3H, c.1979 - back row - John Stevenson, Chris Boffey, Jon Penny, Chris Cousins, Eddie Hoare, Nick Watson, Dave Houghton, Vicki Lowe, Julia Edwards, Sarah Baker, Clare Barker. Liz Churchill, Virginia Scott, Andrea Schofield, Margaret Pratt, Wendy Leek, Micky Barker, Chris Metcalf, Simon Newton, Gary Walker, Richard Boese, Stuart Smith, David Turtle, front row, L>R, Debbie Barker, Heather Grey, Julie Norton, Ruth Wilkes, Mary Langdon, Fiona Glynn, Ann Tyas, Veronica Stead, Helen Mould, Clare Walker, Louise Goodall, form teacher Mark Hatherley (Biology)
Yeadon. as best as i can work it out, this was the boundary. in class terms, the working-class 'zone' spread from all of Yeadon up into Rawdon as far as the top of Batter Lane where new and larger housing with a different class of resident extended through the rest of Rawdon right down into Horsforth. class isn't a hard and fast thing.
an autobiography
2016
these are the memories of my life so far. i am 50 and have written this in sporadic bursts of energy with a not very organised way of going about things. there is some repetition. there are lists. there are large gaps which i have vaguely promised myself i will fill at some point. from here, right now, that doesnt look likely. i cant be going back into that past too often anymore. it was all about the love of a girl and the tyranny of my family and i have wrestled much of that out of my system. going back just brings it alive again and really i know, however much it demands my attention, that it is a dead end and i will not find happiness there. i may however find enlightenment and the thought of that is something i cant help but follow. in the meantime, there is plenty of interest here. i was dealt some colourful cards and the others became colourful in time.
EARLY DAYS, CHAPEL ALLERTON, LEEDS 1966
i was born and then given away, the bastard son of a feckless middle-class factory owner and a divorced working-class barmaid. i was adopted a few weeks after birth at the Folloden nursing home, 4, Allerton Park Leeds, an institution facilitating the transition of infants from the wombs of badly calculating single moms to the arms of childless strangers. it was also one of only 50 approved abortion clinics in the uk at the time. it was a large residential house, built perhaps in the 30s, on a leafy crescent and stood suspiciously behind a large hedge. someone said the place had burned down. certainly it's not there anymore, like much of the past. in its place there is a block of architecturally repulsive flats for young aspirational professionals. no going home for me.
the Fallodon nursing Home, Chapel Allerton, Leeds
my adoptive mother worked at Fallodon for a short while, looking after the children in the hope that one day she could leave with one. and this is what happened. i was born at the home on 27 april 1966 and the adoption papers were signed in october. i assume i stayed in care for these first 6 months of my life, but i haven't broached the question with my parents and could have been living with them for most of this time.
my birth mother, Pauline Lilian Prince, saw me twice before never seeing me again. she was dead before i found out about her many years later. she booked into the nursing home presumably to avoid the stigmatising looks and whispers of the NHS ward but it was an expensive business for a mother who had already given away two children because of her effectively single life and poor income as a lowly barmaid. she was the life and soul of the party, who had at some point been a Go Go dancer in a cage in a nightclub in Leeds. later, behind the bars of her own pubs, she wore incredible wigs and fostered an atmosphere liked by transvestites. desperate to leave home where she lived with her parents and her 13 brothers and sisters, she was married in her early 20s to a quiet stay-at-home sort but was soon having an affair with John Arnold, the smartly dressed factory owner's son with the flash car who liked a drink. he was 6'2", she was 5'0". i imagine them laughing a lot, the bar between them, smoke and the smell of beer. Pauline flirting, John being funny and monied. somehow the question of infidelity was met and overcome.
Pauline Lilian Prince (nee Rothera), my birth mother, who had a fondness for wigs
it didn't end in laughter. i was the last of Pauline and John's three children, all bastards, all given away, all tools it seems to me which Pauline used to try and get John to marry her. it's a testament to his character that he kept refusing this kind of blackmail. Pauline would possibly have still been popping out kids until the end but John met a younger barmaid, got her pregnant at the same time as i was in the womb, and married her. she was rounding out but Pauline was not happy.
she went on to sue her ex partner for 'breach of promise' because he'd allegedly proposed marriage and then run off with another woman. she recovered costs for her maternity stay (£60) by settling out of court with both their photographs appearing on the front of the Yorkshire Post because it was rare for anyone to attempt such a suit. all this was going on about the time John's new Irish wife was about to give birth to my half brother John Michael. the Arnold family had a tradition of naming their first born son's John Michael and this was the name given to my elder full brother, John and Pauline's first born. so John senior ended up with two son's named John Michael. what kind of mind can devise that sort of thing? it surely requires completely erasing the memory of the first child. and for what? familial pride?
John Arnold senior was a public school educated factory owner's son with a good school cricket average. He went to Stonyhurst in Lancashire, a long established Jesuit educational place with strict rules and grand pretensions. He used this religious indoctrination as the excuse for not marrying the protestant Pauline, a laughable piece of moral shallowness and chicanery which bagged him the younger, prettier barmaid. Pauline was 32 in 1966, and had had 3 kids. John's new wife was in her early 20s and throught their affair had had none. John had a small bungalow on an estate in Otley where he lived briefly with Pauline in the mid 60s. She moved out when she found out about the new woman. until he got married, John paid an allowance to his eldest son (who lived with his grandmother) which enabled the boy to go to private school in Leeds. when the new, legitimate John Michael arrived, the allowance stopped and the elder brother was shut out. the younger brother, no longer the heir to a flourishing business, went to the local grammar school in Otley, which he started, unbeknownst to either of us, at the same time as i was starting at the Rawdon comprehensive 5 miles down the road.
Stonyhurst School, alma mater of my birth father
my birth father at Stonyhurst, back row, centre with light jacket
John and Pauline, roughly the same age, probably in the late 1950s
The Arnold family had moved to Leeds from St Helens at the turn of the C20th. great grand father Arnold had worked in the Pilkingtons glass factory there and had been sacked for being a militant - reading the daily newspaper to his fellow workmates. he set up his own glass cutting business, a craftsman's enterprise making shaped pieces of glass for fine furniture and engraved mirrors. the business passed to his son and then, in the 70s, to my birth father and his brother who watched as the market disappeared and the business sank, ultimately folding in the early 80s.
in many ways i was, from the beginning, the embodiment of misery, deceit, desertion and betrayal. what else could Pauline see when she looked into my infant face? before we went our separate ways, she saw me twice - which was just enough time to be sure of her decision and to name me Ian Prince. i was then left in the crib and mummy was gone forever, suitcase in hand, sadness or bitterness perhaps covering her plain 34 year old face. my birth father never saw me and he was dead before i had chance to rectify this fact many years later. to him i was the family embarrassment, the religious abomination, the practical problem.
my birth father, John Arnold
14 SOUTHVIEW CRESCENT, YEADON, 1966
eventually i was given into the care of a childless couple, Alan and Elsie Watson, a sales rep from Dewsbury (carpet pattern books) and an accounts clerk from Glashoughton who gave up her job to become a full-time housewife and mother. one of the first things they did was change my name to Nicholas Frazer Watson. and so a baby moved from the city to the burbs, to be cradled from now on in the all-embracing arms of working-class myth-makers.
my first family home in the outside world was an estate semi in a grim northern suburb of Leeds. i was loved and dressed in the cleanest newest clothes. somewhere at some point conversations were had and a secret was begun. i would never be told the story of my beginnings.
the sun shone and there were visiting aunts, paddling pools in the back yard and an excellent collection of period baby clothes. at this point i was an only child, christened a protestant and given a shiny silver cup with my italicised name on it as a token of someone else's religious aspirations. as a reaction to my spiritual maltreatment, i began eating coal out of the coal scuttle and was photographed 'reading' the newspaper by proud, laughing parents. i had a large head for a baby, dark hair and an averagely pleasing face. i had blue eyes. all these features coincided with those of my new adoptive father, Alan Watson, a fact which, along with my grandmother's facial mole, contrived to persuade me that i was in fact their child. this was a question i was asking myself at age 8 or 9 and wouldn't get a truthful answer to until i was 17 or 18.
at some point in my first year or so i had a hernia operation on my right side. it's said that 5% of babies are born with this defect and surgery is common. i've always favoured that part of my body and occasionally wondered at the scar and the pain of the child.
of course i remember none of this so it didn't matter much that we didn't stay long at this first home, moving instead 3½ miles south to a suburban estate of comfortable semis with large gardens in Horsforth, a place that had good schools and council houses pushed to the periphery. it represented a rung up on the class ladder or at least on the ladder of accumulation and wealth.
34 VICTORIA MOUNT, HORSFORTH 1967-80
a 60s semi-detached on a long suburban road with a slight gradient, great for riding bikes and playing football. my baby brother Jerome Mark Watson arrived here in 1968. my parents called him 'Jump', he called himself Jerome Mark Frazer Watson, everyone else eventually called him Jez apart from the spiv over the road who called him Jerry, much to the annoyance of my parents who had a close friend of the same name die in a car crash around that time.
we had a real fire in the livingroom, a wide staircase which turned back on itself, two large and one smaller bedrooms, a kitchen, a room for a chest freezer, a livingroom and, when the conservatory was built, a front room that was never used tho it did house a large plastic-smelling white leatherette swivel chair and the stereo which i infrequently used. we had an enclosed porch where my dad grew geraniums, a strong smelling place superheated by the full sun on the large pains of glass. famously, over the garage at the front of the house was the small but memorable sign, 'the Watsons'. it was carved in slate, a memento from a Welsh visit which had resulted in my dad dislocating his shoulder trying to pull ironwork out of a slate dump with one hand. we were driven 20 miles to hospital in an ambulance, in fact it was an estate car with a siren, with my dad moaning in the back. his shoulder was never the same and he dislocated it twice more after that - once in the pool at Guiseley, where he could quite possibly have drowned, another time getting up from a sunlounger at Ilkley outdoor pool. the nameplate, the geraniums and the horde of stolen farm equipment made my dad, i see now, a little eccentric even tho by day he was a shirt and tie wearing businessman with a raft of very conformist habits. this tended to make me and my brother embarrassed and self-conscious because iof the reactions of others tho for myself i had no objection to geraniums or ironwork planters.
soon after our arrival in the new house, with my mother out of the room, i picked up the poker by the wrong end and burned a stripe across the palm of my hand. i then tried on some adult shoes and, shuffling along the landing, fell headlong down the stairs. we had a big garden with patio areas, lawn, a shed, a greenhouse and sundry bits of ironwork which my klepto dad had stolen from farmer's fields over the years to use as garden planters. a pig trough, a full size cauldron, milkchurns. all painted black or white or a combination of both. we had 3 apple trees and, at one point my dad built an aviary at the back of the garage. his birds escaped somehow. parrots in the trees of Horsforth at least until the winter came. this was a great environment for my dad to practice his gardening and also his peculiar brand of jerry built brick laying. we had large rose bushes which i used to make perfume for my mum, a small pond under the trees which was always stagnant because it was full of leaves and a stone hut with a floor maybe 6' square which my dad built for no apparent reason as it was always empty.
my immediate circle of friends on Victoria Mount were the Thomas kids who lived at 31 - Sian, Lynne and Steven - the Hodgson twinnies at 32 - Neil (elder) and Chris - for a while the Hurst brothers, Dave and Johnny - also known as RJ or 'rubber' - at 33 and Dave Gaunt, a couple or three years older than me who lived in the next street. tall, skinny, camp, very funny. my mum said she could never tell the twinnies apart but to me they looked nothing alike. Clare Middleton - she could sit on her hair and had double-jointed bendy knees - and her brothers Richard, Hugh and Guy lived at 35. they weren't allowed to play on the street and were hothoused at home which finally paid academic dividends but undeniably played minor havoc with at least one sibling's social adjustment. the naming of children in that house was also interesting. would you call it heraldic? medieval? old english aristocratic?
there were occasional playmates such as Alan Bryce from next door who had a pneumatic spud gun, Philip Atkinson from down the street who had large wingnut ears, large enough to distress him so that he resorted to pin-back surgery and John Holdsworth, an ordinary kid who later got his teenage girlfriend pregnant. there was Kimberley Saphire Jane Holt, a predatory buxom girl, sexually precocious, at least in conversation, who had wiry dark hair. she hung aropund with her neighbour from up the street, Amanda Thornton, her beautiful friend who wore jeans with a 70s lattice of denim under the belt buckle. i kissed Kimberley in a sunny field of long grass for 3 minutes 15 seconds in a competition with Philip and Amanda who followed up with 5 minutes and 12 seconds. i had been given a stopwatch as either a christmas or birthday present and this was the use to which it was put. once Philip had beaten our record he started to try and unbutton Amanda's jeans changing the mood from daring co-operative sport to one of depressing sexual assault. she fought him off as Kimberley and i stood motionless for half a minute and went away sullenly.
amazingly there was a kid about 10 doors up called Nicholas Frazer Wilkinson. he lived next door to a girl who we watched in her bedroom from behind the night-time garden wall on the street. she knew we were there. we were maybe 6 or 8 years old. further across Horsforth there were other friends from school who i occasionally visited.
there were also quite a few kids at the top of the street - strangely, few between us and them - who we knew from school but didn't much play with - Lee Farrer, Mark Bennett, Ian 'Tubby' Moore, Chris Hopkinson, Amanda's step-brother, Paddy Hoosan and others. once my brother and i truied to dig a swimming pool in the field with Tubby Moore at the back of his house. we'd maybe dug out 10 square feet down to a depth of a foot when Ian had a temper fit and threw the spade at my brother. it whirled thro the air and that was the end of the pool.
there was also Ian Burns, a tall kid known as 'I' (pronounced 'E') or simply 'Burns' from the far end of the Newlaithes estate who had grown up in Australia before moving to Leeds aged 8 or 10. he told me about his underage sexploits in Oz and how he'd collected car aeriials by snapping them off cars and had a whole pile of them. he invited me round to see his old english sheepdog.
Burns laughed like a maniac and was good for adventures such as the 'grand national' hedge hopping run which began on Victoria Walk and headed downhill for 1/4 mile over some monster hedges which divided long narrow gardens. one summer dusk, Burns was leading the charge and began clambering over a 12' privet near the end of the run. the plan was that he lay on top of the monster bush and pull us smaller kids up one by one. instead he was collared by an angry householder who we couldn't see from the other side of the verdure. Ian protested that he was looking for a ball which i always thought was quite convincing and quick thinking of the first order but he was disbelieved and got into some kind of hot water. later he got fulminating because we'd all run off when we heard he was caught.
i tried the national one more time when i was 17 or 18. for some reason i was on the street and drunk, a long way from my bed when i decided to give it a go. on the second fence i fell and crashed nose first into a cold frame. i picked myself up slowly, gave up the game and left defeated and in pain but no more sober.
start of the grand national on victoria walk
we played in the park where we crawled under the wooden cricket hut and found old balls and lost wickets. there was pitch and putt and a small shop selling drinks which hired out clubs and balls. i was chastised by a woman as i walked into the ladies aged 7 or 8 because i'd been used to going in there with my mum. there were rocks and bushes for playing hide and seek and a tennis court which gave me my first and last taste of the game. other adventures included making a petrol bomb out of sundry chemicals in Dave's dad's garage, mixing them in a jam jar and taking it to the field for a test. we weren't sure what to do next and neither of us thought to light a rag in the top so we just launched it at a wall in the hope it would explode. Dave gave me my first cigarette when i was about 9. smoked in the field near the mound where i later pissed with john holdsworth and where parents dumped their grass cuttings, it being at the end of a ginnel onto the street. the grass grew long in this field and was never cut. we used to crawl through it on summer days making tunnels where we couldn't be seen. we had a sex appreciation society (SAS) which for me mostly centred on trying to get closer to the feminine volcano that was Lynne Thomas. nothing was achieved in this club except perhaps a lot of talk. further down the field where the grass was shorter, we played football and sometimes cricket. one day, with Steven as wicketkeeper, i ran in to bowl. the ball went past the stumps and he dived to one side, coming up momentarily with horror and dog shit all over his face. another time he got whacked on the shin with the ball which left him hopping about, a tuft of blonde hair flopping energetically with the anguished movement. he seemed to blame me. i ran away, frightened by this demented spectre. we stole berries from the Rowan tree t the end of the Holdsworths's drive and threw them at each other in the street, much to the anger of Mrs Holdsworth.
we stuck bangers in cow pats in the neighbouring field, one time getting too close and getting spattered with shit. Guy Fawkes bonfires were always held at the end of the ginnel every november and we'd spend the preceding month chumping - going round houses asking for wood or dragging it to our woodpile from remote places. occasionally the pile would get torched by kids from other streets before bonfire night and we'd have to start again. neighbours made parkin, inedible toffee and the like and kids let off fireworks under the supervision of parents as we all stood round the great blaze. we used to make the fires to a plan - a centre pole with long pieces laid against it in a conical formation.
one year at least we hollowed out the centre for a den and played guard to stop anyone torching our efforts. we had to go in by 6-00 so this was a pretty pointless exercise and other kids doing the same thing were known to have fallen asleep on the job and not woken up as the pyromaniacs struck. some of the chumping was done for green wood in the wood at the end of the fields. we borrowed an axe one time and cut a small tree for the centre pole, much to the disgust of the Thomas kids' dad who was a motorcycle cop.
i spent many happy days in the wood. lighting small fires, sensibly surrounded by stones, making 'cigarettes' the size of large carrots out of rolled newspaper and dried leaves. they burned with a blue green flame and produced a large amount of white smoke but were great to hold and inhale from. there was a train track running through a cutting in the wood and in summer we could get within a few feet of speeding trains and be sure that none of the passengers could see us as we squatted in the lush undergrowth. i chased lynne thomas here, aged about 10, until we stumbled into the grass, groping each other in a mindless, unplanned frenzy until the others arrived seconds later. she had black cords, i remember that. the wood had a steep slope from the edge of the fields down towards the tracks and there were one or two small streams which ran down when it rained. i remember climbing one of these hunched forward, almost touching my toes, wading up through the water which ran over some iron-orange deposit that mixed with clay. it was slippery and just before reaching the top my footing gave way and i slid 50' on my back to the bottom. i expected worse than i got when i arrived home. every spring the wood was full of beautiful bluebells, blue everywhere the eye could see, moving gently in the breeze and the dappled shade. this had a profound effect on me and i still go there in my dreams.
the fields and the distant Swaine Wood to the far left where so much of my young life was spent. Victoria Mount is on the right
i went to Dave Gaunt's house for tea one day. their family lived in the next street, just up the ginnal (where i had once found a tampon and quickly pissed on it to see if it would expand, which it did - how did i know such things?) and were decidedly more middle-class than my own. Dave's twin brother Johnny wore pale blue turtle neck sweaters and wanted to be a golf course designer. amazingly that is exactly what he does today. he used to melt shoe polish in the tin by setting it on fire then rub the molten black into his brogues. the twins had an older, beautiful sister called Joanna who went out with the lead singer from sisters of mercy for a while. i think she now works with Johnny on course design. there parents we a relief from my own tho i only met them together this once at the dinner table. when we'd finished our prunes and rice pudding (in itself a culture shock) father Gaunt lit a small cigar. i ventured to point out that this could lead to him dying young, to which he replied 'who wants to grow old anyway', a sentiment i'm more in tune with myself these days as i watch the suffering of my parents. in the same street as the Gaunts, a few doors down, was mr adams whose house backed onto my own. at some point when i was young he'd donated half his garden, including 3 apple trees, to my parents on condition that they give him a few bags of apples every year. and this is what happened. we 2 kids were sent out with a couple of sacks every autumn to collect apples for Mr Adams. My dad built a large shed and patio on the land he gave and i planted my hamster Snowy there in a shoe box when he died. our rabbit escaped into the Adams garden never, i think, to be seen again.
the Hodgson house which was attached to ours had a single storey flat roof extension at the back and after a few years my parents were able to afford to have their own built. in typically pretentious style they called it a conservatory but pretence or not it meant we could sometimes climb out of the bedroom window and run across the 2 rooves.
i was doing this one sunny day, gasping for breath, when a wasp flew straight into my open mouth and was half way to being swallowed before i stuck 2 fingers down my throat and pulled the still wriggling little beast out. i threw it on the floor where it lay wrapped in spit and stamped on it. almost immediately my throat began to swell so i was rushed (on foot) to the doctors a mile away and injected with an overdose of something or other. i still don't like wasps flying near my face but i don't kill them these days.
accidents were plentiful at this age. another time we were racing on bikes to the top of the street and back (in fact to 'the tarmac' and back, where 2 different types of the stuff made a line across the road) and timing our efforts with a stop watch i'd got as a present. the first stretch of the race was uphill, then at the turnaround you pedalled like a bastard on the way down. the finishing line was the lamppost outside our house.
i was doing this one day and just about to cross the finishing line so i pulled on the brakes. the brake cable snapped, for a second the bike wobbled then crashed over onto the verge and into a telegraph pole which was virtually beside the lamppost. one of the handlebars of my chopper went straight into my groin which i was grasped in some pain. my mother dashed into the street and started trying to rip my pants down in front of all my mates, some of whom were girls. fortunately i was able to fend off the over-keen attentions of this socially irresponsible woman and i was got into the house without having been de-bagged. my groin, as it turned out, was fine but i awoke in the early hours with severe pain in the wrist and had to visit the doctors the next day. nothing broken. in fact, apart from chipping an ankle bone, i've never broken anything which has at times been a disappointment. Stacey Rainford came to school one day with a broken leg in plaster up to the hip and i fantasised about how great it would be to have a pot like that. it was either because i thought it was really cool because of the attention it created or that Stacey's Amazon smile and blonde hair somehow became synonymous with the novelty of the gleaming white pot. the process of getting one never occurred to me.
my mother dashed into the street a second time when a neighbour ran to tell her my brother was lying dead on the tarmac. he'd been playing in the field behind the houses opposite and was making his way home by way of the narrow ginnel which was bordered by a tall hedge. he ran straight from the ginnel into the street without looking to be hit by a white Comet van. he flew thro the air and, as the story goes, landed on his head which is why he was ok. temporarily stunned, he must have given the appearance of death which was enough for janet hurst to run round and put the fear of god into my mother.
