeks of practice, I was ready for my first gig: the eleven o’clock one-hour mass on the coming Sunday.

The Catholic mass was, to me, the most complicated way to worship a deity I had ever witnessed. The priest said things and the audience answered in monotonous drones. There was no joy in it, no one looked happy. Then again, God’s not that funny!

Then there were the altar boys who walked around the stage, sorry the altar, doing stuff like dusting the crucifix and polishing things. The priest pulled out this receptacle with a silver chain and tilted it from side to side and back and forward, with this foul-smelling smoke coming out of it. To me, it looked like voodoo but hey, money talks and bullshit is king. Then we sang something, which I think was a bit of a relief, more like a commercial break, so to speak. Then, just when you thought you were safe, the priest gathered his gang from the altar and walked down the aisle, spraying holy water on everyone. I tried to take a food stain off my cassock once with holy water and it didn’t work, so there you go.

Back they came to the stage and Pop Gunning brought out the box of crackers. I thought, great, a tea break. Sadly, he held one of them up to the heavens, said something exceptionally holy, and broke it in pieces, then everyone in the audience came for a piece and, while they ate, we sang. It took a while, but it killed some time . . . this was going on forever. I was getting dizzy with boredom, it surely had to end soon. I lost count of how many times people were standing up and sitting down, then kneeling down and then standing up again. It was bloody exhausting.

Somewhere in amongst all the action, Pop climbed into the pulpit to give a sermon, telling us all to be good and not to give in to the temptation of eating meat on a Friday, except spam because that wasn’t real meat. He told us of God’s wrath being cast upon us and that the badder you were on earth, the longer you would be in this place called purgatory till you were allowed into Heaven. He finished by saying that God loved us all, but he didn’t speak of the Holy Ghost. I suppose it’s because it’s not very unique being a ghost up there. Then he went back to the altar, poured himself a glass of wine and drank it all himself. I was impressed – he’d already done the eight o’clock and nine o’clock masses and was still steady on his feet.

It was his last orders and, with us singing at full volume, Pop and his gang left the stage, though no one applauded, which I think was unfair. I thought he was quite good.

My mother was there and she was very proud. She said I was the best singer there, which is what mothers do. However, two weeks later at practice the choirmaster announced to the whole choir that I would be Head Choir Boy and handed me a golden sash to put about my neck.

I thought, shit, that’s a lot of responsibility for someone who has no idea what the hell went on in a mass. I just followed everyone else, and now I would have to sing solo now and again. I wasn’t ready, and I knew it.

I was told that the Head Choir Boys got two shillings and sixpence. Wow, a promotion and a pay rise, all in the name of God. There was a price to pay, however. When practice was over, the deposed Head Choir Boy was waiting for me outside the church, and he was a big bugger. Let me tell you, there’s nothing scarier than an ex-Head Choir Boy whose voice has broken. He jumped me as soon as I got out the door and was systematically trying to knock the shit out of me when the choirmaster came out, kicked him in the arse and pulled him off, then told him that kicking the shit out of people is right out of the question on holy ground (tell the Crusaders that).

My greatest moment as a choir boy was at midnight mass, Christmas 1960. I sang ‘Silent Night’ solo. All lights in the church were out and it was candlelight only. It really was a beautiful place to be. My mother was there again, and she cried. It was magical. There was no applause, obviously, but there was a lot of sighing and ahhing.*

Not all of Warren Young’s ideas had such happy endings.

The example that immediately springs to mind – because it was such an unmitigated disaster – was the boxing tournament he once organized for our troop against the Sea Cadets from across the river in Scotswood. What you’ve got to bear in mind is that our troop was made up of schoolboys aged from ten to fourteen, while the Sea Cadets – a proper naval reserve force – was composed of sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds with biceps and tattoos. More to the point, they were from Scotswood, which was where young lads from Dunston went on a Friday or Saturday night . . . if they wanted to die. It was the toughest place in Newcastle, if not the entire North of England – home to the terrifying Tams family and various other Peaky Blinders-style gangs. Getting into a boxing ring with these lads, in other words, was absolute madness.

