As we were

"As we were" by Michael Lawrenson

I was born at 39, Nora Street in 1935. Memories of those very early days are few and a little vague because we moved to Sutton Estate when I was just four years old. But I can remember visiting what my mother called the 'Daisy Field' and where she and I occasionally went to sit and play. And it was exactly that, a field full of daisies, just to the east of the hospital and within sight of Harton Pit where the hooter would go at regular hours. Like the pit it has, of course, gone long since and as far as I can gauge it is now probably the car park where you pay a ridiculous amount of money to park to visit the hospital and where my car was rammed during a hospital visit there to see my mother in the mid-1990s.


39 Nora Street		My family , circa 1947/48 in Sutton Avenue . Thats me , 2nd from the left , front row .

My friend and I used to play in the street on his tricycle. It was quite safe then but just try that with today's traffic! At the end of the street was a grocer's shop called Harem's (or something like that) and I can remember when the floorboards were taken up for repairs and the only way in was to walk a plank across the main entrance. Nowadays no child would be allowed within hailing distance of such a hazard which would be coned off and plastered with health and safety notices but in those days there was a more relaxed approach and for a time the trip to the shop was made exciting by having to walk across the gaping void which was probably all of six inches deep.

Wakefield Avenue

Our new home in Wakefield Avenue was smaller than that in Nora Street and in fact my parents had had to move there because money was short. But like Nora Street there was a large garden where even we, the very antithesis of green fingers, did our war bit for King and Country by growing vegetables, potatoes and, after a few years strawberries, raspberries and loganberries. Just by the house was the Anderson shelter. Those shelters were little more than dugouts smelling of soil, damp and paraffin oil and covered with corrugated metal and about a foot of earth. We spent many nights there, waiting for the 'all clear', trying to keep warm with the Valor heater and listening to the bombers going over and to the noise of the guns and the bombs exploding. For a short time my mother's parents stayed with us and my grandfather enlivened the proceedings by sticking his head out of the door and giving a running commentary. The sound effects were enough for me, the whistling of the bombs as they fell, although thankfully nowhere near us, and the crash of the guns. There was one particular gun, although there may in fact have been more than one, said to be at Whiteleas which sounded particularly ferocious.

But as the war progressed and it became evident that the might of the Luftwaffe was not homing in on Wakefield Avenue, we got a Morrison shelter which was in effect a large metal table with a metal grille on each side. When the siren went Dad would see that my mother, my sister and I were crouched secure in this cage monstrosity, hook on the last side grill and go off to his ambulance driving leaving us to the mercy of the Nazi hordes.

One particular night remains a vivid memory. My aunt was to be married and the night before the wedding my grandmother's house in Ambleside Avenue was hit. My father's two sisters were present as was my aunt's fiancé. My grandmother ended up in hospital and a family friend who was visiting was killed. My father had the task of helping to dig his family out of the rubble and the wedding ceremony in St Mary's church the next morning was a strained and muted occasion.

Growing up in the early 1940s was different. There was no television and the wireless had only a limited appeal to a young child so we spent much more time out of doors than today's children. Cars were unusual and a car in the street usually meant that the doctor or someone in authority was in the neighbourhood. Every morning the milkman would come with his horse and cart and about once a week the rag and bone man would trundle his cart up the street but these were exceptions. Wakefield Avenue was very largely an area for playing.

We had football, cricket, rounders but especially the street games which were always peculiar to a particular area. 'Pine-Away' was a favourite in our street, a game which was based on throwing a ball at an empty tin upon which were balanced four sticks. Once the tin was hit there was much running round and chasing culminating in a cry of 'Pine-away!'. It was a complicated procedure with its own rules and experts and today, at a distance of sixty years, only the haziest recollection remains.

There was hide and seek which in South Shields was known, for some reason or other, as 'Block the Deddy'. There were the ordinary rules of hide and seek but the end of the game was always signalled by a victorious drawn-out cry of 'Blooock the Deddyyy' echoing round the neighbourhood. Then there was tiggy which again had a local feeling to it. In the rest of the country the person doing the chasing was called 'it'. On most of Tyneside, and certainly in Shields, the chaser was called 'man'. And anyone being chased could cross two fingers and declare they were 'skinch' which meant, in effect, they were resting and out of the game for a few moments.

Of course there were the usual seasonal fads such as spinning-top time. There was no announcement, no publicity, just a general acknowledgement that it was time to get out the tops and whips and for a week or two the only activity would be in whipping wooden tops across the pavement. There were two schools of thought here; those who favoured the broad stumpy tops and those, like myself, who preferred the slim tops with waists.

Winter brought its own delights. If, as seems likely, global warming is here to stay then future children will never know the thrills of thundering down a pavement on a sledge on the frozen snow. Wakefield Avenue was on a slight slope so it was a good street for sledging. Not too steep like Kyffin View and not too flat like Sutton Way. We didn't have a sledge and during the war the chances of being able to buy one were zero. So my grandmother solved the problem by burning a hole through the breadboard with a red hot poker. I could then pull my makeshift sledge up the slope with a rope before trying to sit on what was a very small area even for a child's backside.

It was a small and secure world bounded at one end by four shops known as the bottom shops and another four at the top end known as the top shops. We seldom went beyond our own street to play. There was a children's playground just off Colin Avenue but Mum was convinced it was riddled with impetigo, scabies, head lice and heaven knows what else and we were forbidden to go there (although we did).

