School uniforms were the norm for all secondary schools in Newcastle and I think, by and large, they still are. The idea was always sold as being an ‘instrument of social levelling,’ though of course it did not exactly pan out like that in reality.

The most obvious distinction was the blazer. If you received a school uniform grant then you would be ‘issued’ with a heavier, less comfortable woolen blazer with black plastic buttons. If you bought your own, chances were that it would be smoother, lighter and have silver or gold shiny buttons on it instead.

Those of us who received a school uniform grant mostly had to make our way down to Waterloo House in Waterloo Street, just off Westgate Road. A big old style department store would see to our needs (and I’m sure be handsomely paid in local authority wonga) whilst we all stood in huge Soviet style bread queues and prayed that we would not see anyone from our year there on that day. I did see people I knew a couple of times and a polite nod and then no mention of it from that day forth ever and under any circumstances, would be the unwritten rule – ‘I’m poor, you’re poor, but we’d best not broadcast it or our lives will be made miserable.’

Other than the huge and humiliating queues, the staff there were largely obnoxious. Typical snobby old-style department store types - you only work in a shop, why are you looking down your nose at a child from a poor family? The attitude there was right out of Dickens and I half expected to see the Beadle appear at any moment and drive most of us back to the poor house.

Rutherford’s school badge featured our wonderful motto, ‘nec sato, nec fato’  rather than ‘thank Christ it’s only for 5 years’ , which may have been more appropriate in most cases. Our ties were diagonally striped in black, white and red and we were expected to wear them at all times. Of course, there were ways to wear a tie……

The ’swot knot’ was the term used for any ‘normal’ smallish knot with the top button fastened – the sort of knot teacher’s liked to see and sported themselves (mostly). To distance onself from all possible accusations of swottery, the idea would be to tie as fat and loose a knot as you could – of course this looked completely sloppy and crap, but it was better than looking like a swot. When Mods came into vogue though, a lot of boys reduced their knots into a more Mod-like one.

I was reprimaded regularly for not having my shirt tucked in and was once called a ‘tramp’ by the horrible Mr. Garbutt for it. I’m not really sure why he dislike me so much as he never taught me in my whole time at the school, but he would regularly give me grief. I hope he’s miserable now – probably is.

I did prefer our uniform to the ugly claret of St. Cuthbert’s, the large boys Roman Catholic school just up the road. Theirs was not pretty on the eye and they were easy to spot in a crowd. Most of the other school wore black blazers of course. The Catholic girls school, Sacred Heart, again just a few hundred yards from Rutherford, had an unusual light/mid grey uniform. I remember being stunned when I heard that some of the Catholic schools’ lessons were taught by priests and nuns! I found that extremely strange and slightly worrying.

The first view of ‘the school computer’, there was only one in the early 1980s at Rutherford School, was the massively unimpressive Commodore PET.

Where are intarwebz, dammit?

This thing was so cumbersome that it had to be wheeled in on a trolley. Our lanky Maths teacher, Mr. Parker unveiled it as if he were uncovering the ancient treasures of El Dorado, while we stood unimpressed. It didn’t seem to do very much at all and after he had spent about 10 minutes trying to get it to work out the area of a square, I think Michael Piggott corrected him and fixed it. Oh dear.

I remember not being at all impressed by the thing and it wasn’t until I saw a ZX Spectrum and that you could also play games on a computer, that I really wanted one.

We did get to see an early version of a instant messaging thing at Longbenton School (I forget why we were there in about 1984 or so – never seen so many pictures of Peter Beardlsey in my life), where they had an intranet (well two computers linked together) and a person at each was merrily typing away and magically those very messages were appearing across the room instantly. If only I’d seen the potential back then I could have bought shares in Yahoo or Apple or something.

Eventually the school did get some BBC Model B computers but I never touched them in spite of taking O-Level Computer Studies, which was a peculiar subject in that we learned about computers but seldom actually touched one. No wonder we all failed.

