Broken Music: A Memoir (4 page)

By the time I was born, in October of 1951, they had moved to Newcastle with Father Jim, who had become the resident pastor at the Convent of the Good Shepherd in the northeast part of the city. He ministered to a group of nuns who looked after a school for wayward girls and ran a laundry that provided the local priesthood with clean sheets and altar cloths. I was never allowed near any of the girls, but my grandfather was in charge of the coke furnace in the cellar of the convent, and he ran the laundry vans picking up the soiled linens and delivering them back, pristine white. He rolled his own cigarettes and was invariably dressed in his old blue dungarees and black army beret. He was slyly laconic. Family lore has it that one day at lunch, Father Jim was musing aloud on what his Sunday sermon should be about.

“About five minutes,” quipped my grandfather, just loud enough to be heard, earning a black and murderous look from Agnes and a puzzled one from the priest. My grandfather was a character, and I was fascinated by his long silences and the hairs that sprouted from
his enormous nose and his ears, which grew ever larger as the rest of his body grew smaller.

A terraced house on the convent grounds went along with my grandfather’s job (Father Jim was the perennial dinner guest). Next door lived the Dooleys, who ran the convent farm. Old man Dooley would take me to feed the pigs in the top field and would regale me with terrifying stories about big ugly sows that would gratuitously bite young lads in half just because they could. So I always kept my distance, especially as I was told that pigs were as smart as humans and just as mean. Even now I can see old man Dooley in his gypsy scarf, his rolled Wellington boots, and his enormous, piratical leather belt, which gave him the air of a swashbuckler. I supposed that walking into the pigpen was his equivalent of walking the plank.

Agnes didn’t approve of the Dooleys. She thought they were wild and unkempt, while she aspired to some sophistication. She would complete the cryptic crossword in the
Times
every day, and subscribed to the condensed works of literature in
Reader’s Digest
, explaining that as she hadn’t had the benefit of a real education she would have to take some shortcuts. She had a lifelong interest in and love of books and encouraged me to have the same.

Agnes kept her books on shelves that ran from the floor to the ceiling in an alcove by the fireplace. She would spend much of her time in her armchair, a book in hand, her tortoiseshell reading glasses perched on her nose, with the tower of books looming behind her, a testament to her learning. She never threw a book away. But she lent me Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Treasure Island to
read when I was barely seven, and with only a minimum of comprehension I would plow through it with the same bloody-minded determination that I would later apply to cross-country running. Not exactly an intellectual approach, but one that would prove useful in many other ways. Not
least of all music. She also got me to read
The Lives of the Saints
, which can’t have made much of an impression.

Agnes would often tell me that if I had any brains at all then I must have gotten them from her. And so it was largely through my grandmother’s sponsorship and encouragement that I began to think of myself as bright.

    My own family life began in a terraced house by Swan Hunter’s shipyard in Wallsend. My mother was born and raised there on the north shore of the river Tyne, between Newcastle and the North Sea. Wallsend is where the emperor Hadrian decided to finish his wall after A.D. 122, when he visited this desolate northern limit of his vast empire. Hadrian’s Wall winds like a giant snake for eighty miles over the moors and hills between Barrow-in-Furness, on the western shore, to the Tyne on the east. It is popularly thought the wall was built to keep out the Scots and Picts, but in reality it was built as a means of controlling the trade between north and south, and therefore the population of what would become the north of England. Translating the Latin description of
segedunum
into the depressingly prosaic Wallsend makes it sound like the end of the earth, and I suppose if you were a Roman legionnaire posted to this godforsaken wind-lashed spot in your little leather skirt, then you would agree. When the shipyard in our town was extended, in the early twentieth century, builders discovered the remains of a temple in honor of Mithras, god of light, a popular deity among the Roman foot soldiers, and a few years ago when they demolished my old street, they found an entire Roman camp beneath the cobbles.

