Salut! North

The dignity of labour (1): Shildon Shops

My first job, if you do not count paper rounds, babysitting or doing the shopping for neighbours, was in the Loading Bay at the railway wagon works known to everyone for miles around as Shildon Shops.

Do I remember that first day as if it were yesterday? Have I remained on close terms with the people I worked with? Does the actual date I started the job spring readily to mind? Not, I am sorry to say, so much as a bit of it.

Reliable memories of what I did each day, how much I was paid or who I met - all the important details of anyone's entrance into the world of work - have long since vanished.

How I envy those people who can delve into their minds and extract precise figures for pocket money, the size of their first pay packets and what they spent on earliest major purchases - train set, bike, car, whatever. My memory, excellent though it is in respects that sometimes surprise me, is nevertheless highly selective.

The figure of £1.50, or thirty bob as I'd have called it then, does suggest itself as the weekly reward from one of the paper rounds. I know my first property purchase was a flat in Greater London for about £9,000 and I even remember raising the 10 per cent deposit by selling a freshly purchased Vauxhall Viva, the only car I have ever owned from new. It had only a thousand or so miles on the clock, though if you looked carefully you could just about make out the imperfections of bodywork repairs that sadly became necessary after some clot ran into me as I drove it home from the showroom.

At an early Salut! North posting, I also took a stab at the price of cod and chips from Robinson's fish shop at the top of Diamond Street. But I would not be especially surprised to hear that the passing of years had distorted even that recollection.

And I certainly could not put an accurate figure on my first salary even if life depended on it. Nor, indeed, do I recall with anything approaching conviction how much I earned when I moved to subsequent jobs. There are cluttered files in which I may have stored some documentary evidence, but they are in the basement of my home. If such paperwork does exist, I have not set eyes on it for years and my home, incoveniently, is thousands of miles from here in France.

Angels of the North (1)

Ann, Barbara, Anthea, Dorothy, Christine, Rosemary, Margaret, Trish, Irene, Belinda. And the dark-haired beauty at the Redworth bus stop.

This is not a Salut! North version of that harmlessly silly song about having "a little bit of Monica in my life/a little bit of Erica by my side......". It is just the list of girls who occupied places of varying affection in my heart when I was single.

Even if you add a couple of missing names, it is not a particularly long list by the standards of today or, for that matter, the not quite so liberated 1960s. It becomes shorter still if you filter out one or two that scarcely qualify for inclusion as girlfriends.

My friend Len had much greater success. We'd prowl the rec path on spring and summer evenings, giving the eye to - and hoping to get it back from - any pretty girls that came our way. Actually, it was Len doing most giving of the eye. With perfectly good reason, he would tell me that when it came to chatting up, I had neither boldness nor finesse.

One day soon......

.......I intend to find time to write and post some more memories. The pressure of work is building, I am no longer wifeless in Abu Dhabi and everything must wait its turn.

In the meantime, feel free to let me know what you think of the new design - appropriately, if rather grandly, called Vicksburg Desert.

Programmed to fail

Life, for most of us, is a messy mixture of success, failure and downright ordinariness.

There is no special desire on my part to dwell on the middle bit of that list; it is just that when I think of my young days in the North East, the failures stand out rather more prominently than the humdrum, and much more so that success.

That introduction could have led into any one of several topics. Schooldays, despite what has already appeared at Salut! North, could be explored further. So could the process by which I came to realise I was unlikely, after all, to play for Sunderland. What about those feeble early attempts to attract girlfriends?

All in good time. For now, let me tell the sad rags-to-rags story of the North Eastern Programme Club.

Maybe these Scottish programmes would have sold
Picture: Lutrus

Growing up

Salut! North is growing up.

Sixteen items posted.....it is what you have seen it become and there is much, much more to say. Each time I pour out one set of reminiscences, I know two things will happen.

First? My sister, Sandra, will write in (or to me) from Middlesbrough - where, unforgivably for any Durham lass, she has reinvented herself as a Boro fan - to correct my memory. Well perhaps that was harsh, since in truth she knows not the first thing about football and can therefore just about be excused for not supporting Sunderland (and probably thinks, in any case, that Boro still play at Ayresome Park).

The other thing that happens? Some other memory from childhood, youth and early adulthood streams back into mind. So this site has a long way to go. You will hear - inshallah (I am, after all, in inshallah country) - about girlfriends, elocution lessons, play, fights, jobs and much more besides. That list may well change, grow longer or get shorter.

But please remember - Irene from the Netherlands included, before I say "Irene, goodnight, Irene" - that I am helping to launch a new newspaper, an unbelievable project on more than one level in the age we live in. It is a huge challenge and a huge job; I do not have time to do that job AND write as often as I would like on my various websites.