By that point though, a lot of us had our own computers at home and I do recall a bunch of us sitting in the school library trying to think of some way to write a game on the Spectrum. I think it was a little ambitious given that most of us could barely program in BASIC and we never got past the first meeting.

The first video games machine I ever saw was a car racing game in Newcastle Bowling Alley on Westgate Road in about 1977. It was fairly rudimentary, but it looked pretty exciting and it was a foretaste of what was to come. The prospect of being able to play against someone across the world in real-time in a game with motion almost lifelike, or to be able to stand on an exercise board and Wii myself fit would probably have seemed less likely then than a flying car would have.

After that I didn’t really run into video games again until the ‘tennis’/bat and ball games on Grandstand video game machines a couple of years later. We had a couple of those and I did spend a lot of hours mastering the paddle and imagining it was a real game of football between Newcastle and oh just about anyone really. A couple of years after that I had an Atari Games Console with ‘Space Invaders’ of course and many others such as ‘Berserk’, which I broke the world record score on!

When the ‘real’ video games first hit arcades here in the early 1980s, it was ‘Space Invaders’ that was the pioneer of the genre. Still a classic game and only fully appreciated when played with an original machine with ’stiff’ controls and all, ‘Space Invaders’ was hugely addictive for a competive boy of my age.

It would cost 10p per game and that was prety costly for most boys of my age around then, particularly when it would cost you many pounds just to get the hang of the joystick and avoid being killed within a minute or two.

Those first machines had a score readout that would only go as high as 9999 I believe at which point the machine would be ‘clocked’ and return to 0. To prove you were a top player you would have to say how many times you had ‘clocked’ it in one session. The machines were in arcades of course, but also worked their way into cafes, pubs and various corner shops wold convert a back room into a makeshift mini-arcade. I remember a shop at the top of Wingrove Avenue did just that, as did Jock Ali’s little shop on Fenham Road and Stanton Street in Arthur’s Hill.

We used to play it in the arcades down at Tynemouth and also in a taxi office in North Shields, where me, Keith Bain (Bainsy) and Paul Van Zandvliet would sometimes go and sneak a few games.

Everyone loved Space Invaders or ‘Spaceys’ as we called them and the name became a generic term for all arcade video games machines. Most boys at school would discuss the games and various strategies for beating them and I recall I bought a book with guides to playing Pacman, complete with maps for how you coudl play without even looking at the screen and a ‘hiding place’ where the ghosts could not get you – impressive when showing friends.

The next machine I saw was ‘Asteroids’, where you shot asteroids into smaller and smaller bits and then one of my all-time favourites, ‘Galaxian’, which was kind of a souped up version of Space Invaders, but with more colour and more active bastard aliens.

Each month seemed to bring a plethora of wonderfully exciting new titles and by 1981, Bainsy and me would be spending all day in Whitley Bay on Sundays playing ‘Moon Cresta’, ‘Defender’, ‘Cosmic Guerilla’, ‘Gorf’ and many many others. ‘Moon Cresta’ was our favouite and involved the novel task of having to ‘make rockets dock’. It was a completely mental game with lots of really weird aliens to shoot. Once you got a high score it became hugely difficult and some of the aliens would randomly disappear. I was great at ‘Moon Cresta’, but my expertise really shone in ‘Scramble’, which I would play for hours.

I would take £10-£15 from my stupidly generous pocket money (it was shitloads in those days) and blow it all in the arcades and on chips with the odd game of pool thrown in. Bainsy and me had a whale of a time and if nothing else, it stopped him leading me any more astray than he probably would have if we’d been out on the streets, but that’s another post.

Mostly we would walk from North Shields to Whitley Bay on a Sunday morning from about 10 and get home around 6. The money would all be spent, but we would have enjoyed every moment of thumping the controls of any and every machine we could lay our hands on.