St. Mary's Church - Tyne Dock

Each Sunday my sister and I and our two cousins went to Sunday School at St Mary's Tyne Dock. Most weeks we behaved ourselves and took the Watson Avenue-Lawe Bus and got off at Kennedy's Corner to walk the hundred yards to the church. But occasionally we decided unanimously that a holiday was called for and carried on with the bus along Commercial Road to the terminus where we would spend the afternoon playing by the harbour and watching the boats come in. The only difficult part arose on the bus back when we had to decide on what we had been taught and to get our stories right in case we were quizzed! But it must have worked and I don't think either set of parents ever knew or even suspected that unholy truanting was taking place under their noses.

These days Sutton Estate joins onto yet more housing which continues all the way to Marsden. In the 1940s beyond Watson Avenue lay fields all the way to the coast and the same pattern was repeated on the other side of Prince Edward Road where the three Harton Schools were bordered by fields on the east side. For the first year or so after 1946 when I went to the High School an alternative way home was the 'field way' along the edge of the Harton schools where on one occasion I found a nesting skylark and where now there is housing. A short distance along Prince Edward Road was a pond called, if I remember correctly, 'Penny Pond', where my grandfather and I used to walk on Sunday mornings. To the south of that across a field on the other side of the road was 'Farding Lake', a rather grubby pond with some building near it containing machinery which was probably a pump of some sort or other with its noise booming eerily across the fields.

We all went to Harton Infants and then the sexes were segregated and we boys went to the Boys' School. It was a totally different environment from school today. There was the smell of chalk which seemed to get everywhere, the different subjects we were taught such as the old fashioned writing which was still then in vogue and the old style money with its trials of trying to divide £8.10.0 by five shillings. Even today although I know that a hundred pence equal One Pound a small voice inside keeps telling me that they really equal eight and fourpence. And then there was the discipline.

We weren't ruled by the rod but the rod was in evidence and there to be used. My first brush with authority was at the end of one playtime. The rule was that a teacher came out and blew the first whistle and everyone had to freeze before moving off at the second whistle. This presumably was to catch out those who were where they shouldn't be or doing what they shouldn't be doing and on this particular occasion I didn't freeze but kept on walking. Reaction was swift and I was sent inside and promptly caned. I thought no more about it but mentioned it casually at home that evening and my mother went over the top. She was all for marching to the school the next morning but my father calmed her and I think she compromised by writing a short note to the school. Later my father got me on my own and suggested that when something like this happened again (I noticed he didn't say 'if') it would be wiser not to mention it at home. I followed his advice and as far as my mother knew this was the one and only time her innocent offspring was ever caned. If only…!

As we got older we did go further afield. My cousin and I used to explore Cleadon Hills, the Old Man's Gardens and we frequently ended up at Marsden although this was frowned upon. I must have been rather dim because I was caught out most times. 'Have you been to the beach?' would be the question followed by solemn shaking of my head from side to side. The next morning the evidence of a white mark from the salt water would be clear on my shoes. There would be exasperation and a telling-off from my mother, sincere promises on my part not to go again and it worked until I got careless and again brought home the tell-tale mark which told all.

We may not have had TV but we did have our entertainment and the highlight of the week was the visit to the Saturday Children's Matinee at The Palladium, known as 'The Lid', at the Nook. There for a brief period we could escape the rather drab world of the 1940s into a world where Johnny Mack Brown rode the range and where the goodies wore white hats and the unshaven baddies wore black hats. We cheered and yelled whilst Peter, the one-armed usher, stomped ineffectually up and down the aisles and tried to keep order. The programme always ended with a serial when we gasped at the heroic actions of Buck Rodgers as he pursued Killer Kane across the solar system. Then it would all end and a horde of yelling youngsters would stream up the Sante Fe Trail, more usually known as Prince Edward Road, to continue the gunfights on the waste ground at the end of Centenary Avenue which became, for a brief while, the OK Corral.

So were they better days or worse days? Probably a bit of both but they were certainly different as Shields is different. I left Shields in 1969 but do get back about twice a year and in one way nothing has changed and it's the same town I knew as a boy but in other ways it has all changed.

Fifty years or so ago you knew you were entering different territory: New York may have had the Statue of Liberty and Bombay The Gateway to India but we had Tyne Dock Arches. Granted that the boundary lay a bit to the west where the notice once proclaimed that 'South Shields bids Welcome, especially to Careful Drivers' but everyone knew that the arches, black and cavernous with traffic thundering through, were the real boundary to the town You were in the land of the blue and yellow busses, a place where they made biscuits and ships and dug for coal, a place where Queen Victoria stood, surrounded by naked ladies, in front of a sooty town hall. They banished her for a few years to a roundabout at Chi but now she's back in her old place in front of a gleaming town hall and with some of her original entourage similarly rehabilitated.

I doubt if there's as much playing in the street as we knew because the traffic is simply far too dangerous. Then there are far more home based attractions today than in the forties. Multi-channel TV, videos, DVDs, play-stations all of which are guaranteed to keep the youngster at home and away from the many outdoor fears which seem to worry us these days. But I do wonder. Are there still experts at Pine-Away on Sutton Estate? Do today's young kids know about 'skinch'? And does the cry 'Blooock the Deddyyy' still echo around the houses?