But I was a teenager now and up for anything – something Warren Young clearly liked in me – and I was probably feeling a bit tough after my victory over the thief at the dairy. So, I was one of the handful of idiots who raised their hands to volunteer to join our team, even though I’d never donned a pair of boxing gloves in my life.

A rigorous course of training followed . . . which consisted of exactly one practice round. Oh, and our troop had only two pairs of gloves, and the ones I got were bigger than my head, which meant I had to stuff them with newspaper to stop them flying off whenever I attempted a jab. Even when they were stuffed with newspaper, though, they still felt all wobbly and loose – and by the end of the round, I hadn’t managed to land a single punch. But by then, it was too late to back out.

When the big night finally arrived, the Scout hut was full of spectators, nearly all of them dads, including one Sergeant Johnson, a former boxer himself and connoisseur of the sport. He sat in the front row, scowling, arms folded. But the second I walked into the dressing room and saw those naval boys, I realized I was in very . . . very deep shit. The youngest of them couldn’t have been a day under sixteen, and they all had that cold, hard look of street-fighters who’d put you in the morgue over a bag of chips. I was so tiny and tender compared with them, in fact, I don’t even think it occurred to anybody that I’d be one of their opponents.

A few minutes later, in came the referee – a Cadet officer dressed in a Navy-issue white T-shirt – and we were each given a number and the name of the lad we’d be up against.

When my time came to step into the ring, I could barely move my legs I was so intimidated by the whole spectacle. The ropes. The bell. The church hall lights, a muddy moon colour, due to the cigarette smoke hanging from the ceiling. The first-aid man with a bucket in his hand – for what reason I had no idea. It was a vision from hell.

Then I set eyes on my opponent.

He was four years older than me, five-foot-eight, and looked like he was on work-release from prison. And, of course, he was decked out in all the proper gear, with black shorts and boxing shoes and gloves the right size, while I was there in my little school shorts and plimsolls and gloves stuffed with newspaper. Well, I’ve had a good life, I thought. At least I’ll go down swinging . . .

‘Oh, c’mon, ref – this is stupid,’ snarled the Sea Cadet when he saw me. ‘I’ll kill this little lad.’

The ref looked at me and hesitated. Oh, thank God, I thought, he’s a sensible man, he’ll put a stop to this. Then he shrugged and went, ‘Nah, he’ll be alright.’

‘Listen, son,’ said the much older kid, leaning in. ‘I’ll hit you once, then just fucking stay down.’

I nodded back, thinking, I’ve got to survive at least one round. I can’t go down with the first punch. I’ll be a laughing-stock. My old man will never look me in the eye again.

So, we touch gloves – DING DING! – and off I go, dancing around, Mohammed Ali-style, ducking and diving, using my speed and my featherweight size to my advantage. And I’m starting to think, y’know . . . I’m actually not too bad at this. I mean, maybe I can just waste time, run down the clock . . . wear the guy out.

Not that the Sea Cadet was moving very much.

He was just standing there, looking bored out of his mind, like he was trying to decide when to –

THUMP.

I woke up in the dressing room with a doctor leaning over me, asking how many fingers he was holding up.

‘How . . . many . . . rounds . . . did I last?’ I croaked.

‘Rounds?’ snorted the doctor. ‘Son, you barely lasted a whole second.’

Later that night, when I got home, my ma called out from the kitchen to ask how it went. Like most of the other Sea Scout mothers, she hadn’t wanted to go, because she couldn’t bear to see her little pumpkin get his brains rearranged by a sailor from Scotswood. Now she was terrified to come out of the kitchen to survey the damage.

‘Coulda been worse,’ I said, like I’d been stung on the tongue.

Then my dad walked in behind me and delivered his own verdict.

‘He couldn’t knock the skin off a rice pudding,’ he growled.

Looking back now, it’s hard to believe that I was lucky enough to become a teenager in 1960, of all years – the start of the greatest decade in history. I mean, talk about timing. If I’d been born just a few years earlier, my teenage years would have been the same as every other generation of Geordies since before the Second World War. It would have been all music hall songs like ‘Keep Yer Feet Still Geordie Hinny’ and ‘Blaydon Races’, no sex before marriage, and BBC variety shows. Instead, I was about to get treated to The Beatles and miniskirts and women’s liberation and E-Type Jags and missions to the moon. Although, to be fair, we also had to live with the Cold War and the ever-present threat of the atomic bomb.