Surprisingly the arcades in Whitley Bay never really attracted any nutters back then, but when I went to Eldon Square Recreation Centre in Newcastle to play them, I ran into trouble several times, including a young boy shoving a knife at my throat and pressing it to my skin while demanding money. I just backed off and walked away from him and kept on walking! Never any shortage of lunatics in the Toon.

Luckily a couple of years later we all had computers and/or video games machines at home, where nobody would ever threaten us with knives and we didn’t have to spend £15 a week on our addiction. I bet all the boys I went to arcades with sit and fiddle with XBoxes and Playstations now.

When I began doing this rundown of the people I’d been to school with, it was purely to get something down before I forget it all. Just random junk and snippets of memories was all I intended, but judging by my super-duper stats, it seems that the notes on my former classmates is the most popular bit. Hopefully I haven’t upset anyone.

Anyway here are a few others from my year, though not my class:

David ‘Honda’ Henderson: The main thing I remember about Honda was that he had the hardest shot in our year. When he leathered a ball it flew. I remember being hit on the thigh on a cold morning in games by him a few times and I can still feel the sting.

Honda lived on Cedar Road, Fenham and had a sister I think. He was always up for football and cricket after school – though football was his strength. I always thought that he was a good friend to have, as he was loyal and reliable and he didn’t moan much (unlike me). I don’t think anyone disliked Honda (everyone called him Honda, not David) and he had many friends from throughout our year – he was in ‘R’ (class).

Graham Walton: Graham was good friends with Honda and also in the same class as him. Graham lived in Arthur’s Hill close to St. James’ Park on Diana Street.

I got to know Graham quite well – he was briefly the drummer in our band and I went to the Queen gig at Knebworth with him and Darren Wainwright. Although he wasn’t in my class, I did get a handful of classes with him – Games, Physics and possibly Geography and he went on the Field Trip to Ford Castle in 1984.

Graham was fairly shy and quiet on the surface, but he opened up once you got to know him. He didn’t like sports very much at all though, which was unusual for a friend of mine. I’m not sure if I saw him after school, although I may have seen him on Diana Street a couple of years after school, but I’m not sure it was him – I heard he was working in a sports shop for a while. He also took plenty of photos at 6th form nights out that I would love to have a look at one day, although I’m sure they are long since gone.

David Erichsen: David always seemed to be smiling. I liked him a lot and thought he was one of the ‘good guys’, a good friend to have and always up for a laugh and joke. I think he lived in Chapel House or somewhere out that way.

I took Physics with him and we mercilessly teased Mr. ‘Bamber’ Armstrong and learned next to nothing in two years. I think he also went to Ford Castle where we had a pretty good week there. I think David’s sport was rugby. I also recall him having a family bereavement late in our time at Rutherford and although I would say he was a friend at the time, I had no idea what to say to him or how I should act. I’ve never set eyes on him since, but a he was a genuinely nice lad.

Darren Bolton: I could probably fill a book with stuff about Darren. Often known as ‘Daza’, he was another of ‘R’s boys. Darren lived on Fenham Hall Drive with his Mam and Stepdad and later a newborn brother came along.

I liked Darren and he was loud and opinionated (I was quiet and opinionated) and was a major fan of Spandau Ballet and Howard Jones. We would often talk music and play music in Jeff White’s front room as we played snooker. We would each make a mix tape and take turns on whose would be played each night -let’s just say it was varied.

Darren also had his own snooker table (with huge pockets), but there was less space around it, so we played at Jeff’s mostly. I do remember him chipping the cue ball off the bed of the table and smasing a glass presentation case – the look on his face was priceless. Another thing he did in his house was to pilfer his Stepdad’s soft-porn mags at any opportunity and would often bring them down to show the lads.

We had some good laughs together, playing cricket, golf, football etc on the Convent field and at Rutherford  in the days when security guards didn’t throw you off school grounds at night. He really loved cricket and supported Nottinghamshire for some reason, although he was not the best player among us, he was very keen indeed. He developed his off-spin and seemed to like to bowl that, but he never made the school team unfortunately.