i missed most of this but, rounding the bottom of the street with some friends started jogging up the hill towards the group of people in the road thinking it might be some interesting workmen digging holes. it came as something of a surprise to find my brother was the centre of attention, people kneeling round him on the floor. the ambulance duly arrived and carted him off with no lasting injuries. i was left with granny and denied an exciting trip in the ambulance.
there were two sweet shops within easy walking distance of our house - Mrs Bilton's small corner shop on New Road side and the larger newsagents Murphy's a bit further down the same road. we used to get paper bags full of all kinds of boiled sweets from Biltons - sherbert pips, sherbert lemons, apple tasting sweets and more. i remember murphys for coconut tobacco, drumsticks which were chewy lollies on sticks, sweet cigarettes and bubble gum. and there were blackjacks as well, small chewy sweets which you bought by the handful. my brother and i went thro a brief shoplifting phase. i was quite successful at murphys so my brother gave it a go at a shop further down towards grandways. he was caught and i had to bluster that i'd always been intending to pay. we didn't try it again after taht. Murphys was a good place to sit out with the guy near bonfire night but the old shopkeeper came out and shooed us away for begging. funny how people who live in the biggest houses (murphys had a large place up on Leeds Road) can be the most indignant about beggary. Also on New Road Side was the Co-op where my mum would occasionally send me to do some small shopping, carrying a booklet for the green shield stamps which werera kind of 70s loyalty payment and led to discounts or some such. the stamps i remember for being attractively designed in a nice shade of green and for their tactileness as a sheet of them was passed into your hand. Near the Co-op there was a small shoe shop where we sometimes went for school shoes, sitting on a bench to have feet measured, surrounded by boxes in that cramped but comfortable space. then there was the sports shop, run by a bloke who looked quite a lot like a young Roy Castle. he sold us shin pads, golf balls, goalie gloves, football studs and once every 2 years, football boots. next door was the doctors surgery. 2 rooms, one with a large, red leatherette bench, the other for consulting. when i sat on the bench my feet didn't touch the floor. people were silent there. The GP once over medicated me by way of injection for a wasp sting in my throat. and yet further up there was Bancrofts garage which sold motorbikes. Bancroft in fact owned half of the wood by Newlaithes and over several years decimated the bluebells and other plant life with motorcross events. later a woman motorist took the gentle curve of the A road outside his shop in such a way that she mounted the pavement, took out the pillar holding up the corner of his building and demolished his shop.
occasionally i made the trek to Horsforth library at the other side of the park, an adventurous piece of public building for the time with a central atrium and steel joists open to view. i went for the Asterix books, tales of a small Gaul and his large friend taking on the might of the Roman army, propelled by cups of magic potion and regular feasts of whole roast boar. Town Street was also the place to find the Outside Inn restaurant where the chef tossed pizza dough in view of the tables and where they served chocolate fudge cake. Amanda Thronton's dad who worked behind the till would later be arrested for fraud after undercover detective work by the Thomas's dad, a retired Pc who lived on the same street as his target. I say retired, he'd fallen off his police motorcycle and left the service because of injury. he limped i think. we'd seen his bike parked in the drive one day and were all impressed by the size of it. we were small. i remember now his name was emrys. the family had moved up from Wales and brought some nationalism with them (check the Welsh names here - Emrys, Sian, Lynne and Steven, plus mom). Emrys told me off for swearing at the top of my voice in the field behind his garden and lit the street bonfire which i resented as it was the kids who'd put in all the work. i think he thought i was trouble and perhaps i was. i was foolishly given some boxing gloves for christmas and one day ended up in a bout with sian who was a year older than me in the driveway of another neighbour, Joanne Bayliss. after some pawing about i hit her in the face, not too hard, and she ran of crying. it was one of those totally depressing moments that should never have happened. i'd got into trouble for lifting up Joanne's skirt to see her navy knickers. i used to sit on her dad''s knee in their livingroom before he died untimely and i loved going round to smell the long border of mint plants growing outside their backdoor. jane had an older sister who had a boyfriend. one summer they were throwing water at each other in the kitchen and the boyfriend slipped and went headfirst through the large window which made up half of the back door. there was a lot of bloodloss and story has it he was paralysed in his arm. happiness. terror. a few doors down from the Bayliss family, lived 'fit Bridget', a diminutive large breasted teenager quite a lot older than us kids who was admired from afar by many. one day she went pillion on her boyfriend's motorbike and came back with both legs in plaster up to the hip.
opposite our house there were the Thomas's on the left, the Hursts straight ahead and the Middletons on the right. all had kids of roughly the same age. the Hursts were only there a few years before they left for a big house on West End Lane. before they went i was playing in their back garden with Dave, maybe Johnny as well, and we had a flask for coffee. Mrs Middleton had hung out white sheets on the line just over the low wall in her back garden. Dave poured a cup of black coffee and just threw it at the close-by sheets creating a large brown stain in the middle of one of them. i was stunned. he had his trademark grin going on but i just walked off and went home. he followed and found me telling my dad what had happened. Dave confessed then went home and denied it and blamed me. it caused a minor furore. the Middletons were an unusual family, 4 kids banned from playing in the street, hot-house educated by their teacher parents at home and barely seen by the rest of us. i doubt Mrs Middleton - Cynthia - was used to this sort of thing. none of us were. i was once quite looking forward to a rare visit to the Middletons for the eldest child, Clare's 8th or 9th birthday party but she got something like chickenpox and it was cancelled. they made furry gonks for the primary school summer fayre and i bought one one year. still have it. incapable of letting things go until they've offended me.
FEATHERBANK INFANT SCHOOL, HORSFORTH 1970-73
started my school life at Featherbank infant school, Horsforth, a blackened stone pile of crumbling victorian pedagogic architecture which i liked quite a lot. around the quad style yard there were bins for diving in - i once found packets and packets of cat transfers in empty seed packets - railings for getting your head stuck in (it happened to some kid apparently) and a portakabin which was my classroom. my mum was a DB there.
got sent to the headteacher, Miss Moore, for lifting up girls' skirts in the playground and once watched stunned as one friend pissed over another friend from head to foot in the toilets whilst craning backwards and laughing his head off. remember licking out the bowl while baking buns in the hall and reluctantly performing in girls' woolly tights as a prince's friend in Swan Lake. the tights idea was actually volunteered by Michael Wade who had a younger sister. this was very bad form for a boy as far as i was concerned. the class teacher, Mrs Rothera, gave the class a vote on who should be prince and i lost to Michael, roughly 2:1. there's no way i would have remembered all the lines so this was a good outcome for me. we performed in our portakabin classroom, waiting behind a curtain for scene changes as parents sat on grey plastic chairs out front.
was made to take my shorts down in front of the whole class for talking and was slapped on the arse by a highly strung and happily sadistic redhead, Miss Stead, who wrongly diagnosed my disinterest as laziness. i fumbled with the snake belt holding up my shorts and learned an early lesson, the first of many at school, about how to distrust the judgement of adults. snake belts were popular at the time and i liked mine. began walking the half mile to school on my own age 5 or 6 not knowing adults were capable of being cruel and unjust, crossing the road where i shouldn't so i could wander through interesting ginnels and back streets rather than along the familiar main road. eventually got found out and chastised tho i doubt this changed my behaviour. not that i was defiant or plain naughty, i just liked the more interesting route and couldn't see the harm in dodging traffic.
once in a while my mum got a key to a small swimming pool opposite the front entrance to the school in some council prefab. it was like a large bath with a ladder to climb up into the water and was maybe twice as big as the average livingroom. my mum seemed to like it. i thought it was strange, possibly because we were the only people in there.
there was a privet hedge on the way home from school at the corner of Victoria Walk which for a couple of weeks one year was covered in caterpillars. every leaf had a small crawling animal and i would stand watching them for minutes at a time. further along the same street there was Diane Hebden's house. i used to follow her home from school at a distance of maybe 20 yards, mesmerised by the shine on her silky dark hair. i must have looked like a forlorn dog.
Newlaithes U11 2nd XI football team c.1977 back row, L>R, Harry Pieniazek, Nicky Watson, Michael Raistrick, Lee Farrer, Richard Dennison, Matthew Preval, --? front row, David Piper, Andy Mather, Mark Fearnley, Andy Abbott, Mark O'Brien, Miles Davidson
NEWLAITHES JUNIOR SCHOOL, HORSFORTH 1973-77
most of my classmates, along with myself, moved to Newlaithes where i met other kids as well. from this crowd i made many friends, the majority of whom would later end up at Benton Park. there was my best friend, Nicky Charlesworth who had a beautiful older sister. they won family of the year then their mum died of cancer. she had a blonde purdy cut. he kicked me in the shin with 70s platforms and gave me a bruise the size of a saucer. i thought he did this deliberately and harboured a grudge which would see me attack him outside the school gates on the last day of school. he didn't fight back and i was egged on. i was drawn off before long by someone stealing my bag. a cruel move on my part which would later have consequences as my new reputation preceded me to Benton Park where i was thrice set upon without cause in the early days. i too found it difficult to fight back. there was andy and Johnny Abbott the scruffy brothers from the council estate. Johnny reputedly fed an old mentally handicapped man razor blades and killed him while still at primary school. i never knew if this was true. Andy swapped me a football sticker for a Liverpool bobble hat. i got the hat. Lee Farrer got a season ticket to Leeds Utd with me where we sat in the South Stand. he got Terry Yorath, ex-Leeds and Wales, to come to his 10th birthday party where we had a kick about on some waste ground next to his house. Lee's dad had a bookies near Elland Rd. one time Harry Pieniazek announced there would be a competetive cross country run and he asked for volunteers. i was incredibly bad a t all kinds of running but for some reason Lee and i volunteered. come the event, 2 circuits of some hilly countryside, maybe a mile each time round, we ran together and were near the back but nowhere near last at the end of the first lap. nearing the end of the last lap we were next to last out of maybe 50 runners with only a couple of kids behind us. we were slowly passed on the final hill and all i remember thinking was 'i don't want to come last' so i dug deep and made sure it was Lee that was saddled with that dishonour. i looked back on this with some disappointment, possibly even shame, that i could be so crap to a friend. there was Matthew Previl who could throw a squash ball higher than anyone else and Richard Dennison, a kid with white hair who stood still in the yard as i ran across it following the trajectory of a football, so my mouth crashed into the back of his head, chipping a front tooth for ever more. Michael Raistrick who lived on the Newlaithes estate had a reputation as a bully and he chased me out of his street when i ventured there on my bike. my heart was pounding as i knew the limitations of my legs and i didn't think i'd escape. Ian Deakin was a speedy football winger whose mum gave us all jubilee comemorative biros at the end of the football season as gifts for doing the double. i played one cup and one league game and had to fight back tears when i was left out of the medals by Harry Pieniazek, knowing i was entitled to them. eventually they came but the moment was lost and another example of adult injustice was seared on my consciousness. then there was trevor, a severely mentally damaged kid with a misshapen head, a little older than others in our year who could barely speak and who stood alone at remote points of the school field holding out his hanky in the wind. he was given to outbursts temper, no doubt provoked, and left before his time was up for stabbing some kid in the hand with a fork. he walked to school with the beautiful diane hebden, his neighbour from the victorias. we played conkers and marbles, paddy hooson bringing in some rock hard lump on a string which beat everything and was probably baked putty. we collected Panini football stickers, read comics such as 2000AD, Action and Roy of the Rovers, the latter sending me a solitaire game one time for coming runner up - with scores of others - in a football quiz which had been answered by my dad. i took a rugby ball into school one day and was feeling pleased with myself at the attention it would bring. we were playing on the tarmac playground and to kick off i rested the ball against the 3cm high concrete edging that separated it from the path. i ran in to kick and wham! my full force went into kicking the slightly raised concrete just under the ball. i wince now thinking of the agony. another time Lynne Thomas pushed me down a flight of concrete steps for being cheeky. she was a tomboy and given to shows of force. i rolled down maybe 20 steps unharmed before reaching the bottom and cracking my ankle as i came to rest. i was lifted into his estate car by headmaster Lofthouse and driven 8 miles or so to Otley hospital where i was bandaged up and sent home. Lynne became a police officer. make of it what you will.
there was a sports day every summer and the whole school was divided into 4 teams by colour - red blue yellow and green. red was aways the best, then blue, green and yellow. i was in green. i didn't know until i took part in the egg and spoon race one year that i couldn't run properly as Nicholas Charlesworth jeered loudly from the touchlines at my stiff-legged style. i was humiliated and never got over it. it's strange how best friends really hate each other. i also did the sack race and i won neither. we played rounders one time on the football field and the new attractive female sports teacher threw the ball to Andrew Butterfield who had a bat. unexpectedly, he hit it back with great force and it impacted directly with her chest from a distance of about 2 or 3 metres. this somehow spiked her femininity as she clutched herself in pain. there were 2 yards separated by a couple of portakabins and football or ball games generally were only allowed in one of them. great hordes of kids would play football with a tennis ball or occasionally an actual football , maybe 15 a side with 5 a side goals, shoals of 9 and 10 year old boys racing around after the ball, clattering into anyone who got in the way. weeks and months of young lives were spent doing this.
Trevor
as well as kids there were memorable teachers - the fearsome Mrs Briggs, the art teacher from the portakabin who ran the after school art class. i had to drum up the courage after 2 or 3 weeks attendance to say i didn't want to go any more. hers wasn't my idea of art. Mr Lofthouse, the bearded head teacher with the estate car once drove me to Ilkley hospital with an injured ankle, carrying me to his car over his shoulder. Mrs Cuthbertson, the stout grey haired woman who played piano at assembly, once made me and Michael Wade stand up (we all sat cross-legged on the floor) and sing a duet to the whole class because we'd been whispering together while she was talking. i croaked thro this deeply humiliating experience and once again felt cruelly treated. another teacher once stood over me at dinner time, chastising me with aggression for mashing butterbeans, which i really didn't like, into my mashed potato to disguise the taste. what insanity was this? we ate off steel trays pressed into sections for different parts of the dinner. we also had a table monitor who served at some point. served what exactly, i don't remember. there was a summer fayre once a year with tables of all kinds of saleable items or games to play wending their way through the classrooms and corridors. Newlaithes was a newly built school and had curtains instead of doors in many parts of the school. i once got slapped round the back of the head by an angry Harry Pieniazek for sliding at speed in my sock feet thro one set of curtains during break time while he was busy. i probably wanted to put something in my tray. i felt the burn of injustice again. in a similar manner one of the teachers asked me to take something to the headteacher's corridor during break where, after delivery, i was found by the stroppy Mrs Briggs who chastised me to the point of tears for being there when i should have been outside. these sorts of things affected my personality in a big way.
the school made a big deal of getting a new climbing frame, a hemisphere of bolted steel bars, maybe 15' or 20' high, that came to sit on a rock hard circle of compacted earth on the edge of the mound nearest the caretaker's house (a bunglaow on school grounds at the end of Victoria Crescent). classes took it in turns to get playtime access to the structure and kids took turns trying to climb to the topmost point. it was a lethal piece of kit. nearby the school field sloped steeply down to the fence beyond which were farmer's fields of long grass and along the edge of the fence, a small stream which i rather liked. it was out of bounds but also out of sight so occasionally i'd dare to push a stick into the water and be happy. one year when the snow was deep and Zulu had just been on the telly, a large number of boys stood on the top of the mound (a high grass bank extending the width of the football pitch behind the goal) chanting 'zulu, zulu, zulu' before running down the slope across the length of the pitch to attack a small band of rebels behind a snow wall. i led the charge and crashed through the wall only to find Keith Palmer standing over me with a boulder of snow which he dumped on my back. the battle was competetive and aggressive for them. it wasn't for me.
i played competitive football and cricket as well as taking part in swimming races. won some medals, tried out for leeds city boys and all despite the fact i was a second rate, second choice keeper. Newlaithes had a full first and second XI football team. the firsts were league and cup winners in 1976/ 77. the seconds only played one game, the last of the season, against weak opposition which was coached by a female sports teacher, when the fixture backlog led to two games being scheduled on the same day. the seconds won while the firsts drew securing enough points all round for the title. i started the second XI game in goal but at half time we were coasting and i went to play outfield so someone else could get a turn as goalie. at one point i was on a one on one with the opposition keeper and was considering when to shoot when my friend Lee Farrer, a known 'goal hog', started screaming for me to pass just to my right where he was completely unmarked. i passed, he scored and i wistfully thought for many years how i'd missed my one and only real chance of scoring a goal in a competitive match. i played in a cup match in pouring rain with the goal mouth on the home pitch turned into a bog of deep mud and puddles. these were full sized goals on a full sized pitch and trying to save was difficult enough. in a one on one with myself, an opposition attacker coming down the left wing shot the ball under my late diving body and the game ended 1-1. Andrew Butterfield, captain and hardest shot in the school, missed a penalty in the mud at the other end. so my record was played 2, won 1, drew 1. goals conceded, 1. undefeated. we went on a school trip to Ripley Castle where i drew a picture of the lake. i used to like drawing, especially WWII fighter planes, but was always aware that Richard Dennison could draw them better. he went on to start his own ad agency and came up with a rather memorable XXXX advert showing a huge flock of sheep in the outback blocking the way to a bar which i adulterated for my radical cartoon website without knowing it was his.
the ad conceived by Richard Denison and adulterated by NW
it was at Newlaithes that i was pushed down a flight of steps by Lynne Thomas, a girl who would later become a police officer. it was also where i got my first girlfriend, an amazon blonde beauty called Stacey Rainford who later won beauty pageants and saved horses. i kissed Stacey lying in a summer field of long grass under a pylon. i was in love. she laughed, she was strong and beautiful and dominating. i went to her house for tea and writhed in embarrassment when she farted loudly at the dinner table. except, as i found out later, it wasn't her, it was the labrador under the table. she brought a girl friend on our next date. an older girl who studied me and brought cigarettes. i threw rocks from a dry stone wall down the railway embankment in anger and i left alone. there were no more dates with Stacey, no more love, only anger and disappointment. i went out with Nicola Sorby on the rebound because she had large breasts for a 10 year old and she plied me with bags of sweets. we went to the woods in the summer sun and lay in the shade where she took off her bra for me. we were just about to make some progress with this, though i know not how, when a female neighbour walking a brace of red setters appeared right over us on the woodland path. we leaped up and jumped the barbed wire fence into the fields, Nicola just brave enough to pause and pull her bra from a tree branch. i'd had a precocious interest in sex since an early age, maybe since i was 6 when i was caught with a group of friends behind a garage persuading a girl my age to lift her skirt. i think now that although the interest was innocent in many ways, it was just curiosity and a mixed up expression of love and friendship, it was all also rather twisted and tragic, all the more so because this same interest was shared by everyone else - my friends, their brothers and sisters and their parents. a gang of us would occasionally sneak into the school grounds to play hide and seek in the bushes on the slope at the back of the school. they were maybe waist height and evenly planted with virtual rabbit runs between them. excellent for crawling about in the dust. once, down on the football yard, we played 'kick can and hoppit'.
one day my brother ran out of the ginnel into our road and was flipped headlong by a Comet van doing maybe 20 or 30mph. a neighbour ran to my mum saying, 'Jez has been knocked over, i think he's dead'. he wasn't dead. perhaps unconscious. the story goes that he was saved serious injury because he landed on his head. had a season ticket to Leeds United and used to go with Lee Farrer or Chris Boffey. remember the crowd violence, the chants joking about the Yorkshire Ripper ('13-0, 13-0...'), the racism ('7-0, 7-0...' when a mini van full of Indians or Pakistanis was flattened on the motorway hard shoulder by a juggernaut), the violence (Leeds away fans storming a seated section of the Baseball Ground in Derby and one of them punching an old man with glasses in the face because he dared to complain about it. this, in full view of a PC who i tearfully remonstrated with at half time. he sent me on my way without doing anything). brick dust on the bonnets of cars outside the same ground on the same day where Leeds and Derby fans had had a missile fight near some demolished houses - half bricks skidding at speed off the polished metalwork. i remember the banner Lee made when Allan Clarke, ex Leeds forward, was appointed manager, saying 'welcome back Sniffer' which the police had to check to make sure it wasn't about the Munich 58 air crash because the home team were playing Manchester United. i remember Liverpool fans in the South Stand, them winning 2-0, again, all in red, that strange shade of darkened red that is synonymous with the club. and i remember a horde of away fans in the same section ripping out plastic seats and throwing them onto the pitch. at half time there was oxtail soup so hot it scalded the tongue. of course, Leeds were crap back then, going thro a series of ex players as managers - Allan Clarke, Eddie Grey, Billy Bremner - and depression was the usual after-match fare. walking to the ground from 1/2 mile away, we'd buy programmes with out of date team sheet information and smiling photographs of some happy to be there player in a pristine white kit with blue and yellow trim. i excitedly bought enamel badges from vendors on the Gelderd Road who sold their wares out of trailers or small huts. there was something heavily solid and at the same time colourful and pleasingly metallic about these tribal pins. they were expensive for a kid and i never had more than one or two tho some people had whole jackets covered with them. scarves, badges, more scarves, and burgers down the whole road. my dad used to make me sit in the car with him listening to the local radio sport until a few minutes before the match and then, at the end of the game, he'd be up and out of his seat 3 or 4 minutes before the end to beat the traffic, always to my disappointment. unbeknownst to any of us, both my full brother and sister were going to the matches at the same time. if i wasn't in the South Stand with my junior season ticket, i was in the expensive West Stand where the directors and the well to do sat, using a ticket going spare from one of my dad''s friends who otherwise sat and cheered or jeered in sheepskin coats whilst smoking cigars. as with all professional sports grounds, no doubt, the plastic seats were jammed together and a fat agitated neighbour was a 90 minute problem. as the team rolled out onto the pitch the tannoy would always play the same tinny theme song with the lines 'we are so proud to shout it out loud, we love you Leeds, Leeds, Leeds' which the crowd sang in varying degrees of impressiveness depending on the attendance. the Kop at the Gelderd End was full of the most hardcore of supporters who always started the chants and sang the loudest and the longest. during quiet moments they used to jeer the South Stand for not singing during matches. this whole rite must still be going on today tho i've long since ditched my interest in Leeds United and professional football as a whole so i couldn't say for certain. a big factor in this was the racist beating some Leeds players- Bowyer, Woodgate and others - gave to an Asian origin man in Leeds city centre in 2001. the club wailed and quailed and worried that disciplining the men would affect performances. i wrote to the chairman, Peter Ridsdale, demanding strong sanctions against the players and got a reassuring letter back. but not enough was done. it was a disgusting time and belatedly, after 30 years of support, i threw my arms in the air and was done with the game. of course the idea of multi-millionaire chavs gaining my attention for pleasure eventually became repellant also. i now evangelise about the parasitic nature of professional football to anyone who talks to me about the beautiful game.