You could feel the mood of the country change even before the 1960s began. Suddenly, the grinding poverty of the post-war period ended and a new, unfamiliar feeling set in . . .

Optimism.

My life changed too when I got a part as a child actor on Tyne Tees Television, appearing in various segments of the weekly One O’Clock Show. (I was small, so could play younger, and I was paid a fortune of five guineas – or just over £5 – per appearance. One of the producers had read about my Gang Show performance, which was how I’d been ‘discovered’.) The biggest production that I appeared in was a futuristic drama called In the Year 2000, and my one and only line was, ‘Daddy, what’s a cold?’ – because colds were supposed to have been eradicated by then. Aye, that’s how bright-eyed and innocent we were . . .

Meanwhile, just before the turn of the decade, my dad did something that would have been unthinkably bold just a few years before. One Saturday morning, he took me and Maurice to Byker, on the other side of Newcastle, and headed straight for a used-car garage called Northern Motors. I was in absolute shock. We were getting a car. My dad settled on a dark green Wolseley 6/90 with a long bonnet, six cylinders and the registration plate PBB96. An absolute beauty. The salesman wouldn’t even let him take it for a test drive – the most he would do was let him listen to the engine. But that was enough to seal the deal for a bank-breaking £195.

My dad didn’t even have a proper driving licence at the time. It was an army one, which qualified him to drive a three-ton truck in the Tunisian desert. He hadn’t driven anything since the war, in fact, so he was a bit rusty, to say the least. ‘Shurrup!’ he kept snapping at us as he attempted to operate the buttons and stalks and wind-up windows and – most troublesome of all – the column-shift gearbox, ‘I’m trying to drive!’

Half an hour later, he was sweating heavily and singing, ‘I’m lost, I’m lost, I don’t know where I am!’ at the top of his voice, with a demented look in his eyes. By the time we finally made it home – another hour later – he stumbled out of the car, gasping for breath, then walked the one and a half miles to his social club for a beer.

But we had a car parked outside our house! And it wasn’t the doctor’s or the rent man’s – it was ours. The moment my dad was gone, I climbed into the front seat and sat there until dinner time. Then after dinner, I stood in the front room and looked at it through the window. My dad kept it for only a couple of years, mind you – because by then the repairs, insurance, taxes and petrol had become too much.

After that, it was back to walking or buses.

He never owned another car – or drove again – in his life.

No sooner had I become a teenager than my schoolwork started to suffer. For years, I’d been top of the ‘A’ class. Then they created an ‘X’ class to stop the top ‘A’ kids getting bored, and I came top of that too. But then suddenly I lost interest and slid from No. 1 to No. 6 . . . and after that, my education was pretty much a lost cause. Music being the culprit.

It didn’t help that the school was bulging at the seams with forty-eight kids to a class, meaning the teachers spent more time trying to keep the peace than helping us learn. Or that secondary-modern kids almost never went on to take A levels anyway – you were out on your ear at the age of fifteen – giving you no reason to try harder.

I even managed to run into a spot of bother at the Sea Scouts, if you can believe it.

The trouble started with a ‘field test’ that I had to take to reach the highest Sea Scout rank of first class. This involved me and another Scout – my best pal George Beveridge – going to a campsite called Beamish in County Durham, where we were supposed to capture and cook a wood pigeon according to a set of very specific instructions. We had from Friday afternoon after school until Sunday afternoon to get this done, and we had to walk the seven miles or so from Dunston to Beamish, because if you took the bus or hitched a lift, you were instantly disqualified.

So, off we went in the beautiful sunshine – just kidding, it was pissing it down – and when finally we got there, we had to spend a miserable hour pitching our tent in the dark.

Neither of us had a sleeping bag – they were far too expensive in those days – so we had to make do with some blankets held together with safety pins. And it was freezing cold and wet – and we hadn’t brought enough food – but we were so knackered, we slept.

The next morning, it was time to make our pigeon trap – basically, just leaves, string and twigs with a door held open by another twig and a bit of bread inside as bait. When a hungry wood pigeon wandered in there to have a bit of a nibble, you pulled out the twig, and the bird would be trapped, so you could wring its neck. Cooking the thing was a whole separate operation that involved creating a ‘mud oven’ in the bank of a river. But, until we’d caught our bird, we weren’t going to waste our time worrying about that.

So, we made the trap, set it up . . . then sat there and watched.

And watched.

And watched.

Before we knew it, it was mid-afternoon. By which time we were starting to ask ourselves why any wood pigeon in its right mind would choose to live at a campsite where hungry Sea Scouts in short trousers kept showing up to create wood pigeon traps.

By four o’clock, we were still out of luck, and starting to get worried, because an examiner would be coming at noon the next day to look at our trap and taste our wood pigeon. And we both really, really wanted to become first-class Sea Scouts. So, we said, sod this, let’s walk to the nearest sign of civilization – which turned out to be an old colliery town called Stanley – and see if we can get any help.

In a massive stroke of luck, right there on the high street in Stanley was a poulterer’s shop – like a butcher’s shop, but one that deals only in poultry and game. So, we went in and asked the farmer-looking guy in a flat cap behind the counter how much a wood pigeon would cost. He told us the price, we checked to see if we had enough money between us – we did – so we decided right then and there to just buy one.

‘Do you want it plucked?’ asked the guy. ‘Because that’ll be an extra tuppence.’

‘Nooo!’ we cried in unison, knowing that the Sea Scout handbook called for the bird to be cooked with its feathers on. Having a plucked bird would be a dead fucking giveaway.

‘. . . are you sure, lads?’ asked the poulterer. ‘It’s messy work, plucking a bird.’

‘Oh yes, sir, we’re sure.’ And off we went, back to the campsite for an early night.

After a good night’s kip, we set about cooking the bird we’d ‘caught’ at the poulterer’s shop, making sure to follow the instructions in the Sea Scout handbook to the letter.

First, we had to chop its head off, which wasn’t a very pleasant task. Then off came its feet. Then we went down to the bank of the river that ran through the campsite – Beamish Burn it’s called – and dug two holes in the mud, one above the other. In the bottom hole, we put some pieces of wood and kindling and created a fire, and in the top one we put our wood pigeon. Then we closed up the top hole with mud, basically creating a kind of makeshift clay oven. The cooking time was about two to three hours, and when that was over, we got our billycans out and filled them with some carrots and potatoes and water and boiled them up over the fire. By this time, our meal was just about ready to be served.

Finally, the examiner turned up to judge our work.

It was a huge moment. If he gave us the thumbs up, we’d officially become first-class Sea Scouts. We’d have reached the very pinnacle of Scouting achievement.

‘Patrol Leader Johnson,’ barked the examiner, ‘show me your pigeon.’

‘Aye-aye, sir,’ I said, producing this lump of baked mud with a dead bird inside it.

‘Hmm,’ he said, peering at it sceptically, ‘. . . and your side dishes?’

‘Here you go, sir,’ said George, showing him a little tin plate with our veggies on it. Naturally, we’d boiled the living shit out of them until they’d turned to a greyish mush.

‘Very nicely prepared,’ nodded the examiner. Then he took the mud lump from me and cracked it open with his field knife, like you’d crack open a coconut. And what do you know . . . there inside was some beautifully cooked wood pigeon breast – red and gamey, almost like lamb – with the feathers and skin separated naturally thanks to the heat of the oven, just like the handbook had said they would be.

I couldn’t believe it.

‘We did it!’ I mouthed to George. He nodded and made the thumbs-up sign in reply.

So, the guy sits down on a log, cuts out the meat, puts it on the tin plate with the boiled veggies, and starts wolfing it down. And judging by the noises he’s making, he’s loving it.

‘Do you have any salt?’ he asked, his mouth full of veggies and pigeon.

‘Excuse me?’ replied George.

‘Salt,’ he said, making a little salt-shaker motion.

‘Oh yes, sir! Here you go, sir!’ said George, doing the honours. But the guy had already just about cleaned his plate. I looked at George, grinning, and he grinned back at me, then –

CRACK.