In spite of being close to him, I never saw him from the age of 18 on.

Alan Faulkner: Alan was an easy boy to take the piss out of. He was fairly dopey and very timid, but he was not a bad sort at all. He was probably picked on too much because of it as he was such an easy target. He had that ‘daft as a brush’ quality about him and a comical laugh that you could hear from 100 yards.

Alan lived on Beaconsfield Street, at the top nearest the West Road and I think his Dad was Irish and his Mam Scottish. Oh and I remember his middle name was Charles. His Dad was over-protective and would frequently take boys to task for how they treated Alan – this of course made things much worse.

I saw him recently in The Gate in town and he still looks the same – a weird semi-limping walk, shirt hanging out as ever and that ‘got dressed in the dark look’. He has barely changed in almost 25 years. I hope he’s happy and he probably is – the simple things made him happy.

Phil Aitman: Phil was our year’s leading heavy metallist. He liked loud metal and dressed accordingly – even playing guitar as he got a little older. He once had a go on my cheap strat copy in the 6th Form common room and bizarrely he had a nose bleed on it. I later swapped him a guitar at his parent’s place when we had all gathered there to watch The Exorcist. I think Phil and me were the only 2  boys to play guitar in our year – they’re all it at these days, but in the 1980s guitar was not the thing – it was all synthpop and drum machines.

I liked Phil and he was one of the boys that made our room in Ford Castle on the Field Trip so pleasant. I first spoke to him as we both stood watching rugby in games in the first year, both having notes from our Mams saying we couldn’t do it. I was pretending to have a bad leg, but I’m not sure what Phil’s ailment was, or whether it was as fictional as my own.

Phil lived down at New Mills later at school, but I’ve a feeling he lived in Benwell earlier on at school. I don’t think I saw him out of school very often, if at all, other than the aforementioned Exorcist video night. I think I did see him once on the bus a couple of years after school but I wasn’t sure it was him as he’d grown his hair (or maybe he hadn’t) and I didn’t speak.

I hated swimming lessons. They began in 4th year Juniors at Westgate Hill School in 1979-80, when I was 10/11 years old. We would be taken to Montagu Pool by a coach once a week to learn how to swim.

Immediately I knew I hated it, as did about a quarter of the boys in my class. We were soon moved to the mega-shallow learner’s pool and away from the scary large pool with the 12′ deep end. Of course this was not before I was thrown in to see if I could swim and had my head forced under the water by a teacher ‘to get used to it’ and ‘overcome my fear.’ That worked then.

Once we were at Rutherford, the school had its own pool (shit), from which I was mercifully saved for around a term or so as it was knackered. Mr. Seery was our swimming teacher and shoved us no-hopers down in the shallow end where we would have ’special guidance’ from a mad old bloke who probably had just walked in off the street, called Mr. Freeman. He was firmly of the belief that if kids could not swim, then frightening the little buggers into doing it was probably the best policy. He even fired a starting pistol above our heads a couple of times to startle us and make us jump in. Crazy bastard.

I endured 3 years of compulsory swimming lessons, which mainly consisted of my walking through the shallow end waving my arms around. We would swim a width, get out and touch the wall, jump back in and swim another width etc. Plenty of us couldn’t actually swim though, so there was really no point in doing this at all.

I hated the chlorine stench and the dirty, piss-filled water in the baths, I hated queueing up outside in the cold, waiting for the weekly humiliation to commence and I really hated having a wet towel stuck in my haversack all day.

Teachers would often claim that swimming was important as it could well save your life one day. I never really felt that it would and when pushed, Mr. Seery did say to me, “well you could be on a boat that sinks one day.” How wrong he was.

