About
I was born in Hendon, Sunderland, and left school at age 14. My first job was winetaster’s assistant.
When I wasn’t assisting the winetaster, I was helping him load a wagon with ales, wines, spirits, cigarettes, mops and disinfectant and deliver them to the north Yorkshire hotels owned by the company.
The ales, Bass, Worthington and Guinness, were bottled by about eight girls aged between sixteen and twenty-two.
The way they kicked-up their legs and exposed themselves as they changed their shoes for clogs, made my face so hot and swollen I thought my eyes would pop. ’There’s a bonny blush!’ they’d smiling say, and I felt I turned purple.
The winetasting? At the top of the factory was a tapped hogshead of Australian wine, just below the office window where the manager could keep his eye on it. I’d watch this window while the driver filled a bottle, tasted it, and refilled, ready to shout if I saw the manager enter the office from the far door.
After two years’ of eye-popping, choking, not-knowing-where-to-put-myselfing among those beautiful, smiling, teasing legs and bosoms, I started an electrical engineering apprenticeship with the Sunderland Forge & Engineering Company Limited. I say electrical engineering apprenticeship: it was to become a fitter. According to most of the older lads, even some from the grammar school, electrical engineer, with only years” of nightschool as the route, was unattainable.
Without female distraction, after six years’ of nightschool I was awarded a scholarship. Then after three years’ studying full time I became a Graduate of the Institution of Electrical Engineers. After some practice I became an Associate, and after a little responsibility, a Chartered Electrical Engineer: I was entitled to write C Eng MIEE after my name. My signature endorsed passport photographs.
Can you imagine this impressing the X-Factor producers? Three nights a week after nine-hour shifts, all the home and laboratory work, for six years’? Then three years’ full time? It’s all introvert-producing stuff! We want bright and bushy extroverts! But that’s not why they didn’t put me through Bootcamp. There could be several reasons, with two days” of interviews, auditions and personal examination. I think I know why. I’ll tell you later.
Meanwhile, I became proud dad of Melanie, Nicholas, Timothy and Antony.
‘Dad, I wish when I was young that you’d told me I was beautiful,’ said my daughter not so long ago after she had made me proud grandad of Miles, Richard and Jeniffer.
‘I just took it for granted that you were,’ I answered.
‘When you came along, I was no stranger to beauty. Your aunty Avril, my sister was beautiful growing; and your uncle Ken, my kid brother. And there are the old photos of my mam and dad before they were married. You can see what they both fell in love with.’
All the same, now that she’d mentioned it, I wish I had told my daughter she was beautiful. Others did.
I went to collect her from the home of a boy she liked. For them both it was one of those lovely innocent attractions that are too early to be sexual: the other person is just so interesting. The boy’s dad worked late a lot, but this time he happened to be home. As the four of us stood in their hall the dad said to his son; ‘You’ve talked a lot about her. Now I know why. You never told me she is beautiful.’ And his son and my daugher stood there, the one not grasping what was being said to him, neither the other what was being said of her.
So am I right in making a point of telling my next youngest grandaughter, Sally, that she is beautiful? Will being told cause Sally to become looks-obsessed, or make her quietly and contentedly confident? After all, I’d only be stating a truth. And I love truth.
Here is my daughter, Melanie, at about that time:
