11, 12 & 13

11, 12 and 13

So this is where things really start to happen I guess. And it started with a pretty devastating event. At 11 years old on Christmas day my maternal Grandmother died. Us kids were blissfully unaware. My mum and dad decided not to tell us until after boxing day because they didn’t want to ruin our Christmas. Now if that doesn’t demonstrate a parents love for their children, I really do not know what does.

I loved my “nana” loads, she was a stereotypical grandma. Grey hair with her curlers in or wearing a headscarf, glasses, always had a big smile and a hug for the grandkids. Some of the things I remember about her was that she loved table water biscuits spread with butter. She could peel an orange in her pocket with one hand so you only knew she was eating one when you got a whiff of the orange. Another little quirk she had was that when she made a phone-call to anyone, she would remember halfway through the call that she had made the call and just hang up to save money. She was funny like that. Her and granddad had been together from being kids really. Over 40 years together. It makes me sad that at the age I am now I won’t live long enough to be with someone that length of time and have that kind of enduring relationship. I cried for days when nana went.

Losing nana was my first real experience of a major loss. The only other one I can remember from so young was the death of my dog Timmy. He was a miniature Yorkshire terrier. Lovely, friendly little dog who got hit by a car. I remember my dad on the verge of a fight with the driver because anyone who knows Telford Road on the Thorney Close housing estate will know that it’s about 400 yards of perfectly flat and unobstructed road with a 30mph limit and that driver was doing well over the limit and made no attempt to stop. He was driving a white Opel Manta. Well if you could call it driving. I thought dad was going to lynch him.

Speaking of dad lynching someone. I vividly remember a time when all the lads in the street were playing football with my posh Mitre Delta V3000 “casey” football. It was a birthday present and I loved that ball it was what Sunderland used in “proper” footie matches. We were playing a game of gates. Where each lad was posted on a gate in the street and you had to defend your gate. It was a one on one game and because you had to leave your gate to attack you were always vulnerable. Anyway, this day one of the lads (I can’t remember who) had booted the ball into the back garden of one of the houses on the street. I went to knock on the door to ask for it back and the guy who lived there opened the door with my ball and promptly put a screwdriver into it. I was mortified. I ran over the road and straight into the house crying holding my now deflated casey and between sobs explained what had happened. Well that was it, dad stormed across the road and banged on the door. A row ensued with dad demanding the money to replace the ball and the guy who lived there being pretty abusive about the whole incident. A bit of a crowd had formed at the front wall to watch this public show and I can’t remember the exact course of the conversation but what I do remember is the guy taking a swing at my old man and ending up being grabbed and thrown over the hedge and into the front garden, quickly followed by my dad where a full on scrap ensued. The end result being that I got a new ball and the guy never burst it if it ever went into his garden again.

Another loss I experienced when I was 11 was watching Sunderland lose the Milk cup. Was a decent game against Norwich. Clive Walker missed a penalty, other chances were spurned and Norwich got a goal out of nothing. David Corner was attempting to shepherd the ball out of play when it was promptly nicked off him played into the box before being laid back to Asa Harford who smacked a shot and bloody Gordon Chisholm stuck his gut out and wrong footed Chris Turner who could only watch it sail past him into the net. Now Gordon Chisholm was never going to set the world alight as a player but he was decent. The problem was I remember him having this amazing knack of having the ball booted at him and into his own goal. Maybe it was bad luck, maybe it was a conspiracy, who knows. All I know is that David Corner (the man who lost the ball down at the corner flag) saw his professional career nosedive after that. I don’t think any of the fans could forgive him. And that was how we lost the Milk cup final.

Me aged 12

The following year I started senior school. Bede Secondary. I was part of the last intake. When I left it became Wearside College. Consequently each year with no new intake numbers dwindled and most of the good teachers left meaning we were left to do our GCSE’s with supply teachers taking lessons. I had some great times at Bede and I can honestly say I loved my time there. In many ways I can be a bit of a geek and have a thirst for knowledge. In other ways I’m aware that I’m a thinker rather than a doer. As with any start in a new school there is the inevitable jockeying for position. The unspoken hierarchy amongst the kids there. I think I came up somewhere in the middle if I’m honest. I was this big fat kid, not cool, a little awed really. Being bullied throughout junior school hadn’t done my confidence the world of good and as a result the bullying continued during this first year. Different bully’s but the methods and end result were pretty much the same. This time it was older kids so I was even more intimidated. I did my best to ignore it but it can easily get on top of you. I concentrated on my school work. I wasn’t in any great shape and P.E. lessons were often cross country running which I hated with a passion. It was easy to pick on the fat slow kid at the back of the group. I remember thinking this was my lot. That I was always going to be bullied, always going to be this worthless fat lump that no one gave any positive attention or time to. It was absolute nonsense of course as I had good friends and my family all of whom were great but thats how being bullied drags you down and at the time it was difficult to appreciate the good things because the bad was pretty overwhelming.

At the end of that first year I’d somehow managed to be top of the class in pretty much every subject. I have no idea how I managed that to be honest but I did. The summer holidays were more than just a summer break, it was a break from the bullying. I really needed that. I never really told anyone about the bullying as it was my problem. I had to deal with it, or so it felt. That summer I spent most days with the lads in the street playing football, cricket, British Bulldog, murderball and a thousand other games. This activity meant I lost a fair bit of weight and I also had a massive growing bout. I went back to school in the September a totally different Scott to the one who had finished the previous year. I had resolved to put an end to the taunts and feeling worthless. I followed advice I had been given years earlier. I had decided not to catch each one on their own, but rather just to single out the main culprit, the leader if you like. I had no idea how I was going to do it as he always had his little band of hangers on around him but it kind of happened by chance. I remember going to the toilets one break time and there he was taking a piss. I walked over, said his name and as he turned his head, I just hit him. I threw everything I had into that punch. I was shaking as much with rage as with fear. I think if I hadn’t just done it I would have likely talked myself out of it. Well it worked. There he was cowered in the corner bloody nose and covered in his own piss. I only said two more words to him before I walked out. “No more”. After that the bullying stopped. I instantly became a little bit more popular in school and I felt about a foot taller. Im not claiming to be invincible. I’m not an aggressive man, yes I do like a challenge and I can be hard headed at times but I’m no hardman. I am possessed of that great English quality whereby we can be pushed and pushed without reaction but when we are finally stirred to act, its decisive. That is how empires are forged. Well that and cups of tea. Never go into battle without a good cuppa. Granted I don’t have an empire (yet) but I do have a good cuppa.

Another big turning point in my life happened when I was 13. Practicing for school sports day I discovered I was a bit of a dab hand at the shot putt. The school record at the time for my year was around the 8 metre mark. Well come sports day I launched the little canon ball to 10m 16cm. I can’t explain how good that felt. I liked that feeling and I didn’t want to have to wait until the next sports day to feel it again. My English teacher at the time (Mary Ellis) was also a high jump coach at Sunderland Harriers Athletics Club. She invited me to go along there to train. I went and there were literally hundreds of kids doing all manner of events. I met a guy called Jerry Young who was the field events coach. He took me under his wing and so my athletics career was born. I competed firstly in indoor athletics meetings at Gateshead Stadium. I was winning medals left right and centre. I got fitter, stronger and my confidence was growing practically by the day. It didn’t just stop at shot putt. I tried out for the school football team too and weirdly was picked to play centre half. Somehow I had managed to become a little more coordinated with my feet. Our team was pretty average to be fair but we won more than we lost so it was no disaster.

Me aged 13 Throwing Shot putt (changed a bit from being 12)

I spent the summer competing for Sunderland Harriers in the then Girobank athletics league, more often than not winning the shot, and getting good points in the discus too. I began to enjoy the discus more. It was the fact it flew further and if you caught it right it looked amazing. Sometimes I would do the triple jump or high jump just for extra points. It was all about the competition for me. All about participating. Then one day we were competing at Cleckheaton in a league match and I saw this guy in the cage spinning like a top faster faster faster then boom, he launched this ball on a wire into the air and it went for miles. I was gobsmacked. I remember thinking “That, Im going to do that” I had never seen anyone throw a hammer before I had no idea who would be able to coach me or if I could even do it but I knew I was going to do it. There was a guy called Selwyn Towers used to throw it for Sunderland and he agreed to help me out. He didn’t train down at the track much so i only got to practice with him maybe once a fortnight but it wasn’t long before I entered my first competition. I couldn’t turn with it but only swing it around my head and throw but I managed 27metres. Selwyn managed to teach me one turn which saw my distance increase beyond the 30metre barrier. I was hooked completely. At 13 I was competing for the senior mens team and holding my own too. At Lightfoot (Newcastle) I was competing and Selwyn’s older brother Steve was throwing for Elswick harriers. I’d never met Steve, didn’t know who he was even but he went into the cage and did 4 turns and threw around the 46 metre mark. Full of my new found confidence, after the competition I approached him and asked him if he would coach me. I remember him looking a little shocked and speechless, but eventually he took my details and said he would get in touch with me when he had given it some thought. I must have waited a couple of weeks before he rang me and agreed to coach me. I was over the moon. And so began the 4 times weekly trips on the train then metro to Gateshead Stadium, getting funny looks from people who didn’t know what these strange looking metal balls on wire were that I was carrying around with me. Steve was an excellent coach. I was the first athlete he coached but I was keen and I listened which maybe made his job easier. Within a couple of years he had built a little squad of throwers he coached and had a lot of success with. Shortly after I started being coached by Steve he had gained another athlete. A lad called Steve Dolan. Who incidentally was in my class at school. Steve was a good lad and worked hard in training. We developed a very good rivalry over the coming years and I think that spurred us both on to be better. My sister also started throwing and training with us, she was a pretty good discus thrower and one of the first women in England to take up hammer throwing at a time when it was still not fully recognised as an event in the womens side of athletics.

