I was back in Wallsend, where my roots are and where my
heart, fickle and changeable though it is, generally lies. I decided at short notice on a brief voyage
of re-discovery, pounding the old streets hoping for fragments of memories to
come flooding back. I left Wallsend 33
years ago and much of what I did has been lost in ‘the mists and dark abysm of
time’. I chose a clear wintry night to undertake my journey. I took the dog with me for company, although
the streets of town have no relevance for her. I headed west, along the High
Street. An animated wind blew from the
north, cold as an empty fire-grate, and I buttoned down my collar against the
chill. A three-quarter moon shone down
from the ink-black sky but the sodium street lamps illuminated the roads and
pavements and made observation easy.
The High Street is about a mile long, and runs east to west,
where it finishes abruptly at ‘the Boundary’, where Wallsend spills over into Newcastle-upon-Tyne . The middle section of the High Street
comprises mainly takeaways and fast-food outlets, and you rarely see anyone
buying anything in any of them. The
further west you go, the grottier the buildings become, except for Aldi’s and
MacDonalds, which are brand-new and ugly.
High Street West contains a number of dodgy pubs, including the Queen’s
Head, the Anchor and the Duke of York, the type of places we used to think as
teenagers it would be sensible to go into with the added protection of a
breastplate, if we ventured in at all.
I crossed the Boundary into Newcastle (Walkergate, actually)
and turned right up Grasmere Road, where one of my five-a-side buddies used to
live till he decamped to Smethwick or West Bromwich in 1975. I headed back into
town, past the dainty rows of artisans’ terraced houses with pleasant names
such as Equitable Street ,
Diamond Street
and Windsor Street . I was headed for the little garden street in
which I lived as a young married man from 1975 to 1977 – Croft Avenue , and its sister next
door, Sunningdale Avenue .
I paid £5,500 for number three, Croft
Avenue back then.
There are two houses for sale in Sunningdale right now for around
£100,000, which doesn’t seem an awful lot, but £5,500 almost bankrupted me
then. We retraced our steps and headed for the Avenue, one of the very last
streets in Wallsend, adjacent to the Boundary.
Way back in the late sixties, when I was a callow youth
dressed in a green sports jacket and cavalry twill trousers, I worked in the
offices of a ship repair company. I used
to accompany four of my much more senior colleagues first to the firm’s
restaurant. ‘The Institute,’ where you were served by waitresses in black
uniforms, white aprons and lace caps.
You could get a pretty decent meal for one and sixpence. The Institute, alas, is no more. The ship repair company and its bigger
sibling, the shipbuilding company, folded and the Institute was demolished to
make way for quite the most grotesque building in Wallsend – some sort of
observation tower that looks like a giant mushroom and from which you can see
the unremarkable rubble that represents all that is left of Hadrian’s wall,
from which the town earned its name. After
lunch, the ‘Fatuous Five,’ as some wag in the office had called us, would walk
to the town centre. We invariably went
to Presto’s supermarket in the imaginatively named ‘Forum’ shopping centre
where one of our number, who fancied himself as Noel Coward and a bit of a
joker, would squeeze a loaf of bread and cry out ‘We love you all, Bristol.’
Then we would wander down to the Avenue where another of our group would chap
on the back door of one of the houses there and take delivery of a dozen ‘neggs’
as we humorously called them.
In those days, one of my great wishes was to buy one of the
tiny terraced cottages that line the south side of the avenue. They sold back then for less than £3,000, but
that was still a king’s ransom to someone who earned twenty-six pounds a
week. Then we would walk back to the
office and start work with pen and ink, without the benefit of computers. We did have Marjorie and her comptometer. This artefact was a heavy grey thing like a
typewriter only with numbers on the keys, not letters. She used to cost the jobs with that machine, though
it was an anachronism even then. On a
cold, lonely night, with the wind whistling in the telephone wires, I fancied I
could hear all their voices again, borne to me on the wind. I don’t suppose any of them are still alive
to squash bread or collect ‘neggs.’
Stiff with cold, I turned for home. I passed Buddle Street , where I spent seven years
of my early childhood. Our flat was
pulled down long ago and unexceptional new houses were built in their
place. We used to look out on Simpson’s
Hotel, a hostel for down-and-outs and life’s other refugees. Every now and
then, an ambulance would halt at the door, and a body, suitably covered with a
blanket, would be brought out on a stretcher.
Ninety minutes and four miles after we had set out, our
pilgrimage was complete and we were back at my mother’s apartment at the top of
Church Bank. I could put my memories in
an old trunk marked ‘suitably recycled’ and get on with getting on. My wife’s view of all this sentimental
nonsense is the same as Shelley’s: “The world is weary of the past / Oh, might
it die or rest at last.” Not I.