We did a sponsored swim in the 1st year and I did a creditable 21 lengths of the pool! Not bad as I could not swim a single stroke. Our ‘prize’ for being the class that collected the most moolah was a trip to Crowtree Leisure Centre, where they had a pool and an ice rink (zzzzz). Shit day that was – a school trip to Sunderland!!

I’ve never been in a pool since and I never will go in one again.

We did encounter a fair amount of racism when growing up. It was never comparable to being dragged from my home screaming in the middle of the night by men in white hoods, but it could be upsetting nevertheless.

When we came to North Shields, a place where there were not many Asians at all at the time, we did encounter some whcih was mainly just plain ignorance and a symptom of those times I think. Overall people in North Shields were friendlier and there was more of a community spirit there, but there were a few rotten apples. There were a few mixed race black people there, such as Paul Van-Zandvliet and a couple of well known local families, but that was as far as it went other than Chinese Takeaway owners.

I do remember at least 2 or 3 parents of children I would play with would soon stop their children from playing with me once they found I had a Pakistani Dad. At first it was fine, as ‘I look all white but my Dad was black’ , as Roger Daltrey once sang, but when they discovered the shocking truth I would be sent away – a couple of times told to my face and once a boy told me he wasn’t allowed to play with me any more. Quite what was going to happen to their precious son in associating with me, I have no idea – people are strange. Ignorance was widespread back then and if you think of Rigsby in Rising Damp with Philip, you are not far away from many men’s views on blacks and the jungle etc. ‘Pakis’ were thought of in a similar third world, savage manner and could not be trusted – nobody was especially worried about Islam though! How times change when people are perfectly fine with them being Pakistani, but fear/scapegoat their religion.

He's Just A Stereotype

There was the odd ‘NF’ spray painted on a bus stop and ‘Pakis Out’ etc daubed around some places, but I don’t recall too much nastiness towards me, but perhaps that’s just because I was so young.

Most people were fine, including one elderly woman in our shop who said to my Dad, “ahhh he speaks really good English, doesn’t he.” hmmmmm yes he did – English and only English and in fact at that age I did not even know what language it was that my Dad spoke – I knew it wasn’t called Pakistani, but really I had no clue. My cultural education from him was pretty much zero. The only Urdu I ever learned was a few swear words from boys at school.

Also a couple of boys in North Shields once refused to believe I was from Newcastle – “but you can’t be from Newcastle, you talk just the same as us!” Those were the days before mass car ownership and the Metro and lots of kids in North Shields had never been to Newcastle, thinking it was hours away. The only linguistic differences I could hear were that the Shields kids said ‘geet’ for very and ‘daint’ instead of divvint, as well as ‘Mar’ and ‘Dar’ where we said ‘Mam’ and ‘Dad’.

A lot of my class and also P1 pupils from our year made a gruelling journey by coach to Florenville, in the Belgian Adrennes in late May 1983.

I remember that we sailed from Dover to Ostend in an especially choppy four hour nightmare sea voyage where Stephen Hood and myself vomited for pretty much the whole journey.

Poor Stephen then continued to spew his way through Belgium as the coach had another 300 or so miles to negotiate after the sea crossing. Bearing in mind we had taken a coach from Newcastle to Dover already, this was an arduous trip for the fragile and inexperienced traveller.

When the ferry set out I thought the gentle rocking motion was perfectly fine – sea sick? pah! However my joy was very much short lived when I realised that the waters were becoming a whole lot more rough the further out we sailed.

Descending the stairs to toilets was becoming something of an art in itself as the staircase began to swing violently in the increasing swell. I simply couldn’t believe how much things were moving as Hood and me made our way to the toilets with green faces. We sat in adjoining cubicles and suffered greatly! Eventuallty I thought I wasn’t able to spew any more and we tried to edge our way back up onto the deck level, but poor Hood was in no fit state to be going anywhere.

Fortunately for me we made it and I crashed out wearily across some seats, clutching my sick bag – lovely. People avoided me thankfully. I don’t know how Hood fared during the time I slept but he was not recovering at all.

