Salut! North

Sunshine, snow and the road from Paris to Prospect Terrace

The day after tomorrow, I shall climb on board an Etihad Airbus, hope for rather more leg room than Sir Richard Branson thinks is appropriate and fly home to Britain for Christmas and New Year.

This means leaving the sunshine of Abu Dhabi, a climate to which I have managed rather easily to adapt, for a week and a bit.

It is likely still to be gorgeous when I return - this is said by all the seasoned expats to be by far the nicest part of the year - and will remain so for a few more months until the onset of the traditionally fierce summer. And that will be a test of my powers of endurance; in place of temperatures currently hovering just below 30 degrees, we can expect a punishing 50.

In the much shorter term, I need to prepare for the sharper climes of home (well home-ish....I fear a trip north may be out of the question, forcing me to miss two chances to see Sunderland at home).

Bear in mind that our cat, Monette, having grown up as a chic Parisian apartment pet before taking happily to a life chasing lizards and crickets in the south of France, is already turning up her nose at grey, London skies and a distinct chill in the air.

But I am experienced at moving from hot to cold and vice versa. My return from honeymoon - that's a photograph taken by the Stanley News at Lanchester shortly before my wedding in 1971 - involved only a journey from Paris to the North East, but it felt when we made it as if we were passing through a succession of climate zones.

Of kindness and gaiety at Christmas

In Britain, Sir Elton John, George Michael and even the likeable Coronation Street character Sean benefit from the tolerant attitude towards homosexuality that has prevailed for several years. In France, no one bats an eyelid that the mayor of Paris and top male designers at the fashion shows are gay.

Back in the 1960s, though, the only political correctness was that men who fancied men were queers, bent, poofs (though I think the word we used then was actually puffs). It didn't matter that surveys occasionally estimated one British male in five to be homosexual or, indeed, that some of our Continental neighbours considered this statistic on the low side.

I shall call him Ernie, not his real name but borrowed from the only other man to make advances to me.

The cane and the Bunsen burner tube. That'll teach you....

King James I: within these walls...
Picture: pit-yacker

In the summer before we moved up from Timothy Hackworth (pictured) in Shildon, the bigger boys already at the grammar school in Bishop Auckland filled our hearts with terror.

The 11-plus safely passed, our places at King James I secured, we sat in the recreation ground between games of cricket and listened open-mouthed to tales of ferocious school fights that were broken up by prowling staff or prefects and led to equally ferocious canings.

Fighting was by no means the only offence that would steer hapless pupils towards an excruciating session in old Neddy Deans's study. But that's how things were in those days.

Years later, I reflected on this when my newspaper sent me to Ireland to interview women who had also been beaten, in their cases while incarcerated in bleak orphanages run by nuns. Decades on, they were demanding - and eventually won - some recognition from the Roman Catholic Church of the harsh treatment meted out to them.

My guess was that in the era in question, the early 1950s, you didn't need to be in such an institution to be clattered; a similar fate awaited most children wherever they went to school in the British Isles.

By the end of the decade, girls were much more likely to be spared. Even so, it depended entirely on which schools they attended.

Tin Tacks, as Timothy Hackworth (pictured left) was known, was a mixed school and everyone risked the cane, although oddly enough it was the prospect of having the event recorded in the Punishment Book that worried us most. The same was true at most local secondary modern schools. Did it really help, incidentally, to rub your hands in advance?

Our sisters faced nothing worse than detentions at the girls' grammar school across the playing fields from King James I. But for the boys, corporal punishment was part of daily life and it was applied by various teachers with escalating levels of severity.

The methods included slipperings - which actually meant being whacked with a size 10 plimsoll or bigger by the senior gym master, Les Rawe, or a younger colleague - and an improvisation favoured by one teacher who was nicknamed "Cosher" because he wielded a Bunsen burner tube.

If these were bad enough, being sent to the head was what we all dreaded. "The first two hurt like hell but then your arse is numb and you don't feel the rest," said one of the older lads marking our cards, and his words offered not the least reassurance.

A small world getting bigger

Salut! North may not quite be a week or so old, but its fame is growing.

My thanks to those at the outstanding site Shildon.net* who have already offered words of encouragement. Salut! North is not exclusively about Shildon - hence my choice of an image of Newgate Street, Bishop Auckland (above) - but that is where I grew up so do not be surprised to find the place mentioned rather a lot here.

In particular, may I mention one fellow Shildonian, who signs his messages Catweasle, for alerting me to an item about Salut! North in the Northern Echo, for which I worked hundreds of years ago?