SLIDESHOW OF NEWLAITHES CERTIFICATES AND CRICKET SCORES
played a lot of footy myself at this time, practicing with the team at school, twice getting a game, in the fields and on the street near my home and occasionally, if people could be bothered, up in the park which was 10 minutes away, tho it had better grass and more of it. it was important to have some good kit - a leather ball, some goalkeeping gloves (which i eventually lost in the twilight graveyard at the top of my street and wouldn't go back to find) and shin pads - some high tech variety which you pulled on like socks - not to mention a decent pair of boots, preferably with studs you could remove with a stud key. we played '3 and in' quite a lot. most of the kids were a year or two younger than me, some were girls, but even then most were fitter than me, a boy with a stooped back and strange, stiff-legged running style which provoked laughter, so it was fairly even. sometimes the hodgson twins came out to play on the street and then it became less even. we'd take it in turns annoying our parents by using alternate 2' high garden walls as the goal. when it was the twinny's turn, their mum's roses always suffered in a quite spectacular and stomach churning way. played cricket in the field with someone's mad collie often turning up to steal the ball, picking up the corkie or nosing the football thro the grass. the field had a 20 degree slope and was full of rocks and dogshit so the game was always a challenge. whether it was football or cricket or whatever we always bickered about who was going to bat first, go in goal etc etc. and often as the oldest i seem to think i probably bullied my way into pole more often than was my due. the school team went to the park for a practice with Harry Pieniazek and decided to play on a gentle slope near the carpark. someone inevitably kicked the ball down the slope at some point so i gave chase. i tried to trap the ball as i caught up with it but instead stood on it and fell backwards at great speed, crashing my head on the turf. i came round, having spent some time unconscious, with harry pianiazek kneeling over me and my friends all around. i still remember the firmness of the ball as i stood on it and it rolling forward and away from me as i lurched backwards in surprise. i was captain of the cricket team, chosen no doubt because i was known to like cricket and perhaps because Harry Pieniazek felt sorry for me. i played quite well as an opening batsman for the first couple of games then had a season long drop in form, dropping steadily down the order, until the end of season cup semi-final when i had a return of form and high scored with 13 and took the most wickets - 4. we lost and i was given out lbw by my own teacher which seemed harsh at the time. Harry gave me the score sheets as a memento. there was no coaching. we just turned up and gave it a go. but we did play on a full size pitch at Horsforth Hll ark and i really enjoyed these matches. the one time my dad got off work and came to watch i lofted the ball on my first delivery and was caught on the boundary. out for a golden duck to the only black kid in the game who had pitched a long hop that many would have hit out of the park. my soon to be crest fallen dad was clapping it for a six. no one had scored a six for the team at this point. there was a kid from the year below, Kalyan Basu, who had Indian or Pakistani parents, who was a proper cricketer. his dad had shown him how to spin bowl and he had a batting action. he played in our team and the following season he hit at least one six. unfortunately the boy was arrogant and bitter which can have endeared him to only a few.
went back to Elland Road with the school in 77 to see the queen on her jubilee tour ride round the pitch in an open top car. we all got a large commemorative coin and a mug with flags on it and a face of the queen. i don't think i was much impressed by any of it. now i see the monarchy as a social problem.
loved playing wild in the fields during this time, lighting camp fires, chumping, playing in streams and trying to make petrol bombs. one time my dad had to come and get me from the field as i'd waded into mud in my wellies and was completely stuck. his reddened spitting face leaned over and pulled me out of the boots, dropping me back into the mud in my socks with a slap round the back of the head. also loved collecting newspapers for a school charity drive. had a garage half full of bundles tied up with string, many gained by knocking on doors up and down the street. especially liked repeating the knack required to tie bundles so the string made a cross on top and bottom sides. i expected to help my class win the competition for collecting the most paper, afterall i had accumulated so much and worked so tirelessly, but we didn't win. brought frogspawn back from the fields in buckets for the garden pond, letting beautiful, thick, heavy clumps of the stuff run thro my fingers as i collected it from rain pools in tyre tracks. it was a couple or three years of a happiness which i've never recaptured. as that last summer at newlaithes ended, so began the end of a childhood in which i had known great happiness.
BENTON PARK (GRAMMAR) SCHOOL, RAWDON 1977-84
Benton Park (Grammar) School, Rawdon
3H, c.1979 - back row - John Stevenson, Chris Boffey, Jon Penny, Chris Cousins, Eddie Hoare, Nick Watson, Dave Houghton, Vicki Lowe, Julia Edwards, Sarah Baker, Clare Barker. Liz Churchill, Virginia Scott, Andrea Schofield, Margaret Pratt, Wendy Leek, Micky Barker, Chris Metcalf, Simon Newton, Gary Walker, Richard Boese, Stuart Smith, David Turtle, front row, L>R, Debbie Barker, Heather Grey, Julie Norton, Ruth Wilkes, Mary Langdon, Fiona Glynn, Ann Tyas, Veronica Stead, Helen Mould, Clare Walker, Louise Goodall, form teacher Mark Hatherley (Biology)
LIST OF PEOPLE IN MY YEAR AND TEACHERS
6TH FORMERS WHO STARTED OUT IN 1H
Veronica Stead (deceased) NICKNAME - Vron. bestfriends with Juila Edwards who was by her side through the final months. Outspoken tomboyish character of the kind which only Horsforth seemed able to produce. got soaked on a school trip to Whitby.
Jonathan Penny NICKNAME – JP. diminutive good looker from Rawdon. had a table tennis table in the attic where he played guests, continuously hitting the ball to the side nearest the wall so the inexperienced opponent would clatter their bat on the plaster. strangely never had a girlfriend at school. good at maths and had decided by 6th form that he was going to be an accountant which he duly became. has worked for MTV amongst others. tuck shop finance chief done good.
Wendy Leek (Davey) NICKNAME - Punk. ferocious hockey player. left BP after 5th year with Pauline Dawson because the school couldn't timetable Domestic Science A Level. joined the police after A Levels at Horsforth where she allegedly beat all male and female cadets in a push-up contest. won Pc of the year but eventually left to set up a catering business with younger step-brother Craig. they now serve sandwiches in Leeds city centre and do buffets for weddings etc. check their site here - http://www.centrefillings.co.uk
Pauline Dawson (Mottram) manic laugh. stalwart member of the Yeadon crew. once got drunk with her in a working mens' club on Harper Lane, then again at the Woolpack another time after which she left me in someone's front garden because I'd sat on a wall, fallen over backwards and gone to sleep on the grass as we walked up the hill. so she liked a drink, like any other Yeadon woman. works the checkouts at Morrisons. has kids. married and lives in Yeadon / Guiseley. best friend to Wendy Leek.
Julia Edwards did languages at A Level. generally considered to be a babe by those that judged. short blonde hair, best remembered in the Purdy style. had a thing with John Denison for a while. played hockey, bestie with Vicki Lowe. now an HR manager living north of Otley where she has an allotment and helps organise the annual gala. the town has an ethnic population of 1% and yet the gala committee recently decided to have a 'Best of British' flag waving theme at which hordes of white people wandered around in a nationalist stupour. not good. last year was a musicals theme. check it out here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mmdDSFRsPs
Chris Metcalfe quiet, stringy, friendly kid with fair hair who always seemed to have his hands in his pockets. Not sporting. Not pushy and not in your face.
Gary Walker Beefy kid who's social life and status no doubt improved no end with his inclusion in the school rugby team. Liked cars and trucks. Now a locksmith near Wakefield. Dad died while he was at primary school which brought silence to Newlaithes for a short while. Still a big rugby fan. Best friends with Martin White amongst others. By his own admission, rather large these days.
Clare Walker (Marsh) Went to Kramer art college. Now runs a successful graphic design business in Wales.
Ed Hoare Vicar's son from Rawdon who had a classy cricket batting action. Also played rugger, as hooker, where his scrawny legs flailed around in the scrum like that dying monster at the end of Hellboy 1. Friends with Simon Dawson amongst others. Left school and did voluntary work in Africa where he taught kids how to play rugby. England may come to regret this.
Simon Newton NICKNAME - Isaac. Good at maths and sciences. Along with Stuart Smith, helped me get thro my O Level by turning round in class to help me with algebra and the like. Looked like Penfold, got called Isaac after his namesake. One of the 80s centre parting crew, chief of whom was Simon Hodgin.
Julie Norton One of 'the God Squad' along with Heather Grey, Helen Mould and Dave Turtle. Large owl-like glasses and short hair. Slightly overweight. Short. Clever. Played guitar. Pleasant.
Heather Gray No glasses and short badly cut hair. Not overweight. Or short. Clever. Played guitar. Pleasant. As with many people, inseparable from her best friend. Went on the German exchange where she met some crazy Lutherans who had horses and fed us boiled cabbage.
Vicki Lowe Watched in amusement as I prostrated myself before her on numerous occasions (77-80) in an effort to get her to go out with me. Felt heart thumping joy when I saw her for the first year or so which then degraded into self-mockery. She ended up dating at least a couple of meatheads which is where I was going wrong obviously. Something of a diva, originating no doubt in the fact that her elder sister was also special, her parents were rich and divorced. She had eye catching long straight hair cut with a sharp fringe. Brunette. Lost to Sarah Scott Baker in the first BP election for Head Girl. Played a cheerleader in the school production of Grease. Went to Keele to study law.
Helen Mould NICKNAME - Mouldy. Slightly dumpy best friend of Vicki Lowe who lived on the Ruffords. Another who fell foul of the perm God that beckoned from every high street stylist's doorway back then. Went from smooching with Pat West and drinking beer at Dave Hurst's house party in 79 / 80 to a fully paid up member of the God Squad a year or two later. Did languages at A Level and became a hospice nurse after leaving BP.
Virginia Scott Tallest girl in the year, perhaps only rivalled by Andrea Schofield. Parents owned a dairy farm on Warm Lane in Rawdon. Went on a school trip there where Mrs Scott made us buns and laid on jugs of fresh milk on the patio overlooking the valley. Went wandering thro low rooved barns with slurry pouring into the yard, listening to the lament of caged animals. Smallest bloke in our year, JP, one confessed a fantasy about asking her out. Later became a librarian in Manchester after turning down an Oxbridge offer.
Sarah Scott Baker (O'Connor) Of course I loved this girl from the moment she sent me a note quoting the Beatles in 3rd Yr History - “For well you know that it's a fool who plays it cool by making his world a little colder.” By the time 6th form was over and she'd gone to Cambridge, she'd broken my heart and left me a wretch. In the top two or three cleverest kids in the year, more hardworking than gifted, grafting on homework for every hour there was. Got a place at Girton to do law and became a barrister, later marrying a banker. Now lives in Monaco with 4 kids. Working-class girl done good. Tacky good.
Chris Boffey Excellent left back at football. Blonde hair, chunky thighs, acne problem from early doors. My best friend for the first 12 months at BOP as we'd come from Newlaithes together. Saved me in the street from the bullying Richard Hammond. Blushed bright red at the mere mention of Maria Povey or Jenny Wilcox's names. Big Leeds fan. Used to go to matches together. CB collected empty beer cans and got a shed bought for him to keep the collection in. His dad was a principal at catering college in Leeds and was jailed for fraud / theft. He's since done many years of voluntary work helping people get around by driving for a non commercial taxi service. Chris's mum looked a bit like Wilma from the Flintstones and cooked fishfingers for guests. CB did English and American Studies at UEA then moved to the US and married a Nepalese woman some years his senior. No kids, CB works in in-house publishing for a company near / in LA. His diplomatic nature is extreme, nay delusional.
Richard Boese NICKNAME - Gigs. Member of the centre parting gang which made his head look like a deep furrow in a muddy Yorkshire field. Cheerful, slight of build, later became a keen distance runner. Married with kids, lives down south. Seem to think he has African connections tho that could be Simon Newton.
John Stevenson Entertainer and super nerd, JS was the smartest boy in the year. Specialised in sciences which got him into Cambridge which he left after a year to do Economics at Leeds. He left this quickly as well to work in a bike shop – a world he is still in today. Until recently he was editor of bike magazines here and in Australia where he spent quite a few years. Had a difficult home life with a meathead step brother and a step dad he didn't like. Eventually his mum separated from these sources of JS's misery but not before some of the damage had been done. John liked rock music, being one of 3 or 4 kids in the year to come to school in 1980 or thereabouts with long hair and an embroidered denim jacket. Whitesnake, Led Zep etc. You get the picture. Who did all the sewing I wonder? Went to see Genesis with JS and a group of people, John sprawling in the back of an estate car on the way down eating chicken drummers like some kind of Louis XVI bohemian aristo. Had a big thing with Sandra Core, swapping spit in the most graphic way during break in the common room. Generally accepted that JS was a little on the vain side. Got picked on for being a nerd. Friendly, intelligent kid who liked bikes, girls and guitar riffs.
Chris Cousins NICKNAME - Cous. Hard drinking big Yeadon tough guy with a tragic line in working-class romantic theory ('well, I could be dead tomorrow'). Fancied himself as a stud, wore uniform until it was too small for him and loved Elvis. Eldest of 4 brothers and 1 sister, Chris took a year of 6th form before leaving to get a job in a factory. Showed me the working-class ropes over many years from the time I moved to Yeadon in about 1979 to the time I left it for good a decade later. Pub life was central to all this. In fact there was nothing else. I enjoyed it at the time but these days I'm a teetotal vegan who's given up smoking so we've pretty much gone our separate ways. CC likes Rugby League – one of his brothers was a pro – and still likes a pint despite a heart condition. We hitched many miles together. Trudged across most of London and thro snow storms. CC's school highlight was the Grease production in 83/84.
Stuart Smith NICKNAMES – Skiff. Quiet, mild mannered, shy kid who hung round with Richard Boese, Chris Boffey, Simon Newton and myself before 6th Form turned me into the Mask's partying alter ego. Seems to have disappeared after doing a Geology degree in Oxford and falling for a South American woman. Speculation has it that he's currently hanging from parachute cords high up a tree in the Colombian jungle surrounded by pieces of Cessna and broken bags of 100% pure cocaine.
David Turtle NICKNAME - Turts. One of the main characters of the 6th form, mainly due to the fact he was physically awkward and a timid socially dysfunctional Christian. Classic bully material. I don't know if he was ever physically bullied but DH was ridiculed everywhere he went. Went with him and Evelyn Maxtead to the pilot of Countdown at YTV. He did his degree at Royal Holloway and buddied up with Mary Whitehouse, speaking on radio and TV about the evils of modern broadcasting. Stood as a Conservative parliamentary candidate in a safe Labour seat and eventually joined the Met Police where he is now a sergeant. Still an active Christian bringing his mores to law enforcement in the capital. Married with at least one kid. Nick Watson Shy kid in years 1-5 who liked to play football. Did his homework and made a fool of himself with girls. 6th form saw a deliberate decision to be more outgoing. Became a party animal and wore an orange jacket and red beret to 6th form. Permanent dropout and later mental health case, loved Sarah Scott Baker like no man has ever loved a woman until she married a banker. Likes art and secular preaching. Doesn't drink, doesn't smoke and only eats vegetables. Partner of 23 years recently moved out with 16 year old son.
Fiona Glynn I always saw FG as an outsider tho she had a fair number of friends. Probably because she was an only child and I knew her dad was significantly older than other parents and he was a blacksmith. It all seemed very different from the business suits and baked scones of the Rawdon set. Fiona showed everyone how to do it when she moved to Germany in the 80s with only O level German and stayed to raise a family. She works for a local council just outside Koln, has one daughter and 2 step daughters.
Louise Goodall Lousie was rather highly strung. Dragged her mum to the school gates at Newlaithes to berate me for playfully calling her 'Badall'. Don't think she ever forgave me for this. Later had some kind of allergic reaction to hair dye in 6th form and started losing hair. Enough to drive anyone crazy. Remember her dad was a great host at her 7th or 8th birthday party, getting us all playing pass the parcel and a game with cocktail sticks and a milk bottle. Best friends with Fiona Glynn, both of whom sported that classic 80s perm. Became a nurse after BP.
Ruth Wilkes Quiet with shoulder length blonde hair. Lived in the Victorias behind a monster privet.
Andrea Schofield (see 3H class photo below) Lanky girl who was good at hockey. famed for being in a love triangle during 6th form with Simon Newton and Richard Boese.
Margaret Pratt Member of the 80s perm club. Quiet, skinny girl, best friends with Wendy Leek. Sat next to me in 3H for a year due to Hatherley's alphabetical / gender rotation seating arrangement. Flirted I think.
Mary Langdon (Arda)
6TH FORMERS WHO STARTED OUT IN 1BL
Jim Foggitt NICKNAMES - JimBob, lothario, roll up smoker, drinker, rock music fan and man of healthy appetite. Once watched in awe as he shovelled bacon and eggs into his face whilst simultaneously smiling and holding a conversation. Drove his parents Maxi and Lancia, lived by Whitelands in an old stone house. Told me I was being a social parasite at one point and disowned me for being drunk and obnoxious at another. Fancied himself in a rather ugly way. Good friends with myself, Chris Cousins and Greg Shepherd tho was totally gregarious and had many friends all over. Wore one of the last purple BP blazers thro 1st year, often seen flying into the hedge at the hands of West et al. Not sporty and didn't play any instruments. Mum baked one of the best cakes I've ever tasted. Works as an electrician and lives in his parents old house.
Clare Middleton Her hair was long, her legs were bendy, she could recite verbatim every line from every novel in C19th English literature. Or so it seemed. Very bookish, but tried to break out in 6th form by becoming crazy about pop superstar Boy George. Strange dress sense (see above) and equally strange gurgling laugh. One brilliant white front tooth in the top set. Could get rather hysterical in a dramatic kind of way. Learned this the hard way when I dumped her one day in the 6th form block. Best friends with Sarah Scott Baker who she still sees. Clare's been Head of English at an Oxford comprehensive for the past few years tho is cutting back on her responsibilities I hear. Went to Oxord to do her degree. No mean feat for a comprehensive girl.
Sarah 'arty' Baker (Brumfitt) Did Art A Level and won the school Art Prize at the end of 6th form even tho Duncan Blackburn seriously doctored her exam painting after she'd finished it. Short blonde hair, sort of tomboyish or maybe perhaps a boys best friend. Went to Paris with me after A Levels where we got drunk by the Seine. Now works as a Housekeeper at a stately home near / in the Lake District. Married an RAF squaddie then divorced him. 2 kids.
Jane Constantine Christian beer drinker who liked rock music and boys. Lived on the Laytons and did English A Level which has carried her to Head of English at a school / college in Bognor where she lives in a fisherman's cottage. Not married nor in a relationship the last I knew. Likes cats I think.
Greg Shepherd Carrot-topped guitar maestro who liked to take photos. Was a steady thing with Emma Taylor for a while. Lived in a Headingley squat after A Levels collecting firewood from the rubble outside. This comes in alongside Fiona Glynn's move to Germany as the most courageous post school lifestyle choice. Ended up on the south coast (Devon / Somerset) making designs for gift wrap out of his own photos – images which tend to show items of the same thing in large groups – his christmas baubles photo is my favourite. Now blocked me from his email because I dared to criticize the Rock n Roll lifestyle.
Simon Hodgin NICKNAME - Hodge Bolton born and raised until the start of secondary school then brought the broad Lancastrian accent to the heart of ridicuke. Said 'buzz' for 'bus' and 'luke' for 'look'. Played bass guitar and hung with the rock crowd of Shepherd, West and, on the fringe, Stevenson. We became good buddies in 6th form as we did art A Level together. Eventually my descent into madness got the better of him and he burned some bridges. Now an exec with AXA insurance, lives in Manchester and is a season ticket holder with his beloved Man City. Not married. No kids. Probably doesn't use the buzz.
Andrew Butterfield NICKNAME - Butters (AB left) Top cyclist with a lightweight Dawes cycle which took him hundreds of miles over a weekend. Terrific BO problem after these jaunts which didn't seem to scare off the ladies. Met his future wife staring thro binoculars at the houses opposite from his mum's flat in Yeadon. Football captain, jovial, tall.
Nicola Mortimer (Thompson) (NM 2nd right) Diminutive Rawdon girl with another classic 80s cut. Best friends with Alison Campbell.
Martin White Rugby team prop with shaggy dark hair. Got a green Citroen for his 17th and took Wendy Leek to the Lake District. Talked authoritatively about double declutching. Now works in engineering on the Isle of Man where he and his family moved quite a few years ago.
Diane Lister Never spoke much to DL, the girl from Yeadon who came to school in heels. She complimented me one day on getting a skinhead, saying she understood my act as a sign of rebellion against the authoritarian forces of education. True so true tho a day or two earlier it had been a mohawk. So much hysteria over so little hair ('how could you do this to me and your father?') so I had it cut to save my future. No idea what happened to Diane after school. She had determination and ambition it seemed to me and the looks to take her far.
Dave Hurst NICKNAME - Hursty Dark curly haired, dentally distinctive rich kid with working-class roots whose dad ran a second hand car business. Had a big house in Horsforth with a pool and a sauna. Drove to school during 6th form in his parents' Roller and in a string of other expensive cars. Loved to party and still does, running a cocktail business from just outside London. Married with 2 kids. Big Leeds Utd fan. Still athletic – a good distance runner at school – doing charity bike rides and the like. Very good at languages. By his own testimony “a wizard” at languages, in fact.
Julian Sutcliffe Quiet kid who liked a chuckle, left school to go to Agricultural College, later joining the N. Yorkshire Police where he is now their Wildlife Officer chasing down hamsters in speedboats, guinea pigs in balloons and the like. Came to the mini reunion at the Bull and looks very much the same as he did all those years ago.
Julie Jennings Awkward looking with glasses and acne, shy, quiet. Julie was pilloried behind her back by the average looking boys and girls of her year group. Now works in a bank, married, no kids, lives near Bradford. Made it to the mini reunion at the Bull.
Gillian Farrington (GF far left) Never really talked to GF tho had found out just enough about her by results day to know that she wanted to do Medicine. Unfortunately you need straight A's to do this and they weren't forthcoming. Now an earth mother with a brood of kids living somewhere down south. Doesn't reply to answer machine messages about reunions.
Heather Leach Did Art A Level and went to King Kurt gigs to get showered with gunge. Spiky hair, tomboy qualities. Could be abrasive as I found out last year when I chastised her for getting smutty on the forum. Went to Art college in Leeds and did some jewellery design. Now runs a restaurant / pub with partner somewhere in South Yorkshire I think.
Kerry Leek (Teehan) Flirty good looking girl with short mousy hair and a classic Roman nose betraying some 2000 year old British heritage. Did A Level Art where she had me wound round her little finger. I was one sentence away from asking her out for many months. KL now lives in Birmingham and is married.
Mark Fearnley Another comedian who ended up marrying a girl from the year below – Sarah Berriff. MF sold miniature spirits out of his garage as a pre teen, looting his dad's sample collection for the benefit of his mates and his pocket. Famously cracked his head on a girder leaping from a conveyor belt down a coalmine at a point where the belt emptied into a bottomless pit. Only saved by the quick reflexes of a wizened miner who maybe thought he'd be getting a tip for saving the boy's life. MF and SB turned up to the Bull mini reunion where Mark vied with Alan Williamson in the loudness stakes. His wife wore a G-string in see-through white pants. I found this patronising but no one else seemed to mind.
Catriona Hastie Very diminutive Scottish girl who somehow ended up in Rawdon. Now sells select cheeses via the web. Still friends with Suzanne Matthews – the 2 recently went on holiday to the states together.
Karen Lacey Last saw Karen at my 25th in 91 where I woke in a room of many people to find her sharing a bed with my younger brother. Didn't ask what was going on there. Lived in a big house down Woodlands Drive.
Janet Black, Alison Campbell, Alison Kinghorn, Bev Sands
THOSE WHO LEFT IN 5TH YEAR & OTHERS
Pat West Tall, athletic rugby captain with wavy fair hair. Given to temper outbursts. Once refused to run round Whitelands in the snow when Bush / Taggart made everyone else do it twice. Quite good at basketball. Left BP after 5th to do A Levels at college. Now has a law qualification and works for Leeds Council. Drank pints of milk with me when it was on draught at the Bull. Sat in a tree with Greg Shepherd and overheard a girl talking to cows. Could be scornful in all the wrong places. Found a caterpillar in his school salad and caused a furore when he complained.
Liz Churchill Lives in Rawdon and trains dogs for the blind. Seems to have kept in touch with a lot of people from BP.
Micky Barker Very quiet skinny, friendly kid with dark hair. One of the Yeadon crew that didn't wear a blazer. Met him and his wife in a working mens club shortly after leaving school. What excitable energy MB lacked, she had in spades. Since divorced. Still lives in Yeadon. Once forgot himself and attacked Sarah Scott Baker with a shoe on the Whitby school trip.
Debbie Barker Wiry dark hair. Yeadon girl last seen behind a desk in Rawdon's dole office scowling at claimants such as myself. Reputedly living in US but location unconfirmed.
Kevin Bateson Arrived from elsewhere around 2nd year then immediately established himself as an anti-authoritarian clown. Once simulated masturbation by rapidly banging the underside of a desk with his fist in Martin's RE class. Ginger. Famed for being the fat kid that beat up Andrew Firth. Looked like Cartman.
Ann Tyas Sends her kids to the same cub / scout group as Mark Fearnley in Horsforth. Known for appearing to make the legs of her chair sink in the grass on the 3H class photo.
Simon Dawson Played some kind of brass instrument in the school band, possibly a French Horn. Completely different cultural background to my own where such an instrument had never been heard of. Lived next to the church in Rawdon with an underhouse garage. Friends with Eddie Hoare, his next door neighbour.
Tim Mellors Eccentric pianist and trainee pilot who left UK for Germany at some point and taught himself the language. Met a woman and then moved back to the UK working in London and commuting from north of the smoke. Led 'Rough Round the Edges' a 6th form band and has earned a living playing in bars, including a stint at the Emmots. Made the mini reunion at the Bull and looks pretty much the same as he did back in the day, only more so.
Michael Smith
Graeme Marks Yeadon postman
Steve Ellsworth Freddie Mercury lookalike and huge Queen fan, a year older than the rest of us, Steve did 6th form for a short while before dropping out in a blaze of glory. Cranking the 6th form stereo up to full blast during a break, he strutted a Freddie Mercury impersonation across empty desktops round the edge of the room to an enthralled audience of half a dozen. I was myself privileged enough to witness this show of high camp genius. Later put me in an armlock for smashing a bottle at a party. Said he wanted to join the police. Sported a very tidy ginger moustache more in the Montgomery tradition than the Mercury one.
Alan Williamson NICKNAME – Skinny Willy. Year comedian. Told proper jokes about an Englishman an Irishman and a Scotsman to groups of avid listeners in the yard that were always hilarious. Was indeed skinny. Blonde hair. Loud and in your face. Now a highrolling print executive in Bradford after a stint as a milkman. Dave Houghton (DH pointing) Comedian who lived on the Laytons. Joined the RAF with friend Archie who died untimely. Had a thing for Vicki Lowe. Unrequited.
Eleanor Garrett Step sister to BP's only black kid in 1977, Richard Brown. Once guided me blind drunk down the Billing after a party night on neat Cinzano only for me to puke in her mum's garden and walk mud across their livingroom carpet. Obviously heard one too many of Jane Constantine's jokes midway thro Lower 6th (see above).
John Denison NICKNAME - Denny. Jock type who once ran the 800m at sports day in bare feet and won by 200m with a sprint finish. Totally impressive. Older by a year than everyone else, had his pick of the ladies and had a thing going with Julia Edwards for a while. Played rugby, drank and smoked. Lectured me about borrowing money from friends too often.
Lee Farrer Big Leeds Utd fan. We were season ticket holders together aged 10. Lee is now spokeman for Maverick Whites, a supporters group which travels to away games. Check their site here - www.maverickwhites.co.uk/ Lee's dad knew a few Leeds players thro his job as a bookie near the ground and Terry Yorath was invited to Lee's 8th or 9th birthday for a kickabout with his friends. Very impressed to find the lumbering Welshman heading towards me with the ball at his feet with cake waiting for afters.
Helen Claughton (Spence) NICKNAME - Clogger Very pronounced gluteus maximus and, a fine sprinter as a result. Short cropped brown hair, toothsome smile and a forceful manner. Another member of the Yeadon posse. Once shared her miniature bottle of whiskey / brandy with me by Ives field after a school trip. Still lives in Yeadon and works for Jet2.
Suzanne Matthews (Mather) NICKNAME - Parrot. Not sure how she got the nickname as 1BL culture was something unto itself. SM was gangly and did have a large nose. Maybe it was that. Maybe it was her loud nature. Pleasant chatty girl, a little hyper. Still friends with Catriona Hastie who will keep her in good quality cheese.
Richard Hammond Tried to beat me up after school one day having followed me around in the sun hours before threatening me with violence - all to satisfy his macho ego. Fortunately Chris Boffey intervened and saved my petrified skin. RH had a wide grin and a curly head of fair hair to rival the best female 80s perm. Lived on Leeds Rd in Rawdon.
Mark Upton Parents ran the Liberal Club on New Road Side in Horsforth which was a bar in a small house in the middle of a terrace. They had apple trees behind. Their house was separated from the garden by a small road which ran behind the terrace. Quite odd.
Caroline Glover
Phillip Smart Dentally distinctive kid with glasses who came in 1st year and left soon afterwards. Looked like Patrick Moor. Seem to think he played the trumpet.
Steven Schofield NICKNAME – Scoffa. large sidekick to the bullying Andrew Firth
Graeme Mellor, Richard Jevon,s Claire Barker, Iain BrookDeborah Parkinson, Jeanene Reeves, Penny Hartwoods
TEACHERS
Mr Lambley Deputy Head Uncanny resemblance to Flanders from the simpsons. Replacement for Mr Kershaw arriving in 78 / 79. Not that tall when stood by JRG. Seem to remember pale blue suits. Another authoritarian, this time with a slightly friendlier face tho in a different era could see him charging over the top with a bayonet wearing a trench coat and a german soldier's tin hat. Now a good golf player - 5 holes in one - lives out towards Harrogate i think.
Mollie Butler SUBJECT - NK Taught the bottom stream in the science block. Also ran an animation / film making class at lunchtime during my 1st year which i enjoyed going to for a while. Never made my film tho happily dreamed with bright felt tips and clean white paper for a few hours. A Winston Smith thing. Mollie Butler now lives in Menston.
Gillian Mallet SUBJECT - maths NICKNAME - Madge Maths teacher, nicknamed Madge. Lacked any ability to instil discipline and classes were a riot. Allegedly left after a nervous breakdown sometime in the early 80s. Don't know if she returned. Now lives in Leeds. My brother's class, 2 years below ours, used to shout 'low flying goldfish' in her classes and everyone would dive under the tables. Inventive. Me and Chris Cousins were dragged out of one of her classes in 1st year by Jeffrey Smith with ties tied round our heads - spotted by JRG spying thro the door window. I remember feeling sorry for Mrs Mallet at the time and sensing that this was not a commonly held sentiment.
Keith Robson (deceased) SUBJECT - Physics Much better remembered by others than by me as I was only briefly taught by him and probably never spoke to him in 7 years. Short, skinny, wild fair hair. Think he wore a leather jacket and played a red electric guitar. Taught physics.
Dave Spalton SUBJECT - Geography NICKNAME - Spoz Famously short geography teacher. Balding, laughed a lot and threw board rubbers at people's heads as well as using actual heads to clean the board. Once intervened to stop me committing playground suicide by throwing some mud at a giant who had been bullying me and the nerd gang. Lives in Horsforth on the Victorias a few doors up from Richard Hoban. Never taught by him. More stories to be told here I'm sure.
Alan Dulake SUBJECT – Physics NICKNAME – Jasper. Still lives on Yeadon / Guiseley border off Queensway. Tall, skinny, striding man to be seen making his way to school in tweedy jacket and drainpipes above the ankle with a briefcase and lambchop sideburns. Seem to think he might have had a very narrow tie. What style is all that? Had a reputation for ferocity tho was never taught by him and probably didn't speak to him in 7 years so can't verify. No obvious resemblance to Jasper Carrot. Owns a disused quarry.
Dave Welbourne SUBJECT – History, later HoD. History teacher, tall, glasses, strange hair. Lived in a room with old fashioned flip top desks sporting old and new graffiti, some of it mine. Big Bradford City fan. Also likes rugby and played for teachers team in late 70s / early 80s. Lives in Otley about which he's written (Prince Henry's school being named after a Prince of Wales who never made the throne). Had a cane hanging behind his desk but says he never used it to hit a kid. Did parade up and down in front of the board with it, absent mindedly he says, but a little intimidation was good for order. Made the bull mini reunion. Still looks very much the same and talks in a broad Yorkshire accent as tho just emerging from a Sheffield pithead. Joined him on a CND march in 79 / 80 thro Harrogate out to USAF Menwith Hill.
Richard Hoban SUBJECT – Science (retired as Deputy Head). Recently retired as Deputy Head at BP, a monumental career climb from the cherub-faced science teacher I remember from 1st year. Popular with the girls for being a looker, also commended by everyone for being an all-round nice guy. Played for the teachers rugby team in the late 70s / early 80s. lives in Horsforth on the Victorias where he's been all this time. Likes to play golf and unofficial archivist for the school with a wad-load of photos. Once told a 1st year class he drank from a cup of tea and got a bluebottle in his mouth. Turned up to the Bull mini reunion. Wide second hand car salesman smile. Claims he has no influence at BP now that a new regime has moved in. 100% approval rating on RateMyTeacher.com.
Steven Hinchliffe SUBJECT - Biology NICKNAMES - Rubble / Barney / Barney Rubble Biology teacher who one day proudly announced that he had called his 2 sons Willy and Dick. Why? Shortish, overweight, black curly hair. Apart from the hair colour, very accurately called Rubble for his likeness to the Flintstones character. Lived above the 6th form common room in a lab. Moved to Whitby on retirement, a town famed for it's goth / vampyre weekends. Likes to take upside down selfies. Possibly some recent Whitby bat influence there.
Mick Bush SUBJECT - PE (HoD). Gingerish short hair, ageing by sport standards tho was still playing rugby league for pro side Bramley in 77/ 78 and made his debut against the mighty Wigan. Very laid back and never broke into a sweat at BP. Made us run twice round a snow bound Whitelands to the irritation, no, anger, of Pat West who staged a one man go-slow. Last seen by me in the early 90s in a classroom wearing a tweedy 3 piece, retired from the boot room. Now likes to play golf with other retired teachers.
Lesley Taggart (deceased) SUBJECT – PE. Young, handsome, athletic Richard Hoban clone. Wore a tracksuit 5 days a week and probably at weekends in the days before scousers made it popular. Wide grin. Well liked, not least by female U15s. Died untimely.
Mr Beaver (deceased) SUBJECT - Chemistry NICKNAME - Boris Boris Karloff double, Mr Beaver Lived in his own world of white coats and bunsen burners in the chemistry lab just over the bridge. Always thought this block had a different atmosphere, cleaner somehow, probably more windows or whiter walls. Coached me to an A at O level so I have to assume he was a good teacher because I never felt that comfortable with the subject. Filled the lab with poisonous orange gas and looked like a large kid with learning difficulties - rather slow with his speech, distant, tho friendly enough. Can't say as I've ever used any of the knowledge he imparted in 30 years tho every so often I think about the cleverness of sticking 2 metal strips together made of different metals with different melting points to produce, i think, the operative bit of a thermostat. That and the impossibility of learning the table of elements.
Joyce Rimmington DEPUTY HEAD Mrs R had the look of Dolores Umbridge. Deputy Head alongside Mr Kershaw and later Mr Lambley. Famed for banning "elephantine" socks on girls - the fashion for wearing thick woolly socks pulled over the knee (ridiculous fashion statement) which sooner rather than later sagged and slid south to produce rolls of sock round the ankles.
David Kershaw DEPUTY HEAD Deputy to JRG in 77 / 78 when he left to head a school outside Oxford. Recently-ish retired. Has terminal cancer and told me he doesn't expect to make it past 2014. Had a fearsome reputation amongst 1st year boys at BP as Smith's henchman responsible for all the canings. pure fantasy no doubt. Wore a cape to assembly along with JRG which added to his thrashing image. Never spoke to him at school.
Jane Evans (deceased) SUBJECT – PE. Arrived early 80s. Young sports teacher, slim, navy tracksuit, shock of short, thick red hair. Strode everywhere with chin up. Never spoke to her. Moved to France sometime after leaving BP. Died this summer from cancer in Paris where she lived. Friend of Val Boyle who has paid testament to the courage with which JE coped with her illness.
Pete Simm SUBJECT - French & German (HoD). Languages teacher. Slightly overweight, dark hair, slightly balding. Jovial in a defensive or flirty Lancastrian way. Dark blue suits, quite sharp. Eye for the ladies, should we say girls. Something of a drinker, got banned from driving in 83 / 84. Owned a series of minis which he sped along in in front of the gym every morning (until he was banned then he got a lift from Tony Martin). Good cop to Tony Martin's languages bad cop. Loud laugh, seemed to command attention without really trying.
Duncan Blackburne (deceased) SUBJECT - Art (HoD) NICKNAME - Rock Ageing art teacher, wore tweedy suits, possibly with a waistcoat. Significantly touched up Sarah Baker's A level painting after she'd finished which was hushed up by all that knew despite the fact i complained to Phil Halstead. Interestingly, Sarah was given the Art Prize for this work by Phil Halstead. DB was obviously mad which makes me think it would have been good to have been taught by him. Never happened for me.
Pete Grove HEAD OF 6TH. Head of 6th form with an office above the common room. Seem to remember him telling me he was a longtime Labour voter. Me, Greg Shepherd and Jim Foggitt snuck into his office one lunchtime and rifled his filing cabinet to read personal files. One or two in the office, one or two lookout on the stairs, then rotate. Very interesting. First learned here that Pete Simm thought i was 'dilettante' - "a person who cultivates an area of interest, such as the arts, without real commitment or knowledge." Others might have called it 'getting a liberal education' - “an education mainly in the liberal arts, providing the student with a broad cultural background rather than with training in any specific profession.” PG once went ballistic, beard quivvering in righteoous anger, at members of the common room who had the stereo on during lesson time. Lives in Ilkley. Wore very bad pale grey suits in the style of a left wing trade unionist with a degree in something like sociology.
Janet Inglis SUBJECT - Domestic Science. Fragrant curvaceous blonde domestic science teacher, probably in her 30s at the time, who occupied the top floor corner room opposite music. Known, for those of us that didn't cook, for bringing Patrick Lee cups of coffee during music lessons. Now a deputy head at Emanuel in Bradford, probably getting cups of coffee brought to her.
Jill Crabtree (Sutcliffe) SUBJECT - English Young attractive dark haired English teacher. Slightly overweight I seem to remember. Form teacher in Yr 4 or 5. Demanded that we call her 'Miss' at registration so teased her by not doing so. She planned a production of Blythe Spirit by Noel Coward in 83 which I auditioned for on the strength of the fact that Sarah Scott Baker was going to be in it. Now living in Cambridge running a drama school with husband. We had a falling out when i pointed out her website was 100% beautiful white kids, rather like Jerry's Vision in the Addams Family where the pretty white kids get the parts and the Jews, the fat, the black kids and the weak are pushed out. More black faces in the website photos these days. drama school link here - http://www.dramaticmoments.co.uk/enrol-here.php
Leo Tane (deceased) SUBJECT – English (HoD) Ageing english teacher in brown 3 piece suits, incredibly large nose, somewhat birdlike. Short, bookish in an antiquarian bookseller kind of way. Occasionally irritable.
Phil Halstead SUBJECT - Art early painting by PH Youthful dark haired art teacher with large lips and bad breath no doubt caused by his Marlboro habit. Wore eccentric shoes – the mid 80s type with a straight inside edge and a curved outer edge so if you put them together they'd form a circle. Failed miserably to make sure kids had adequate brushes for painting and killed many a love of art by sitting enthusiastic students in front of potted geraniums for an hour a week. He was a good art history teacher - enthusiastic and knowledgeable - sometimes taking me and Simon Hodgin and / or Jane Ibberson back to his house for lessons to make up for the fact it wasn't adequately timetabled. Had a gas fire surrounded by 20 demijohns of homebrew wine which seemed to suggest what life as a teacher was really like. Shared smokes over Mantegna and other renaissance masters. Led a school trip to London where I had the good fortune to see some excellent exhibitions - Stanley Spencer, Braque and Hundertwasser, all of whom I still like today. Painted in his off hours - strange flat, almost comic book style landscapes with stylised palm trees and pyramids. Very bright and happy in a masculine sort of way. Left BP and moved into education management. Now retired and living in Norfolk.
Mr Howe SUBJECT - Geography Mam Tor in low cloud, Peak District, scene of a very low visibility school trip c.1980, led by Mr Howe Handsome, young, curly haired, brown suited, inexperienced geography teacher who only lasted a couple of years. Word had it he had 10 kids and left to become a monk. Seriously.
Jack Ayling SUBJECT - History, Politics & Economics, General Studies Never knew what this bloke did until i got into 6th form where he took us for General Studies. Others had him for A Level Politics and Economics which he seemed to teach in a conservative and credulous way. Wore very sharp dark blue suits with a waistcoat (banned for 6th formers) and had greased back dark hair. Slightly above average height, slightly portly. Well spoken. Passing resemblance to Dracula.
Evelyn Maxtead (deceased) SUBJECT - English Tall, chisel-faced woman who taught English in the conservative tradition. Tweedy. Got me and Dave Turtle tickets to the pilot show of Countdown at YTV where I kept obscuring Dave's face from the cameras by wafting my hand in front of him, much to the annoyance of the publicity hungry Christian. EM all but killed books with her teaching.
Karen Bullimore SUBJECT – PE & Biology Pleasant, waif-like sports teacher, ridiculed behind her back for her flat chest. Blue tracksuit, short fair hair. Form teacher for the legendary 1BL. Very low marks on RateMyTeacher.com
Patrick Lee SUBJECT – Music David Soul lookalike music teacher hiding away in the top floor corner room, occasionaly brought cups of coffee by the curvaceous and very married Domestic Science teacher Janet Inglis from across the hall. This sparked much speculation. Organised well in school music - productions, bands etc - and composed his own material, some of it on the web. Retired to a golf course in Ilkley then to full time composing. Seemed to miss the point in his Ilkley Moor composition. listen to PL's music here - http://www.scoreexchange.com/profiles/patrickjlee
Andy McColl SUBJECT - Metalwork Metal work teacher, blues guitarist, football coach and diminutive beard guy. Took U15 soccer to a cup final after previous season of 9-1 defeats under Steven Hinchliffe. Plays guitar around the clubs of Yorkshire in his retirement.
Angie Gilliard SUBJECT - PE. Never spoke to the woman in 7 years. Seem to think she had a lisp. Female games teacher spitefully and erroneously labelled a lesbian behind her back by the girls she taught. Curly mousy hair, tracksuit and authoritarian manner. Recently married, living in the US. Val Boyle SUBJECT - English (VB 3rd from right) 80s short haired blonde English teacher who took 1984 by Orwell at A level. Introduced the black-eyed bean to my consciousness. No longer in teaching and just finished her first novel. Claims to be a feminist but is also very feminine in the traditional sense. Lives in the north-east with husband. No kids. Good friends with Jane Evans who recently died of cancer.