Mercifully we reached Florenville in the Ardennes one evening and we were fed some soup (or potage as John Walker correctly answered Mr. Lamb’s poser). Tasted disgusting to me though in spite of all my troubles – I needed to sleep and that was easier said than done as there were something like 8 of us sharing one very large room. What totally threw us was that there were 3 double beds in the room which meant we would have to share and share with a boy! I think I shared with Darren Wainwright or possibly Stephen Hood – maybe we alternated, I really don’t remember.

Possibly the hotel we stayed in (much changed now)

The reason for me not remembering probably has something to do with the licensing laws in Belgium (or lack of them). On our first night there, we wandered around the town and walked into a bar. One of us asked for a beer and the landlord happily served us. The bar had a weird pool table in it with holes cut in for pockets and lots of locals there who seemed to be a bunch of Teddy Boys. This was weird as it was 1983, not 1959. The drink of choice for all of us was Stella Artois and we all drank a lot of it, or as much as we could afford and it was pretty cheap.

That bar became our haunt during the trip and we made the most of our time there. I do remember Mr. Lamb getting really drunk and actually not being able to find the bar counter with his elbow in classic slapstick style. The teachers turned a blind eye until we all got really drunk and someone (I’m thinking Darren Wainwright) blocked the sink with spew. The teachers then decided to clamp down a little and tried to get us to do other things in the evening.

The night before our departure, Mr. Lamb had us present the female owner of the hotel with some gifts and we all stood around and applauded while I had the duty of saying, on all our behalfs, “Madame, de la part do tout le monde, un grand merci,” or something like that. In the spotlight though, I managed to fluff my lines and Mr. Lamb had to prompt me.

We did run into another school from Yorkshire who stayed one night on their way back home. We played them football and some of their girls flirted mildly with us. Perhaps they liked our accents or something, it was a welcome change for most of us at the time.

Aside from that we visited various places in the Ardennes. Some caves, a cable car, some weird wildlife park where we saw a very sad looking bear and Dinant and Namur which were both fairly pretty towns with not a lot to do in them.

Florenville was a quiet but interesting little village and one thing I remember is that they put all this weird stuff on their chips – jam and that kind of thing. Most weird. I think Stephen Hood liked it though as one of his tricks was always dipping his chips in his custard during school dinners. The newsagents sold a lot of porn as well, but we didn’t buy any I hasten to add – that was way too intimidating. I bought two French football magazines and Mr. Birrell had a quick read of them before I did, so it’s just as well I hadn’t slipped a porn mag between them I reckon.

It was great to be abroad and away from home with my mates, but Florenville was not really a happening kind of place – very sleepy and fairly hollow. I’d never seen so many trees in my life, that’s for sure. I do have a problem with my memories of this trip and that is that they have merged with my memories of the school trip to Etaples in France which we went on the following year. The Florenville trip was better though as it pissed down the whole time we were in Etaples.

The ferry crossing home was a doddle and we stopped at St. Pancras in London on the way home for some reason. We pulled in outside a Wimpy facing the station (I was in there just a couple of months ago , it’s now a McDonald’s) and I was awestruck by the sight of the wonderful old station. The best thing I’d seen on the trip and I think at that point I realised that I had to get to London and explore the place – which I later did many times and began my love/hate affair with the capital. So the best bit may well have been the journey home.

I wonder if Jeff White still has his photos from there? He had some good ones, including a fitting one of the ‘Chiny’ sign.

I played a lot of snooker when I grew up. Most of it was on home tables at the height of the 1980s ’snooker boom’, but eventually we graduated to wanting to play on full-size 12′ x 6′ tables.

I had played on full-size tables in Eldon Square Recreation Centre (where they had two tables), but my first entry to the world of a dedicated snooker club was going to Riley’s Royal Court Snooker Club which was in Newcastle City Centre down the lane where City Vaults used to be in the Bigg Market.

