On Reflection - Trevor Hipkin

• Chapter 1 - Gateshead Years
• Chapter 2 - Wartime Recollections
• Chapter 3 - Norfolk Sojourn
• Chapter 4 - Australia - The Ten Pound Poms
• Chapter 5 - Teenage Years - When Life Really Started
• Chapter 6 - Marriage and Responsibilities
• Chapter 7 - Work and Career
• Chapter 8 - Seeing the World
• Chapter X - Family Fun
• Chapter Y - Prejudice and Belief
• Chapter Z - It's a Small World
• Appendices - Family Trees

Chapter 1 - Gateshead Years

The Family

I  was the third child of Albert Edward and Gladys Hipkin, born in a gas-lit upstairs flat at 72 Howe Street in Gateshead.  Married in February 1931, our parents had a difficult economic and emotional start - living through the 1930's depression and the twin traumas of the death of their firstborn (Sally, born 14th December 1931) after only three days of life, and the failure of an adoption attempt when the natural mother reclaimed the child, something that broke Mam's heart and caused permanent emotional scarring.  Dramatic though they must have been, these tragedies were never mentioned at home, so I was unaware of my deceased sister until I was ten or twelve, learning of the failed adoption even later, and then from my Aunt Edna, not from Mam.

The 1930's depression hammered the shipbuilding and heavy industries of the Tyne, putting most men out of work and reducing the working class to penury.  People had to scrounge for food and fuel and just try to stay alive until the economic situation improved - but things eventually improved for the Hipkins, because my elder brother Brian was born on June 22nd 1937 and I came along on July 20th 1939, six weeks before the start of WWII (not my fault!), then a war time gap until Malcolm was born on 18th March 1944.

Our parents had a volatile relationship, with constant bickering and verbal sparring, sometimes escalating from exchanges of insults into exchanges of blows.  Dad was a hard man, an 'old-school' working class sort of bloke, he worked long hours at a strenuous job, expected his dinner on the table when he came in, paid Mam her 'house-keeping' money on Friday night out of his wage packet and kept the rest for himself.  He maintained an arms-length relationship with us kids - he didn't get too involved in case it interfered with going to the Club, or the dog track, or the horse racing.  Because he worked such long hours (and then went down the pub!) he left everyday family things to Mam, who reckoned that boys needed a firm hand and ruled over us with a tawse - a piece of saddlery leather that had been split into three on the business end and something that she wielded with great effect on bare legs, sometimes backed up with the ultimate 'wait until your Dad gets home' sanction.

Our mother had started a career in domestic service, something that ended in 1928 when her mother became seriously ill, leaving Mam with the responsibility of bringing up her younger male siblings and complicated further in 1931 when she brought her new husband into the family home, something that caused friction with her elder sisters and contributed to a lifetime of alienation from the female side of her family.  By all accounts, she did an excellent job as a substitute mother, but the experience left indelible marks and the later traumas of the early days of her marriage crippled her ability to demonstrate open affection - in our house there was almost no comforting physical contact, few kisses or cuddles; we rarely got to sit on anyone's knee, or had stories read to us.  This endured with her grandchildren and great grandchildren, even into her nineties any attempt to give her a cuddle or a peck on the cheek would cause her to stiffen into stone, a dreadful price that she paid for her early experiences.

Like most young parents of his generation, Dad didn't do things with us; he didn't take us to the football, or to the cinema, or swimming, or other fatherly activities.  We had occasional trips to the seaside at Marsden, street trips to Newbiggin and up the Tyne to Ovingham, but that was all.  It wasn't that he disliked us, but he locked us out of his world and we didn't have anything in common, so that I didn't form a father/son bond with him in the normal way.  In adolescence, I felt a sense of loss, something that would grip me when I saw how my mates got on with their Dads; how important and supportive their relationships were.  I don't think that I was damaged by this; working through it taught me self-reliance, to look outside for love and companionship and to cherish and strive to maintain long-term friendships.  Dad was following the pattern of the times and replicating the manner in which his own father had behaved - the real loser was himself.  He was unusual in other ways; falling into what looked like an epileptic fit if he saw his own blood, even from a cut finger, and in later life he had anxiety attacks if he had to stay away from home; this despite our adventures in Australia as Ten Pound Poms.

72 Howe Street

In 2006, Howe Street still stood as a reminder of the sort of rented housing provided for the working class of the early 20th century.  Terraced flats ascend in an unbroken line on both sides, the street surface originally cobbled and very steep (great for sledging!) and in our day lit by gas lamps.  Our rented flat was gas-lit too; I still have a scar on my neck where a white-hot piece of gas mantle fell and burned me.  Basic accommodation, with three small bedrooms, an all purpose and fairly bleak front room with a black range for heating and baking, a rudimentary kitchen with a gas cooker, a cold water tap, a 'set pot' for heating water and a 'poss tub' for doing the laundry.

Outside in the concrete yard was the 'netty' - the local name for a toilet.  This was not a fun place to be - the netty was smelly, hairy spiders lurked behind the rusty cistern and the small heater was inadequate to warm the space, or to prevent the newspaper squares that we used as toilet paper from becoming damp and easily perforated.  The brick-built air raid shelter was in the yard too, together with a wire mesh hen 'cree', the source of a steady supply of eggs and an occasional chicken for the pot, neck broken by jamming in the hinge side of the backyard door - the attendant squawking ensuring that Mam never ate poultry!  No bathroom, just a galvanised tin bath on a nail outside, brought in for the weekly bath in front of the fire; kids dunked in seniority order and without changing the water.  Furniture was mostly hand-me-down, but with some cheap oak-veneered stuff branded with the wartime 'utility' stamp and marked with cigarette burns from when our Auntie Jean came to stay, the suite bought on a 'Provident' check from Shepards, a department store in Gateshead.

There were few books in our house, and some of the titles (like 'Pickles of the Lower Fifth') were desperately incongruous given our locale - we had 'Bullets and Billets' from the First World War and a multi-volume set of Odhams' Encyclopaedia - books that I read and re-read until I had virtually memorised the text.  At age six or seven, an introduction to the Gateshead Public Library changed my life forever; I was amazed at the quantity and variety of books and even more amazed that it was free! - I became a voracious reader of anything that took my fancy; reading six or seven books per week, books that extended my horizons and transported me away from the reality of Howe Street and the bleakness of post-war Gateshead.

We had a battery-powered radio; a Bakelite set that used a 'high-tension' battery, plus a rectangular glass 'accumulator' that required regular recharging at a special shop down on Sunderland Road.  The radio was the focal point in our otherwise austere front room; it was always on and catered for all tastes, from educational/propaganda stuff like 'The Radio Doctor' to variety programmes like ITMA and singalongs like 'Worker's Playtime' (usually from an ammunition factory in Preston, or similar) and the Sunday lunchtime 'Much Binding in the Marsh', the signature tune instantly starting the saliva glands working.  For kids, the main attraction was the nightly fifteen minute episode of 'Dick Barton - Special Agent', a serial programme with a tremendous following; something that cleared the streets each weekday evening at 7 o'clock.

With no real reason to stay in the house, we were on the street each evening in all but the worst weather, playing playground games like 'hide-and-seek' and 'muttikitty', and territorial games like 'relieve-oh', often playing on long after the gas lamps had come on and the curtains were closed.  As days lengthened, we headed for the 'bankie fields', a large grassy area where we were free from adult view and supervision and long grass provided material for dens and hideaways, secret places where we took bread and margarine sandwiches and 'pop' made with a piece of liquorice in a bottle filled with tap water.  With the dry grass of summer, we stole matches and started huge fires, running around in the smoke then heading home with dirty and tear-streaked faces and clothes reeking of smoke, the cover story being that we'd been putting out fires started by other kids.  It was a godsend when the council started building flats on the edge of the bankies - we used the site as an adventure playground, running around in the half-finished buildings and pinching offcuts of wood to make campfires, or jumping over gaps in the garden walls, something that went awry when Malky (aged 4+) fell off and broke his arm.

