Mining My Archive

A Memory of Esh Winning.

At the age of ten, my father moved me and the rest of the family from Low Fell to Esh Winning, without consulting any of us, including my mother. He had bought a tumble-down holiday cottage, situated between the pit-heap and the sewerage farm. The garden contained gooseberry bushes, a hand-pump for water, and a cesspit. I had to commute from Low Fell via Durham to Esh Winning and back from September to November, 1950, while 'Hardstruggles' (ex-'Waterloo Cottage') was being made fit for my mother to bring up me and my sisters (one-year-old and six-years-old at the time). From November on, I walked to school - along the Durham Road to South Terrace, where I would be joined by children either going the short distance to 'our' school, or to the rival Catholic school. 'Our school' was across the road from the Majestic Cinema which charged 6d to watch the likes of Roy Rogers on Saturday mornings; theirs was close to the 'fleapit' at the other end of the village. It charged 3d for similar fare: the dialogue sometimes being drowned out by heavy rain or hail on the metal roof. At school on the first morning, with 35 pairs of eyes fixed on me, I was saved from the sort of misery I had experienced as a 7-yr-old 'new boy' in the Low Fell school in 1947, by being placed by the old, emergency-trained schoolmaster in the only spare ('semi-detached') seat - at the front of the class. The boy forced to cohabit the double-desk with me was called Clive Wilkinson. He was ten: too bright for his own age-group. He went on to get a 1st Class Science degree and a PhD at Cambridge, and to become a Professor, renowned for his work in the study of crystallography (for prestige, running Bobby Robson close, I think). He died in 2019. Apart from Clive's frriendship, another reason I got accepted was because I was happy playing football and cricket on the 'Rec' - and when my mid-thirties, bachelor uncle came up from Birmingham for his B.S.A. holidays, he was happy to join in - and then buy home-made 1d ice-lollies from the Elite (pronounced E-light by everyone) for twenty-or-more 'scruffs.' Happy days!

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