To enter you had to go down the lane and take a left through  gloomy, dodgy-looking door and walk up some steps that were right out of the days of Fast Eddie Felson and his road trip during The Hustler. To get into the club itself you had to press a buzzer and show your card before being allowed in.

Royal Court Snooker Club Down the Lane (or was)

The interior was very dark, severely smoke-filled and like a paint-by-numbers version of what I thought a snooker club would look like in my mind. It seemed like a really seedy, badly-lit den in which to mis-spend some of my youth. The first visit we made was me, Jeff White, Darren Wainwright, Darren Bolton and possibly Mark Slater.

We played doubles and none of us were any good the first time of course, with the table seeming like some enormous, treacherous terrain when compared to the home tables we always played on. I don’t think anybody potted more than four balls consecutively that day. We found it really difficult and were told that these tables were very tight having been former billiard tables (they were really really old) – I think there were about 7 or 8 tables in there, but we played there only around 15 or 20 times before the new club opened in High Bridge called the Chalk N Cheese.

An old bloke with glasses on called Peter worked behind the bar primarily with an older woman whose name I forget, but whose daughters went on to work in Chalk N Cheese for years. I remember Pieter Foster always called Peter, ‘Harry the Bastard’ (a Young Ones reference) as he was particularly awkward and discourteous to us younger members. That’s all apart from the young up and coming super-duper prospects who were at that time I think Darren Thompson and Robert Drane, neither of whom really made it very far in the snooker world in the end.

In the end we were glad to head for the Chalk N Cheese in around 1984 or 1985 where we were much more at home. Initially the Chalk N Cheese did not sell alcohol and it had fourteen tables (8 upstairs and 6 downstairs). What made it even better was that Doreen the manageress would let under 18s in from 9am-11am on weekends to play for free. You had to share a table but it was a good day out and we usually stayed and played a lot longer. Eventually we got better and better and managed to pot more than four balls consecutively. Mainly it was Jeff White and me, but Darren Bolton would often come there with us and I regularly saw Pieter Foster and Dicken Foster there too,  both of whom I played a lot of snooker with in the years to come.

I spent a lot of time and money in that club until it closed in about 2006. It spanned my teenage years and a lot of my adult life until I got married and it closed down. Newcastle now has no decent snooker club, which is sad.

My Dad sold his shop in Grey Street, North Shields in 1981 and after a brief lay-up, he bought a shop in Readhead Drive, Walker from a bloke called Mr. Kaura. I don’t remember Mr. Kaura very well, but I did hear customers later mention that his wife had a leg amputated.

The Walker shop was quite different from the North Shields one. For a start, this was a lock-up shop, whereas my Dad had always lived above the shop in North Shields. The other major difference was the kind of area we had gone into. The East End of North Shields, while not being posh, was definitely a lot more respectable than deepest, darkest Walker at the time.

The shop itself was on the ground floor level of a four storey council block of flats. There was a hairdressers next door and the third shop changed use a couple of times while we were there. This was on the bend where Lancefield Avenue and Readhead Drive met.

Now Demolished

I remember that when we opened up, there was a large glass display cabinet which contained some really weird items for a corner shop to sell. Jewellery and varied fancy goods adorned this cabinet and sold from time to time too! Behind the counter we had this enormous wooden stand with lots of little pigeon holes in it, in which my Dad ‘filed’ all his hardware and assorted junk. We sold buttons, thread, sellotape, baby’s bottles, candles, playing cards, dominoes – you name it, all of this stuff lay side by side with Maxwell House, Heinz Beans, Ace Lager and Regal King Size.

I worked there at weekends and immediately noticed how much rougher and Geordie-r the people there were. They seemed to drink a lot, smoke a lot, eat a lot of 10p mix-ups and constantly need change for their gas/electric meters (50ps).