School holidays and weekends saw us further afield, by tramcar to the wonderland of Saltwell Park with real trees, rowing boats, pets corner, Museum and castellated walkways; the inspiration for many an attack by Tuaregs or Saracens.  We stormed the Castle Keep in Newcastle, a torrent of farty and giggling little boys swarming up the stone stairs and fighting with imaginary swords in the dark pee-smelling rooms, climbing up to watch the steam trains on the huge rail crossing, then crossing the river to climb the wall at Gateshead Engine Sheds to get closer to the engines; the bolder elements climbing onto the footplates to pinch the emergency warning detonators - circular grey objects that made a very satisfactory explosion when hit with a brick.

Playing out was very special during the cold winter of 1947, when continual snowfall covered our street with three feet of hard-packed and polished snow; the steepness making it a magnet for sledgers from miles around.  Speeds increased as we started from further up the street, but with occasional overruns onto Sunderland Road and a crushing sense of disappointment when anxious parents dug a trench to curtail the run after one of the kids narrowly avoided death under a tramcar.  This weather endured for weeks, with snowy days when we couldn't wait to get home from school, to get the sledge out and get going, with enduring memories of home knitted mittens that doubled in size when wet and the stiffness of snot-frozen balaclava helmets and the special agony of freezing cold toes crammed into wellington boots.

Howe Street was an urban village - with its own Policeman in Constable Fox, a figure of fear to mischievous kids, someone who would clip your ear with the threat that he would come around and 'tell your Dad' as backup, no double jeopardy in his legal world!.  Mrs Winship provided unofficial and unpaid Paramedic support, serving as an auxiliary (often the only!) midwife and washing and 'laying-out' corpses ("ee, doesn't he look well") and the other support services were there too, our own illegal off-the-course bookmaker, the only car owner in the street and someone much patronised by Dad, the Co-op was on the corner, the Claxton pub was across the road, and Auntie Edna lived up the street if we wanted a glass of water and a biscuit.

Ordinary people didn't travel much and felt that they 'belonged' to the street, something exemplified in street parties and bus trips and folk gathering round when a neighbour was in trouble.  For kids, community feeling had a downside - moving around required constant vigilance and a knowledge of the 'neutral' ground, because the area was divided into tribal areas by the main roads and the kids (us included) were fiercely territorial, defending the patch against all incomers, usually by throwing rocks and other missiles, occasionally by a brutal charge with fists and feet.  This was something that we accepted as normal, instinctively grouping into defensive formations as we passed through enemy territory and accepting the occasional 'split head' as part of life.

Primary School

Brian and I went to King Edward Street Primary School, in the next street and a short walk through the back lane.  A standard pre-war district primary school, it had architecture of the period, with separate entrances for boys and girls, wide corridors and airy classrooms, and with toilet blocks down in the separate playgrounds.  Able to read before going to school, I was well up on general knowledge and worldly matters, but my abject failure at anything arithmetical or mathematical was something that my teacher was concerned about, so she asked my Mam to call in for a chat.  I knew that I was in trouble when I was not allowed to play out with the other kids that evening and had to wait, in trepidation, until Dad came home.  His response to my mathematical incompetence was first to thrash me with his leather belt, then to make me sit at the table and do a big list of sums.  This extra 'tuition' with the belt and sums went on for a few evenings, until he got bored with it or perhaps realised that I wasn't able to excel in the way that he wanted.  Other than this character building experience, I don't recall any of the teachers or the subjects, but I remember my embarrassment when the teacher asked me to go up to the office to check the time on the big clock - I could tell the time on a standard clock, but the office clock had Roman numerals, something that I'd never seen before, so I had to go back and confess my failure.

My appearance made me a sitting duck for taunts and name-calling - I had psoriasis and was covered in scaly and peeling skin that needed lengthy and messy treatment with smelly coal-tar ointments, plus a fair amount of bandaging of arms and legs.  I also had a cast in my left eye which resulted in the eye gradually being 'switched off' by the brain - the squint responded to treatment but too late to reverse vision damage, so that I had to wear glasses all of the time (and for the rest of my life!).  Opportunities for nicknames and insults generated by scabby limbs and glasses proved irresistible to all but my closest friends and I had a low self-esteem during those years, something reinforced by nocturnal enuresis - I slept so soundly that I often didn't wake up in time to use the 'po' (no inside toilet in our house), so I regularly wet the bed - and Brian, who shared the bed with me - forming a vicious circle of parental chastisement and ridicule.  Despite all of this, and to everyone's surprise, I was one of two pupils who passed the eleven plus exam, gaining a place at Whitehall Road Secondary School, where Brian was already a pupil - but I never started at that school, because in the interim we moved to Norfolk.

Wartime Recollections

Aged six when the war ended, my earliest memories are from those years, like the spine-tingling sound of air raid sirens warning of an incoming raid, and the sight of searchlight beams trying to penetrate the smoke-filled sky.  After a raid, we went around looking at bomb craters and watching other kids collecting bits of shrapnel - our Mam wouldn't allow shrapnel into the house - a house in a nearby street was flattened, but I don't think that anyone was killed - most people used the shelters during a raid and these primitive structures were very effective at reducing casualties.

Dad was not conscripted for military service - as a machine shop driller, he was in a reserved occupation and worked in the gun shop at Vickers - but with his pals he joined the ARP as an air raid warden and the anti-aircraft rocket part of the Home Guard, remaining a battery member until the Luftwaffe menace was over and the force disbanded at the end of 1944, and later in life he would tell us about the excitement of firing salvoes of rockets, the tremendous noise and the explosions amongst the German planes.

Norman Sandell (Dad's cousin) was in the Army for the duration, including being evacuated from Dunkirk (he kept a map showing how his group got to the French coast).  On leave, he brought stuff that he had 'liberated' from the Germans, including badges and Nazi Swastika arm bands and a Luger automatic pistol.  We were fascinated by these artefacts and thrilled that 'real' Germans had touched them, then even more thrilled when Norman fired the pistol down the back yard, blowing a hole in the yard door and provoking a visit from the Constabulary! - we played with the badges and stuff until sleep called but next morning it was gone, the badges and arm bands went on the fire and the pistol was thrown off the Tyne bridge.

Dad's brother Harry Hipkin was a soldier too; later in the conflict he was in the Middle east, becoming completely 'kippered' by the sun and acquiring some fluency in the local languages.  There had been no regular communication from Harry, and Mam was astonished when she answered the door one day to a deeply suntanned Arab, in full desert garb, who was talking away in Arabic and trying to give her a kiss!   In panic, she screamed for Dad and he came pounding down the stairs to the rescue; then they fell about laughing on realising that it was only Harry, back from the war.

Mam's brother Harvey joined the Royal Navy in 1944, then volunteered for training on two-man submarines - enlarged torpedoes which the operators sat astride and piloted up to the target before attaching magnetic limpet mines.  The war ended before Harvey saw real action, but he was a real hero to me and I loved to listen to him tell of the arduous training that he and his comrades underwent in Scotland as part of the preparation for what would have been desperately dangerous missions.

Auntie Rita lived with us - she was dying of renal failure and spent all of her time in bed, spitting mucus into bits of newspaper and throwing the crumpled pieces into an enamel bucket.  I remember her as being very pretty but desperately pale and thin and she was the first person that I'd known who was dying.  Rita married a man called Dickie (his first name), but they had only a short time together before he was sent off to war.  As Rita's illness progressed, Mam was in contact with Dickie by letter and telegram, urging him to get compassionate leave; something not easily gained at that stage in the conflict.  Rita went to hospital and died shortly thereafter, then a few days later Dickie arrived at our door, in uniform and straight from the train, completely unaware that his wife had already passed away - he was so distraught that he had arrived too late to see Rita that his life was destroyed and he never remarried, spending the rest of his life as a lonely man living in the Robinson family flat at 24 Allhusen Terrace, the street where he first met the love of his life.

Mam had an amusing story of wartime spirit and common sense, involving dough and the making of bread.  Apparently, one of our uncles worked the night shift in a local bakery, producing bread for local distribution.  Air raid damage cut the oven gas supply just as the machines had mixed the dough for that night's production, and not wanting to waste the material, our uncle and his mates used wheelbarrows to bring the stuff around to Howe Street in the middle of the night, rousing Mam and the neighbours to get ovens fired up to bake the bread before the dough went off - the wonderful smell filled the whole street!

