I just listened to ‘He’s In Town’ by the Rocking
Berries on my hi-fi. In my mind, it’s nineteen
sixty-three, 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, a gauche and callow
youth in a grey corduroy jacket and blue slacks. I happened to mention to her how much I liked
this record. The following week, back at
the Oxford, Lesley gave me the single, which cost her six shillings and
eightpence, a fortune in those days. I was overwhelmed by her
generosity and there followed a brief and nervous courtship until I decided
that Dunston was just too far away 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 forty years. Whenever I touch it, which I do often, I am
taken back to my greatest achievement, my first ever century, against Holy
Cross Seconds, in nineteen ninety-four.
It was a baking hot day on the Meadows in Edinburgh, where several games
were being played at once. One of their players
looked like a Bolivian, with a flattened swarthy face, high cheekbones and a
pigtail. All he was missing was a bowler hat. He split his trousers and had to
go off. Most of my team-mates missed my one
hundred not out – they were asleep in the long grass. Amazingly, I scored another ‘ton’ the next
week, on the artificial wicket at Stewarts Melville Seconds. I never scored another one, despite playing
for another eleven years.
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 or Gateshead sheds, or in Newcastle
Central or Carlisle Citadel stations or once, by mistake, Motherwell.
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 tobacco factory pavilion, on the Coast Road
in Newcastle, circa nineteen sixty-seven, 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 floor 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, and not for the better. Now the
factory is a block of flats, and the cricket ground and replacement pavilion
have all gone
Nineteen years ago, the last Citroen 2CV was imported into
the United Kingdom. They stopped selling
it here because it failed to meet EU standards, whatever they were. Maybe they'll start making it again after Brexit. I was in Stenton 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
seventy miles per hour flat out. Last
year, I retraced my steps and undertook the journey again, in a modern
MPV. The distance nearly killed me.
