First posted: April 8, 2013
I've had this blog a long time without really knowing what to do with it. The trouble is I write three columns a week for my newspaper and always have a book on the go as well. This leaves little spare time to write anything else about world events or the price of fish. Or anything that needs an extra creative urge. The latest book I'm writing is Pilgrim, which sort of involves time travel. Which made me think why not use time travel here? So I shall. I shall delve into the past and tell my life story. It's the sort of project I've often considered and then dismissed. But everyone is unique and everyone has a story to tell. So I shall tell mine, in bits and bats and as the mood takes me, and if anyone finds it interesting, I shall be pleased. If they don't, it doesn't matter, for it will serve as an extra wedge of information in my family tree and history. I may, of course, get bored with it and stop and do the honourable thing and fall upon my keyboard. Which is a lot less painful than a sword.
Are you ready? Then I'll begin.
I was born on May 8, 1941, in the front room of number 5 Cheapside in Wakefield. Actually it was the only ground floor room in a tall terraced house just off Westgate in the city centre. The house had no electricity, and only had gas light in that one room, which also contained sink and oven.
Candles were needed at night to go either into the cellar for coal or upstairs. The first floor had three bedrooms and a bathroom with a bath with a wooden lid. The house was rented by my grandmother and was home for her bachelor son Eric and her married son Austin and his wife Doris. During the war, while my father was in the RAF, my mother also lived there.
There was a third floor to which no one ever ascended. When I was about five I was told: 'Timmy died up there' and became convinced the third floor was haunted. Timmy, I later discovered, was a pet dog that died whilst having a fit. Maybe it was his feet I could hear at night. Maybe it was mice. Or rats. The building was old enough and could be described as Dickensian. Very picturesuqe unless you had to live there.
But for grandma it was step up. She had previously lived in nearby Scot's Yard, which the family had nicknamed Paradise Alley with a touch of irony. This was one of the city centre yards to which immigrant Irish families were drawn at the turn of the 20th century. It was poverty and survival. In fact, I come from a long line of poverty stretching back on both maternal and paternal sides. My ancestors escaped the famine in Galway to become coal miners in Yorkshire. Frying pan, fire comes to mind.
So I was Yorkshire-born in the middle of a city in the middle of the Second World War. Everyone had a gas mask. Babies were issued with full sized chambers into which they were supposed to be fastened during air raids. Mothers could view their infants through a small window. Few used them as they looked too much like coffins. Our family took refuge under the table whenever the sirens sounded.
My earliest memory is when I was four and I was carried on the shoulders of an uncle to the VE celebrations in the Bull Ring. It was my birthday, 1945. Crowds thronged the city centre. They drank, danced, laughed, cheered and burnt effigies of Hitler and his cronies on bonfires.
After the war, my father returned from the green fields of Lincolnshire where he had been ground crew for bomber command, and we moved to Leeds.
If I am ever in Wakefield, I always drive down Cheapside to look at the place where I was born. The street was appropriately named at the time of its construction. But in later years, after my grandmother moved out to the luxury of a council house in Lupset, I was pleased with what happened to the old place. That solitary front room became an Indian take away for a while. Later, it became the rear extension of a wine bar on Westgate. The very spot where I was born was now occupied by drinkers enjoying a tipple. Better than a blue plaque any day.
I've had this blog a long time without really knowing what to do with it. The trouble is I write three columns a week for my newspaper and always have a book on the go as well. This leaves little spare time to write anything else about world events or the price of fish. Or anything that needs an extra creative urge. The latest book I'm writing is Pilgrim, which sort of involves time travel. Which made me think why not use time travel here? So I shall. I shall delve into the past and tell my life story. It's the sort of project I've often considered and then dismissed. But everyone is unique and everyone has a story to tell. So I shall tell mine, in bits and bats and as the mood takes me, and if anyone finds it interesting, I shall be pleased. If they don't, it doesn't matter, for it will serve as an extra wedge of information in my family tree and history. I may, of course, get bored with it and stop and do the honourable thing and fall upon my keyboard. Which is a lot less painful than a sword.
Are you ready? Then I'll begin.
I was born on May 8, 1941, in the front room of number 5 Cheapside in Wakefield. Actually it was the only ground floor room in a tall terraced house just off Westgate in the city centre. The house had no electricity, and only had gas light in that one room, which also contained sink and oven.
Candles were needed at night to go either into the cellar for coal or upstairs. The first floor had three bedrooms and a bathroom with a bath with a wooden lid. The house was rented by my grandmother and was home for her bachelor son Eric and her married son Austin and his wife Doris. During the war, while my father was in the RAF, my mother also lived there.
There was a third floor to which no one ever ascended. When I was about five I was told: 'Timmy died up there' and became convinced the third floor was haunted. Timmy, I later discovered, was a pet dog that died whilst having a fit. Maybe it was his feet I could hear at night. Maybe it was mice. Or rats. The building was old enough and could be described as Dickensian. Very picturesuqe unless you had to live there.
But for grandma it was step up. She had previously lived in nearby Scot's Yard, which the family had nicknamed Paradise Alley with a touch of irony. This was one of the city centre yards to which immigrant Irish families were drawn at the turn of the 20th century. It was poverty and survival. In fact, I come from a long line of poverty stretching back on both maternal and paternal sides. My ancestors escaped the famine in Galway to become coal miners in Yorkshire. Frying pan, fire comes to mind.
So I was Yorkshire-born in the middle of a city in the middle of the Second World War. Everyone had a gas mask. Babies were issued with full sized chambers into which they were supposed to be fastened during air raids. Mothers could view their infants through a small window. Few used them as they looked too much like coffins. Our family took refuge under the table whenever the sirens sounded.
My earliest memory is when I was four and I was carried on the shoulders of an uncle to the VE celebrations in the Bull Ring. It was my birthday, 1945. Crowds thronged the city centre. They drank, danced, laughed, cheered and burnt effigies of Hitler and his cronies on bonfires.
After the war, my father returned from the green fields of Lincolnshire where he had been ground crew for bomber command, and we moved to Leeds.
If I am ever in Wakefield, I always drive down Cheapside to look at the place where I was born. The street was appropriately named at the time of its construction. But in later years, after my grandmother moved out to the luxury of a council house in Lupset, I was pleased with what happened to the old place. That solitary front room became an Indian take away for a while. Later, it became the rear extension of a wine bar on Westgate. The very spot where I was born was now occupied by drinkers enjoying a tipple. Better than a blue plaque any day.
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