Waiting for Australia

When dhe war ended, Dad's feelings of relief translated into a rekindling of interest in emigration to Australia, and resumption of contact with his Uncle Sam (see page 1 and page 2).  We went to London on the train for medicals and interviews, and on the return trip I was fascinated by mile-after-mile rows of tanks and armoured vehicles parked in fields by the railway line.  Despite Dad's hopes for an early result, nothing was heard for many months, because Australia had reserved the first available migrant ships for ex-service personnel.  We knew that our time would come, but the delay had quite an effect on Dad - he was desperate to get away from Tyneside, away from the post-war dirt and squalor and into a situation of new opportunity, and if we couldn't go to Australia, we'd go to Norfolk instead, where his father came from, and where the Hipkin name originated.

The big problem about moving to Norfolk was lack of money - and this is where Auntie Florrie entered our domestic arrangements.  Florrie was Dad's half-sister, a woman larger than life in every way, with scant regard for the proprieties and someone who always got what she wanted.  While Dad despaired of acceptance to emigrate, Florrie was having an affair with a man called Leitch, a long distance furniture van driver for the Norfolk based 'Jentique' company.  'Leitchy' and Florrie held their liaisons at our house, where Mam served tea and scones to the lovers before they went off for a few hours of passion in his big green van.  Inconveniently, Florrie had a husband, a weedy creature who seemed to be despised by everyone who came into contact with him - and especially by Florrie.  Florrie also had money - something rare in our family.  During the war, Florrie had a sweet-shop in Jarrow, with links back to the 'sugar-boilers', the people who produced the sweets for retail consumption.  People could swap sugar rations for sweets without using up their ration 'coupons' and a smart person like Florrie could turn this to pecuniary advantage; something that she did with aplomb until the Luftwaffe bombed the shop, with the predictable destruction of the books and trading records.  Florrie took the rent-book back to the landlord, sold the recoverable stock and went into forced retirement.  The ingredients for a major life-change were there, ready money, lust for Leitchy, an aversion to her husband, these were the signs that Florrie wanted a new start and her paramour's Norfolk location made it her choice, so Dad and Florrie made a deal on the joint purchase of a house at 51 London Road, East Dereham, and instead of packing up for the Antipodes, we headed off on our Norfolk Sojourn.

Chapter 3 - Norfolk Sojourn

We lived at 51 London Road in East Dereham only for a year or so and the fact that we were there at all was due to problems with our intended emigration to Australia.  We moved just before the summer holidays, travelling down in the back of a big green furniture van with the back doors open, all sitting on our brown leatherette suite except for Auntie Florrie, who sat in the cab with the driver - her paramour John Leitch.  One absentee was Smokey, the family cat, who disappeared just before our departure, probably because Dad planned to drown the poor creature instead of taking it to the other end of the country.  Cat lovers can relax, Smokey pops up again later in this narrative.

The new house was a shared equity deal between Auntie Florrie and Dad; Florrie put up the lion's share of the cash, the advantage from her viewpoint being that she had a lover's nest away from her husband.  I can't imagine how Florrie thought that she could keep her new location secret, but she got away with it for several months until her husband tracked her down.  There were big advantages over Howe Street, like electricity, a garden, a garage, a recreation ground over the back wall, etc; but one backward step was the absence of a flush toilet, we still had to go outside to the loo and it was a 'thunderbox' dry toilet at the bottom of the garden.  Dad found a job labouring at the Jentique factory and Mam found a job as a barmaid in the town and got started on getting Brian and myself fixed up at School.  We both had to resit the 11+ examination down in Norwich, then we were invited to visit Hamond's Grammar School, right beside the pedlars effigy in Swaffham - things went well and we were accepted, then for some reason we walked past the bus stop and started walking the ten miles home! - it was very hot and we had nothing to eat or drink and we were absolutely exhausted when a kindly motorist picked us up about three miles from Dereham.  Later in life, Mam confessed that the reason for our long trudge was that she didn't have a single penny in her purse, not even enough for a drink of lemonade.

We met the local kids on the recreation ground just behind our house and used our garage as a bad-weather playroom, a place where we could get away from adults and a venue for our budding entrepreneurial talents when we organised shows with a little green 'Bat' magic-lantern projector, charging the other kids thruppence to attend.  I met my first girl friend on the recreation ground, a very pretty girl called Evelyn Tooke and a romance that quickly went wrong when her dog bit me because I put my arm around her, an injury that lost me the girl but gained me half-a-crown hush money from her Dad.

Our Hipkin forebears came from Norfolk and we still had relatives in the area, so our new presence lead to a renewal of acquaintances and a certain amount of inter-family visiting.  The clan were originally based around Syderstone, with other relatives from North Creake and the surrounding hamlets, all of which were familiar to me from a summer spent at my Auntie Lily Parnell's house.  That holiday had a huge impact on me, it was the first time away without my brothers, the first time away from my parents and the first time that I'd made a long journey by road.  After travelling down with the ubiquitous Leitchy and Auntie Florrie, I met Aunt Lil at the tiny cottage that she shared with farm-labourer husband Hector and settled in to the rural life.  I was pretty much free to come and go as I pleased, Aunt Lil didn't keep set mealtimes or domestic routine, so my daily routine mainly involved playing with the local kids in the fields and woods around North Creake and environs.  However, I did have one specific duty, which was to carry Uncle Hector's lunch down to wherever he was working in the fields.  If I could get one of the local kids to go with me I was quite happy about this, otherwise I was scared witless by rustling noises in the hedgerows and by having to cross fields full of cattle - this provoked much mirth amongst my new friends, kids who were born and raised with country noises but who would have struggled to cross Sunderland Road.

Aunt Lil's little white cottage was like something from a novel by Thomas Hardy, and Lil wasn't houseproud in any way, domestic stuff like dusting and polishing didn't get much attention in her vision of things, so the interior was a random collection of old furniture and accumulated junk with a Tilley lamp for light and an enamel bowl for a sink.  Water was precious, supplies were hauled up from the communal well in white enamel buckets and stored under the kitchen bench.  Water scarcity meant that scant attention was paid to personal hygiene, something that suited a nine year old very well, so that when I finally got home to Gateshead Mam was horrified to find that I had not been washed or bathed for six weeks!  I really appreciated the Norfolk experience, with fond memories of Hector and Lil and their traditional way of life, something that has now completely disappeared, from the mechanisation of the farms to the conversion of the labourer's cottages into holiday homes for rich Londoners.

Hamond's Grammar School

Hamond's Grammar had been a fee-paying day school for boys and still had pretensions that it was really for the sons of the gentry.  Games were important and apart from the school uniform we had to have all sorts of kit, from cricket whites to football strips, all to be purchased from the official outfitter in Swaffham or Dereham.  Despite the flashy kit, I was terrible at games and even worse at the academic side of things, being rated 31 out of 31 for attainment - the only bit that I enjoyed was the Tuesday night workshop sessions, the first time in my life that I got to make things using my hands.  The journey to and from Swaffham was much more enjoyable than actually being at the School - we had a special train on the old Lynn and Dereham line, with our own little engine, puffing through villages like Wendling, Great Fransham and Little Dunham before pulling into Swaffham.  The train was slow and ancient and the braver spirits used the outside running boards to pass from one carriage to the next, their pale little faces pressed against the compartment windows and wreathed in the smoke from the engine - at the mid-point, our train sat in the station alongside the Dereham Girl's High School train, which each day went in the opposite direction and these meetings were much enjoyed, especially when the girls would wave their navy blue gym knickers out of the windows.

My Form Teacher was Mr Cudworth, an old man in a greasy black academic gown and with a face like a screaming skull, with yellow rodent teeth and bad breath from the huge number of cigarettes that he smoked, sometimes even lighting one up during the lesson and holding it out of the door of our corrugated iron classroom whilst droning on about French verbs or Latin declensions - Cudworth's party trick was to use a ruler to part the hair of the boy sitting in the centre of the front row, all without looking at the unfortunate lad or losing the thread of the lesson.  Biology lessons were taken by the only female teacher in the School; a young woman who taught in an atmosphere awash with testosterone and was everywhere followed by hundreds of pairs of lustful eyes, and went bright scarlet when, as part of a lesson on the 'facts of life' she showed us sniggering twelve-year-olds the sexual organs of male and female rabbits.

I've mentioned that sports were deemed to be 'character building' and therefore figured quite a lot on the timetable.  My view was different - I saw that kids who were naturally athletic or talented got the attention and the less able were ignored or made to do pointless and repetitive exercises to keep them busy whilst the star players honed their skills.  As a cricketing duffer, I was told to take the outfield, then instructed to go further and further out until I could barely see the batsmen, much less keep up with the play - I spent the time watching a hedgehog rootle about in the long grass, and when I looked up the field was empty and the match was over.

I was saved from the hellish prospect of spending the next few years at Hamond's by the arrival of our boat tickets and the wonderful news that our emigration applications for Australia were finally approved - I spent the last few weeks with a fixed smile - I didn't know what I was going into, but I felt confident that it would be an improvement on Swaffham - ah, the foolish optimism of youth!.

Chapter 4 - Australia - The Ten-pound Poms

Aussie rhyming slang: immigrant = pomegranate = pommy = pom. More usually heard as pommybastard or whingeingpommybastard - most immigrants paid £10 and entered the country on an 'assisted passage' scheme

Our family lived in Australia from 1951 to 1955.  I never knew the full rationale for our going to the other side of world, but I guess that it was a combination of my Dad's itchy feet and boyhood hero-worship of his mysterious and elderly Uncle Sam.  According to family lore, Sam Hipkin was the black sheep - one of a large family living in the village of Syderstone, he apparently shot a gamekeeper and was smuggled away by his younger brother under a wagon-load of turnips before stowing away on a ship bound for Australia.  Safely 'down under', Sam changed his name to 'Armiger' (his mother's maiden name) and again to 'Armature', the name on his letters back to England.  This was in 1888 or 1889, but Sam remained a part of the Hipkin family and Dad seems to have maintained a sporadic correspondence with him right up to the outbreak of war in 1939.  In these later letters, Sam's tone was encouraging, laying great store on the advantages of life 'down under' and promising a job and assistance with accommodation if the Hipkins decided to emigrate.  Sadly, and as with so many other plans, WWII put paid to any early realisation of these dreams; all sponsored emigration ceased because ships were required for the war effort and Dad spent the war years working as a Radial-Arm Drilling Machine Operator in the gun-shop at the Vickers-Armstrong factory on Elswick Road in Newcastle.

Our move to Norfolk was partially caused by frustration at lack of progress with the Australian Immigration authorities, so we were surprised when acceptance agreements came from Australia House, with tickets and arrangements to join RMS Otranto at Tilbury on 14th June 1951.  This caused a mad scatter of excitement, packing our stuff, leaving school, travelling back up to Gateshead to say goodbye to those few family members that we were still 'speaking to' (see Family Fun), then finally down to Tilbury for our big adventure.  During this hectic period Dad sent a telegram to Sam, to let him know that we were coming and our arrival details for Sydney.  This was the polite thing to do, and was essential because Sam was our 'nominee'; our guarantor that we wouldn't become a burden on the Aussie state, etc.  See the curiously worded reply.

Leaving home

When our relatives came to see us off at Tilbury, they thought that this would be the last time that they would ever see us, so it was tears and big hugs all round before we boarded; then paper streamers joined us together while the ship slipped her moorings and slowly edged away from the quayside as the streamers snapped, one by one.  We were excited, running up and down and exploring our floating home, but Mam cried as the shore of England receded and the ship turned south, bearing us away to our new life, perhaps never to return.

The voyage was something out of a cruise brochure - 'Otranto' was a big ship, carrying lots of passengers (we were on 'H' deck, with portholes submerged when the ship rolled) and she also carried a fair amount of cargo.  Our trip took place in the declining period of the British Empire, but Britain still had substantial overseas possessions serviced by vessels like 'Otranto', so we called at Port Said in Egypt, then through the Suez Canal and the Great Bitter Lakes to the Red Sea at Port Suez, then Aden, then Colombo, then across the Indian Ocean before touching Australia at Perth.

Shipboard life was great, but the Dining Room was something of a puzzle, with four course meals and rows of knives and forks, plus menu items like 'Brown Windsor Soup' and 'Sole Bonne Femme' - things that hadn't appeared too often on menus in Gateshead.  Daily salt tablets were also on the menu, something that was standard practice in the 1950's and something that could cause major stomach upsets, but we were resilient - something that would be tested more fully in the weeks and months to come.

Bad news - back to Earth

Between Perth and Adelaide, our Uncle Harvey (my mother's brother and my favourite Uncle) sent us a telegram with some very bad news.  Sam's family had responded to Dad's post-departure telegram and been trying to contact us in Britain, to prevent our embarkation.  Sam had suddenly become very ill (he died in 1952) and his elderly daughters didn't want the stress of coping with us, and were withdrawing any offer of support.  This was shattering for our parents - they had burned their boats financially, had no home or furniture, had three kids still at school and the family was on its way to a foreign land 12.000 miles from home.

The situation became more complicated when Australian Immigration found out that our sponsorship deal had evaporated - this was only a few years after WWII, lots of fairly dodgy folk were trying to get into countries like Australia, Canada and New Zealand and some of these people had destroyed their papers and were trying to change identities to avoid being charged as war criminals, some were army deserters, others were just flotsam and jetsam washed up after so many years of war.  The Immigration people suspected that we belonged to one or other of these categories so they took us and our gear off the ship in Melbourne and made arrangements to send us to a special camp while matters were sorted out.  Our destination was Bonegilla, on the Victoria/NSW border and close to the Hume Reservoir.  Bad news though this was, things got worse as the crane lifted our gear out of the ship - the driver dropped some of our crates onto the quayside and our crockery and breakables were smashed.  We had no insurance; the unsigned Proposal Form was with Mam's papers when she died and this was the last straw, Mam counted the coins in her purse, then sat on the broken boxes and wept as if her heart were broken.

Up in the bush

Waking up in an old Nissen hut at Bonegilla, with grass growing through cracks in the floor and with the camp Tannoy system giving orders for the day, my first thought was that we had strayed onto the set of a bad movie, and that I would soon wake up - I felt better when we located the dining room, although the food was institutional and bland (no Brown Windsor Soup at Bonegilla), and better still when we learned there were some other kids in the camp, and that we could come and go as we pleased.  Over the following days we explored the area, climbing over the dam on the reservoir, watching large mobs of kangaroos bounding over the hillsides and admiring the cockatoos and colourful galahs in the trees that surrounded the camp and the possums that sat on the roofs of the huts at night.  Thankfully, we were only at Bonegilla for about a week when Dad found a job at his trade at a factory in the Melbourne suburbs and we transferred to Brooklyn, a very large hostel not far from Footscray, a place that we later learned had acquired a reputation as the toughest hostel in the system.  Our 'home' for the remainder of our Australian sojourn, this was the place that finally broke our parent's determination to succeed in a new life but also the place where we broke away from parental control and gained almost complete freedom to roam and to do our own thing.

How the Aussies got it wrong

After WWII, the Australian Government decided that medium-term economic development would be retarded unless the population could be boosted by an increase in the number of skilled and semi-skilled immigrants.  Various initiatives were started, usually including subsidised travel and a guarantee of hostel rooms until permanent accommodation could be obtained - these schemes were very successful, with huge numbers of people coming into the country, but provision of accommodation and availability of jobs lagged behind.  To clear the backlog, old wool stores were converted into primitive lodgings and wartime Nissen huts were re-erected in rows and streets, with communal dining and laundry rooms.  Austere in appearance and function, these places may have been adequate if used on the planned short-term basis - but the weekly 'tariff' payable meant that the typical migrant family had to pay most of their weekly wages in rent; trapping them in the hostel system, obviating any possibility of finding their own place, and guaranteeing that they lived in relative poverty.

Socially, the policy was even more disastrous - the system ghettoised whole communities of disaffected people in out-of-town locations without on-site facilities or diversions; no shops, no pubs, no churches, no communal hall.  By this date, any Australian preference for British migrants was over and inevitable hostel disturbances brought critical condemnation from the newspapers; the 'whingeing pom' tag being widely used and enthusiastically repeated by schoolmates and the man in the street.  Unsurprisingly, up to 30% of British immigrants became disenchanted by these conditions and returned 'home', although quite a few then emigrated for a second time.

Our new home

En route, the bus picked people up from other hostels before pulling through the gates at Brooklyn, where a one-man reception committee was waiting - this man climbed up into the bus to introduce himself, to tell us the basic stuff about the camp, but in particular to warn parents about the bottom areas of the camp, where poliomyelitis was rampant, and where there had been riots and a major fire when Italian migrants were evicted for not paying their 'tariff'.  The adults were horrified, concerned at what they were bringing their families into, worried about their kids contracting polio (this was before the good Dr Salk's vaccine), and wondering if emigration was such a good idea after all.  We passed the concrete bases of burned-out sheds, then huge warehouse buildings on either side - constructions originally built as bulk stores for bales of wool, outside walls now pierced with rows of windows and with people coming and going through large door openings in the sides and gable ends.

The sheds were very large, about 200 feet wide by 500 feet long, subdivided into 'flats' of three or four room each, with walls of 4 x 2 inch studs clad with ordinary hardboard on the outside, the inside faces unlined, with the timber frame showing.  Ceilings were clad with hardboard, with a central section left open for ventilation and covered with wire netting to prevent birds from flying in - flats around the shed periphery had windows that opened onto the outside world, inside flats opened onto the interior of the shed.  From safety, privacy, or other humane viewpoints, the accommodation was unsatisfactory for anything other than an overnight stay and would certainly have been condemned if proposed as long-term accommodation for prisoners-of-war.

With no available alternative, we settled into our inside flat and got started on checking out our surroundings.

Bounded on one side by a large and very smelly abattoir and meat-packing plant, Brooklyn had run down houses and vacant building lots to the other side, while in front was a green field with a smoky and dirty steelworks to the side and the back fence opened onto a wasteland of old quarry workings (generally part-filled with chemically-polluted water of unusual hue) and scrubby areas with derelict factory buildings and shacks - a paradise of things for boys with time on their hands and a complete absence of parental control, to explore, climb up, swim in and fall from.  Migrants were forbidden to cook in their accommodation, so we ate in the communal canteen and rarely saw our parents (Dad was soon working lots of overtime, Mam worked unsocial hours in the Hostel canteen, later as a barmaid in Footscray), so we used our new-found freedoms to the full, made new friends and found our way around the local scene.

With a two-year age difference, Brian and I had separate groups of friends but a joint pal was Norman Leaver, a Brit from somewhere around Manchester.  Norman was able to identify different types of metal from 50 paces, even when the metal was covered in paint - he could instantly discriminate between cast and wrought iron, brass, bronze and gunmetal and various purity grades of copper, etc.  Combine this with a head for heights, a high degree of native cunning and a full set of spanners and Norman appeared either as a nascent scrap metal millionaire, or a lad who would spend his adult life incarcerated at Her Majesty's Pleasure.  We had profitable fun exploring old factory and quarry buildings, pinching any non-ferrous metal that we could reach and dismantle - Norman called these metallic lumps 'cobs' of brass or gunmetal and he knew to a penny what they were worth at the scrap merchant.  Our parents would have been appalled if they had known what we were doing, but hostel kids operated a strict 'Omerta' policy so we escaped retribution while learning some basic engineering skills.

I chummed up with Fred, a couple of years older than me, the eldest son of a family from Guernsey in the Channel islands.  They were on Guernsey during the German occupation and had learned to fend for themselves, so the manner of their leaving the hostel reads like 'The Great Escape' - I'm sure that some sort of 'statute of limitations' applies after all these years, but I'm not going to reveal the family name, just in case the Aussie authorities are nursing a grudge.  Caught in the hostel poverty trap, their solution was direct and effective - in secret, they bought the smallest and cheapest piece of ground that they could find, miles out of town and without any utilities laid on - next, they scrounged scrap timber to put in the base for a very small house, then, over a period of several weeks, they dismantled the entire interior of their hut and removed it, re-using the materials to erect their new place.  Toilet pans, cisterns and washbasins were liberated from the toilet blocks, the canteen supplied a complete set of cutlery and crockery, and the camp laundry supplied sheets and blankets, etc.  I was an enthusiastic helper, keeping watch while the truck was loaded each night and once going out with the team to the new site.  Finally, the Nissen hut was an empty void, all doors and walls were gone and the floorboards and joists removed and I waved the truck away for the last time, then took the hut key back to the hostel office, passing it over without a word.  Next day, the story was all round the camp and Mam said 'apparently, one of the boys just threw the key at the office staff and ran before they could catch him' - I said nothing!

My particular mate was Alan McClurkin, an Ulsterman from Lurgan.  Alan learned to drive when he was about twelve and regularly drove the family on their various outings in an old Willys Station Wagon, always with a trilby hat pulled well down to disguise his age.  Lots of kids had air rifles and we would sit on the sides of the abandoned quarries in our locality, shooting at rats as they emerged from holes in the rubbish, or shooting bullfrogs as they surfaced for air - this being even more satisfying if the frog had just taken a big breath and inflated its throat in preparation for a mating call.  I'm ashamed of it now, but with air rifles we decimated wild life within a radius of four or five miles, shooting at anything that crawled, walked or flew.  Big on rafts, we made elaborate constructions out of old pallets and bits of timber, then sailed on the bright green or blue water in the quarries, sometimes catching fresh-water crayfish with bits of bacon rind tied on strings.

Alan worked with me on a Saturday job at the Gun Club on Kororoit Creek (more about this creek later), where we loaded live birds into spring loaded 'traps'; metal arrangements that launched the astonished pigeon or starling into the air so that a 'sportsman' with a shotgun could shoot the poor creature before it flew over the perimeter fence.  Covered in dirt, blood and pigeon fleas, no-one commented on the irony as we joined the club members in the club house, where we drank cups of tea with our little fingers crooked and ate exquisite little cucumber sandwiches from delicate china, then stepped outside to resume the carnage.  When the shooters had departed, our last job for the day was to clean up; catching the wounded birds and wringing their necks, then piling the feathered corpses into bins for removal before collecting our ten shilling wages.

The area provided all sorts of other outlets for our energies too, like climbing the fence into Borthwick's Abbatoir to pinch surplus blank cartridges from the stun gun in the killing pens, then lining the cartridges up on a piece of burning cardboard and standing back as they exploded and became miniature rocket projectiles; or liberating lengths of gelignite fuse and silver detonators from local quarries.  Sadly, we rarely managed to lay hands on any gelignite, so our explosions were somewhat muted except when someone concealed a very small amount of explosive inside a November 5th bonfire, with predictable results as the entire bonfire lifted about three feet in the air.

I mentioned Kororoit Creek earlier; a place that I will never forget because it left me with a permanent reminder of youthful folly and the dangers of boys playing with air rifles.

Brian and I climbed through a hole in the hostel fence and walked the couple of miles over to the creek, our plan being to root around in the slabby sandstone cliffs to catch or shoot lizards and whatever else we could find.  To aid our endeavours, we picked up a length of scaffolding tube with one end flattened into a wedge shape, the idea being that we would use this as a lever to jam into the rocks to bring them crashing down, then dive in to see what was revealed.  This worked really well, but I made the big mistake of standing too close as the cliff tumbled and one of the rocks trundled right over my foot.  First, the shock and horror of the impact, then the realisation that we were in big trouble; miles away from home and no-one knew that we were there, then the feeling of nausea as the initial numbness wore off and the pain started.  Getting home was a nightmare; we were so slow that it took hours - Brian carried me on his back as much as he could and I hopped and limped the remainder, right up to the door of our woolshed flat.  I was fairly howling with pain and must have looked like death, Mam took one look and ran screaming into the bedroom - thankfully, one of the neighbours heard the hullabaloo and went to the phone box to call an ambulance.

Plastered and on crutches for a couple of months after this incident, the permanent reminder is that my left big toe joint was so badly crushed that the toe bends up but not down!

The Nissen Hut

One day we had good news - we were to transfer out of the woolsheds into a Nissen hut, the even better news was that Brian and I would live on the opposite side of the hut from our parents and would have our own front door.  Extra space and freedom brought new opportunities for our interests in music (especially Jazz and Swing) and short-wave radio.  We had accumulated some ancient radio equipment, stuff that Brian supplemented with home made receivers and record turntables attached to bits of plywood, and with wire aerials slung across our room we would sit up late at night, listening on headphones to the arcane chatter of radio 'hams'.  The new privacy appealed to me because I was in the throes of teenage angst and could keep away from my parents as much as possible, communication being largely restricted to weekends.  Summer temperatures were a big problem for hut dwellers, the corrugated-iron construction soaked up the heat and radiated it inwards, ensuring that one slept in a pool of perspiration and soaking wet sheets.