When the legions eventually returned to Rome around A.D. 400, the area suffered constant invasions, mainly from across the North Sea by the Saxons, Danes, Jutes, Vikings, and Normans, as well as
the Scots. Political ownership of the region changed hands so many times over the centuries that the local inhabitants began to feel that they belonged to no one but themselves, neither Scots nor English. We called ourselves “Geordies” for historical reasons that are still debated by local historians but have long been forgotten by most of us. What remains is a fierce regional identity supported in its uniqueness by a dialect that at times can be cannily unintelligible to the rest of the inhabitants of the British Isles.

Some famous ships were built on the Tyne. The
Mauretania
, built for the Cunard Line, held the record for crossing the Atlantic. Her sister ship, the
Lusitania
, was sunk by a German U-boat at the beginning of the First World War, which precipitated the U.S.’s entry into the conflict. The
Esso Northumbria
, in my own time, a quarter-million-ton oil tanker and the largest ship in the world at the time it was launched, was built at the end of my own street, where the shipyard was situated. The ship blotted out the sun for months before it was finally launched into the river and the North Sea, never to return.

There was something prehistoric about the shipyard, the giant skeletons of ships, and the workmen, tiny by comparison, suspended in an enormous cage silhouetted against the sky. The cranes too seemed like enormous prehistoric beasts, metallic monsters grazing thoughtlessly and moving with unnatural slowness over the busy yards and the acetylene flashes.

Every morning at seven A. M. the hooter was sounded in the shipyard, a mournful wail calling the workers to the river, and hundreds of men filed down our street in their overalls and caps and work boots. Across their backs many carry ex-army haversacks for their “bait”—sandwiches and thermos flasks. Apart from those who work in the coal pit or the rope works, everyone else in Wallsend seems to work for Swan Hunter’s. As I watched them, I wondered about my
own future, and what kind of job I would be able to do. Would I too join this vast army of men and live out my days in the bellies of these giant ships?

On Sunday mornings my dad would take my brother and me down to the quayside to look at the boats. The
Leda
was a Norwegian steamer that would sail weekly from Oslo to Newcastle and back again across the cold North Sea, plying the same route as the old Vikings. I remember my father gazing dreamily up at the wheelhouse and the ropes securing the bows of the ships to the quay. “Go to sea!” my father would always tell me, but I know now he was really speaking to himself as a younger man, and ruing his landlocked captivity.

Having received some training in the army, my dad then served his apprenticeship as an engineer’s fitter at the De la Rue engineering works, where they built massive turbines and engines for seagoing ships. We were not a wealthy family, but my father was earning enough for my mother to stop work and look after me at home.

Three years after me, my brother, Phil, is brought into the family and my father will make another decision that he will regret for the rest of his life.

When I am five years old, in 1956, my father decides to leave his engineering job and take over the management of a dairy. The owner, a friend of my grandfather Ernest’s whose name is Tommy Close, is retiring, and he needs someone to take over the business. The real incentive for my dad is that he will be virtually his own boss, and that along with the job there is a large two-story flat above the premises to accommodate our growing family—my sister, Angela, a year behind Philip, is on the way.

Below the house is a shop that sells milk, fresh ice cream, chocolate, sweets, and bottles of fizzy pop, Orange Crush, lemonade, and my favorite, dandelion and burdock. There are two assistants: Betty, a plump, hysterical teenage girl with a delinquent “teddy boy” for a
boyfriend, whom everyone thinks beats her up, and Nancy, a sassy redhead who will become a close confidante of my mother’s and something of an accomplice. Out at the back of the shop is the dairy yard, with two electric milk floats and a diesel truck called a Trojan on which the milk is delivered each morning. The town is split up into three delivery rounds by my father and two other milkmen, Ray and his younger brother Billy. Ray is a scurrilous, foul-mouthed dwarf of a man with slicked-back Brylcreemed hair. He shows me his hernia at every opportunity—“It’s like a fuckin’ orange, look.” His gentle brother Billy is soft-spoken and prematurely as bald as a billiard ball.