Tony Martin SUBJECTS - French & German NICKNAME - French Martin. Arch enemy number 2 in the BP authoritarian nonsense stakes. Had a ferocious temper, once marching down the entrance hall and flooring an unsuspecting 2nd year with a double handed shove in the chest. Told interesting anecdotes about French culture but was basically an angry man in a polo neck carrying a mandolin. Plays guitar in the blues bars of north / West Yorkshire and vacations over the summer at his holiday home in France. French wife, daughter, got his teaching qualification at Airedale College in Horsforth. Once marched down the drive solo to confront a gang of skins. High marks on RateMy Teacher.com.
Mark Hatherley SUBJECT - Biology NICKNAME - Tramp 3H form teacher known as 'Tramp' for his tweedy jackets and perma-stubble. Leggy, dark haired. Once donned a bee keeping suit along with JRG Smith to wrestle the school bees off a hedge and into a sack. Very impressive work. Seated his form alphabetically and in M/F rotation to stop idle chit chat.
Jon Cresswell SUBJECT - History (later Head of 6th).
John Webb SUBJECT - Music (HoD) Tall individual with glasses and brown hair. Composed music for the funeral service of JRG Smith's young daughter at Rawdon church. Still lives in Rawdon. Fearsome reputation built on urban myths about his fondness for caning.
Dave Hancock SUBJECT – Maths. Muscular maths teacher who took responsibility for the school's first computer – a small shed load of bits assembled in the boys toilets which could probably add up small numbers in a matter of days. Took a school trip down a coal mine. An excellent adventure for the few who went. Lives in Horsforth.
Dave Martin SUBJECT - RE. looked like the 118 blokes. Likeable hippy type with droopy moustache whose classes were a riotous mess not unlike those of Madge Mallet. Kevin Bateson once similated masturbation at the back of the class by banging his fist rapidly up and down on the underside of a flip top desk. Raucous hilarity.
Barry Mills SUBJECT - German Ginger German teacher with beard. Bad taste in pale grey suits. Preferred to be known as “Herr Mills”. Keeps canaries. Enjoyed sledging in Germany.
Jeffrey Smith HEADMASTER also taught Latin NICKNAME – Batman Would have been called a 'headteacher' today but back then it was definitely 'headmaster'. A short tempered authoritarian and corporal punishment practitioner who I saw as the arch enemy of my youth. Only later did I find out that many of my contemporaries actually liked the man. He taught Latin to a select few and played squash with 6th formers. Took assembly in a cape and wore pale grey 3 piece suits. Still lives in Guiseley and likes to play golf. Famously drove a pale blue Volvo 244. Wrangled bee swarms with Mark Hatherley.
Keith Martin SUBJECT – Metalwork. Taught me to lay a plane on its side to protect the blade and subjected me and others to blister producing hours of filing. Made a bowl with legs which I used as a candle holder. Nearly set fire to my bed when the wick burned out and a pool of burning wax melted the solder holding the legs on so I couldn't pick it up. Really enjoyed using a hammer on the anvil to beat copper plate.
Christine Fairhead SUBJECT – History,
Jean Peck SUBJECT - Chemistry
Andy Brown SUBJECT - Maths NICKNAME – Fez Maths teacher with another moustache to rival Ned Flanders. Never taught by him but seem to remember he had a distinctive line in brown suits, often covered in chalk dust. Emerging from his room after a lesson he sometimes had the air of someone who'd just been run over by a bison.
Dave Dietz SUBJECT - German. Tormented by his A Level German class for being too nice. One day his desk in a biology lab was turned into an altar replete with lighted bunsen burners and bulls' eyes in petri dishes by his waiting 6th formers . He left teaching soon after.
Joyce Dutton (deceased) SUBJECT – Drama Eccentrically dressed ageing dramaturge with large glasses and a beehive. Very aloof for no apparent reason. Encouraged 1st year drama classes to act like trees.
Jean Harris (deceased) SUBJECT – English Short fair hair, possibly in her 50s during the early 80s. Taught Pinter's Caretaker (see above) at A Level and famously cried as she read a scene to one of her classes. That seems perfectly fair now but it was amusing to many at the time. Wore chunky jewellery and lots of it.
Karen Short SUBJECT - PE. Still teaching at BP amazingly enough. Arrived in the early 80s with distinctive near-centre parting short floppy brown hair and less distinctive blue tracky. Efficient looking march in the way that gym teachers seem to have made their own. Likes a drink apparently. 96% quality rating on RateMyTeacher.com. June Brown SUBJECT -
Mr Cole SUBJECT – metalwork / 5th year football coach
Barbara Pickles (deceased) SUBJECT - English Geoff Scott (deceased) SUBJECT - Reg Worth (deceased) SUBJECT -Christopher Brewis SUBJECT - Maths - Paul Ratcliffe SUBJECT – TD NICKNAME – Fred / Ratty Mike Holmes SUBJECT - Eric Walker SUBJECT -
The Dinnerladies A final note so we don't forget the dinnerladies who kept us fed thro those many years. Spam fritters, fish on Fridays, scotch eggs, dinner tickets and a caterpillar in Pat West's salad. They loved us, we called them dinnerbags.
Simon Hodgin
Andrew Butterfield (left), Martin White (right)
YEADON
Yeadon. as best as i can work it out, this was the boundary. in class terms, the working-class 'zone' spread from all of Yeadon up into Rawdon as far as the top of Batter Lane where new and larger housing with a different class of resident extended through the rest of Rawdon right down into Horsforth. class isn't a hard and fast thing.
Class of 77 demographic by residence
Horsforth
Veronica Stead
Gary Walker
Simon Newton
Mark Upton
Fiona Glynn
Dave Hurst
Louise Goodall
Mark Fearnley
Clare Middleton
Andrew Butterfield
Bev Sands
Heather Leach
Martin White
Greg Shepherd
Ruth Wilkes
Michael Smith
Stuart Smith
Lee Farrer
Chris Boffey
Richard Boese
John Stevenson
Clare Walker
Rawdon
Jonathan Penny
Julia Edwards
Julie Norton
Heather Gray
Vicki Lowe
Ed Hoare
Jim Foggitt
David Turtle
Jane Constantine
Simon Hodgin
Catriona Hastie
Karen Lacey
Pat West
Eleanor Garrett
Julie Jennings
Simon Dawson
Nicola Mortimer
Richard Hammond
Tim Mellors
Yeadon
Wendy Leek
Pauline Dawson
Helen Mould
Chris Cousins
Margaret Pratt
Diane Lister
Virginia Scott Helen Claughton
Micky Barker
Debbie Barker
Nick Watson (started in Horsforth)
Guiseley
Sarah Baker
Sarah Scott Baker (started in Yeadon)
Not known (either Yeadon or Rawdon)
Chris Metcalfe
Andrea Schofield
Mary Langdon
Julian Sutcliffe
Gillian Farrington
Kerry Leek
Janet Black
Alison Campbell
Alison Kinghorn
Liz Churchill
Kevin Bateson
Ann Tyas
Graeme Marks
Steve Ellsworth
John Denison
Suzanne Matthews
Caroline Glover
Alan Williamson
Phillip Smart
Steven Schofield
Graeme Mellor
Richard Jevons
Claire Barker
Iain Brook
Deborah Parkinson
Jeanene Reeves
Penny Hartwoods
YEARS 1-5
the summer of 77 was in many ways an idyllic time, playing in fields and woods, lighting fires and exploring the world. as it ended, so began life at Benton Park and so ended any route to happiness i might have had. i remember thinking miserably to myself as i stood looking at the school building, early in my 1st year, 'i've got 5 more years of this to go'. after attacking Nicholas Charlesworth on the last day of school at Newlaithes, a reputation had followed me to secondary school of which i was quite unaware. the first year mixed about 4 or 5 primary school groups and amongst these several hardnuts were looking to establish their reputations, encouraged by the poisonous whisperings of older friends and brothers. i was considered a rival and picked out fior fights by three of these people. the first time i defended myself on instinct after having been cornered by Carl Greaves and his older friend, surrounded also by an enthusiastic crowd of illwishers. i got a fat lip after Greaves' friend hit me while i was being held in a headlock. Karl and myself were dragged apart by music teacher Webb and made to stand in the headteacher's corridor to await punishment which, as it turned out for me, meant nothing. I was then stalked by Andrew Firth, kicked on the way into assembly and terrified for weeks as i expected to be attacked round every corner. I took a week off school feigning an illness my mother suspected was fake then reluctantly went back to school. i saw Andrew on the stairs soon after. he smiled in a friendly way saying, 'i'm not after you anymore i'm after Hammond'. Richard Hammond himself came after me on the playing field with Andrew Firth as a henchman at some point. he was goading me into a fight yet despite the fear i was fixated by his ridiculous keegan perm dancing in the afternoon sun. i was afraid and kept walking. then after school he was waiting for me. he punched me in the stomach and i was unable to defend myself, too afraid to retaliate, at which point my mum arrived and pulled up in the Chevette next to me. that was it as far as fights were concerned until i was in 5th year and, standing with a bunch of geeks, we came under attack from mud bombs, thrown by a gang of 4th year jocks. they were standing by the gym which is where everyone cleaned their studs after a game of rugby or football and they had piles of grassy mud to play with. i got hit in the side after dodging several missiles. i picked up the projectile and strode in a fit of righteous rage towards the gang of slavvering meatheads. as i reached the edge oof the group, i asked 'who threw that?' there was a long pause. then from the back a new kid stepped forward. his distinguishing feature was his size, a giant in the yard, ugly and hostile with it. 'i did' he said. i didn't believe him. he obviously wanted to take me on. i didn't care. just as i was about to throw the fistful of mud right at him, the gnome-like geography teacher David Spalton appeared from the edge of the yard and told me to turn around and move away. i did this. he'd save me.
my first form teacher was Dave Hancox, a maths teacher. i don't remember much about first year except that i was one of the smartest dressed kids in my year. this was entirely down to my mum who harboured secret personal nightmares about shoddy school uniforms. i drew geraniums badly and ate spam. i was miserable and afraid on a daily basis from this point on. i was besotted with Vicki Lowe, mostly for the fringe she had on her long, very straight, shiny almost black hair. i say it was the fringe. i can't think of anything else as other girls were more attractive and other girls had long shiny hair. none had a straight fringe. then again it could have been the fact that she came from a wealthy family and she fancied herself as a cut above. she did hold her chin up and treated me like a lesser being. i asked her out. she said no. i did this again and again, eventually on my knees, mostly prompted by my friend Chris Cousins who liked the amusement. she never said yes tho she never really sent me away with enough crashing disappointment to give up. this went on for a couple of years until my attention moved to Sarah Scott Baker in the 3rd year. more to tell there. much more. my entire life can probably be documented in terms of which girl i was interested in at the time.
i don't remember 2nd year at all and only remember 3rd year because i was in love with Sarah Scott Baker. she'd passed me a note in History, smiling in a gingham blue shirt from her window seat as i opened it nearer the middle of the room - "for well you know that it's a fool who plays it cool by making his world a little colder" - Hey Jude, the Beatles. i asked Jon Penny who was sitting next to me what it meant. "it means she likes you" he said shrewdly. i don't know if my heart leapt at Sarah's interest but it did something that meant it would never be the same again. the leaping came shortly after when one day she fell off her stool at the front of the class at registration and i felt myself lurching forward to go help her. i sat down again even before i'd got up, instinctively knowing this would be social suicide. my heart was pounding. she'd fainted and lay there in a lifeless pile of feminine helplessness. she was lifted up by form teacher Mark Hatherley. i'd done nothing about my secret love and would say nothing to her for another couple of years tho i did start to follow her home, tormenting myself, back to being the loyal dog. the thing about Sarah was she was the smartest girl in the class. she was on the social class fence like myself, tho in a slightly different way, and i think in some way she loved me. Mr Hatherley arranged class seating alphabetically by surname and alternately by gender to stop chatting and i ended up between two girls, Wendy Leek and Margaret Pratt, who wanted to have my babies. they talked in code but that was it. i was handsome and smartly dressed and intelligent and harmless. if i'd been better at sport i would have had the world at my feet.
fourth year passed without note except i think, that i played for the school football team in goal and our average result was a 9-1 loss. the team was coached by Rubble who obviously had no idea what he was doing. then fifth year arrived and i'm sure i must have been counting down the days until it was over. the football team dramatically improved with the arrival of a new coach, the unlikely Mr McColl who was too quiet and un-macho for this sort of thing. but he succeeded where iothers had failed and got the team to a cup final. at his try-outs i decided to play outfield and dashed as best as i could for the whole while, doing just enough to get a place as centre back in the new team. one evening we played on the school pitch and Chris Cousins watched from the touchline where, with a couple or three Yeadon tough nuts he started verbally abusing our coach, the metalwork teacher Mr McColl. 'D-I-L-D-O' he chanted, over and over in an angry thuggish way. Chris had three brothers and a sister, all younger than him, all well over six foot, all working-class practitioners of the working-class code. Chris's dad was a ted, the source of Chris's Elvis idolatry and a slick haired working-class beefcake who worked in the enamelling factory by JCT roundabout. if he'd had fewer kids he may have been well off but the family of 7 were crammed into a small prefab semi just off Kirk Lane in Yeadon where kids shared rooms into their teenage years. Chris's mum Maureen was a slightly plump middle-aged woman with worn good looks who worked serving food in the canteen at the Guiseley engineering firm, Crompton Parkinsons.
the cup final was a disaster. we played away and lost 5-1 to a team of giants from Pudsey Crawshaw who largely scared me off the ball. Mick Bush turned up to watch his only game of the season. the kid who played on the wing for us didn't like my amused attitude when the opposition scored their fifth goal, berating, arms flailing. he was disappointed in the Yeadon manner. all this might just have got a mention in assembly from the rugby loving Smith who i sometimes followed down the corridor as he straightened pictures, unstraightening them. i remember there was a Van Gogh haywain print. Phil Halstead once exhibited his paintings in the school. his work was interesting and certainly it made a difference to the dull corridors and entrance hall of the 60s pile that was Benton Park. he painted desert landscapes with stylised, almost cartoon-like pyramids and palm trees, devoid of figures, very bright. i liked them but i didn't understand why anyone would want to paint this stuff.
Fire Dazzles Bluebird by Phil Halstead, probably painted late 70s. i bought this for £20 in 1984
i must have done O levels at some point tho i don't remember them. i took eight subjects and got 5 A's, 2 B's and a C, the latter being in English literature, a subject i would later spend many years unhappily tied to at university. tho i did well, these weren't the best marks in the year by any means. i struggled with A level choices, eventually going for English, Art & Art History, German and General Studies. GS was compulsory. it was explained that another exam pass would better scores for university applications. the mandatory exam was all down to Andrew West who had taken it upon himself to sit the exam alone 2 years earlier and had done well enough to influence Smith's exam policy. German i chose because the alternative was maths - a serious contender until i went to the incomprehensible 'bridging course' after which it was dumped as an option. we had a sex education class with other forms in a large room where a middle aged woman draped condoms on an overhead projector and fielded mocking questions from priapic fourth formers. i was of course completely priapic myself by this stage and had been since about the age of 9. i was obsessed with girls, their beauty and their soft, harbouring souls. i was a slave to the part of myself that loved women.
more than anything about school life, apart from perhaps the sense of impending violence and the beauty of women, was my reaction to the injustices and dishonesties i saw exercised by teachers. i recoiled from hypocrisy in others just as no doubt i was practicing it myself. i think that teachers held a opposition of trust and responsibility as well as authority made their shortcomings particularly bitter for me. some of this stuff left me dumbfounded. at some point, for example, there was a referendum of parents on the school name. someone had suggested the word 'grammar' be dropped while the headmaster, JRG Smith, recommended that they vote to keep this prestigious descriptor so that it would look better on university application forms sent out by 6th formers. smith was defeated and the word was dropped but in my eyes he had now become a rank hypocrite to be held in contempt for selling the lie whilst piously demanding - sometimes at the end of a rod - honesty and good behaviour from his pupils. then there was the arbitary nature of staff justice - french Martin running thro the entrance hall to shove, without a word of warning, a 2nd year full in the chest, knocking him to the floor. the crime? messing about in the dinner queue. or the way in which the playground was often deserted of staff so fights could go on for 5 minutes or more. teachers repainting art exam entries and so on. what kind of authority was this?
LOW ROYD
possibly in the summer after 5th year, i started working part-time for the Joughin family down on Woodlands Drive in Rawdon as a garden labourer after seeing an advert in the Yeadon Job Centre. 'Have you got transport?' asked my future employer when i phoned about the job. 'yes' i replied. henceforth i used to challenge life expectancy averages as i hurtled down Apperley Bridge on my rickety racer, cycling to and from Yeadon in a 4 mile round trip. Woodlands Drive was a long sweeping private road lined with trees and large detached houses in grounds, a wood and fields on one side, Woodhouse Grove school and the river on the other. i enjoyed these visits to an intellectual family with an eccentric matriarch as i pottered in the garden. i also enjoyed the size and the character of the house and garden, a regular oasis in a sea of working-class schlock and social battery farming. Margaret, the matriarch, was a retired teacher, short, maybe 5'1". round shouldered, mild Irish accent subject to years of Anglicisation, a mop of untidy short grey hair, maybe in her late 50s when i first started there in 82. there were six kids - Brian, Martin, Sheena, Kyran, Bridgid and Cathy. for a long time i assumed the number of kids and the Irish connection meant the family were Catholics. not so. Cathy was my age, Brian, the eldest, was old enough to be my dad but was a laid back dropout with an interest in the arts. all the kids were talented in one way or another except for Cathy who lacked the academic edge or entertainment value of her siblings. Sheena was a fabric designer and writer who had depression issues and had done therapy, Martin was an antiquarian book dealer and Dr of Philosophy married to a Dutch art magazine editor, Kyran was a paper conservationist and Brigid eventually became a GP. Brian seemed to be the heir apparent. a couple of the siblings went to Oxbridge. Martin had hitched from the UK to Pakistan as a young man, a very impressive feat, apart from the fact that he got drugged and robbed on the way. Maragaret's husband Derek was seen only infrequently. when he arrived, he invariably stormed around in a rage, barking orders and criticism at a frightened Margaret who turned into another, trembling and quietly hysterical person. Derek was also a teacher in his younger days but had moved into making faux stone paving out of concrete. he travelled the world a fair bit and had found himself a South American mistress who had impeccable housekeeping practices. he had an impressive matchbook collection but this was as nothing compared to his £70K collection of Napoleonic books which Margaret got as part of the divorce settlement. one day, helping to catalogue these books, Margaret asked me to pick out one in particular which, she informed me, had been owned by one of the Bonaparte emperors. i was very impressed. it was a red leather bound tome with a gold crest on the front. surprisingly, it wasn't the most valuable book in the room. this and another few were hidden upstairs by Martin who was working on cataloguing this 3 wall, ceiling-high collection which required step ladders to manage.