One request I would make is for access to photographs of Shildon and south-west Durham for use with future postings here.

My immediate needs are for images of Old Shildon workingmen's club, the Dolphin Milk Bar or any other George Reynolds related photos, the recreation ground path, Dean St football ground, Busty Bank, Shildon station and tunnel top, the railway works and crossings, the No 1 bus servce, the Hippodrome and Essoldo, the industrial estate........I could continue this for ever.

Any help would be greatly appreciated (and acknowledged at Salut! North). I am not looking for photos taken by professionals unless it is known that they would grant permission for their reproduction on a modest blog.

For the image published at the top of this posting, I must offer gratitude to Ken, one of the brains behind Shildon.net, who has kindly agreed that I may reproduce any of his photographs. He needed to say so only once, and first results can be seen here and in my previous posting about wasted schooldays.

* The idea for my posting about my Bad Pupil days came from Shildon.net. Having chanced upon the site while trawling for local references, I found numerous mentions of King James I. Curious outsiders may not know that this was Stan Laurel's school, though the gap in their knowledge Hardy matters. I took the spellings of names from there, and tested them as best I could against memory and on the internet, having no relevant files or books from home out here in the Middle East. If you spot a howler, let me know.

Aces and diamonds in the heart of clubland

At workingmen's clubs dotted around the country, and in particular in the North East where every self-respecting town had at least one, a tradition took root in the late 1960s that may have been the inspiration for pop tribute bands.

Years after the hits dried up, British and American pop stars and groups would pop up in such institutions, providing welcome distraction for small town club goers if a slightly sad flipside to fame and fortune.

It is fair to guess that the high points of the careers of Bobby Vee and Del Shannon, pictured together above with due thanks to Bobby's web site, were not their separate appearances at New Shildon Club.

These were men who had been right at the top of their game, each with a string of hits many of us had listened to on crackly Radio Luxembourg reception under the blankets. What they made of Redworth Road and the railway crossings is not, so far as I know, recorded.

But I bet they both took away particular memories of their evenings there.
Del Shannon's encounter with the admirable but sometimes unbending nature of the WMC movement - I speak with affection since my late father was a long-serving secretary of the Old Shildon club - actually made the national press.

The Daily Mirror, possibly only in its northern editions, ran the story of the great man's arrival at the front door as that night's star turn.

"Where are your club cards?" growled the steward on duty at the entrance.

"But I'm the artist who's appearing here tonight," Del protested, perhaps struggling to suppress that famous falsetto from Runaway.

The steward was not impressed. "Aye," he said, "they all say that. As far as I am concerned, if you're not a member or an affiliate, you're not getting in unless someones signs you in."

Scraps of memory, memories of scraps

No one would raise an eyebrow if you said you'd bumped into a man from Delhi while in an Indian restaurant in Richmond, or Darlington or Shildon (unless they knew the only "Indian" restaurants in the town in question were actually Pakistani or Bangladeshi).

A chance encounter in Delhi with a couple from Swaledale, when ushered to their table for dinner, is slightly more unusual, especially if you then discover mutual acquaintances and even friends.

But what are the odds against sitting on the back of a bus in Jaipur and finding that the woman nearest to you not only comes from the same small North Country town but lived in the next street to your own?

North Country made

Main Street, Shildon
Picture: kanala_uk

Welcome to the first posting of a new website or, if you prefer, blog. Salut! North will be a home for items about the North East of England, the region where I grew up and which remains dear to my heart.

But let us begin with a confession. I was made a northerner, not born one.

In an act betraying serious lack of consideration, my mother gave birth to me not in south-west Durham, the part of the region where I grew up, but in a sedate resort of the kind to which most people go to die. I breathed my first air in Hove.

So that's the skeleton out of the cupboard without delay. My parents, who had lots of North Eastern family connections (mainly Ryhope, Tynemouth and parts of Newcastle), moved to Shildon only a few months into my life. It was the least they could do.

And there I stayed for my entire childhood and, indeed, into early adulthood.

When I moved away, it was first to Stanley, the north-west Durham one, and then to Darlington and finally to Newton Aycliffe. Marriage to a French lady who likes the North East but not as a place to live, soon led me back south - London, then Bristol, then London again.

In 2004, we moved to Paris. After three-and-a-half years spent there and in the south of France, we returned to London, but only for as long as it took for me to organise another departure, this time to Abu Dhabi. It is a long way from Shildon, though as you will discover in my very next posting, Shildon has a habit of catching up on you wherever you go.