It was through athletics and around this time I met my good mate Andy Rutland. He started at Sunderland Harriers as a Discus thrower. He was coached by his dad Tom who is a lovely bloke and his mum Jeri who was one of the chattiest women I’ve ever met (in a great way) was always there to support him too. Andy has always been a bit shorter than me but he is from the same mould. Fiercely competitive and always gives 100%. Like me he is also left-handed. The only difference being that he throws left handed whilst I throw right handed for some strange reason. Anyone who has ever competed in athletics will know that runners are generally one clique whereas field eventers fall into the other. So naturally we became mates. Apart from a few years where we lost touch later down the road, we are now back in contact and Andy is now my powerlifting coach, mentor and great friend.  

Aged 6 - 10

Well we had finally moved home to a three bedroom semi on a council housing estate called Thorney Close. Compared to the flat, this place was enormous. And at last I had my own room. Yes it was just an 8 by 8 box room - Kimberley had the bigger room, her being the oldest – but it was a room of my own. When we first moved in, the back garden was like a jungle. Twenty feet high privet hedges grew right across from fence to fence. It wasn’t until I forced my way through a small gap into an even bigger jungle of four feet high grass and my granddad came looking for me, that my parents realised just how big the garden was. They thought the privets were the bottom but they were only about twenty feet into the garden. There was another forty feet of land between the privets and the back fence.

My parents still live in that house and the back garden now is amazing. For the most part it was my mam who was the green fingered one, but since dad has retired he has become something of a resident Percy Thrower. When they first tackled the jungle, dad used all manner of weird and wonderful gardening tools. I’d never seen any of them before, the flat having only a concrete back yard. There was the paraffin grass burner, the petrol rotivator, petrol strimmer and this huge lawn roller that I couldn’t move an inch but dad seemed to move like it was made of paper. It took them a good while to get it to something resembling a lawn but somehow they managed it. Personally I felt that my contribution of pulling up the odd weed and putting stones into a pile in the corner was the most important job of all, and without this effort mam and dad would have gotten nowhere. Thirty years later and mam and dad still haven’t got the garden the way they want it. There is always some other job that needs to be done. They’ve added a patio, a water feature, two New Zealand trees (which are impressive as far as trees go), a brick barbecue, a wooden wishing well, a shed and a vegetable patch. No doubt in the summers to come there will be other additions to and subtractions from the grounds of the Thompson Estate but what they will be, who knows?

Winter was a pretty harsh time in the Thompson house on account of there being no radiators upstairs. You would wake up on a morning with just the top of your head out of the covers. Slowly lowering the blankets to see how quickly your nose got cold. Most days you could snap your breath off it was that cold. Many times there was ice on the inside of the windows. I’m not talking about a little bit of frost or condensation. I’m talking ice, thick ice the kind you could chip off and put in a drink. One thing this lack of upstairs heating was good for though, was to increase family contact. In later years when I had moved out as had Kimberley, only my brother remained at home and he would come in from work and go straight to his room, rarely spending any time with the olds. Back then though, you really had no choice. You either sat together watching TV or playing a board game in the sittingroom where it was warm or went to your bedroom to freeze. Some nights for supper we would have toast. Now we didn’t have a toaster in those days so we used to do it in front of the fire with a slice of bread on a long fork and toast it that way. It took ages to make enough for everyone, and you got a right sweat on being so close to the fire, but I used to like making toast that way.

