Child from Home (2 page)

They were rather shy and tentative with each other at first, both being afraid of rejection, but Dad persevered and set about winning her over. Fortunately for George, and me, Mam had returned his affection and they were soon a courting couple talking dreamily of their future together. There was a joy and spontaneity in each other's presence and Dad was totally smitten. Each set the other's heart a-flutter as they fell into that deep and intense love to which I owe my life. They became inseparable and were completely devoted to each other. Hating to be apart, each stored up the other's touch and smell until they were together again.

Early in 1934 they had walked hand-in-hand up the approach road of the newly built Tees (Newport) Bridge to join the cheering crowds that lined the route beneath colourful streamers and buntings. Large shields, bearing the royal crest, had been fixed on to every lamppost and the bandsmen of the 1st Battalion of the Durham Light Infantry kept the flag-waving onlookers entertained. When the royal party, accompanied by a retinue of civic dignitaries, arrived in a cavalcade of gleaming, black cars, they had watched as the Duke and Duchess of York completed the official opening. Mam thought that the Duchess looked stunning in her pale-coloured fur coat with its thick, fox fur collar, her white strap-over shoes and her white gloves. On 7 July of that year, Mam and Dad were married in St Cuthbert's Church – the year in which the driving licence, which cost five shillings (25p), became compulsory.

My brother George and I were born during Dad's six ‘civilian years', in my case almost exactly nine months after the wedding. New blood from old blood! To Mam we were both little miracles – sublime gifts from heaven – and to her, childbirth was a powerful and mystical event. I was brought into the world by the local midwife in the front bedroom of a small rented house at number four Stanley Street. Our red-brick house was the second of a long row of two-up, two-down, Victorian terraced houses that faced each other across a grimy side street off Cannon Street. It was an area in which the teeming masses of unskilled labourers, dockworkers and the unemployed lived out a poverty-stricken existence. Two towering, cylindrical gasholders that stood within a high-walled compound dwarfed the houses, and we lived and played in their shadow. When fully inflated, the gas tanks loomed up through the smoke blotting out the light and making the workmen on top look like midgets as they were silhouetted against the sky. At other times, the tanks shrank so low that the superstructures surrounding them stood out above them. The locals took these monolithic landmarks for granted, scarcely noticing them within their encircling, skeletal framework of vertical iron columns, catwalks and metal steps.

The area was known as ‘Foxheads' and it was probably named after a firm of iron makers called Fox, Head & Co. that had once had iron-rolling mills nearby. The doors of one row of houses had doorknockers in the shape of a fox's head, and similar motifs could be seen at the ends of the stone lintels of all the doors and windows. It had an unsavoury reputation, being a very rough area where the police, swinging their wooden truncheons, patrolled in pairs rather than singly as they did in the quieter and more respectable parts of the town. It was a lively and turbulent neighbourhood to say the least and disputes among the tough, hard-drinking men and women were usually settled by fists. In that rough and ready cauldron of teeming humanity it was not uncommon for drunken women to fight in the open street, the ‘scraps' usually taking place outside the pubs from which they had just been ejected. As a crowd gathered they would punch, pull each other's hair and scratch until they were arrested and carted off in the police ‘Black Maria'.

In the year between my birth and George's, Mam had given birth to a stillborn baby boy. They say that into every life a little rain must fall, and that summer it came down in buckets. ‘The heavens must be weeping for him,' Mam said tearfully, as she carried his tiny body down the steep and narrow stairs in a battered, tear-stained shoebox. There is no loss more heart-rending to a mother than that of her child, and a few days later he was placed in the coffin of another person thus allowing him to be decently buried in consecrated ground. At that time, children who had not been baptised into the church were not allowed a Christian burial; it seems they were destined to spend eternity in limbo. Very close to tears, Mam said, ‘His little soul has gone back to heaven whence it came. He will be loved and cared for by the angels. He is now a new star in the Milky Way, and if you look very carefully on clear nights you might be able to pick him out.' At times she was very worried that I might soon join him, as I was a weak and sickly child prone to picking up all of the illnesses common to the infants of our crowded and socially deprived neighbourhood. Every day I was given toast with Virol, the bone-marrow preparation, said to be the ideal fat food for children and invalids.

