Childhood: Newcastle V Birmingham

I remember going to my grandparents' house in Low Row, Addison. It was a colliery village and it was always a treat to go there in my summer holidays. The house was basically a two up, two down but the downstairs back room was where we slept, with my mum and dad and baby brother. The house had no electricity, just gas lights. There was no bathroom just a scullery with one cold tap. As a kid we always wanted to explore, but we mainly visited our aunties and uncles. We were allowed to play in the road as there was very little traffic. My grandad's garden was up the bank opposite the yard and he kept pigeons in the loft and had a shed where he kept his gardening tools. He had a dog called Lassie and we used to go for walks to Ryton Willows and back along the golf links. I remember being alowed to run up to Norman's shop at the top of the bank. It was a corrugated iron affair and smelt of soap and paraffin but you could buy anything from there, from sweets and pop to cigarettes and newspapers. The brew house or wash house was on the corner with a lamppost that you could swing from. My grandmother used to clean the doorstep every day like everyone else and the only way I could tell the house apart was to identify the white-painted windowsill to the scullery. When Addison was being demolished we had a great time running over the flat roofs of the coal houses or around the overgrown gardens that would have been the pride and joy of many of the miners.
My grandparents John (Jack) and Margaret (Maggie) Wood moved into a retirement bungalow in Ryton. We visited them twice a year on my dad's motorbike and sidecar - a gruelling seven hour journey up via the Ten City coach route. I loved the north east accent more so than the Middle England, and I was fascinated by all the heavy industry on the way up north. Ryton was more select, and rural. I hankered to go to all of the outlying areas where the coal mining industry was just about surviving. Ryton had an air of respectability, unlike Blaydon where we used to go to the pictures with my grandma. Then Blaydon fell foul of the demolishers and the old Victorian buildings were swept away. It took on the form of any old town just waiting to be developed. It still felt that way for many years and yet Ryton has hardly changed at all. It still feels like home.