My wife joins me (finally) in Abu Dhabi this weekend; she deserves some time too, and not only because she has packed a rolling pin to bring as hand baggage.

Friday - tomorrow - is the start of the weekend here and I may well have something to add then. You will find more in due course, if only you can bear to be patient and keep coming back. Salut!

Wet chips and Wate-on

No bones were broken. I was left grazed and dusty, not bleeding. There was, unfortunately, no cause to stay off school and counselling hadn't even been invented.

But it was still a middlingly unpleasant experience, being pounced on in the dark, pushed and jostled by two or three other boys and left feeling sorry for myself on the ground as they ran off laughing.

My crime, aged all of 11, was to be caught in possession of grammar school uniform while carrying a briefcase that even a bunch of louts could see was probably on its way to or from a piano lesson.

If only they'd known how bad a grammar school pupil I was, how hard I was applying myself to the sort of under-achievement that could have only one outcome, explusion, they might have spared me. But no, at that moment on the path that leads down from the King Willie to the railway tunnel top in Shildon, I was a "grammar school snob" and that was reason enough for their half-hearted assault.

Changing places: from Provence to the Tees

If you'd been the woman in Stockton, you might have thought Christmas, birthday and small lottery win had all arrived at once.

You could leave your home and teaching job in cold, damp Teesside and move to the beautiful southern French city of Nimes. It didn't seem possible, but they'd found someone there who was willing to come to Stockton.

It happened. And six years later, Flossie Malavialle is still in the North East, happily settled in the West End of Darlington and combining teaching (supply these days) with a useful singing career, applying her outstanding voice to pretty much any kind of music. British influences range from the Beatles to Vin Garbutt, French ones from Edith Piaf to Jacques Brel (well, he was Belgian but you know what I mean).

But enough of the Flossie Malavialle story. It is being told elsewhere in the little Salut! empire.

Read what she thinks of the North East and north-eastern folk (not just the music) at my main site Salut!. And if my synopsis of her musical adventures strikes a chord, see the first part of my interview with her - plus a YouTube clip - at Salut! Live.

The singer and the song; death by strangulation

Del Shannon has a lot to answer for. No, I am not talking about the hurt pride of the Shildon workingmen's club steward who didn't want to let him in without membership cards. This is more altogether more serious.

If anyone in the world was responsible for making me believe I might be able to sing, it was Del.

You can at least admire my ambition. There were so many singers of the age whose hits I could have chosen and whose voices would have been a lot easier to copy, giving me a sporting chance of stringing together a few notes and staying in tune. But who did I have to decide I would try to mimmick? None other than the master of falsetto.

No wonder poor Paul Younghusband talks of never properly recovering from the ordeal of living next door when, years after my attempts to become a Del Shannon soundalike, I took to practising folk songs. "My poor ears," Paul reports in his response to my item on the club trip, "were never the same."

The club trip

By neither appearance nor disposition was Ernie Randall an obvious choice of secretary for a workingmen's club in the North East of England. When he opened his mouth, any lingering doubt vanished.

How could a Cockney, let alone one who had never clocked on for so much as a single shift at Shildon Shops (the railway works) but was the cutting room manager at the Northern Clothing factory, occupy such a position?

But he did, for several years. He did the job not only diligently and with obvious enthusiasm but, so far as I ever heard, with some distinction.

Despite being a Londoner and having a white collar job, he was a good club secretary, and he even had Club and Institute Union honours to prove it.

That neat little world map in the bottom right hand corner of this page may last only as long as the free trial. Then they'll tell me the impossible figure I'd have to pay to keep it, and Salut! North will revert to a more mdoest arrangement.

Picture: Blue Blanket

But use it while it is there. It gives a heartening snapshot of the geographical reach of this little site after such a short time in existence.

Even when you exclude all the visits from Abu Dhabi - it seems I am recorded each time I dive beneath the bonnet to write something new or fiddle with something already there - you see that your fellow readers may be found all over Britain, in north America and Continental Europe. There is even the odd appearance of a visitor in deepest Africa.

All are welcome. I sincerely hope my musings on the North East offer something amusing, entertaining or just interesting. More are to be found at Salut! Sunderland, of course, and even from time to time at Salut! and Salut! Live, and there could be occasional overlap as the four sites continue to develop.

How much time I will have to update them as my new job in Abu Dhabi becomes ever more demanding is open to question. But wherever they lead, and even I do not know the answer to that, they are here to stay.

Please accept my very best wishes for a terrific Christmas and every happiness and success in 2008.