The year after George came into the world Dad was re-enlisted, this time into the Royal Artillery. In 1938 he was posted to the barracks at Hartlepool, a small town on the coast a few miles to the north of the river mouth, where he managed to find a tiny terraced house to rent. Mam's fifteen-year-old sister Renee came with us and was a great help. When war was imminent Dad sent us back to Middlesbrough, while he was posted to an ack-ack (anti-aircraft) site near Blyth in Northumberland on one of the great gun emplacements tucked away in the high sand dunes just to the south of the busy harbour where submarines were based.

In order to protect the harbour, Blyth Battery was reactivated in the early months of the war and Dad, being thirty-four years of age, was looked on as an ‘old man' by the young conscripts. His earlier military service and experience of army life was – on the whole – much respected. A series of these anti-aircraft batteries formed part of the north-eastern coastal defences and they were located in large, camouflaged concrete bunkers and emplacements with their guns pointing seaward. The huge, long-barrelled guns ran on steel rails, and could be rotated through an arc of 180 degrees.

Our new home was in another small terraced house on Cannon Street, a little closer to the Newport Bridge. It stood in a low-lying area that tended to flood whenever we had heavy rain, and behind it was a narrow, cobblestoned back lane from which sacks of coal were tipped through a wooden hatch in the wall at the end of our yard. There were no gardens in our part of town; the dreary street was our playground, and in it crowds of small, noisy, undernourished children shouted and clamoured every day. Fishmongers would come round trundling two wheeled handcarts shouting ‘Caller Herren!' (meaning ‘fresh herring') as gusts of wind blew gritty particles and filthy bits of paper around in the grey back alleys. The houses extended in row after grimy, monotonous row, all looking much the same with their chimneys belching out smoke for the greater part of the year. It was autumn but there were no rosy apples ripening anywhere near our treeless streets. Every week the window ledges and the round-edged front doorsteps that led directly on to the flagstones had to be scoured with a donkey stone. In our community, women were much respected if they scrubbed and polished until they were ready to drop.

Like all the other unbeautiful, unpretentious houses ours had no bathroom, even though the planners had called them ‘dwellings for artisans'. At the end of the high-walled yard was a brick coalhouse and water closet that we called the lavvy. The swan-necked gas brackets were fitted solely in the two downstairs rooms and these provided only a dim light. To light our way to bed Mam used candles or, if she could afford the fuel, a paraffin lamp with a glass shade that was inclined to flare and smoke and need constant adjustment. In the tiny kitchen a coal-fired range provided warmth and was used every day for baking and cooking. The large black kettle always seemed to be simmering and steaming on the hob.

The house, rented from a local solicitor, was situated some 400 yards to the east of the Newport Bridge – one of the many bridges built by the local firm of Dorman Long & Co. Ltd. It spanned the tidal River Tees, once noted for its fine salmon but now badly contaminated by the effluents that had poured into it from the many industries along its banks over the years. The river formed the boundary between North Yorkshire and County Durham, and the bridge was unique in having a 270-foot-long (82.30m) stretch of roadway that could be lifted vertically to a height of 120 feet (36.5m) above the river by means of a system of huge steel and concrete weights and counterweights. This allowed high-masted ships to pass below it as huge pink-eyed rats with naked tails ran along its wooden pilings. The local people were proud of this technical marvel that was the first of its type in the country. It was the largest and heaviest bascule bridge in the world, and it was raised and lowered on average 800 times a month – twenty-seven times a day. Hundreds of workers crossed it to reach the growing number of industrial sites on the northern bank, thus reducing the long journey round to the next bridge, three miles upstream at Stockton-on-Tees.

Middlesbrough, with its population of some 140,000 inhabitants, was bordered to the south by the Cleveland Hills. Many people escaped from the dirt, smoke and noise of their day-to-day lives by going out to the hills at weekends. Some joined local rambling or cycling clubs to visit the lovely countryside, while others caught the train out of town and hiked for miles in the fresh air.

The people of Teesside often had to endure extremely dense fogs, and when the rising smoke met the cold, damp air stream, thick smogs formed. These yellow smogs sometimes persisted for days. They were real pea-soupers that turned day into night and at times it was impossible to see to the other side of the road. Emissions of chemicals, such as ammonia, mixed with the damp air of the river valley were thought to be a contributory factor. A large metal foghorn mounted on the superstructure of the new bridge was sounded to warn approaching ships of its presence. I vaguely recollect lying awake listening to the eerie, fog-muffled blaring. It was so loud that it seemed to be right outside my bedroom window.

The heavily polluted river between the two bridges was over 300 feet wide in places, and it formed a long, northward-sweeping bend that enclosed a roughly triangular piece of land known as ‘The Ironmaster's District'. A network of railway lines and marshalling yards separated it from the grid-like pattern of our streets. Further downriver, beyond the Transporter Bridge, lay Smith's Dockyard with its crowded berths and its tall crane jibs that leaned at all kinds of crazy angles. The Ironmaster's District was packed with grimy iron and steel works; blast furnaces and coke ovens that reached up into the smoke-filled sky. Cooling towers belched clouds of white steam and noxious gases poured from smokestacks adding yet more filth to the already foul-smelling air. At night, as the furnaces were charged, a hellfire glow emanated and lit up the underside of the clouds, turning the whole sky a dirty orange. The ugliness of the scarred landscape was offensive to the eye but I assumed that this was the colour of the night sky everywhere.

The smoke-laden air left a permanent layer of smut over everything, settling on the washing that hung on the clothesline that was strung across our tiny back yard. There was the constant rattling and clanking of rail locomotives and heavy freight wagons being shunted; klaxons blared and screamed at shift-changing times and every day, prior to the sounding of the hooters, the streets were filled with crowds of grey, flat-capped men. These were the ones lucky enough to have a job to go to, and their segged and steel toe-capped working boots clattered on the stone setts echoing back from the grimy brick walls. Hissing steam poured from pipes and boilers; steam hammers clanged; drills whirred and the whole combined to produce a deafening and hellish cacophony. The hustle and bustle and the frantic activity never ceased and after a while people became inured to it. The endless din was part of the fabric of our lives.

On the northern bank of the river stood the huge British Oxygen Company, and close by lay the busy Furness & Company shipyard, with its massive dry docks and slipways. The activity had recently increased as it had received government orders for the construction of large numbers of naval vessels, and the increased employment was in marked contrast to the prolonged and catastrophic slump of the inter-war years. Now things were picking up, and on the south bank further downriver, Smith's Dockyard found itself in the same boat. Both yards were soon to be involved in the construction of warships.

The biggest economic event on Teesside in the inter-war years had been the amalgamation of a number of large works that now formed the Imperial Chemical Industries Limited (ICI). This sprawling complex lay to the south of Billingham just across the river from us on the Durham side and was the largest chemical plant in the country. The new chemical giant had played a major part in the provision of a wide and diverse range of products for the British Empire. With its many oil refineries, distillation towers and flare stacks, it was now working flat out and its oils, lubricants and high-octane aviation fuels were to be of vital importance to the Allied war effort.

These activities were to make it a prime target for the German bombers. Nitrogen was needed to manufacture explosives; fertilisers were vital to a much-needed increase in wartime food production, and perspex (formerly called Resin X), the first transparent plastic in the world, was produced here. The bomber and fighter pilots would now have the protection of perspex cockpit canopies and ‘blisters' whereas in the past they had endured the bitter cold with open cockpits. Nothing was wasted. Hundreds of thousands of tons of high-octane aviation fuel was being manufactured from coal and creosote, and the coke oven gas was used within the works and in the domestic grid.

The effluents, which had been pouring into the local waterways for years, had turned the mudflats along the margins of the Billingham Beck a sickly, bluish-grey colour. The polluted waters of the tidal beck then emptied into the River Tees turning it a dirty, greyish brown. The murky waters formed swirling eddies that we called ‘whirlpools' before they swept the few short miles eastwards past Seal Sands to flow out into the vastness of the North Sea.