No Egg Jokes, please
We gathered in the town square, gusty winds bringing out the goosebumps on our legs, ties and ‘a sports jacket’ incongruous against the grey shorts. Passers-by looked at us oddly, thinking ‘what’s a group of kids doing out on a cold morning like this?’ Then the Salvation Army arrived, instruments shining in the bleak sunlight, and off we went. The Good Friday march.
I don’t remember it being very long, but I was only five, holding my brother’s hand as we staggered forwards, unable to keep in time despite the over-loud bass drum, bashed with gusto by the burly man with the bearskin. There were probably a hundred of us from different churches, all Protestant, mostly Methodist or other ‘non-conformists’. After what seemed like hours but was in retrospect probably only ten minutes, passing the new library and the old Magistrate’s Court, we turned a corner and the end was in sight. We returned to the place where we had started. How biblical. And then, our reward for coming out and ‘witnessing for Jesus’ (not that we had any choice) – an orange. Never have I felt so rich, nobody ever thought at the time.
Back home, there were hot cross buns, and one chocolate easter egg, and Nana, who asked us to play the piano and gave us half a crown for our efforts. That’s twelve and a half pence, by the way, or a couple of dimes. Proper money, the first I ever earned from music, enough to buy an everlasting strip and perhaps even a curly-wurly and still have enough left to save in a jar. Because prudence is a virtue, you know.
Yes, I can confirm, Easter was pretty boring in the Sixties. Away from North Shields, people were growing their hair and playing loud music and discovering something called sex; in North Shields, we held hands and got an orange. Which sounds like a euphemism, but wasn’t.
It was still a fishing town then, with banks of North Sea trawlers moored on the Fish Quay, hundreds of them, five abreast, and fights breaking out in the appropriately-named ‘Jungle’ pub, where they said you had to duck when you walked in, to avoid the flying bottles. Walking down the street, if you met a man with tattoos you were warned to keep your eyes down, immediately identifying a fisherman, the guys who endured storm-tossed nights on tumultuous seas, then came on land to get paid, and laid (there were brothels in town), and start a fight or two. One street was renowned for having the most number of pubs in one stretch in the country, and no wonder, with so many blokes around with cash in their pockets and no homes to go to. In the Seventies there was a TV series called ‘The Stars Look Down’, set in the same place, my home town. In a scene which made my brother and me fall over laughing, two old blokes sat in a pub, nursing a pint of mild, looking disconsolate. ‘If I’d known I’d live so long’, said one, ‘I’d have got out of North Shields’.
In later life, this time of year became impossibly glamorous; Easter Egg hunts for the kids at my in-laws’ hotel in North Wales, or skiing in Zermatt, relieved there was still enough snow. Today, Easter will be different again; I’ll be on my boat, watching other boats, two to be specific, in a race where my old university will lose to that other one whose colours look green to me, not light blue. Perhaps I’m colour blind, perhaps it’s a longstanding joke which nobody has the courage to call out. They say the women’s race may be close, and the men will lose easily, as has now become traditional. One of my kids is coming, with a lot of friends, all singers, so it should be a musical event, and us Oxonians can drown our sorrows with the barrel of London Pride I set up on the main deck and secured with a chain. This is not because I’m concerned about theft (if you can skedaddle with a metal cask containing one hundred and fifty pints of beer, good luck to you), but in case the wash from the race-following launches makes my houseboat rock so much, it rolls off the side and into the Thames. I wonder if it will float. It could be a danger to shipping. And Cantabrigians. (Hmm: perhaps this is how we can finally win again). Winds are forecast against a flood tide, and this week I spoke to an old chap who coxed the Cambridge boat in the seventies and said ‘I reckon one of the boats could sink’. Whatever happens, we’ll be sinking pints.
In modern Britain, the Church of England has morphed from ‘C of E’ to ‘C and E’, meaning Christmas and Easter, the only times the majority of the English bother to attend their eponymous places of worship. The UK generally is largely irreligious, which strikes me as an excellent thing if the alternative is a so-called ‘Secretary of War’ who thinks he’s on a crusade. A bit of lukewarm faith and a lot of doubt pervade our island nation, our passions inflamed by football, that excellent war surrogate. Easter has become a time for family, and rail replacement buses, and thinking that summer will be along soon. And on the fourth day, we shall rise again, and go back to work.
Meanwhile, to nobody’s expectation, North Shields has become fashionable. The Jungle has been turned into yuppy flats with BMW compacts parked outside. There are precious few trawlers on the Fish Quay, but there are gallons of restaurants, some in the Michelin Guide. Just up the hill, past the long-demolished theatre where a local lad called Stan Laurel used to perform before discovering films, is Sam Fender’s favourite hostelry, to which the UK’s answer to Springsteen, also born here, gave one of his umpteen music awards. It will be doing a roaring trade this weekend with people in chinos, drinking craft beer. The tattoos in town are rather different now. And there is no longer a pervading stink from the ‘guano’ works, which boiled down fishbones to make fertiliser, the odour of childhood. Twenty years ago, as the place was in full transition from dump to artisan, I chatted to a posh lady from London, up to work in the Arts and loving ‘the north’. We talked houses, inevitably. She listed all the places she’d like to live but couldn’t afford on an impecunious creative’s salary. ‘But’, she said, eyes widening, passion shaking her Sauvignon Blanc, ‘have you seen …. North Shields?!’ I said I had, but perhaps in rather different days. Time marches on.
But now, I suspect, nobody else. I rather doubt the streets were full of kids yesterday, traipsing past the library on the Good Friday March. Not when you only get an orange.
