Musical tastes were very much divided by sex. The girls would most often like Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet and Wham! whereas the boys regularly seemed to love Madness, The Jam and most of the Two Tone stuff. From time to time an act would ‘cross over’ – I seem to remember Adam and the Ants being popular with boys and girls for a short while.

Music was a big deal to me and I often associate particular people with particular music. For example, I will always associate Howard Jones with Darren Bolton; Phil Aitman was very much a metal man, as was Philip Moore, and wore it on his sleeve (and his back); Julie Willis was a massive Duran Duran fan and her then boyfriend, Gary Arrowsmith was very much in my camp with his love of The Jam. It’s weird how when I think of those people, I hear ‘their song’ so to speak. However, the most amusing turn of musical events saw Akash Handa suddenly becoming a hip-hop devotee as the whole breakdance thing exploded. Don’t get me wrong, I liked Akash, he was a jovial and friendly boy, but I hadn’t expected him to go all South Central on us. I seem to remember David Bogan being into that too, but nobody was going to laugh at big Dave! Actually, I always got on really well with David Bogan and he was a genuinely nice boy (though I suspect he may have been a little older than the rest of us in reality).

I tended to wear a lot of badges as well. By the time we got to the 5th year I had covered one half of my jacket with badges. There must have been 30 or 40 of them strewn across my jacket at any one time and it had an unexpected side affect of people ‘reading’ me as I walked past them in the school corridors. Keith Fair’s punk jacket was way more impressive in that he had both patches and badges on it, whereas I simply couldn’t have sewn them on and could not compete.

I don’t think I went to many gigs with people from school, although I recall going to see the magnificent Big Audio Dynamite with David Erichsen in 1986 at Tiffany’s. It was actually Lynn Allan who had first played me their music and I immediately loved it. I can recall that gig very very clearly and it remains one of my very favourite gigs ever to this day. I also went to see Queen at Knebworth with Darren Wainwright and Graham Walton in spite of me not really liking Queen. It was an interesting day at any rate.

I’d gotten to know David Erichsen and Graham Walton, Paul Porter and their mates from fourth year on when I was placed in the Geography and Physics classes with a lot of the boys from Q1 and R. Up until then I had only ever had Games lessons with them and it was good to mix with some new people. We would mercilessly tease our Physics teacher, Mr. Armstrong by calling him Bamber (he did really look a lot like Bamber Gascoigne) and he didn’t let it bother him too much, but I wasn’t exactly a good pupil for him as I had no interest in Physics at all. Weird because I’ve read loads of Physics books since then and I’m no longer bored by it.

I don’t know if there is one single song that I would say sums up my school days but The Piranhas ‘Tom Hark’ brings back vivid memories of us queueing up outside the West Rd changing roomsin the freezing cold and somebody began to sing the ‘du-durr-du-du” and pretty soon we had a whole chorus going:

At Rutherford we did still have the remnants of some of the old grammar school teachers (Rutherford had been a grammar school back in the day before they let scruffs like me in) and some of the older teachers had come through that system.

I remember an old Physics teacher called Mr. Moss who seemed to be very much of the old school – literally. He spoke in a particularly posh voice and always put me in mind of a retired Major or something. I just remember him being at a loss at what had become of his wonderful school – now bespoiled by all of these oiks.

Our head teacher was Miss Kirkby and she seemed aloof and distant to me. The only time I ever spoke to her was in her office in the 6th form I believe. I think I’d won some prize or other (by default really as class sizes were very small) and I got three seconds flat of her time and no sincerity whatsoever. She was another who seemed from another era and set in her ways. It’s remarkable to think that she ran the school – she was a real absentee landlord as far as I could tell. She reminded me of a little bird for some reason. I think she met the Head Boy and Head Girl (elected as Stephen Hood and Lynn Allan in my time there) and I’m not sure what went on there, but I’m guessing it was nothing either of them will recollect. One needlessly petty thing she did do was refuse to sanction our application to go onto Blockbusters! It had to be signed by her and she refused – I was forever robbed of a chance to do a Gold Run. I’m trying to remember who I applied to go on the show with, but memory fails me (I’d guess Pieter Foster or Jeff White depending on when it was).

So who were the outright bad teachers? I have to be careful not to libel anyone here I suppose, but a certain Maths teacher whose nickname was ‘The Bald Eagle’ Mr. Foster had methods of teaching that were completely mystifying to me (and a lot of others in the class). I went from being pretty good at Maths in 1st year to being clueless by the 3rd year. When our class switched to Mr. Espiner in 4th year I think he was amazed by how poorly we had been taught and he managed to drag a few of us through our O-level.  If it had not been for his intervention then I would definitely have failed.

I also remember a games teacher called Mr. Burke was almost universally unpopular. He used to really wind a lot of the boys up. I remember during games that he would insist on stopping play during football all the time and pick holes in our ‘tactics’ with gems like “stop, look what you are all doing! you are all just chasing the ball around” – wise words indeed. Like most of the games teachers, he was a rugby man. Sadly for him, most of the boys thought rugby was shit and just wanted to play football.

I’ll save most of my ire for a music teacher called Mr. Higgins. He seemed pretty old but was probably late 40s, early 50s at the time and was very distant. I think he sometimes played organ at Durham Cathedral. Anyway,  you know these days when you see footage of kids in school being engaged in music lessons and doing all kinds of interesting and fun things? Well our music lessons were nothing like that at all. We did nothing. I mean – nothing. He taught us precisely nothing in 3 years. I think the first lesson we had with him he asked if anyone could play piano and Darren Wainwright said he could and I do believe he was about the only one that old Higgins took any notice of. I can actually remember copying music down from a stave on the blackboard into our music books without being told what it was, how it sounded or why the hell we were doing it in the first place. Pointless. I love music – always have and always will. I play instruments and none of that was helped or nurtutred in any way at school by Mr. Higgins.

At least Mr. O’ Brien in 6th form did enable us to form a band and use the music block to practice in. I’m sure we made some truly shocking noises, but at least he did his job properly and compensated for Higgins.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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’.

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 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.