From about the age of seven, on school holidays and at weekends I will go out to work with my father on his round in the High Farm estate and the miners’ cottages at the north of the town. He works seven days a week, every day of the year but Christmas. My dad is the boss, but he can’t afford to take a holiday. When I join him, he will shake me awake at 5 A.M., leaving my little brother in his slumbers, and I’ll bundle myself into the warmest clothes possible. Sometimes, in the winter, it is so cold that there is frost on the inside of the window and I have to fumble to get dressed underneath the bedclothes as my breath condenses in the chill air. I stumble downstairs where my father is pouring the tea and I begin setting a fire before the rest of the family rise. We load up the van, wearing old leather gloves with the fingers cut out and lifting the cold metal crates as gently as possible so as not to wake the neighbors. Soon we are making our way through the dark empty streets. I learn to love the unique quality of the early mornings. When everyone else in the town is tucked up in bed, we move quietly like cat burglars and seem to own the streets, investing them with an exclusive and mysterious glamour that will vanish as the morning progresses. Even today I
find it hard to lie abed. I’m always the first up—sleeping long will not become one of my talents.

The winters of my memory are grim, and there are mornings when I have no sensation in my feet for hours on end, my hands and face blue with cold. If the streets are icy, it makes it impossible for Bessy, as my dad affectionately calls the truck, to get up the steep banks near the river. I remember having to complete a lot of the round using my sledge. Sometimes the cold will force the cream at the top of the bottles to burst through the tinfoil caps and form solid tubes of frozen milk that protrude from the necks like strange mushrooms. We know that no one is going to pay for these, but what can we do? My dad puts a small paraffin stove in the cab on really cold days, but this makes getting in and out of the van extremely difficult.

Because my dad is tough and stoic I too never complain, or ask to be sent home. I want him to be proud of me. I also want to be like him, so I learn to carry six full bottles of milk at a time in my hands, and two under my arms. I learn the door numbers and how many pints each house receives, telling my father if there have been any changes. If so, he writes them in the book. I think I am good at my job, but he never praises me.

Every morning at seven-thirty we take a break and watch the smoke rise from the massive slag heap behind the pithead that looks like a man-made volcano. We sit silently eating cold bacon sandwiches, him thinking his thoughts and me thinking mine. My father is at times remote and taciturn, but I don’t mind because the silences leave my imagination to run wild. I create all kinds of fantastical futures for myself as I run from door to door, my arms full of milk bottles: I will travel the world, I will be the head of a large family, I will own a big house in the country, I will be wealthy, and I will be famous.

* * *

    My auntie Amy, who was no relation, lived next door (every neighbor was your auntie in those days). Although she must have been close to retirement, she worked in the offices of the shipyard, and on launch days she would take me to see the enormous jeroboams of champagne, four times the size of a normal bottle, that would be shattered by some invited dignitary against the side of the hull as the ship was launched. She would stand me on the table, where the giant bottle, dressed in bright colored ribbons, would stand before the ceremony. I remember it being taller than me at the time. I also remember being distinctly afraid later as the bottle was smashed violently against the steel hull, the white foam flowing like spittle down the side of the ship, and the loud cheers of the men as the ship began to slide backward into the river drowned by a sickening cacophony of steel, wooden stanchions, and massive iron chains. The Queen Mother once came to the yard to launch a finished ship, and as she drove down our street in her Rolls-Royce, with motorcycle outriders followed by a motorcade of civic dignitaries in top hats, we all waved little Union Jacks, and I was convinced that she had smiled at me. The ships leaving the river would in hindsight become a metaphor for my own wandering life, once out in the world, never to return.

One day my mother and I are visiting Auntie Amy—she is one of Audrey’s few friends in the street. I suppose she had become something of a mother figure for her after the passing of Margaret, her own mother. Amy is always well dressed, her hair always done, and in her flat-heeled brogues, thick winter stockings, and tweed skirts she exudes an air of middle-class respectability. My mother looks up to Amy as someone to aspire to, and over endless cups of tea they gossip about nothing in particular, at least about nothing that concerns me. I try to be as interested as a seven-year-old possibly could
be under the circumstances but soon become bored and start to interrupt, asking questions like, “When will the next launch happen, Auntie Amy? Can I be there? Have you always worked at the shipyard?” Prattling innocently enough, but then letting my curiosity get the better of me, I ask, “Why don’t you have a husband?”