Margaret's housekeeping style was something to behold and was largely what i liked about working at Low Royd. she was a hoarder and salvager of quite impressive proportions and this impressed me greatly. rooms were filled above door height with piles of clothes, boxes, furniture and bits of wood. nestled amongst the pile there would be a small table and a couple of chairs for drinking tea, chatting about family and books, and doing some knitting. it was a period house and rooms had high ceilings, heavy doors and moulded plasterwork. there was a real fire in the dining room and soil in the cutlery drawer. one day, driving on the outskirts of Bradford, she stopped the car and sent me into some derelict terraces to salvage wood. she had rolls of carpet and more wood stored in a specially built, stone garden shed and under the railway bridge next to her neighbour's garden. the low royd house was just being divided in two when i arrived there as part of the divorce agreement. the larger side was to be sold, Margaret and the kids would get the other half. the sweeping staircase with the beautifully patinated bannister went to the new owners. there was also a stable block which went to an architect who renovated it himself. before this could happen, the contents of the lower floor had to be removed to the Joughin side of the boundary. it was at this point i broke an antique, or at least vintage, mirror. another time, as i was moving other stuff, the eldest daughter, Sheena, who was sleeping in the upper floor, pulled back the curtains, staring down at me for a couple of seconds in full nudity as i was pushing a wheelbarrow. i was alerted to her presence by the sound of curtain rings. as i turned my head i slowly carried on pushing the barrow, staring blankly at the figure in the window. Margaret's neighbours were hostile to the madwoman nextdoor in a polite, teeth gritting way. on one side, the retired TV producer who had taken to watercolour painting, his glamorous wife and young child. on the other, the architect with his screaming wife and young daughter. the wife's episodes concerned Margaret enough for her to consider calling the NSPCC. i don't know if this happened. the husband wandered around his garden, contemplating his moustache and the lack of adequate foundations in the Joughin-built dividing wall which stood six foot high but finished half way down the boundary line where the two gardens began to merge with shrubbery. apparently he'd agreed to fund the other half but refused to do so when he discovered the news about the foundations. he wanted the wall demolished and rebuilt. Margaret evaded. there was a large sycamore tree overlooking the stable block, just on the Joughin side of the wall. one day i found Margaret feeding a fire up against the trunk. when i asked what she was doing she said sycamores were weeds and she was trying to kill it. if the tree had fallen it would have crushed her new neighbour's house. with a screaming wife and a highly testing neighbour, the architect was up against it. there were other neighbours. Margaret once sent me on an errand to a house somewhere up in the woods off Woodlands Drive and i arrived at the bottom gate to find it had a nine hole pitch and putt course in the garden. there were the Piries, father and daughter Pamela, who had the first floor in a large detached house just up the road. Pamela was a couple of years younger than me and very beautiful i eventually gt up the courage to ask her on a date and we went for a walk around the private roads of the area. we talked, probably there were log silences. certainly she never wanted to see me again. she mocked me in whispers to her friend Cathy after that. i don't know where i went wrong. i suspect i was too much of a gentleman. Pamela, like the Joughins, was middle-class and i knew there was a difference between me and everyone else i met at Low Royd, apart from the tradesmen who in turn were working-class and radically different from me in their own way. this was grammar school country and the divide was well illustrated when Cathy, at the insistence of her mother, invited me to a party in the stable block. i'd been there only a short while, taking Christian square and white suit wearing Dave Turtle from school, when the drunk grammar school boys came over and started spoiling for a fight with that particular brand of aggressive / contemptuous behaviour for which they are famous. we left. for quite a while while i was working there, there was a shabby static caravan parked in the drive. various family members and guests slept in it as the house was being converted until one day it's time was up and it had to be moved. somehow it was noted that Chris Cousins' dad's estate car had a tow ball and that he would come to the house and tow the caravan up the windy drive and out of the incredibly narrow gate which had 6' stone pillars on either side. Chris arrived smiling, up for the challenge after recently passing his test, but must have spent over an hour doing left hand down, right hand down and burning out the clutch with ear piercing revving before the mobile shack made it into the road. i seem to think Margaret thanked him profusely in the insincere and profuse way she had but i'm sure the car was never the same again. Margaret often tried to butter up male workers she'd set strenuous tasks by referring to their 'big strong muscles' even when, in my case, there was no evidence of such. one such occasion must have been the time we were improving the rockery in front of the front door and she wanted a metre high boulder moving to the centre of the plot. Martin, her aesthete son took charge, directing operations wearing flannels and a panama hat in the hot sun whilst myself and one or two others tried to shift the rock across the soil. he stood on the lawn beneath the branches of the massive copper beech, asking us to tweak it backwards and forwards to achieve the best perspective, seemingly oblivious to the contempt he was generating. work at the Joughins was always varied. some days, especially in the early days, i was landscape gardening. other times i would be sorting wool or cleaning plasterwork. Margaret used to like to remind me, in a class-war kind of a way i thought, about how i'd compared this to cleaning earwax out of an ear. i painted window frames, bagged shoes from under the bed - an incredible pile of old styles that completely covered the 30 squre feet of floor space to a depth of 2 pairs. i buried their cat after being sent to scoop it off the road outside with a spade, the ginger animal being hard as a board. Bridgid was most upset. the family had a small wiry white dog called Kerry, named after the Irish county and then when that died, Margaret got a collie which she called Dingle after the place in south west Ireland. a regular at Low Royd was Mr Segar who built the non-specification stone wall, the shed without planning permission (he chiselled a fake date in a stone by the door) and sundry jobs around the house which were technically beyond my inexperienced ken. he was what you would call a miserable old bastard and used to pride himself on taking the middle-class woman to task in his shouting flat cap way. i worked with him a few times - building the wall - and it was difficult going. he constantly bitched about his employer and expected me to take his side in awkward confidences. Margaret's husband Derek eventually got himself a place in Harrogate, an upmarket apartment in one of the town's mansions. i helped move furniture there from his office at Low Royd. for an old man with a worn out hip he gamely helped lift a heavy antique desk up several flights of stairs. i met the mistress, soon to be the new wife, who was very pleasant in a ladylike way, the complete antithesis of the womble-like Margaret with her fridgeful of decaying food and ever growing pile of stuff. Derek died a few years ago, about the same time as Margaret had to give up on a favourite old car. she tearfully blurted down the phone, after a long conversation, "i miss that old car". despite all the arguments, the shouting, the divorce and the histrionics, there was grief for Derek.
the sibling dynamic was what you might call competitive in so far as everyone talked over each other, getting louder and louder and louder until sense was not to be heard. one time i turned up for a christmas family get together when everyone was there (Cathy, the youngest, still lived at Low Royd then but all her brothers and sisters had long since moved out), seated round the large table in the dining room with logs on the fire blazing away. it was chaos. everyone was shouting at each other in a massive and appalling din. i caught Margaret's eye and shouted, 'if this is matriarchy you can keep it'.
i stayed working for the Joughins occasional weekends on and off until my early 20s when eventually i started staying in Liverpool full time. when the youngest, Cathy, had left home and got a family of her own, Margaret moved to be with her other daughter, Brigid, in Newcastle where she bought a nice Victorian terrace opposite an allotment society. she got a half plot and continued the gardening which she'd done at Low Royd where she'd grown fruit and vegetables. she said, when i visited for her 80th birthday, that she'd like her ashes scattering under the tree by the beehive. a few fellow plot holders were in accord. as to be expected, her half plot was rambling and ramshackle but there were some interesting plants in there, including a new variety of apple tree which she named Dingle Jesmond after her dog / the area of Ireland she remembered fondly and the area of Newcastle where she lives. the Joughin house was always visited by interesting people. it was the middleclass / academic / slightly unorthodox mix that i just wasn't used to but in which i felt more at home than in my football and vacuuming and airgun firing family in Yeadon. of course i was interested by the superficialities. the interesting vocations of family and friends, Margaret reading in French in the sunshine, stories of Sheena's parenting (apparently she just cut clothes off her baby when they became soiled) or Brian's latest feckless development - he was officially a part time photographer but was actually a pugnacious raconteur and 70s post-hippie drop out. my hours at the Joughins were completely irregular - some weeks i could work 30+ hours, others i wouldn't be there at all. the longer it went on, the less enthusiastic i was about going. i became idle in a way even tho i needed the money (and got lectured by John Denison that i should go work at Low Royd instead of regularly borrowing money for drink) and actually quite liked it there. Margaret was a no hope case and maybe this is what put me off. she would never finish sorting her pile of stuff, never complete even half the jobs she had lined up and the whole thing was rather frustrating. on the upside, she did make Low Royd crunch quite often which i absolutely loved. nothing like this in Yeadon - oats, butter, sugar, fruit, nuts and seeds, baked to a golden brown. more than once i found myself dipping into the tin when i shouldn't have been. shameful petty thievery. we lifted the floorboards in the kitchen which was 3 or 4' above ground level and i went under the boards to lift Yorkshire flags from the original house floor. they were very impressive pieces of rock and difficult to lift from the narrow hole but Brian helped out and the job was done. in the end i think they were used to pave the car parking area in front of the house - a job me and I. Burns completed one summer. it was almost level and almost drained into the drain at the corner of the square. heavy work as some slabs were 20+cm thick and almost a metre square. i helped cater Bridgid's wedding reception. her husband later killed himself leaving her with 3 young kids. the father of Sheena's son, a toyboy with a ponytail, fell off his house barge and drowned, possibly while drunk. i helped move Margaret out of Low Royd on a day the house was full of an army of friendly helpers which included the irascible and now aged Mr Segar. the Joughin family, from Margaret's line, have a distinctive face which in all members most noticeably features a somewhat bulbous nose. Derek was different. wild silver hair and a sharp face, staggering around on that malfunctioning leg in strangely dated and ill-fitting suits. he was an old fashioned kind of businessman i think tho it's a breed i've rarely come across. the copper beech between the drive and the house was something to behold. a massive, solid, tree with subtle dark hues and attractive oval leaves. i liked that tree. it's gone now. removed by efficient owners with a H&S consciousness, unwilling to let themselves be crushed by branch and lightning strike in the name of arboreal love. when i first arrived at the house there were the brick foundations of a large greenhouse which i had to take out and an area behind the house which i levelled with a rake. or at least i tried to level it. once the grass began to grow it was quite obvious that i'd failed miserably and the lawn was in fact a dome with an obvious slope. no one minded. i remember the feel of soil in my shuffling footwear from these days of labour. door to door 'antique dealers' - 'knockers' - came round and the following week Margaret lost a grandmother clock and other items to burglars. she got an alarm. Derek had a wine collection in the very damp cellar which his children seemed to appreciate. i once house sat while the family were away, alone in this dark, isolated old house in an old fashioned bed piled high with old fashioned or at least strange bedding. it was a comfortable bed and i slept. eventually Margaret treated herself to a new kitchen, literally building a new room and then equipping it with a new cooker. she still furnished it with reclaimed wood and brought some of the old fixtures - i remember a revolving cupboard - with her from the old, small, dilapidated kitchen next door. i learned a lot at Low Royd, mostly that life didn't begin and end with lower middle class culture death. there was a more intellectual world out there even if it was populated by elitist groups with share portfolios that included Guinness stock. intellectualism is of course no sign of superiority in itself. i've met many intellectual people utterly flawed. but it was all new and here i was. i got to garden while i learned about this interesting life and that in itself was a happy thing to be doing most of the time tho there's no gardening like the gardening of the gardener who decides what goes where and when. particularly i remember the patch of gooseberry bushes with it's perfect thorns and large ripe berries. i went back to Low Royd for the first time a couple of years back and found they'd block-paved the drive, built some garden walls and installed a rather cheap looking garage. the owner showed me the garden when i explained i'd worked there and we wandered thro the new fruit trees his family had planted. after 20 years it was remarkably the same. the infrequent trains still went by on the Ilkley - Leeds track at the bottom of the garden and the Woodhouse Grove school clock no doubt still chimed every 15 minutes as it had done to mark my hourly pay those many years previously. my partner, Leonie, who attended Brigid's wedding with me, said she thought they all patronised me, like i was the help, the boy from the village. i never really noticed this or saw it that way but in retrospect it was a little like that. i must have seemed a bit of a pleb. and in many ways i was tho as i've said above i was never really part of the working-class. was this an inverse Road to Wigan Pier? no. there was no such extreme gap between myself and the Joughins as there was between Orwell and the owners of the tripe shop. but it certainly provided a little material for a sociological document on British class culture. i should say, relations with all family members was friendly and warm or at least friendly. i've maybe taken this for granted while writing. oh, and yes, they always called me 'Nicholas'. this was unusual for me but not for them as they'd never known me as 'Nick'. i think i must have given my proper name at the Job Centre. otherwise 'Nicholas' was never used by anyone except for when my mother was loudly trying to patronise me into conformity. i've never managed to quite replicate Low Royd crunch tho doubtless i will continue to try, albeit to a more enlightened vegan recipe.
a typical Margaret Joughin woodpile by the Segar shed, built from stone taken from a retaining wall - much to the anguish of her neighbour
A LETTER TO SARAH JANE SCOTT BAKER
WRITTEN IN 2011
trying to find closure
a note on sarah jane scott baker and nick watson going out
Your birthday is 21 june, midsummer. Although we’d been in the same classrooms for 3 or 4 years, I barely knew of your existence until one sunny day in history a note from you on a small piece of torn paper was passed my way – “for well you know that it’s a fool who plays it cool by making his world a little colder.” I had no idea what this meant or that it was a beatles quote. I asked my neighbour. “it means she likes you” he said with a sagacity I didn’t know he had as he leaned into my face with a predatory grin. You had rather gawky golden pigtails, a skinny thorax and, in history at least, you sat by the window. You were the smartest, most hard-working girl in the class and things would never be the same. I’ve still got the note.
I began to love you from this point yet, despite some contradictory signs, I was incredibly shy and did nothing about it. I told no one but started to follow you home at a distance of maybe 200 yards whenever I could. As you turned right up the hill towards home, I stood at the bottom of the street watching your back with a sense of sadness and longing. In registration we sat at right angles to each other, you a couple of rows nearer the front than my also alphabetically organized self. One hot day, you in blue gingham shirt, sat on a stool in this science lab, fainted and fell to the floor. I was probably the first to notice, and before I could help myself, made a lurch to go pick you up. Then, as quickly, I fell back on my chair, stopped by the lightening realisation that if I helped you I would be subject to ridicule. Then everyone else went to your aid and I, the only one in the room who loved you, sat in silence doing nothing.
A german exchange arrived in town and you hooked up with a square jawed, blonde, muscular, aryan called andreas. I tried to fall for the dubious charms of the sultry christian ulrike and kissed her against a hot radiator in my parent’s house but it wasn’t her I wanted to kiss. They left and the miserableness continued.
Soon after I kissed another girl on a snow bank. It was a mistake and done out of a sense of obligation because I knew she liked me. Then I asked you on a date. I don’t remember asking but it must have been a nerve wracking event for me. And so we went for a walk at Danefield with your cocker spaniel, Emma. It wasn’t until many years later that seeing a picture of you and the dog on this occasion I thought about ‘people who look like their pets’. You had that way of clipping back your hair leaving loppy tresses down either side of your face. It wasn’t fashionable and was strangely gawky for such an intelligent girl, but it was your trademark and I liked the fact you weren’t a fashionable bitch like so many.
In fact, and unlike my own culturally spasticated family, you were lower middle class / upper working-class, aspirational conservative. I didn’t really put this all together – mostly that the aspirational element would screw us in the end - but I noticed things. You told me you had a “bottom drawer” – who but you was thinking about this at your age and that, despite my ridicule, you were going to celebrate a rotyal jubilee on the pub lawn.
Some way round our walk of danefield park on our first date, we climbed a tree on a steep bank and I asked if I could kiss you. “yes” you said “so long as it’s not the only time,” referring good humouredly back to my snowbank misadventure. We walked home holding hands. I felt self-conscious, but incredibly happy.
You let me read your diary. I don’t remember a thing about it except the manner of your handwriting and that it was in a gree exercise book. I started my own after this which you would later read and which accidentally broke the news of my adoption to my inquisitive brother.
We went to germany on the return trip where you had to ask me at a party to save you from the clutches of andreas. We kissed in a closet and walked in the snow until you were irritated by something, possibly my need for attention, and you sulked.
We went out for about 4 months, you gave me a cup with a moulded tie on it, some shells and a card saying “dare to be different” for my birthday. First the Beatles note and now this – I clearly wasn’t the complete package. I think I may have met your parents and listened to some 78s from your stepdad’s record collection, been impressed by the comfortable, Habitat feel of your terraced home and especially the working sixpence fruit machine and its pile of shiny sixpences.
and then you dumped me. I don’t remember the exact reason though you probably told me. I’m guessing I was too demanding. You did more homework than anyone else in the class and often turned down my requests for time together. Perhaps I was boring. Perhaps I was groping. I do remember a row we had in the school corridor where you stormed off after I said “I’m only human”. I didn’t understand that either. Of course, being dumped made no impact on my feelings, except to make them more intense at certain times. Like when I saw you. I secretly wrote you clumsy poetry, some of it mentioning our nights in yeadon taprooms, rhyming, metre-free words trying to capture the sadness that engulfed me.
Sometime later I was informed by a mutual friend that you had given your virginity to a gawky, lanky unimpressive individual from the year above whose sole claim to merit seemed to be his choice of pale grey school pants. I wasn’t expecting the news and I felt desolated. A month or two later I gave my own virginity to a girl from the year above but it wasn’t how it should have happened. I loved you.`
I booked an expensive place on the second german exchange in the belief you’d be going as well only to find out too late that you weren’t. that cost me dear – 2 weeks with a coachload of aggressive cretins. I also signed up for a school play because you were in it despite the fact I couldn’t remember more than a line or two of dialogue at any one go. It was cancelled, we were spared, but not before you stroked my hair under stage lights.
I went out with your best friend because she was the nearest thing to you but after a short while I realised this was nothing like what we’d had – or at least, what I’d had. Perhaps it was different for you. So I dumped her and spent the days miserably alone as you walked past me, indifferent, in the corridors of a lonely place.
We’d moved into the 6th form and were on the cusp of the legal age limit for alcohol so the social life of the whole year went up several notches. With that, I’d made a conscious effort to throw off my shy self and, bolstered by a lairy, orange, wool jacket and red beret, marched loudly and comically into the block everyday. This idiocy obviously impressed you because after another short while we were going out again. I loved you more than ever and felt more equal than I had before. I watched you playing hockey on the field. Your physicality, like your hair choices, was a little awkward but you showed determination.
You played bass in the school band and it’s off-shoot, “rough round the edges” which i went to see in a near-empty village hall. We also went to see Sky in Leeds along with your muso friends (I wasn’t one of them) where, sitting next to you in the balcony, I confessed that I couldn’t hear the bass playing of herbie flowers. You laughed, incredulous. I hear the bass these days.
But best of all we regularly went to a pub by leeds coach station to see snake davis and his band play R&B covers. Standing on the leatherette seats, drinking, gyrating, smoking, being with you. These were the best of days. Many nights were also had in the black bull with a large group of friends, getting drunk for a fiver then heading for the bus and the chip shop. Scalding battered fish being shoved into the mouth as I ran for the bus hoping to get the seat next to you. I loved you. There were also the regular trips to the sun inn out by fyligdales , a pub we had to reach in a convoy of cars along unlit country lanes. I remember following you one time as you raced to keep up with the car in front, your car narrowly making it round a hairpin.
We went to most pubs in guiseley and yeadon, taking in the exotic air of the working-class boozer. Organ nights at the oddfellows, sitting by the hostile dart board at the robin hood. One night at town gate as you got ready to go home I said, “I want you to have my babies”. About your future plans you said, “it’s got nothing to do with staying in the same place.” I didn’t understand this although I do now. It was the unspoken ambitious plan, the bottom drawer agenda. You’d already cut me out of the loop although I loved you. It’s strange also how you seem to have made up your mind about my own plans. There was no one wanted to leave yeadon more than me and that’s exactly what I did. Several times. And there’s no one staying in the same place more than you right now.
Your family moved when your stepdad’s cement mixer hire business was declared bankrupt, his partner having defrauded him and run off. You had your 18th birthday shortly after at a local factory and I was invited as the boyfriend. I don’t remember anything about it except that I’d made myself an earring out of a small white feather and your daily mail reading mum was most put out. I’d never had any ill will towards your mother but this was the start of open hostilities from her side. My lack of conventionality wasn’t part of the plan I would realise. Later we painted the doors of the school canary (actually ‘jasmine’) yellow in the night and returned to your house where my pariah status was no doubt confirmed. And if it wasn’t, the afternoon you trimmed off my mohican on the back step should have sealed it.
I blindfolded you and drove round in circles before heading for otley. Led you to a wood with a box of matches and some marshmallows but you said you had to go home. Went to otley again to collect a motorbike for my underage brother. left you to drive him back in the car as I sped off on the bike, only to realise a couple of miles away I had the car keys in my pocket. Remember you standing by the roadside as I returned humiliated.
Then there was a house party, somewhere south of the leeds road in rawdon. I’d been there a while and was lying on the back lawn when you arrived, fluttering across the grass towards me in an emerald green party dress. You left early, to get back for homework or something, and I continued to get drunk, little knowing I was beginning a journey into 8 years of destructive alcohol abuse. i ended up groping or fucking another girl on the floor of the bathroom with a gang of people banging on the locked door, little knowing also that this was the beginning of an 8 year sordid fall into loveless sex addiction.
I don’t know if you found out about this animalistic tryst but there were enough people outside that door for it to have been public knowledge. Ironically, the same sense of obligation could well have been at play with the bathroom floor girl as with the snow bank girl as only recently she’d taken my virginity. In any event and as I would later learn, my drunken exploits would know few bounds.
We slept together very few times in the 12 or 18 months we were together. You broadcast an early disastrous performance to a friend who told me about it with a grin when you said nothing. Fucking hell. Did you hate me?
Then there were university applications and exam results. Your mother by this time no doubt hated me and decided I couldn’t go to cambridge to live with or near you. You succumbed to the mother yelp and I was set adrift. I was getting to be heartbroken again, the slow painful way. you left for college, I moved to the headingley bedsit.
I visited a few times. Once, having moved to a job in cornwall, I chose to make a surprise visit and hitched the 360 miles north to land the wrong side of cambridge in a snow storm with 1ft of snow of the ground. I walked 3 or 4 miles across town to your room, hunched against the wind, only to find you’d gone to oxford for the weekend.
By this time I’d been ambushed in my flat by a sexually predatory nymph and you’d started sending me letters about being caught in the coital bed by warnock, and fantasies about riding ‘shane’ round the bedroom naked - another andreas lookalike in my imagination. I was jealous and unhappy, miserable in fact, but this wasn’t something we seemed to share and eventually, as you went into the second year, the visits stopped. I’ve still got all the letters you sent. I’ve still got all the letters anyone sent.
I tried to get you to feel something again at a party on the coast but you were cold and my drinking turned me into an animal. You left, hard faced, refusing my pleas to stay together for another day or two. So miserable. I was now beginning to sense a certain superior attitude towards me. Whatever I was doing – living in bedsits, claiming benefits, getting wasted and hostile – it never occurred to me that you could see me as inferior. Because I still loved you. What had happened to what we had? It felt so painful and there was nothing I could do about it.
I kept writing, you occasionally replied. then your tone changed when wrote to say you were going out with “the best person I’ve ever met”. You said “I may marry him”. For all that there was no mention of love. I was miserable some more because I loved you and I’d been left in your wake with my insane drink problem and my loveless relationships.
Then, a couple of years later you invited me to a party at your parents house where I briefly met your fiance as I was being thrown out of the house for being drunk and lewd with your aunt. Why was I even at this party? Because I still loved you and I was in the middle of your future husband’s parade. Harsh.
A while after someone told me you were getting married and, in a combination of remorse, hunger, alcoholic haze and birthday drug induced mania, I trashed my flat and became an inpatient at several psychiatric hospitals for three months. . They told me where and when – the last Saturday of september 91 – and I started to imagine scenarios in which I could interrupt your big day – fireworks from the hill I thought about a lot. But as it turned out I slept in on the day and never made it.
So there it was, something terminal. Or so it should have been. But the feelings dragged on until they gradually wore themselves out. Now you have kids, the same husband, an idiotically wealthy lifestyle with no moral compass – charity isn’t a compass - and a small collection of blue and white. Now I feel superior but I remember the feelings as though they were happening at this moment and that’s a strange trolley of baggage to pull around. For many years I think I felt cheated. Your mother got in the way, you acquiesced and I was left to witness my own slow death. That’s how it felt often – like grief.
Now you’re worried that I may be a potential stalker in need of a restraining order. The amount of sneaky stuff I’ve confessed to has probably done nothing to help this view. But I left you completely alone for over 20 years and have no intention of harrassing you now, except and insofar as I need to get this story off my chest. ‘Looking for closure’ is the phrase. There were things missing from my last mail which were like bits of broken glass scattered about the room. This is cleaning them up. I’ve been alcohol and drugs free since 91 and strangely pathetic as this sounds, never hurt anyone.
As the years went by I became more politically radical, staying poor, developing as your philosophical antithesis. “Puppy love” she said. How calculating. I just hope, in the end, you worked out that following the cynical ‘love’ of your mother with it’s monacan lifestyle agenda was not the path of love. But then I never knew you felt that anyway. And then you married someone who was good at maths and who used charity as salve for a shrivelled rich man’s heart.