On the whole though we had little trouble there, which is amazing when I think about how crap the area looked and that kind of thing, but my Dad was again reasonably well accepted in the area. He didn’t make friends there though like he had in North Shields where he drank like a fish in the pubs (yes, he was a Muslim but he liked to drink and gamble – a lot). I think he missed that social aspect of life in Walker, but he was making pretty good money and by 1984-5, the shop was a little goldmine.

I can remember a lot of the characters from Walker more than I can the ones from North Shields and there were some absolute stars.There were people like young “thpring and onion cwithpth pleathe” (spring AND onion crisps) and Mr “Four Cans of COlt 45″, as well as a fat bloke who called my Dad “Mr. Czar” for some reason and a rag and bone man who had the filthiest hands I ever saw, horse-style false teeth and ate copious amounts of ice cream. Also I think Dennis Tueart’s Mam was a regular and an old bloke who claimed to be Eric Burdon’s Dad or was it Uncle? I was slightly dubious over his claims though. Oh and Ian Bogie used to come in on his way out for a night on the tiles and utter the classic “a packet of Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum, mate.” Can you imagine young Newcastle players buying a packet of gum to get change for the bus now? Enough to make you lol.

In total we spent something like a dozen or so years in Walker, in the Readhead Drive shop and then in a shop on the corner of Welbeck Road and St. Anthony’s Road and I have vivid memories of both. The Welbeck Road clientele was noticeably more well-heeled and cultured, we sold more Nescafe there than Happy Shopper stuff which in itself shows you the class of the area.

I did meet some thoroughly nice people though and only today in fact I saw a woman with her daughter who is currently around 24 and has a daughter of her own now. I remember the girl before she started school and I only mention this because I heard her mention her Gran to her Mother in our shop (she doesn’t know I knew her as a toddler) “Gran would have loved that” and I thought that yes she would have, her Gran being a lovely old Cockney woman, right out of the old East End. Quite what she would have made of her Grand-daughter’s now pink hair I do not know, but she was a real character who I would talk to about the past and learn quite a lot from – her recollections of the Blitz were enlightening to me when I heard them.

I love watching the changes over the years as a shop worker. You get to watch a whole generation grow up as they walk past your shop window – you sell them penny chews, then ice pops, single tabs and before you know it, a cheeky bottle of Olde English as they stumble their way through teenage Britain. If you’re really lucky you get to bump into them years later and sell them a carpet for their newborn’s room.

See? you don’t get that at Tesco-bloody-Express now do you?

Learning all about the Romans was a big deal when I was at school. The area clings desperately to its place in history as being the outpost of the Roman Empire in its superpower days. They only really got as far as here and then pretty much conceded that they were never going to get any further north.

My teacher at Westgate Hill Primary School, Mrs. Matthewson was a real lover of all things Roman. I think she lived in the Tyne Valley somewhere up near Heddon-on-the-Wall and was immersed in the whole history of Hadrian’s Wall and everything that went with it. She was one of my favourite teachers and aside from playing the piano, Roman history was her favourite subject. She was always really lovely to me and I think I was something of a teacher’s pet in her class. She’d actually got hold of some of my brothers’ books and told me how great my family was and how much of a pleasure it was to have us in the school! I don’t think any teacher ever understood me more or encouraged me more than her. She used to talk about trips to the USA and spoke with pride about her son. I think she was a single parent – she never mentioned a Mr. Matthewson and I never delved (being 11, how much delving can you do?).

We took a trip to Vindolanda and Chesters Fort and both of those were alright, but the one that really left me feeling conned was when I went to see the Roman Temple in Benwell. That was years later when I was in Rutherford and I was expecting a whole lot more.

It is located just oposite Rutherford School, a few yards down the hill and along a bit from Handa’s shop (or what was Handa’s shop) and the only time I went there I was amazed by how small and insignificant it was – I felt conned.

Is that it?

All that's left...

Where’s the rest? Weren’t the Romans religious? Too many Gods, so little time?