Suddenly the examiner was holding his jaw and howling in pain, in a state of great distress, trying to pull something out of his mouth, something he’d just bitten down on, hard. Then he spat his mouthful out onto the plate and started poking around in it with his finger until he found what he was looking for. He held it up for us to see.

George and I squinted at the tiny black speck in his hand.

It was . . . ah . . . this could be a problem.

A shotgun pellet.

‘Was it hard to catch this pigeon, eh, lads?’ hissed the examiner, seething with rage.

‘How did that get in there?’ spluttered George.

‘The bird must have been shot . . . right before it walked into the trap!’ I gasped. ‘What are the odds?!’

‘Enough!!’ bellowed the examiner. ‘You cheated on this test! You’ve let down your troop . . . and you’ve let down the Scouts! You should be ashamed of yourselves! I’ll be recommending to your Scoutmaster that you’re both dishonourably discharged!’

This was a serious business.

We returned to Dunston with knots in our stomachs, feeling very sorry for ourselves. I hated the thought of letting Warren Young down after everything he’d done for me. And I certainly didn’t want a dishonourable discharge from the Sea Scouts on my record when the time came to start looking for a job. I mean, who the fuck ever gets thrown out of the Sea Scouts? I could already hear my dad’s voice echoing in my head – ‘You’ll end up sweeping the roads!’

At our next troop meeting, we had to go and explain ourselves to our Commodore, a retired naval captain in his seventies who, for some murky reason, lived in a room above a pub in Birtley.

But the strange thing was . . . he didn’t really seem to care.

Neither did Warren Young.

‘Don’t worry, lads, no one in the history of that test has ever caught a wood pigeon,’ he told us. ‘You’re the first ones who at least showed a bit of initiative. We’re always telling you to be prepared . . . and you were. I mean, aye, you should have been honest with the examiner . . . he’s going to need a fair bit of dental work. But as I said to him myself, a Sea Scout can’t learn without making mistakes!’

George and I just stood there in silence. Surely, we weren’t going to get off this easily?

‘So, er . . . we won’t be dishonourably discharged, then?’ ventured George.

‘No, of course not!’ snorted Warren Young. ‘The examiner was just very cross.’

‘So . . . we’ll be, er . . . honourably discharged?’ I asked.

‘Noooo, no, no, no, no,’ said Warren Young, laughing. ‘We wouldn’t discharge a Sea Scout over something as silly as that! And I think you’ve learned your lesson, right lads?’

We both nodded vigorously.

‘Good,’ said Warren Young, suddenly growing serious, ‘because the decision’s been made to put on another Gang Show – and I’m going to be needing both of your services . . .’

A few weeks later, Warren Young did me his last and biggest favour.

I knew that he worked as a draughtsman at C. A. Parsons & Co., which was based over the river on Shields Road in Heaton. It was a huge place, covering a hundred acres, with a railway terminal next to it and tracks running straight into the factory buildings. The only way you could really appreciate the scale of it was to see it for yourself. It’s what people meant when they called Britain the ‘workshop of the world’.

I’d always assumed that getting any kind of job there would be impossible. It was well known that they took on only sixty or so apprentices a year – from all over the North East – so the only way to get in through the door was to be the best of the best.

But Warren Young insisted that I apply, and he promised that he’d put in a good word for me.

‘Brian, son,’ he said, ‘you might not have got into grammar school, but you’re a bright lad, you’re full of energy, and you’re a hard worker and, most important of all, you’re always willing to try new things – whether it’s stepping into a boxing ring, catching a wood pigeon or dressing up as a Beverley Sister at the Gang Show. And don’t worry . . . I won’t mention any of those things in your reference letter.’

So, I took his advice and applied, expecting to hear nothing back. Then I got called in for an interview . . . and a few weeks later, a letter arrived that made my ma burst into tears.

I’d been invited to become a Parsons apprentice, which meant five years of technical school and on-the-job training, followed by a union-protected job for life – as long as I didn’t fuck anything up. Even my old man was over the moon. Or at least, when I told him the news, he grunted a bit more enthusiastically than he usually did.