Should you care about any of this? You’re a lawyer, professionally cold, perhaps you can put yourself above it all. Or merely get angry that I am still sending you stuff. Yet you had a massive effect on my life, were my first proper girlfriend, were an idee fix and no doubt the focus for other things which were out of your sight and control. So I spiralled and burned and twisted in the wind as you stayed home with another on-time, well crafted shakepeare essay written in that girlish hand of yours or kissed other boys, or forgot about taproom happiness. But for a while I made you happy.
I was depressive from an early age, probably 11 or 12, and it only got worse as I moved through my isolated teens. This was nothing to do with you, except that you offered an unreliable happiness in a desert of such an emotion. I’m still depressive as you might know – diagnosed manic depressive or bipolar in 91 – and am medicated for it. Nothing wacky or dangerous like schizophrenia or psychosis which you maybe suspected.
I remember what we had and for a moment or two I can still remember how it felt like it’s real and it’s now. but I know these days you’re a different person, a wife, a mother, a shyster lawyer, a bigger version of the ambitious you I didn’t see in the 80s. And I’m a different person too. A dad, a partner of 20 drink free, faithful years and a more politically sophisticated being than your sad self. So what would I like from you? Just an acknowledgement that you’ve read this then hopefully that’s it. I’ve just felt misjudged all this time. Like you never really knew me. Like you thought I was a typical yeadon stay at home. You once sent me a card saying Dare to be Different – finish reading this autobiography and decide for yourself.
I’ve just been diagnosed with left ventricular dysfunction which may shave some years off my life expectancy. I would have mailed this to you direct but of course you shut your account.
Money can’t buy me love
Best wishes
NICK
HIGH ROYDS PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL, MENSTON
started the free life by doing 2 weeks voluntary work in the OT department of the local psychiatric hospital where i made tea and pushed wheelchairs. the place was a large specially built asylum dating from the 1880s and had a kind of mythological aura in the local community. if ever there was need to refer to madness or crazy behaviour, the name of menston or high royds was sure too be mentioned. it was sunny when i went there. the summer of 84. i wanted to do some kind of voluntary work and somehow ended up contacting the hospital. on my first day or thereabouts i met a very mild man with a frontal lobotomy. there was a dint, perhaps 3/4" deep and the size and shape of a digestive biscuit in his forehead. he was balding, maybe in his early 60s, and wore a shabby brown jacket and pants. he entered carrying a tray full of things for making tea, holding it with both hands as it was rectangular and quite large. i stared at him for a few seconds. i stared at the missing piece of his skull. the patients who went to OT were given various recreational things to do in an outbuilding. painting was one of them and this was organised by an attractive female art teacher who later asked me to life model for her in the buff. it never happened - i was embarrassed - and i regretted for a long time not taking this opportunity to be seduced by a beautiful older woman. this intention may well have been entirely a product of my imagination, but it was a version i lived with for a long time. i briefly smoked a pipe, sitting under a tree by the cricket pitch. the art teacher said i looked ridiculous. overall the hospital was a culture shock. large high ceilinged corridors running thro the gothic pile were filled with people walking here and there who could be divided into two distinct populations - the mad and the staff. the mad invariably seemed haggard and dazed, sometimes wild, with strange postures and mannerisms as they moved about. the staff looked capable of instant violence or murder by the righteousness of law. they were guards with the aspect of carers, wearing white coats. the patients might have worn dressing gowns tho i could be confusing that with later, more personal psychiatric patient experience. old people were generally being shunted by young people. no sense to be had from the mad who couldn't communicate. the carers weren't qualified to deal with these people. i could probably have worked in such a place for a long time. it was certainly an oasis from the real world and that's what i wanted. but i left after two weeks and never went back, instead serving time as an inpatient in other psychiatric institutions far from Menston.
High Royds psychiatric hospital, Menston. now converted into flats
had thought about going to a kibbutz but was already deeply depressed by this stage and somehow rationalised that i wouldn't be able to escape myself by running away to Israel. also thought about going to Kramer art college like friends had done but didn't want to kill one of the few things i loved by having some art school twit educate it out of me. a very wise move. so i drifted thro the summer until the love of my life and other friends left for university in september when i left home and moved to leeds bedsit land.
VICTORIA ROAD, HEADINGLEY, LEEDS 1984-85
left home while the sun was still shining and went on the dole, moving into a headingley bedsit with my collection of paperbacks and some ugly bedding. began hitching around to visit college friends which went on for a year. i was quite strongly anti-job at this point, something that's stayed with me until today. i didn't want to end up in a factory or behind a desk or indeed anything like my tie and suit wearing dad. i was, i used to think, an ideological halfbreed, a bastard son fathered by the hippies and mothered by the punks. rejection of the norm, which i'd so painfully lived thro, was key, it was like ideological draft dodging.
in my hitching journeys i was once subject to the laying on of hands by a barechested, fat and short midlands vicar in his jimjams who was concerned about the drunk in his home and his daughter's virtue. i didn't realise this is what it was until many years later. he decieved me, insisting he massage my shoulders because i looked stressed or some such. i didn't want this and tried several times to just go to bed but, as i say, he was insistent and stood in the way. the whole thing seemed weird but i went along with it to keep the peace. of course i was flattered when the penny dropped and a little surprised that such arcane things still went on. blue and white jim jams on a small angry looking cleric flexing his fingers. i went upstairs and pissed in a row of pot plants in the bedroom, not out of vengeance (i didn't have any such feelings) but because i didn't want to met any parents on the landing. if anyone ever realised i never knew. the daughter, ruth, was a dance student at a college in winchester where i had a friend. ruth dropped out because of injury and returned to home at the vicarage in loughboro and to work in a bank where she promptly and accidentally gave away free cash to dishonest customers.
another time, walking along a lane to find a road, i crested the brow of a hill to see a landscape of fields down below in a sunny haze with smoke rising from a copse in the near distance. it was Hardyesque. for a moment maybe all was well.
PENZANCE 1985
Market Jew Street, Penzance. at the time, the neo- classical building was a branch of Lloyds bank where i opened an account
after a year, moved to Cornwall where within a week i'd been thrown off a 'Cathedral Camp' - a voluntary 2 week restoration project at Truro cathedral - for being caught smoking dope after lights out. slept under a hedge on the way there, woken by cows being driven into the field just after dawn. drifted a bit around Cornwall. tried finding work on the Lizard peninsula because on the map it looked remote but the day i got there 90 men were made redundant in Helston. the following day i went to Penzance, right at the extremity of this island, and soon landed a part-time job as a garden labourer on St Michael's Mount whose gardens and buildings were kept in order by the National Trust which had an office in a barn in Marazion. planted daffs, said hello to Lord St Levan who would later give all the workers a small christmas bonus which was resented by some, smoked a lot of weed, did some acid, lived in a caravan which i once accidentally filled with flammable gas (i put out my cigarette while looking for my door key), grew a goatee and dyed it and my hair black. i bought my drugs from someone on the island. one time the garden labourers had been set the job of creating a small lawn. we raked, pulled out stones and got it level. we got stoned. then the grass seed was brought out. Greg the Hippy told me i needed a dibber and sent me to the boatmen to ask for one. i came back empty handed so he gave me a small stick and told me i had to make a hole in the earth for each individual grass seed. i looked at the size of the job he'd just described but got on my knees and began making holes. after a minute of being watched by my workmates, Greg strode on to the raked area, put his hand in a bucket of seed and, laughing his head off, began scattering it freely everywhere around him. i was humiliated. i got up and walked off to a far part of the small island. eventually i was found and persuaded to return. ironically Greg got married a few weeks later and, on the journey to Penzance in a workmates minivan, he invited me along. i didn't believe him, rationalising that a hippy would never get married. he said the in-laws had insisted he cut his long hair and beard but he'd only agreed to trim the beard, the hair being sacred. i still didn't believe him and didn't go. the following week i was shown the photographs of the happy couple and their nuptials. borrowed a small tractor from the deputy head gardener, Clive, and drove it stoned up the mount. his brother-in-law, Barry, was head gardener. he had a beard, was quietly spoken and was depressed about the fact that the government and National Trust in cahoots had forced him to take on 4 pot smoking wasters while the island was covered with another 30 labourers from the same source with the same habits. Barry tried to give up smoking his fat roll ups while i was there. he had a beard and had come from a channel island or somewhere similar where he'd been a n estate gardener. all the full time workers on the Mount got to live in cottages on the island which were on the seafront at the end of the causeway. we used to walk the causeway to work, unless the tide was in when we'd get a boat sent from the Mount. sometimes this was hairy and one time in particular i remember the boatman wrestling with the engine of his small boat in a swell at the jetty, trying to land a cargo of stoned garden labourers. we had to jump one at a time from the boat to the jetty, leaping across 3 or 4' of open water as the boat lurched in the chop. even so, the weather could be worse than this and at these times the boatmen sent out the DUKW (known as 'the Duck') - a WWII amphibious vehicle which drove up the beach. exciting times. the waves broke over the edge of the vehicle soaking the passengers in the 10 minute journey as they pitched, rolled and yawed in cold silence. we had yellow NT issue waterproofs and we still got wet. after one storm there was a massive pile of seaweed washed up on the Marazion beach which quickly began to rot and create a pungent, gagging smell which enveloped the whole village. "Marazion Pong" headlined the local paper. we were sent out with tractor and trailer to collect it for compost on the Mount and eventually we'd created 2 piles 8' high and maybe 30' long by 10' wide. the stuff began to crawl with maggots and the smell only got worse. behind the cottages at the foot of the Mount there was a large wall and against that a huge fuchsia hedge which must have run for about 200'. we strimmed the sloping north side of the castle gardens and i wandered interestedly along the quiet south side where there was a stepped garden with tiled walkways and a remote bench on the clifftop, facing the sea. this area was off limits to the pubic who only got guided tours on a weekend. the sense of privilege became tangible.
was also befriended by a hippy maybe 10 years my senior who sometimes gave me a lift to work down Cornish lanes in the sidecar of his motorbike, brushing hedges all the way. his girlfriend Barbara had long blonde hair and taught at a local school. they were from the North East and sounded like it. at least Greg did. when i left Cornwall, Greg replaced my ballast in the sidecar with a large sack of potatoes which i'd given him. i'd been living exclusively on these for some time and had tried several different ways to cook them. the drunkest i'd ever been up to this point happened in Greg's company. i'd just come back from christmassing in Leeds and bought myself a bottle of whiskey. i got on the bus in Penzance and who should be on the top deck but Greg going home from work. i showed him the bottle and his face lit up. we cracked it open there and then i seem to think. i went back with him to the cottage he shared with his partner Barbara and ate vegetarian food., it was spicy. i didn't like it much. after this we headed to the pub where we met a man from the Sunday Times wanting to know about redundancies at nearby Geevor Tin mine. a few beers later and we headed off. somewhere on the way we were invited to an art installation unveiling in a warehouse or farm building which had drink. by now i must have been well drunk but by the end of the evening i was falling about and incoherent. i'd been trying to get friendly with the ladies but got nowhere until i started talking to Rose who took the drunken toyboy home. Rose's house was just inland from the St Just cliffs, arty with a field for a garden, home at one time to her two sons and late husband Roger, the man with a painting hanging in the Tate. i collected my stuff from Greg's and from Bone Valley with Rose giving me a lift in her 2CV to the coach station where, still poisoned by the drink, i headed off towards Brighton, sick of the loneliness.
BRIGHTON 1986-87
then moved to Brighton. lived with Heather Pindar for a couple of years at Sussex uni campus, worked in Freeman Hardy & Willis shoe shop stockroom, Mcdonalds for a week, Presto supermarket and Hove Council yard for a day. met a rent boy down from London for the day outside the grand hotel and ventured to Stallions gay club in London with a gay chaperone. on the same night got turned away from the Turk's Head pub 'for not being gay'. Rula Lenska liked to drink there i was told. met an American who had swallowed a live goldfish as part of a college initiation and wistfully wondered about the practicalities of stealing a campus cash machine from a wall which is something that happened while i was there. blagged 2 of us into a Bhundu Boys gig in a marquee on campus by forging tickets with a biro and some colour pencils. Heather was a fox tho i didn't see it that way at the time. she insisted on lathering her face with powder to cover spots making her look quite unattractive when beneath all the crap there was really a quite beautiful face. i betrayed her in a night of drunken insanity and nothing was the same again. we played a variation of the Dice Man game, a book i'd learned about from Greg the Hippy in Cornwall.
marched in London against Tory education cuts. made a banner painted in red oil paint that didn't dry because i'd asked Heather to get the paint. and saw a badger the size of a tipped over fridge rooting thro bins at night on campus. after relationship meltdown involving older women and surfers, moved back to Leeds despite the fact i'd just landed a job driving a miniature steam train along the seafront. visited Cornwall to find Heather sleeping with a surfer and went body boarding but ended up swimming for my life in a rip current. crawled from the surf, exhausted but honour intact for not calling out to the life guards, an act i was seconds away from when my feet unexpectedly touched sandy bottom from where i staggered in with sandy waves 'dumping' on my head and shoulders. i collapsed on the beach still carrying my body board and stayed there, next to the life guard post, until the incoming tide made me get up and move back towards the cliffs.
YEADON 1987-88, 1991-92
back to Yeadon after finding myself deserted and alone in Brighton with no money and crushing depression. worked emptying aeroplane toilets using buckets at Leeds Bradford airport, waved to Princess Michael of Kent in her limo, got sacked for almost filling a plane's drinking water system with the bright blue water for the toilets, did some builders labouring, some butchering, some barwork at the Yeadon Image and finally i worked in a Guiseley printers where i broke pens with clumsy hands and drove the work's Fiesta like a maniac. the Image occasionally had strippers and had a massive horseshoe bar with a lot of staff. it got packed. i drank on the job, drank my wages in fact. the manager there used to go shooting and he told me that while he'd been waiting to head off into the fields he'd shot the head off a chicken at point blank range with his shotgun. he grinned as he said this, knowing i would be appalled. he was a meaty, thuggish bloke in a clean shirt with a no nonsense, jovial manner. his sidekick, the deputy manager, was a kind of mini version of the same bloke. he was, apparently, some kind of circus performer. after Paula Keen had dumped me for showing a lack of serious commitment, she started seeing this bloke. as i cleaned the bar one night they whispered and looked my way, laughing. i'd been at Brummels night club in Guiseley one night with Chris Cousins, it was near the end of the night, and there she was, the beautiful, rough, laughing blonde two or three years my senior. i hadn't seen her for nearly a decade since i had a crush on her at Benton Park where she held court in the bike shed with a circle of boys. i never spoke to her. but in Brummels, drunk, i went over and confessed my crush. we went out for a few months until my shallow interest and her obnoxious son put paid to any hope of a future. she came with me on my first visit to Liverpool. i got lost and drove straight past the campus so we did other things. her son Oliver was maybe 5 when i met him. a mixed race kid with a fierce hatred of me, pulling hair, spitting. his dad was or had been in jail. i made him a colouring book with a Ghotsbusters drawing on the front which smudged when you touched it. I also went out with Corinne, barmaid at the Robin Hood, a single mom maybe 10 years my senior who had enormous breasts and eyes like Susan Sarandon. she had had to go into hiding from a violent ex-partner who, she told me, could turn up at any time. Corinne was jovial and savvy and indulged my drunkenness. we spent Christmas one year in a caravan parked next to her mum's chalet-like home somewhere in the country. i was happy in this relaxed working-class environment, smoking a lot, drinking a lot, chatting with her mum.
went to Cornwall again and got a job making pizzas in the same Warner holiday camp at Perranporth where Heather had worked. wages were low and ate virtually nothing, spending it instead on drink. had to leave, forfeiting a weeks wages, following threats to my safety arising from drunken exploits (i told a girl someone had called her a lesbian. neither her nor the slanderer liked the revelation. in fact the Pennine thug that told me said afterwards, 'i've never hated anyone as much as i hate you'). then kicked a girl's car when out of my head on drink because she wouldn't sleep with me. her heroic ex boyfriend found out and he came looking for vengeance. he tipped sand on my head at a beach fire - a trick obviously known to seaside folk for being particularly long-lasting in it's effects - then launched an assault which was brought to an end by intervention. i left shaken but not bruised and soon after left the camp as the threats were still ongoing. watched as friends of these same goons lay in wait under a static van, shooting rabbits with an air rifle. a stoat or a weasel ate the eye of a dead rabbit so they said. made friends with a couple of pro beach bum Aussies who involved me in a drinking prank which ended with the three of us spurting beer at an unsuspecting mark. the game involved asking someone what noise certain animals make and getting them to imitate the noise. after a while you say, 'and what noise does a whale make?' they're stumped and pause at which point you take a drink of beer and spurt it all over them. her boyfriend wasn't happy with me, the runt, but he seemed ok with the cheery Oz alphas. the antipodeans had toured Europe in a mini van taking catering and bar jobs where they could. at Perranporth they worked in the restaurant kitchen where one night they gave me a Hawaiian burger on the sly. a great treat for me tho they got to eat for free 7 days a week. the staff all lived in static caravans, 2 to a van, scattered around the massive site on a cliff top overlooking a wide beach. everyone had hooked up by the time i got there a week late and i was immediately an outsider. i got drunk a lot and made enemies but also got the attentions of a couple of girls. after i left, virtually running away before i got attacked, i went south west to visit Rose Hilton who i had met when i lived in Penzance. i phoned her from the harbour and she came to meet me. i got a bed in the garden in a tent. she introduced me to one of her sons who drove me pillion back into Penzance where we met some young beautiful people in a pub. at this point one of the Perranporth staff walked in with his girlfriend, looking at me in that same repulsed way that i was starting to get used to. i stayed at Rose's for a while. met Ted the Shed, a 50-something, ailing photographer with little talent who lived in her shed and worked part-time at a gallery in town. he asked me if i was the toyboy who had had a fling with the 50-odd year old Rose. i said i was. this created a different expression. surprise mixed with admiration perhaps. i looked at his photo collection in the shed. Ted also had the use of a polytunnel Rose had installed in the garden. it was quite large, maybe 40' long. nothing was growing as it was a work in progress and the ground, being on top of a granite cliff, was rocky. he said he'd left his previous small-holding, kicked off by the landowner, where he'd grown garlic on sculpted mounds of earth. it sounded admirable. Rose took me to see the travellers living in the disused quarry on the cliff face. we lay on the grass at the top of the cliff and peered over at the vans and the fires and the kids. they were being hassled thro the council by local residents who wanted them gone. eventually i must have gone back to Leeds. i had a university course to begin, or to re-begin.
Rose Hilton, painter and widow of 60s abstract painter, Roger
LIVERPOOL 1988-91, 1992-present
1ST YEAR
after 4 years taking orders from badly dressed sadists who were bigger than me, i finally accepted a place at liverpool university. missed an earlier interview at newcastle uni, tho i did try to get there, driving hopelessly late and completely lost round North Yorkshire in a saturday morning drunken stupor. shortly before going to Liverpool. blew most of my savings on a 2 week holiday to Rhodes on my own. coincidentally, met simon hodgin and john denison at LB airport going on the same flight. failed to catch up with them in rhodes but needed them to drag me off the floor of the airport lounge and onto the plane back due to a red wine binge with a group of Welshmen in a taverna.
i arrived in the city, a hard drinking, virtually suicidal depressive with no interest in my course. as far as i was concerned it was a way to avoid the oppression of the job market. in that way, my years at university worked just fine. i had a room in halls where i was mocked by sophisticated vegetarian girls for unloading a packet of lard into the fridge, thoughtfully packed by my mum. on my floor there were Roger and Pek San, two Asian science students, Kev the architect scouser, Roger, the OCD dysfunctional family man, John Moakes, architect, Leonie, archaeologist, Kate Lynch Smith, prick teasing convent girl scientist, Liz from Birmingham, the large breasted hysterical vet, Kath Vicars, daddy's little ex-bulimic rich girl who was studying vet science and had a taste for a bit of rough. there was a blonde babe called Janine from Manchester doing languages. she left to have babies with a musician and was replaced by John. she rejected my advances because i was the wrong star sign. there were arguments about hair on the shower curtain and i once defrosted the vegetarians whole stock of frozen food whilst drunk which cost me 20 quid. i tormented Raymond by leaving drunken notes in his cupboard mocking his tea stirring regime. downstairs there was another crowd who we all socialised with – Steve Shanahan, the ginger London neurotic who liked anarchism. Tim and Sue. I ended up in bed with Sue a couple of times while drunk, but as had happened in the past with other women, just as i thought i'd got lucky my ambitions were disappointed. there was an older woman with a deformed hand studying to be a GP. i saw her many years later in Copperas Hill sorting office where she was waiting to collect her GP qualification. there was a Scottish young woman who turned down my advances because she was going out with an older man. i tried and failed o persuade her that this was a bad thing. there was another scouser with a toothy aggressive face, boorish. we didn't talk much. there was Alexis, the Londoner with some strange skin disorder which she said could be healed in Cuba using foetus tissue. we ended up in bed, but not before she'd ended up in bed with Kevin which came as an unpleasant surprise to both male parties. lied about my age to my corridor roomies, adding 3 or 4 years, to impress the girls and to show a little contempt for something or other. spent my grants on beer and greasy spoon hangover cures, missing lectures routinely and without much of a care. took the first year 3 times due to low grade alcoholism but eventually cleaned up and got a 2:1 in English with subsid. 1sts in literary theory, modern poetry and medieval lit. i calculated that i'd missed out on a 1st by about 2% and blamed an arrogant young professor for unexpectedly marking me down. i was also hopeless at remembering quotations, a rather basic skill needed for doing well in exams. i got drunk one bonfire night and launched a rocket from out of my hand thro the halls window. many times i hung out till the early hours in Liverpool's coolest, most dangerous rasta club, the Sierra Leone where we scored dope and drank bottled beer to the incredibly loud sounds of Afro-Caribbean musos. someone i took there puked upstairs. John Moakes got his wallet swiped outside then gave chase to the teenage robber who weirdly gave him it back when he caught up with him. i didn't know this had happened untyil later as i was trying to diffuse the situation with other threatening youths and John was behind me, then not there at all. Leonie and Kev Liddy also ventured to the Sierra. possibly Steve Shanahan and Sue Hunt and Tim came along as well, i don't remember but it seems likely.
