I am told that my life began in the summer of 1948 when I was conceived at Butlin’s Holiday Camp, Filey. I do, however, have a birth certificate to show that I first saw the light of day on Monday 28 March 1949. I don’t suppose that the early days are significant. Suffice it to say that I was the third child of the family and, to my sisters always the baby to be cared for.
My father was a woodcutting machinist, my mother a housewife, though she had been a state registered nurse before the demands of family tied her down and she would) in later life, return to nursing. We lived in terraced house in Hull, in the front room of which I had been born. I was rather a weedy little boy and it was possible to count all my ribs. I cried a lot at school and occasionally ran home but as I was invariably taken back, I eventually got used to being there and by the time I reached the age for Constable Street Junior School and met Mr Elliott I discovered that there was something to look forward to. Mr Elliott was my teacher from 2A to 4A and could do no wrong. If ‘Sir said’ then it must be true. It was from this adoration that I conceived the idea of becoming a teacher myself though I do not recall thinking of it while I was at Junior School.
I remember reading an 'E Reader' in class. The story was about Grace Darling but the discussion with ‘Sir’ ranged as wide as jellyfish on the beach. Certain pages of a volume entitled ‘First Aid in English’ stick in my memory. The centre pages were filled with absurdities.
It flits from bow to bow.
It makes its nest in a rhubarb tree
And whistles like a cow.
Those were the days of the dreaded 11 plus and I was duly entered and sat the exams. I have no memory of sitting them but I do remember that Mum was advised to give me some extra training for the intelligence part of the test and I spent some considerable time with a book called ‘Comprehensive Intelligence Tests’ If dog is spelled d o g then write cat but if cow is spelled c o w write dog, that sort of thing. I passed the exam and was due to begin my secondary education at Riley Technical High School but some fate decreed that I was offered a place at The Hull Grammar School and so I spent seven years taking two buses to Bishop Alcock Road and walking passed fields of cows to school.
Perhaps at Riley High I would have been a star pupil but at the Grammar I was cannon fodder. There were four classes in the first year. The top two classes α and β were for the rising stars and the others for the also-rans. I was in the Remove because my name came near the end of the alphabet. If I had been Baker or Candlestick I would have been in the General which doesn’t sound half as bad.
Secondary education seemed like hard work, though there were aspects I enjoyed. One was singing with the school choir under the wrinkled and mottled hands of ‘Wheezy’ Graydon. He was a tartar to the ordinary scholar but a different kettle of fish with the choir and orchestra. My form master in the first year was Fred Plater, brother of Alan I believe, and I enjoyed his English lessons.
It was Fred who altered my life, though I doubt that he ever realised it. I had made friends with a boy named Patrick Brennan and we travelled on one bus together into town before taking our second bus to other parts of the city. Patrick had been chosen to play the part of Publius in ‘Julius Caesar’ which Fred Plater was directing. I had offered to wait for Patrick to finish rehearsals and was sitting in the hall watching. It came to the part of the play where Mark Anthony addresses the crowd before Caesar’s body and Fred realised that he didn’t seem to have much in the way of a crowd. I was called upon to make up the numbers and that was it. I was hooked. I was even given a speech as a servant when a boy dropped out and I lapped it up.
My English master at the time, who I didn’t really like, confirmed me, in my new love, when he told me that my performance was the best of the minor roles. I had little opportunity to extend my interests dramatically at Grammar school so I had to wait until I went to Teacher Training College to take it further.
At Sunderland College of Education, I studied Principles of Religion and English. I also joined the Drama Club and acquired the nickname ‘God’ that stayed with me for three years. The club were presenting a Mystery Play and I was the voice of God. This meant that I did not appear as a character on stage and was able to double in as an extra for the creation scene where I met my future wife.
I appeared in three Gilbert & Sullivan Operettas where I could combine singing and acting, though only as chorus. I was co-opted by the Drama Department in the form of its Head, Endre Muller, a Hungarian who frightened all his lady students and amused those over whom he had little power. Endre had decided to resurrect a play he had appeared in professionally in London, ‘The Alchemist’ by Ben Jonson. I was Dapper, my lawyer’s clerk and ended up sitting on a toilet with my trousers round my knees. What fun!
The pinnacle of drama for me at college was Leontes in ‘The Winter’s Tale’. It was rather under-rehearsed. Kenneth Graeme was a lovely man but found it hard to keep up with the schedule and several areas of the play had not been exhaustively covered. I didn’t care. I was the lead. Endre offered to do my makeup. When he had finished I looked as if I was ready to return to the Mystery play, this time as Satan.
‘Vot you vant, ‘ he said, ‘to be made up for ze front two rows or ze back of ze hall?’
In 1970 I got married to Julie Kathryn Ward who had once appeared, with me, in a Creation scene and we began to create our life together in Grimsby. We spent our honeymoon in a caravan on ‘Humberston Fitties’ while we scoured the Grimsby Evening Telegraph in search of a flat. We found one with about three days to spare before we began teaching, Julie at Yarborough Girl’s School and I at Western Junior School.