Williamstown High School

Grammar School attendance in England meant acceptance into the Australian system at High School level, so Brian and I signed up for Williamstown High School; quite a lengthy trek by bus and train from Brooklyn, but still the closest school of the type.  Without money for new blazers or other kit, it was agreed that we would wear our Hamond's Grammar stuff and that we would 'wear it with pride' - some of the kids had other ideas, the alien colours and badges were something of a focal point for 'pommybastard' taunts, and in my case, marked the start of bullying by 'Bodgie' Williams, a racist thug a couple of years older than me, a cretin that I've never forgotten; someone who made me dread going to school and marked my days with fear.  Time heals most things; but I still feel anger and I'd like to rearrange his face with my fist before giving him a short lecture on the rules of hospitality and the socio-economic causes of immigration.

I didn't do well at Williamstown and I don't want to use bullying as an excuse for poor performance; the truth is that I drifted through those times in a dream, where reality was in our extra-mural activities and tomorrow would never come.  Intervention by the school may have helped me to a better focus, but it wasn't on offer - Williamstown was a rag-tag place with a relaxed attitude to discipline and academic success and little or nothing in the way of involvement from most of the teachers.  Mr Head was my Form Master in my final year and I don't recall a single word of encouragement or expression of interest from him, or from any of the other teachers except the Music Teacher and Mr Keogh - Brian's Form Master and Boss of the Army Cadet Force.  There was little in the way of a school identity or corporate spirit; something exacerbated by the lack of sports facilities, so that every football or cricket game was 'away' and necessitated rail travel, allowing me to skip school every Wednesday afternoon by the simple expedient of hiding under the train seat while the Prefects made a perfunctory check, then getting off at the next station and heading home.

Despite the bullying, I had some good pals at school, especially Norman Smith, a lad that I had lots of adventures with, including our time in the Army Cadets.  The Cadets were very keen on accurate shooting, with regular Saturday morning practice at the Williamstown rifle ranges and on Friday afternoon each Cadet was issued with a full calibre Short Lee-Enfield .303 rifle (almost as big as many of the boys) and told to report at the ranges next morning.  Ammunition for these lethal weapons could be bought at any sports shop, or could be smuggled away for free from the rifle range, either hidden inside the butt-trap of the rifle, or stuffed down into the regulation gaiters that we all wore.  Officers and NCO's were alert to these tricks and would try to stem the torrent of contraband by counting discharges, empty cartridges, etc, but despite this we could sometimes smuggle away enough ammunition to have a fun Saturday afternoon, shooting at telegraph pole insulators and other things that I'm not going to confess to, even after this amount of time.

I went to Cadet camp with Norman, up in the bush near Mildura on the NSW border.  We loved it.  We were billeted in an Army camp, with regular Officers and Instructors and had a great time running around in the bush and ambushing other groups with smoke grenades and blank ammunition.  A highlight was the last night, when we broke out of the compound and crossed the local airfield to raid a nearby orange grove, filling our kit bags with oranges to take home.  On the return trip, runway lights came on when we were crossing the tarmac and we dived into the long grass beside the strip and waited until a plane landed before we could get back to our billet.

Smithy was my best mate at school, but I had to be careful when I went to his house; this was because his big brother 'didn't like poms', and I had to keep my mouth shut and reply in monosyllabic grunts if anyone asked me a question - not a problem when you're a teenager!  This is not to suggest that all the locals were hostile - many of the people that we met showed the friendliness and comradeship commonly supposed to characterise Australia and its social mores, and we soon became less of a novelty as newer folk arrived and we moved up the pecking order, becoming 'insulters' rather than 'insultees'.

I couldn't wait to leave school, the source of my humiliation and failure and the place where I had endured bullying that no-one seemed able to stop.  Like a soldier awaiting demobilisation, I had a sheet marked with the days until I could go, kids could leave school after their fourteenth birthday and I didn't intend to spend one unnecessary minute there.  On the due day, I went to see Mr Head, so that he would sign my release forms - he had nothing to say to me, no words of encouragement, no words of regret for his or my failings; nothing that acknowledged the failure of the school to connect with me, or the dereliction of duty and responsibility that he and most of his colleagues had demonstrated towards me and lots of other kids like me.

My first two jobs

Jobs were easy to find and on the very first day I got started at Smorgons Cannery, a short walk across the fields.  I was part of the 'hygiene' squad, a team responsible for ensuring that the fruit (or meat!) was prepared in sterile conditions, then put into tin cans and passed through a steam oven to cook the contents for the appropriate period - the work was repetitive in the extreme, stuff that crossed my boredom threshold and caused me to look about for something to relieve the tedium.

I found two main outlets for my energy - the most interesting was to talk to the married women and young girls that made up the majority of the work-force.  Although I was well aware of the facts of life from playground talk and fumbled encounters at teen parties, the effect of spending eight or ten hours per day with people who regarded sex (in the sense of who was doing what, and to whom) as the main or most interesting topic of conversation was new and fascinating, something that rounded out my knowledge in a very satisfactory manner.  There were some small opportunities for kissing and cuddling with the girls too, but this was something that had to be handled with great discretion because of Clive the Foreman, a man much given to fits of apoplectic rage and shouting at people while showering them with flecks of spit. The other outlet, much less exciting, was to sit in the office, reading the newspapers and doing the crosswords, then fabricate the records so that the average temperatures and pressures for the shift appeared to be correct.  I did this without a conscience, the operators on the line adjusted the oven speed and temperatures to suit and they phoned me if anything was wrong, and finished canned goods were stored in a 'quarantine' area to see if any of the cans burst as a result of bacterial contamination.

Dad was impressed with my new job, firstly because I was well paid (with overtime, I made almost as much as him) and secondly because I wore a white coat - 'one day there and they've made him a gaffer'.

Eventually, need for stimulation overcame my inertia and I took a new job in Melbourne, as a gopher working for J.H McGrath and Co, of Little Lonsdale Street. A radio and electronics component distributor, this was something closer to the world of radio that Brian and I had become so interested in (Brian was an apprentice Radio Technician with the Department of Civil Aviation) and that had developed into an all-absorbing hobby.  I had no plan when joining McGrath's, just to move towards something that could be more stimulating and might lead on to other things.  Apart from checking on my basic welfare, my parents took no real interest in either of my first jobs - I made the appointments and went to the interviews of my own volition and changed direction when it suited me, gradually developing confidence in expressing myself to adults and gaining a clearer picture of what I wanted to do with my life.  By this time, the family was accumulating funds to return 'home' and I passed my wage packet to my Mother unopened and she gave me pocket-money in return; something that continued until I was 21 years old.

The Wales Street Mob

Nubile girls at Brooklyn attracted the lustful attention of local young males - guys who would appear in beat-up old cars and would cruise the main roads through the hostel, trying to contact girls by offering a ride - the most notorious team being 'The Wales Street Mob', from an area between Brooklyn and Footscray.  These lads travelled in two very large pre-war American gangster cars, of the type commonly seen in movies about the prohibition era.  Us younger boys were afraid and kept out of the way when these menacing juggernauts prowled the roads; the older lads (and some of the parents!) saw the mob as encroaching on their turf, but were unable to stop the incursions without setting up some sort of confrontation.  Eventually, an uneasy truce developed when some of the hostel lads became friendly with the mob and began riding on the running boards of the cars, something that ended in a dramatic way when these lads were beaten up and only escaped more serious injury by running across a field in the dark and hiding in the scrub while the cars drove around with their headlights on, searching.

The Repatriation Fund - Apples and Toes

I'm pretty sure Dad had made his mind up to return to the UK when we were sent off to Bonegilla, but I do remember a family discussion about coming back, the reason for the new democratic approach being that Brian and I had both been paying our wages into the repatriation fund, so we were entitled to at least a nominal say in the family decision.  I didn't feel confident enough to stay in Australia on my own and I was quite happy to return, because we were locked into a vicious circle of poverty in the hostel, my job wasn't going to lead to anything worthwhile and if we came 'home' there was a possibility that I might get an apprenticeship at some sort of engineering trade, something that appealed more than just being an errand boy.  That's not to say that there weren't going to be some sad farewells, to guys like Alan McClurkin and Ken and Dave Pawson and Brian's pals Dennis Mole and Douglas Megson.  We had made some good mates, people that we'd shared important and formative experiences with, things that you don't easily forget.