1ST YEAR (2)
1ST YEAR (3)
2ND AND 3RD YEARS
THE PhD YEARS
EDGE LANE
no.1 Edge Lane, in fact, right next to the traffic lights on the hill above campus.
HUSKISSON STREET
somehow managed to get a bedsit in the Canning area after Philharmonic Court. i'd been to see a house on Pilgrim Street with Sue Hunt and met the landlady,, Beryl Williams, who said she had a room i could look at up the road. it was a big room with a high ceiling and moulded plaster cornices. high windows with wood shutters and sunlight in the afternoon. there was a fireplace and a kitchenette constructed in the corner with a small tank on the wall for boiling water. there was no heating at first - Beryl put in radiators later - and a bathroom with a small unbreakable window just off the corridor. i know it was unbreakable because later i tried and failed to break it. i went slowly mad in this room and ended up hospitalised and dropping out. that was in 91.
58 Huskisson Street, Liverpool 8. my bedsit was on the ground floor and looked onto the back yard.
AIGBURTH ROAD
BLACKBURNE TERRACE
MULBERRY COURT
SHEIL ROAD
ES
spent the next sober and drug free 15 years failing to get a PhD in modern English poetry, partly because my supervisor disappeared, it later transpiring he'd been charged with the attempted murder of his turkish wife, and partly because i preferred to paint and work on the student paper rather than do any work. a last minute rush did not save the day tho it was a relief to give the job a mercy killing when i realised what they wanted was nothing to do with learning. my supervisor was acquitted then quit his job as he had been blackballed by a department obsessed with appearances and anyway, he was not the same man.
GIVING THINGS UP
went on the wagon (20 years sober this year) due to a well known drink problem, kicked my minor drug interests, stopped smoking, went from being a guardian reader to boycotting all national newspapers. went veggie then vegan in rapid succession and produced one tall handsome son with a beautiful woman. my son is taller than me. he lives with his mum down the road.
not only am i vegan, i'm a self-styled '3K vegan' which means i don't eat anything which comes with more than 3000km of food miles on it, i don't eat E numbers or other additives, i don't eat food from 4 of the major supermarkets for a variety of political reasons (gerrymandering, support for Israel, support for the republican party etc). i also indulge a handful of other minor food 'don'ts'. i'm slightly overweight but, according to blood tests, otherwise nutritionally healthy. i don't eat out much. my partner and son are both veggies which means i get to lecture them about the evils of cheese. also grow oak and horse chestnut trees on my allotment for guerilla tree planting. this country is one of the most deforested in europe and it needs all the help we can give it.
ADOPTION
i went on a journey of discovery to find my birth family after being told i was adopted in 84 and came back with an older brother (John Michael) and sister (Sally), a half brother six months my junior (John Michael) and a long dead mother who wore large blonde wigs. stranger still because she was only 5' tall. my birth father, a feckless individual who fathered 4 kids by 2 women - one a married woman, the other a younger, prettier barmaid - allowed 2 of his children to go up for adoption and a 3rd to be disowned, all because of his middle-class snobbery - the factory owner's son could father the divorcee's children but not acknowledge them. by the time i knew all this, he was also dead and, in one sense, i was now an orphan. one womanising drunk had succeeded another.
ART
unsurprisingly perhaps i've produced a lot of art over the years and failed to earn more than the cost of a greggs pasty in all that time. that said, i had a year long run of political cartoons in the guardian as a student, was the campus cartoonist at the liverpool university student newspaper for many years and have had my drawings published alongside articles by Noam Chomsky in reputable political journals. i was once hunted by a gang of angry jewish thugs who didn't like a cartoon about the settlements. John Pilger once said that if he were to ever appoint another editorial cartoonist to a newspaper, i'd be it. sadly the days of popular campaigning radical journalism are all but done. my political cartooning stopped after the 2005 election when i realised with some shock that i had no audience despite the fact i was talking sense.
MISCELLANY
i've interviewed a nobel laureate in poetry, edited a couple of arts magazines and ghost edited a student newspaper. i've attended the freedom of the city presentation for the mersey beat poets, poured whiskey for phil lynott and successfully grown spuds on my allotment. Mordechai Vanunu, 26 years an israeli political prisoner, invited me to join his friends email group after his release (on the strength of a supportive cartoon). i've been barred from a cyber cafe, from jamie oliver's forum, from hugh fearnley-whittingstall's forum, from the indymedia editorial wiki and from a nightclub and been told by a psychologist that i needed a bath. i've boycotted christmas for the past half decade, don't do charity and not been abroad in 20 years. i'm something of a pacifist but once had a fully naked 2am dust up with a Liverpool burglar. i've blagged a cartoon book collection by writing reviews. i began using computers in 88, starting with WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, memorising F keys to write essays, no internet, and now function at a fairly literate level with windows 8.1 and a select few programmes for doing my artwork. i no longer read books and get all my information by surfing.
i've lived in Leeds, Penzance, Brighton, and Liverpool and always been poor or thereabouts. i've no complaints about that. it's sometimes been stressful but there are valuable lessons to be learned in this arena that can't be learned elsewhere. these days i'm a bit of a hermit, most adventures taking place in the countryside of east yorkshire where i've been charged by a bull and seen an upside down sheep. i like walking, and have written a walks booklet about a small part of the east coast, i like making things and meeting people (er, no). i don't much like heights tho am working on it. i've climbed the towers of york minster (70m), cologne cathedral (157m) and liverpool cathedral (100m). i don't do religion but i do do religious architecture.
from maybe 72 - 82 the watsons spent two weeks a year in one of the following sunspots: 1. northern france (caravan) 2. lloret de mar, spain 3. tenerife 4. corfu 5. venice 6. malta 7. west coast of italy 8. tunisia 9. florida. in 83-84 i also went to germany twice as an exchange student
PSYCHIATRY
got taken to the Royal psychiatric ward after trashing my flat sometime in the early summer of 91. there had been several signs that something wasn't quite right in the lead up to this cataclysmic event but i was already pretty strange and no one, least of all myself, picked up on the clues. i was in the Royal for about 2 weeks and got sectioned under the mental health act at some point, an outcome i argued for because i thought it would get me released (when i could have walked out anyway). all this was kickstarted by my wild 25th birthday party.
i was transferred from the holding pen at the Royal to Fazakerley hospital and then courtesy of my parents' BUPA policy to the renowned Retreat in York where i spent a couple of months. i was diagnosed with manic depression and spent those weeks being very weak and afraid of the outside world. i was also worried about ECT which i knew some of my fellow patients were having. ended up in an OT room not unlike the one i left in 84. am now much better in a dreyfuss kind of way. that said, 'as many as 15 percent of people with bipolar disorder will die by their own hands, half will attempt to, and nearly 80 percent will contemplate doing so'.
NOSTALGIA
haven't been in touch with any benton parkers since the party but, 20 years later, am feeling a little nostalgic and slightly burdened by my schoolday past. i need to unload. this doesn't mean i'm looking back thro rose tinted glasses - i still remember the bullies, the deadening effect of most every lesson and the sordid sexual merry-go-round of the later years - and in fact i've gone out of my way to destroy much of the person i was back then. but that said, something of the past me remains, and hopefully it's the better bit.
6th FORM
6th form was an opportunity for me to break out of my bullied, cowed, introverted self now that the meathead chavs were, except for one or two exceptions, out of my sight during school hours. i bought a russet coloured jacket from a charity shop which i wore to school with a red beret, pushed sideways like a paratrooper. i clowned and got louder. i hung out with clowns and loud people. central to all 6th form life was the common room in the detached block at the top of the drive leading to Quakers Lane. it had one large room with a canteen servery and a smaller side room. there was a stereo, comfy institutional armchairs all about and low tables. there was a science lab above doubling as Steve Hinchliffe's form room, and Pete Grove's office. he was head of 6th form.
instead of 8 subjects, i was now studying 4 which began to make teachers more familiar, more tiresome in some cases. 6th formers' uniform was different. we could wear individualised clothes around a basic school model which, for boys was jacket, tie, white shirt and dark trousers. there was now a certain distance between us and the rest of the school pupils. i didn't feel a part of the sweating mass. the flexible uniform, the physical separation of the 6th form block from the rest of the school, a common room, the loss of the chavs. it all contributed to making the atmosphere different and i felt as tho i could be more expressive. i still felt that i was up against the system, that i was a reluctant participant in it. i hadn't forgotten the fields, the woods, the frogspawn and myself wandering thro summer fields. that was who i was. this was just in the way. but there were girls, in particular Sarah Scott Baker, which soothed the pain. and there was drink and drugs which i consumed in great quantities and this in itself became a great adventure which would last 8 long years, symbolically culminating in a near derelict lunchtime drinker stealing a small book of hardcore porn from my coat pocket while i was away at the toilet, blind drunk. we were playing pool, which i was paying for. i got thrown out of the pub, threatened with violence by the landlady who invoked the image of her large oafish son because i was trying to seduce her with graphic entreaties. i was persistent. this was, for her, perhaps the most irritating thing. and she was old enough to be my mother. which was all part of the adventure. but all that was much later, somewhere along the road from the first few drinks in the Emmot Arms or the Black Bull. it wa in fact the Emmots where i had my first drink as a drink buying adult tho i was only 17. if i remember right, i bought half a Guinness on the advice of Pat West because i knew nothing about drinks. it was a bitter, barely drinkable brew that under other circumstances i would have washed down the sink. but i sipped it and watched others like Greg Shepherd play with their rum and blacks. a few of us wore trench coats in those days and Greg later sneaked out of the pub with a full sort in his inside pocket, drinking it on Rawdon Town Street under the street lights. the Emmots was a dreary pub but it was the only one in the old part of Rawdon where many 6th formers lived.
drunkenly rowed with my dad after a night at the pub, stormed out of the house at midnight and walked 9 miles into Leeds to sleep on a freezing bench in leeds station where I was woken at daybreak by the prod of a copper's truncheon. then walked the 9 miles home to eat humble pie. got a mohawk which prompted the immortal outburst 'how could you do this to me and your father?' then had it removed several hours later on the advice of sensible people. it never occurred to me that asking a provincial hairdresser for a flat-top in 1984 might be problematic.
had a jelly house party - jellies made with vodka, gin etc and eaten off paper plates. seemed to work. the rebelliousness continued one sunday night when me and sarah scott baker, soon to become a pillar of the community, snuck into the school grounds and painted the school entrance doors canary yellow. the colour was in fact 'jasmine' and i signed the tarmac 'the jasmine pimpernel'. the next morning we were hugely disappointed to find the paint had been completely cleaned off and nobody got to see anything. sometime later, and perhaps even now, small streaks of yellow could still be seen in the grain of the wood.
got suspended twice in the 6th form - once for being cheeky, once for smoking and started to wear a red beret into school as a consequence. also began smoking cigarettes and pot. went on a school trip down a coal mine (excellent) and cleared a Yeadon beck full of shopping trollies which ran behind the Inn on the Park. prepared for my art A level by spending a sunny week on Ilkley moor drawing heather and rocks with lunch in the Cow and Calf pub. around the time of my birthday got hammered on my own in the same pub and tried to sleep under ferns on the moor, but it being April and me only in a T shirt and denim jacket, i lasted an hour before the cold sent me walking the 9 or 10 miles back to Yeadon to sleep in the shed at 5am. once set off hitching to London with Dave Hurst at 2am after leaving a Leeds nightclub, walking together straight from the club door to the start of the M1 with virtually no money in my pocket. i fell asleep in the cab of an extremely slow moving truck as Dave continued to chat with the driver who eventually let us out near Sheffield.
later i would realise that being literary was in itself just another form of the same. between the ages of maybe 7 and 16 went on a 2 week foreign holiday every year with my family, mostly to the sunspots of europe and always a package holiday. was falsely accused of trying to drown my brother on one such trip, another time the two of us swimming in a sea of huge waves during a lightning storm.
another time went back to a friend's house with his older brother and a mate after a night in the pub and, after several large whiskeys, got punched in the head for innocently asking how he felt looking so gay. a goth with a short temper. stumbled out, collapsed in the street and woke early in the gutter just up the road. managed to get the bus home only to wake up in bed with my mum screaming over me as she looked at the dried blood covering half my face. still have the scar. it would be another 7 long years before i would give up the beer.
my art A Level painting of the Cow & Calf rocks, Ilkley. it got me a 'B'
edited the second and last edition of Conscious Aspidistra a 6th form magazine run by students but executively edited by French Martin who was overseeing the photocopying. he banned my article 'Burp' which damned the the iniquities of school life so i walked the walk and the magazine never appeared. used to spend friday nights with the 6th form crowd at the Black Bull in Horsforth wondering how to squeeze a seat nearer to that girl i liked. eventually left school in 84 with a bag full of passably good A levels and several mental scars including one gained by losing at table tennis to the Bishop of Winchester, a competitive old codger with his own table.
used to make night time trips into leeds to some murky rasta pub carpark to buy dope, handing tenners thro a half opened window for what you were never quite sure - ganny black, red leb etc etc. once gave my brother some resin in an attempt to stop him freezing his tongue again by inhaling lighter fuel or glue or whatever. he made up some spliffs and sold it to friends at school. if he ever seems a little vague, you know why. also made regular visits to the central station pub on wellington street in leeds with the 6th form crowd to see R&B funksters Zoot and the Roots with Snake Davis on saxaphone - great nights.
MILLSTONE COTTAGE, COPT ROYD GROVE, YEADON
the house where ogres lived
as i moved to Benton, so i also moved house from Horsforth to the only middle class street in Yeadon, which came as something of a culture shock. before my parents shockingly renamed the house 'Millstone Cottage' ('millstone' being a synonym for 'burden' and 'cottage' not in anyone's remote fantasy except in the deluded mess of a world inhabited by my pretentious dad, meaning 'Barratt house'). this depressing place had been, until the name change, number 13 on the street so all in all the omens were very bad. i felt utterly depressed the first time i saw this characterless architectural eyesore and things never really looked up. i was comparing it to the Victorian detached houses of friends at the bottom of Horsforth and this was an utter disappointment which embodied the gulf between my parents and myself - something which was just coming to fruition for me around the age of 13. yes, 13, another omen. the house had 4 bedrooms - one turned into a large upstairs livingroom - a bar, a study and 2 toilets. there was a tiny garden at the back with a shed and no front garden to speak of. this is where my dad sited the two eponymous millstones. the neighbours were all incredibly dull, prim and proper ostensible law abiders with well kept, unimaginative gardens and well kept unimaginative lives. this was calculated to destroy my soul, to drive me to drink, which is exactly what it did. well,, it drove me to drink. my soul distorted by loneliness and adversity survived. there was no escape. drunk or sober i always returned to this oppressive house with it's insane family shutting down every piece of happiness i scraped from my miserable life. and i was miserable. without end, seemingly, for hour after unproductive hour, for day after week after month after year.
the bottom of Yeadon High Street
in Yeadon i learned of class war and working class culture in a hands on way although i found myself stuck between the two classes in a way i found difficult to understand. eventually i realised i was capable of existing with both camps though happy with neither. neither camp was happy with me, it has to be said. i played pub darts and reached the semi final of a local competition where the nerves got to me in front of the pressing crowd and i was beaten by a woman in the semi-final. i played league pool quite well, drank every night, read camus, lawrence and cooper clarke and wrote liverpool beats style poetry. of course anyone who lived this kind of life spent a good deal of time in the chippy and, in a kind of micro racist way, there was always someone spewing tiresome gobshite about the superiority of yeadon fish and chips and yeadon tetleys beer. the local indian takeaway had large sheet glass windows replace with small panes of glass because the large panes were expensive to get replaced when raciosts on the piss wandered down the hill from the half dozen pubs at the top of the hill. once this had been done the persistent white boys bricked the small panes one at a time and moved down the hill to Mrs Parmar's off licence where they put through her plate glass. she later replaced this with a steel sheet so she and her working kids had no view and little daylight 12 hours a day. she wore a sari, was middle aged and plump. very friendly. i liked her, possibly a little for her trenches situation which had similarities to my own.
as i said, i detested the Barratt style cul-de-sac i had to return to every night with it's lower middle-class / working-class-done-good melange of soul destroying habits and values. the whole place was ugly and hostile and dead. the hours and hours of stultifying tv with the parents, so house proud it was impossible to do anything practical like sit comfortably in a chair. racism and sexism were just a part of life tho i seem to remember being appalled by both by my mid teens. remember looking out of the front bay window one time to see our incredibly stupid bearded collie with it's front paws round the neck of next door's 6 year old - a redhead my brother had creatively nicknamed 'buzzard' - humping for dear life. the kid was struggling but couldn't get away. he got his revenge anyhow, firing a cap gun at point blank range into the dog's ear so it quivered everytime it saw him after that. i don't know if that made the kid a typical mormon. his dad, banned from drink and other vices, used to sweep down the street and into his drive in a series of flash cars. i wondered about the polygamy thing. the dog, a pedigree bearded collie, was called Boots because as a puppy he had four white paws and a black coat. this soon changed as he turned into a shaggy pale grey, lop eared imbecile with no discernible 'boots'. he was a retarded unlovable animal given to aggressive shows of temper and represented every piece of bad practice my parents could bring to the dog world. he was also a walking penis. it was impossible to look at him without catching this body part in your peripheral vision and i think over time this twists your hview of home. on a car journey north one time, Boots barked in my ear for 75 miles, around 2 hours, as i foolishly went for a weekend to the lake district with my parents. the dog didn't like the car. he sat in the back, barking metronomically and in an angry and vaguely threatening way, restrained pathetically by my mum as he strained forward to put his head between the two front seats. i wanted to talk about Camus and here i was.
my brother Jez on his christmas present, 1981 / 82
another Copt Royd neighbour, a 30 something blonde beauty, Rita, used to sunbathe in the drive. there was something odd about this provocatively exhibitionist behaviour. something which only came to light at my parent's christmas party where it came out she was sleeping with a bloke from up the street. she gave him an expensive lighter for christmas. this was the giveaway. my dad and Rita's husband, a handsome but very dull looking chap, left the party and marched off up the cul de sac in the snow, my dad inexplicably armed with a spade, to find and bludgeon the felon tho nothing came of it. the cad's daughter, maybe 16, ran up the street in the snow shouting after the two righteous men 'don't hurt my dad, don't hurt my dad'. her dad was a walnut faced comedy chav, a builder, which must have pained the betrayed husband beyond repair. how any of this was my dad's business is anyone's guess. he was drunk. i guess that was reason enough.
other brief anecdotes from the street include the kid my brother's age who rounded a corner on his motorbike, lost it and piled into a dry stone wall. he had a helmet on but hadn't fastened the strap so it came off and resulted in him getting a plate in his head and a rather dramatic scar. a few years later he was at work, walked in front of a JCB scoop and had a large boulder dropped on him. there was another kid, a few years older, played volleyball for england, had a fast trials bike and was zooming down leeds road. he thought a stationary lorry was moving but it was stationary and he shattered both legs. Maureen and Ian went scuba diving in the west indies when they were young but were now the most unexciting middle-aged pair who came round evenings to play trivial pursuit with my parents and other neighbours. they'd all get drunk and raucous and the women would be stupid and the men would be oafish and loud. there were a few kids the same age on the street, Debbie and Mark, Graeme, Nigel and his younger brother Spock and Rebecca, the dark haired girl next door but one who had a massive copper beech in her garden. we all climbed this and hidden by the leaves, Debbie groped my brother, unbeknownst to me. later my brother would go out with the dark haired girl. despite her parents being triv partners with my parents they disapproved of the match and it fizzled out. she later got pregnant to a geek workmate at a local factory, then had an affair with a fireman. her elder sister dated a fat faced and ruddy cheeked meathead with some kind of souped up coupe. she was said to have damaged the spinal development of her horse by trying to break it in too soon. i don't know if this was true. it was said by a competitive girl. then there was John Cutliffe who lived behind our house. he was my age and had the initials JC which was he nickname used to mock his well known christian beliefs. what this doesn't tell you is that he also had a spiteful, mischievous streak. so one night when Graeme and his family were away JC snuck into their garden and dug great lumps out of their small lawn. bizarre. when later questioned about this he denied responsibility and tried to blame me and my brother. JC's older brother had built a shed with transparent corrugated plastic sheets for the roof up against our wall. he was a bodybuilder and trained others so several nights a week great grunting noises could be heard for a couple of hours shattering the peace of anyone nearby. most people on the street i never talked to. one christmas however, walking drunk down the street at night, i saw a neighbour walking his small dog. 'merry christmas y'boring bastard' i yelled at the top of my voice. he glanced up. i looked again at the dog, then i was at my front door being dragged in by my mother.
it was about this time someone's mum called me 'a rebel without a cause'. this seemed rather patronising coming from a housewife who celebrated charles and dianas' wedding at a pub garden party. the cause was there, i just hadn't worked out what it was. now i know. she'd taken early offence because i turned up to her daughter's respectable 18th birthday wearing a white feather earring i'd made. got a quality 35mm camera for my 18th birthday. was never very good with it but it gave me an interest in taking photos which i've still got and, thanks to the digital revolution, i fare a little better these days.
Jane Ibberson, Sarah Scott Baker, Clare Middleton
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Fire Dazzles Bluebird by Phil Halstead, probably painted late 70s. i bought this for £20 in 1984
Low Royd, Woodlands Drive, Rawdon, home of the Joughin family
a typical Margaret Joughin woodpile by the Segar shed, built from stone taken from a retaining wall - much to the anguish of her neighbour
the Sun Inn, Norwood
the Black Bull, Horsforth
NW aged 16 c1982
NW a year later on the German exchange in Koln
my art A Level painting of the Cow & Calf rocks, Ilkley. it got me a 'B'
didn't have a girlfriend from years 1-5 then had a flurry in the sixth form - Sarah Scott Baker, Clare Middleton, Jane Ibberson then Sarah Scott Baker again. Jane was more what they call these days a 'friend with benefits'.