We travelled the length of Cleethorpes and Grimsby to reach our schools and so eventually bought a house that was at the same side as our schools to cut down the journey time. Of course, this could not last and I applied for and got a position with responsibility for English at a school at the opposite side of town and had to travel the length of Grimsby and Cleethorpes in the opposite direction. The new job was at Thrunscoe Junior School and I spent the rest of my teaching career there, some twenty-five years.
I did nothing about my enjoyment of drama for some time. Then I went on a course and met Cath Hollingsworth. She was teaching drama at a secondary school and was running a course to help people work in drama with children. She suggested that children could be taught speech and drama as an out of school activity and they could be encouraged to take exams with Trinity College of London. She also suggested that the best way for us to understand what the children went through in these exams was to take them ourselves. So, I found myself learning, and performing, pieces of poetry and prose for Stage four exams. Cath was a very persuasive lady. I was surprised and not a little embarrassed to find that I had gained ninety-five marks and had won the Junior Cup. I was embarrassed because this was usually presented to children of about ten or eleven and I was twenty-five.
Once bitten by the bug I continued working with Cath and eventually achieved a licence with the Trinity College of London to teach speech and drama. I have seldom used this licence but I am proud that I own it. Cath also persuaded me to join ‘Old Winghams’ a drama group that she had connections with, and I spent a number of years playing a variety of characters in a wide range of plays, some quality like ‘The Crucible’ and ‘Habeas Corpus’ some dross.
During this time, I managed to acquire three lovely children, two cats and a dog. I doubt very much if the children would like the idea of being lumped in with the animals but this isn’t supposed to be a long autobiography, though it’s turning out that way. John was our first-born and he lives today under the stigma of having been driven home from the hospital in a Skoda that I had bought for sixty pounds from my father-in-law. By the evening of the first day home we wanted to send him back as he cried incessantly. Then we learned to ignore such behaviour but it was a hard lesson. Christopher came two years later and was born at home. He has always seemed to be the calmest and most happy-go-lucky of my children and I wonder if this wasn’t because he was a home baby. In 1979, we had an accident that brought my lovely daughter into the world. Kirsty is still convinced that she was swapped from another family when we left the hospital but only when she isn’t happy about something.
This sounds like an idyll and I, perhaps, looked at it that way and closed my mind to things that I should not have done. It was a great shock in 1984 on the 21 December that, following what I considered a trivial argument over a pair of jeans, Julie told me that she wanted to leave me. She had been going to let me have Christmas before telling me but the argument had brought it to a head sooner. She had met someone else and was going to live with him. I was devastated as I could think of no reason for this. How blind can we be when we don’t wish to see. The man she was going to leave with changed his mind, as he didn’t want to upset anybody. I was left with a wife distraught at rejection with no one she could turn to. Christmas was to say the least, not the festival that I had always loved.
I tried hard to save my marriage, losing a lot of the weight that the years had piled on and trying to do the things I should have done in the past. We went our separate ways the following year, Julie to a house in Laceby and me to a terraced house in Cleethorpes. I saw the children regularly. We both worked very hard to lessen the strain that our break up had put on them.
This situation lasted for about eighteen months during which time I had never ceased to love Julie. One day we took the dog for a walk in Bradley woods. She offered to let me back into her life and thank God, we have been together ever since. It is funny really, how things work out for the best. We had owned a four-bed roomed house which had been sold when we separated. When I moved into the house in Laceby there was enough money left from the sale of the house in Cleethorpes to put both John and Chris through university. How we would have managed such a feat if we had not spent that time apart I do not know but it seemed a hard price to pay at the time.
Months before Julie dropped the bombshell, she had encouraged me to join The Orpheus Male Voice Choir. My friend Richard who was Musical Director had tried for several years to persuade me to join but she succeeded where he had failed. I sing first tenor and this, too, has changed my life for the better.
One February morning on the eighth hole of Laceby Manor Golf Course my playing partner struck a ball that rebounded from a hazard marker and hit me in the left eye. The eye surgeon saved the eye but I no longer had any sight in it. I have found that can manage well without the sight of that eye but I do find that my golf stopped improving from that point. I thought that I had fully recovered from the time it took to get over my eye injury but I believe it contributed, with pressure of work, to several months of clinical depression. With the support of my family I worked my way through that but I was not sorry when the opportunity arose to take early retirement from the work that was no longer really motivating me.
I had some supporting of my own to do when Julie was diagnosed with breast cancer and had part of her left breast removed. She was, as she has always been, the strong one in our lives and she went through radiotherapy and chemotherapy with that bold spirit that had kept me going through difficult times. She is my rock, and together I believe we can face anything.
After I joined Julie in retirement (she had retired early because of her hearing) I began to write a book. I was encouraged by a number of friends to write something a little more substantial than the sketches, poems and pantomimes that I had written for school or choir. I haven’t got far with it as I ran out of good ideas and good intentions and supply teaching keeps me busy and there are so many excuses why it has lain neglected for almost a year now. I went on a creative writing course at Franklin College that really encouraged me and now I am writing this piece of nonsense for a course at Hull University which I hope will ‘kick start’ me again.
What I really need to do of course is shut the door and get my finger out. It is always easier to give advice than it is to take it. Let’s see how it goes.