Mam showed entrepreneurial flair in building the repatriation fund, the most memorable initiative was the toffee apple business that she ran while we were in the woolsheds.  Dad bought cases of eating apples and we scrounged around where the builders were erecting new Nissen huts, looking for offcuts of floorboards or similar; stuff that we could split up and whittle down into sticks for the apples.  Our electric fire was turned onto its back, propped it up on bricks, then used as a cooker to make a huge panful of toffee; the apples were plunged in then placed on aluminium trays to cool - the toffee smell drifted dhrough the wire mesh ceiling and permeated the whole shed, and by the time the apples were cool enough to eat we had a big queue of kids outside our door.  This was a good little business, profit margins were high, the hostel had a huge number of kids and only one small sweet shop - Mam always said that toffee apples paid our fare home; a claim with at least some basis in fact.  The fund benefited from the loss of Dad's big toe, something that happened when things went wrong one day at work and a heavy casting fell off the drilling machine table onto his left foot, almost severing his big toe and badly bruising the rest of his foot - the toe was reattached, but after a couple of weeks it turned suspiciously black and was cut off, converting a digit on his foot into digits in the bank!

Teenage years - When Life Really Started

The Poms return

Mam had been so impressed by our outward trip on the 'Otranto' that she insisted on going back on the same vessel.  We were happy with the prospect of a trip and didn't much care which ship we travelled on, but there was still the big farewell scene to go through, where our friends and neighbours came down to Port Melbourne to see us off.  The photo shows the scene on the quayside, my mate Alan in the bottom left-hand corner with Brian's girlfriend Connie Sutherland next to him - a colourful and emotional scene as the streamers began to break and the Hipkins started on their next big adventure.  The return trip was similar in many ways to the outgoing, the differences being mainly in the additional ports visited, places like Perth, Naples and Marseilles being added into the itinerary.  I remember the trip mainly because of concerns that I was beginning to feel about my own future, what would I do, where would I end up, where would I find new friends?

Otranto berthed in Southampton and Uncle Harvey was on the quay to meet us but Auntie Grace was absent because she and Mam were estranged for some reason (see Family Fun).  We spent our first night 'home' in digs, then took the train up to Newcastle to restart our lives and to pick up where we had left off five years previously, when we left Tyneside for Norfolk.  The general plan was to rent or buy a small corner grocery shop of the 'General Dealer' type, so our first few days were spent trudging around commercial estate agents in Newcastle and Gateshead, eking the money out by having tea and toasted teacakes for lunch in 'greasy spoon' cafes around Newcastle Central Station.  We visited a few sites before Dad decided on a small shop in Gateshead, but the existing tenants owned the property and could not vacate before finding alternative accommodation, so the family was split up again, Brian and myself staying in digs in the flat above our proposed new shop, with Mam, Dad and Malcolm sharing one room in a disgustingly dirty house at the top of Bottle Bank in Gateshead.

Our digs were inhospitable places, so we stayed out during the evenings and weekends, meeting up with new-found friends and visiting with Aunt Edna and our old neighbours in Howe Street.  During a visit to Mrs Winships' house, a cat suddenly came miaowing and scratching at the back door.  When the door was opened the cat came bounding in and it was Smokey, the puss that we had left behind almost five years previously and who had been living a feral existence ever since.  We took Smokey back into the household and he lived until he was 22!

The Gateshead shop deal fell through when the erstwhile seller suddenly claimed that he had suffered a heart attack and would not be selling the shop after all, and back on the estate agent trudge, Dad found a property in Richardson Street, Wallsend, where he and Mam lived out the remainder of their lives.

The Sorcerer's apprentice

Meanwhile, I had been looking around for an apprenticeship with one of the big engineering names like Parsons, Clarke Chapman and Reyrolles, then major companies with worldwide reputations in their respective fields, now all sadly defunct.  Reyrolles responded first, with an invitation to interview and to sit their standard admission tests, something that scared me witless given my execrable performance at anything mathematical - Dad came with me as moral backup and I was interviewed by a panel of managers for about half an hour, then sat a series of practical and aptitude tests.  No-one was more surprised than me when they offered a five-year engineering apprenticeship, including education at Technical College - I didn't fully realise it at the time, but this was the big break that I had been looking for, the event that would bring form and structure to the rest of my life and would allow success in areas where I had previously tasted only failure and humiliation.  As part of the deal, I was signed up for a pre-apprenticeship course at Gateshead College, an institution that would play an important role in my future career development.  Following this course, I started my training at Reyrolles in-house apprentice training school, where I received a first-rate induction to basic engineering skills and a first look at the Toolroom where I would spend most of the next five years, and where my worldly education would begin.

In the 1950's the apprenticeship route was the best way for non-academic kids to acquire the skills that would (almost) guarantee reasonable employment security for the foreseeable future.  Tyneside was a centre for all kinds of heavy engineering and shipyard work and the Durham and Northumberland coal fields represented an important part of the UK mining industry.  In practical terms, this meant that anyone who wanted a 'trade' could find an apprenticeship that would lead to 'journeyman' status in the chosen craft.  Note that there were no charitable or philanthropic notions involved here - apprenticeship wasn't 'free'; apprentices effectively paid for their own training by accepting low wages for doing men's work, thus explaining the ubiquitous nature of the system.  I realised this early on and I resisted menial tasks like running errands, making the tea, or sweeping the floor, always maintaining that 'I'm here to learn a trade, not to be used as a general dogsbody'.  I spent eighteen months going through the various parts of the factory on a general training in electrical fitting, then I decided to be a Toolmaker and to finish my five years of training in the Toolroom, because the Toolroom was the best paid part of the entire 12,000 strong establishment!

I can't claim that I actually enjoyed 'serving my time', we were treated like dogs and it was too much like 'doing time' in that we had to clock in and out each day and ask permission for everything including time off to go to the doctor or dentist, despite the fact that we had to clock out and lose pay anyway.  On a 'reductio ad absurdem' basis, we lost fifteen minutes pay if the works bus was more than three minutes late!
I played the game in reverse, if the bus was three minutes late or more (meaning that we would all be 'quartered'), then I would wait by the clock and only stamp my card in after fourteen minutes, there was no way that I was going to work for no pay.

There were highlights, some of the people that I worked with were talented craftsmen, guys who could work to very fine tolerances and who seemed to have an instinctive empathy with the materials and processes that we used.  One such person was my mentor Jackie Posgate, an old-time journeyman toolmaker who looked after me and my buddy Ernie Glenwright.  Jackie had a quiet and unassuming manner, but he knew the toolmaking trade inside-out and he was great at passing the knowledge on to us youngsters.  Bill Simpson was another, one of the elite of the toolroom and reckoned to be the best 'hand' amongst a group of very highly skilled men.  Morale in the toolroom was always high, at least amongst the apprentices, and we enjoyed ourselves by continually cocking a snook at authority in the physical form of Ian Caldwell, the deeply unpopular (at least with me, I thought him a bully and a boor) Toolroom Foreman.  Mostly, we did this by finding ways to circumvent or otherwise evade Caldwell's orders or instructions, but sometimes more directly, for example, when Arthur Ponting found that there were no paper towels to dry his hands he dried them instead on the brown dust-coat that Caldwell wore, all the while saying 'I'm not complaining, but it's your responsibility to make sure that paper towels are provided'.

Apart from the constant black humour, my abiding memories of the factory are of the ingenuity applied to the production of 'homers', stuff that we made in the factory and smuggled out.  As toolmakers, we had access to every imaginable material and manufacturing process, so we were much in demand to do 'homers' for other people.  One such job involved the regular soldering of patches onto a copper kettle owned by a man who used it every day and often let it boil dry.  Eventually, almost all of the toolroom personnel had been roped in to fix the kettle at one time or another and we had a collection to buy a new one, something that we presented to the astonished kettle owner with the admonition 'now p*** off and don't come back'.

