TRUSTING THE SENSES

I just listened to ‘Dance On’ by the Shadows on my hi-fi.  In my mind, it’s 1963, and I’m in the Oxford Galleries ballroom, Newcastle, at the Saturday morning dance for teenagers.  A girl from Dunston, called Lesley, shows an interest in me, then a gauche and callow youth.  I happened to mention how much I liked this instrumental (and the vocal version by the curvaceous Kathy Kirby).  The following week, back at the Oxford, Lesley gave me the single by the Shadows, which she’d bought for six shillings and eightpence.  I was overwhelmed by her generosity and there followed a brief and nervous courtship until I decided that Dunston was just too far to travel on public transport.  The Oxford Galleries, is no more, swept away in one of Newcastle’s frequent road construction schemes.  Pity. 

Though I have long since finished playing cricket, I have a cricket ball mounted on a plinth standing in my study.  I was given it on the occasion of my retirement from the sport I played for 40 years.  Whenever I touch it, which I do often, I am taken back to my greatest achievement, my first ever century, against Holy Cross III, in 1994.  It was a baking hot day on the Meadows, where several games were being played at once.  One of their bowlers looked like a Bolivian, with a flattened swarthy face, high cheekbones and a pigtail. He split his trousers and had to go off.  Most of my team-mates missed my 100 not out – they were asleep in the long grass.  Amazingly, I scored another ‘ton’ the next week, on the artificial wicket at Stewarts Melville II.  I never scored another one, despite playing for another eleven years.

Every time I taste battenburg cake, which is like the Blackburn Rovers strip only in two-tone pink, and tasting of almonds, I am transported back to the old Wills pavilion, circa 1967, when that variety of cake formed the staple sweetmeat for the cricket teas.  They had tea ladies in those days, and freshly laundered table linen.  Tea was a very formal affair, with both teams sitting apart at long tables.  The pavilion was wooden, and you could easily get splinters in your feet if you forget to put on plimsolls, for spiked cricket boots were verboten in the dining hall. The pavilion was demolished to make way for an industrial estate and a new pavilion and cricket ground were built at the back of the factory.  The atmosphere was never the same afterwards and the teas tasted different.

There’s only one smell that I crave above all others. Forget the smell of Brut or Chanel no 5, new-mown grass or hot bubbling tar. It’s the smell of smoke and steam emanating from a steam locomotive. There’s nothing like it. I used to inhale that aroma as a fourteen-year-old boy by the side of Heaton sheds, or Carlisle station or once, by mistake, Motherwell. Steam traction regrettably died in 1968, but there are now many preserved railways that operate steam traction, so I can go to Bo’ness whenever I want, stand on the platform next to J36 ‘Maude’, and get a right lungful.

Sixteen years ago, the last Citroen 2CV was imported into the United Kingdom.  They stopped selling it here because it failed to meet EU standards, mainly because they were built from Baco-foil.  I was in East Saltoun last week with the dog, when I saw the back of a derelict Citroen 2CV Dolly poking out from a garage in someone’s back garden.  It was covered in moss and algae and looked a sorry sight.  I was instantly reminded of the early happy times in my mid-thirties when, for a few short summer weeks before I moved there, I drove back and forward to work in Blackpool from Wallsend in a jade green Citroen Dyane, which was the slightly posher version of the 2CV.  I had the stamina and optimism of youth then, and I ignored the shortcomings of its tiny two-cylinder air-cooled engine whose maximum speed was 70 miles per hour flat out.  Last year, I retraced my steps and undertook the journey again, in a modern MPV.  It nearly killed me.