Another 'order' came from an old pal who worked on the other side of the factory, so the request came by note via a passing messenger.  This time, the request was for a 'budgie stand', something that I agreed to make because I envisioned a small tubular affair that hung from the bars of the cage, or similar.  When I unfolded the sketch, the plan showed an 18" diameter turned metal base with a telescopic upright suspension frame for a full sized budgie cage.  The actual construction of the assembly was less of a problem than concealment and removal of the finished article, so I delayed and procrastinated several times about the job, eventually receiving a laconic note, the gist of which was 'don't bother, the budgie has died'!

I had a regular production line for car ramps, welded steel affairs that allowed a car to be driven up for greasing and servicing - a regular requirement on the pre-war cars that were common in those days.  The making of the ramps was complicated slightly by the need for the assembly to fold down to a maximum 4" height, so that the finished article could be slid out under the rear car-park gate!

A 'bench buddy' was Alec Bush, a fellow apprentice who shared some of my outside interests and who had a high reputation as a budding craftsman.  Alec was a talented dinghy sailor and he successfully constructed a full size road trailer for his new boat, concealing the component parts under our workbench and painting them to merge with the background until it was time for final assembly and removal.

Carrying on these clandestine activities was actually quite easy in such a huge factory, where very few managers had any kind of overview of what was going on, so our activities generally went undetected and unpunished, although I did get close to retribution when I was involved in helping the Northumbrian Ski Club construct the first ski tow for Cheviot.  Click here to follow this story.  The production of ski-bindings for the Ski Club was a successful venture and I set up a small production line to duplicate the 'Cubco' release bindings that I purchased from Lillywhites in Edinburgh.

I have often thought that if Reyrolles had been managed in such a way as to tap into our combined energy and ingenuity, then the company would still exist as a major employer.

Technical education went with the `ractical training in the Reyrolles factory, and this was important to me for two reasons.  Firstly, because the mathematical content of the syllabus had a practical use in my everyday work, I began to feel more at home with arithmetic and geometry, previously areas of failure and humiliation.  Secondly, I began to make contacts amongst the lecturing staff at the College, people like Alan James and Jack Heslop, folk who would be very helpful to me later in my career.

Chapter 6 - Marriage and Responsibilities

I was always the 'marrying kind', maybe it was something to do with my unhappy childhood, perhaps it was simply the basic primordial urge.  Whatever the reason, from my teenage years I was looking for someone to bond with, someone I could spend the rest of my life with, raise a family, prove to myself that there was another way.

I had enjoyed the company of girlfriends at the youth club that I attended when we returned from Australia and I had brief liaisons with girls that I met at Wholehope and through the Northumbrian Ski Club. 

Chapter 7 - Musings on Work and Career

Apart from my time as an apprentice the

Chapter 8 - Seeing the World

Some stuff in here

Chapter X - Family Fun

In those days, Mam had seven live siblings and Dad had two surviving full siblings, plus a half-sister from his father's first marriage - see the family tree appendices - so we had lots of Uncles and Aunties and a large number of cousins.  Sadly, we were alienated from most of these folk, with the exception of Mam's sister Edna, her brothers Harvey and Fred and Dad's half-sister Florrie.  We had occasional contact with Auntie Jean and Uncle Harry (Dad's brother and sister) and once in a while we saw Uncle Norman, Dad's cousin.  I was puzzled by our estrangement from Mam's sisters and their offspring, but attempts to raise the matter were firmly snubbed and I never established what caused Mam to distance herself from her family, only that it concerned her self-perceived status as matriarch following the death of her mother.  This persisted all her life - in her nineties she would rather sit alone than go over to spend time with her sister Edna, because 'I'm the older one, she should come to see me' - Edna was 89 at the time!  Mam was the real loser, but we were deprived of the companionship and support that we might have enjoyed from our extended clan.

Chapter Y - Prejudice and Belief

Kids don't come into this world pre-programmed, they have to be taught bigotry and intolerance and post-war Gateshead was not lagging in this regard.  My parents were fairly typical; they were not churchgoers but thought of themselves as Christians of the Wesleyan persuasion, so we were made to attend Sunday School at the local Methodist Church and were raised with quasi-Christian values.  Despite this, and like many of our generation, we were brought up in an atmosphere of casual and overt religious and racial prejudice, the most obvious expression of this concerning Roman Catholics.  Mam couldn't even say the word 'Catholic' without pursing her lips and was expert in its pejorative use, lumping Catholics together and ascribing all manner of evil intent to them - never mind the perils of the engine sheds or pyromaniac doings on the bankie fields - we were banned from the 'Old Fold' area of Gateshead, because it was 'full of Catholics'.  The mechanism of our certain corruption was never spelled out, just the basic message 'Protestant good - Catholic bad' and my search for proof of the effects of 'creeping Catholicisation' brought an extra dimension to visits by Auntie Florrie, who had converted to Catholicism on marrying and had modified her vocabulary as a side effect of modifying her beliefs.  With the fervour of the convert, Florrie became unable to say certain previously blameless words aloud, spelling them out instead, thus 'pig' became 'p.i.g.', etc, but since Florrie had new clothes, went on holiday, had money and usually had sweets for us, I began to think that Catholics were right and the inconvenience of having to spell things out was a reasonable price to pay for a life of comfort.

Dad shared the anti-Catholic bias and was also broadly against anyone not of white anglo-saxon protestant Geordie descent - and he had strong reservations about most of them!  His most outspoken condemnations were for the Scots, or 'Scotch' as he called them, perhaps due to a folk memory of the fear and loathing caused by importation of strike-breaking Scottish miners and engineering workers during previous labour disputes and exacerbated by his dislike of Auntie Jean's husband, Kilmarnock-born Dave Paterson.  When Vera and I moved to Scotland, our love of the country and defence of things Scottish caused Dad to moderate his language, at least in our presence, but old ideas die hard and I doubt that he really changed his beliefs.

Sunday School attendance was mandatory until the tenth birthday, then optional, and the choice between reading a library book, or playing out on the bankie fields, or sitting for one and a half hours in a bleak Methodist Chapel was easy - when parental coercion was removed Satan triumphed every time!  I formulated my own beliefs and became deeply sceptical about the Christian message, observing double standards in many of the adults that I came into contact with and finding risible the notion that Bible stories were 'the word of God'.

Organised religion uses guilt as a means of preventing free enquiry, and feelings of guilt may become so deeply embedded that even a quasi-religious upbringing can permanently cloud individual judgement on spiritual matters.  I struggled with this, but people need a belief system as an anchor for societal values, and now, in my twilight years and with the dark fast approaching, I align myself with the Humanist view that we must face the problems and opportunities of the world with human cooperation but without supernatural help; that it's up to each person to interpret this for themselves, and that it is a heresy against humanity to propound belief in the existence of omniscient prophets of any persuasion, or worse, in the superiority of one creed over another.

I'd like my epitaph to read:

"For a short time, I was part of the universe and I was privileged to experience the beauty and wonder of mortal life.  I tried to live each moment to the full and to live as morally and happily as possible. My wife and family were everything to me, seconded only by 'C' Company and the rest of my circle of very close friends, folk that I knew and loved for my entire adult life.  I never knew the place of origin or the place of transcendence, but it didn't matter.  Living was the journey, I never sought a destination".

Chapter Z - It's a Small World

On our last Christmas in Australia, a local Aussie family asked the hostel management if a couple of immigrant families would like to share Christmas Day with them, as a means of showing hospitality and to welcome those folks to Australia - their ancestors had originally come from the North East of England, so immigrants from that area would be preferred, but people from any area would be OK.  Our family was invited, along with the Donnelly family, also Geordies despite the name, and we all crammed into the Donnelly's old Essex Super Six car for the trip, where we met the Burnell family and had a super day of fun and companionship, marred only by a small scrimmage when their dog bit Malky.  To round the day off, we posed for a group photo outside their house in Williamstown.

Forward a few years, to when we were back in the UK, when Vera and myself had become an 'item', and we were at the stage when my folks went down to meet Vera's folks.  After the introductions, Vera's Mam made small talk about hearing that we'd been to Australia, that she had relatives there.  Going to the bureau, she produced a photo of her relatives standing outside their house in Williamstown.  It was the same house, the same family that we had spent Christmas Day with on the other side of the world!  Happily, Vera and I were able to return the hospitality when Fred Burnell (it was his dog that bit Malky) and his wife Pat came to stay with us in Callander in about 1998 or 1999.

The End