Of course moving to a new house meant moving to a new school. I attended Thorney Close Primary School.  It was a good school, and I had a great time there. It used to have the longest corridors of any school in Sunderland at one time but they’ve since installed fire doors at stages to divide up the walkways. It was at Thorney primary as it was fondly known that I developed a love for football. This has since diminished somewhat and I only really like to watch Sunderland play in the English game. Other than that, I really don’t think you can go past the Bundesliga for pure football.  Modern footballers are all just too bloody soft. We used to play in all weathers. Sliding tackles were always the order of the day, even on concrete-like frozen pitches in the winter. If you got hurt there was no magic sponge. You were just told to stamp your foot and run it off. Modern footballers would probably be out injured for a full season if they experienced some of the tackles that went flying in. They go down like they’ve been shot by a Japanese sniper if someone breathes on them these days. Soft as shite!! Our football teacher at the time was Mr Curtis (Phil). I always remember him being a giant of a man. He totally lived football, even owning a shop round the corner from Roker Park (Sunderland AFC’s old ground) selling vintage and rare football programmes. The school always had two teams. I was a goalkeeper. There seemed to be a long tradition of Thompsons being goalkeepers. My cousin David (who had also moved house and school to Thorney Close that same year) was keeper for the first team. His older brother Joseph was likewise a goalkeeper. (In recent years Joe played in goal for a local team that almost made it to the first round proper of the FA cup). I was the second team keeper and always substitute keeper for the first team. Its just as well I was a goalie. I had bugger all skill to speak of with my feet. My hands however were safe as houses. Added to that was the fact that I could kick the ball from my hands, almost the full length of the pitch, which proved to be a pretty handy trick. Forget Rory Delap’s throw-ins. They’re nothing to write home about, a big fuss over nothing special. Try handling a ball dropping from the heavens onto the penalty spot at 50mph and you’ve got something to worry about. Amazingly I hit the crossbar from these kicks more times than I can remember but sadly never scored with one.

My lack of dribbling ability and rocket like left foot, probably had a lot to do with maintaining my impeccable record for breaking windows, (my temper often helped that too). I must have broken at least three of the school’s windows during playtime when we played in the yard. After the third one, the windows were unsurprisingly replaced with Perspex sheeting. I’m sure my mam had a standing order with the headmistress to pay for broken windows in instalments. I never broke small windows, always big expensive ones. I even broke the sitting room window at home on a number of occasions. What can I say? Football and windows, a deadly combination, and I was prolific at bringing the two together.

Some of the most eventful incidents from this time in my life came during games of football. Often a squad of 10 or 20 of us kids from the street used to go to the school field to have a game. We always ignored the “Trespassers will be prosecuted” sign as we climbed over the big metal gates, locked to keep us out. Thing is, the caretaker never minded us playing there. One of the dads from the street would usually come with us as referee. One time we were playing a game one balmy summers evening. There was me, Gavin and Martin Brettel, Steve Morton, Dennis Smith, Kirk Weston and Steve Donkin. There were others but I can’t remember all of the names. Gav and Martin’s dad was ref. While we were playing, there were some girls sitting on one of the small hills at the side of the field. I distinctly remember them making cheeky comments the whole time. Then one of them threw a stick onto the field. It just missed Steve Donkin, so I picked it up and returned it. It was a hell of a shot. It hit the lass right in the boat race. Obviously she ran off crying. Gav’s dad suggested we call it a night, so off we went home. Later that night, there was a knock at the front door and there was a copper. He asked if he could come in. It was about the stick incident. After explaining to my dad what had happened (well the girls version of events) he asked if he could have a word with me, so I was called down from my room. I sat there in the living room as this copper reeled off some script about how what I did was dangerous and she could press charges for actual bodily harm. Then the copper made the mistake of threatening me. Not with violence or anything like that. He said the words “you know I can send you to jail for this”. Well that was it. Dad went off like a firework. “what”? he shouted. “Now you listen to me, the lad has done wrong, he has accepted that but no-one ever comes into my house and threatens my son like that. You’ve said more than you need to or have any right to say now get out of my house”. I didn’t know where to put myself. On the one hand I was bricking it (fear of my dad) and on the other I was dying to laugh. Here was this copper giving it the large one, then my dad just took the wind right out of his sails, broke his yard-arm and sank his battleship. The lawman tried desperately to placate my dad but he was pissing into the wind really, anyone who knows my dad well enough, knows there’s nothing can stop him when he is in full swing. He is both the irresistible force AND the immovable object.

The end result being that the copper was dispatched with his balloon totally deflated. Then I got a right royal telling off followed by a lecture about how coppers think they ARE the law etc etc. My dad really has no love for the police whatsoever. I think it’s fair to say that if a copper was on fire my dad would warm his hands. If I’m totally honest, I’d be pulling up a chair next to him with my long fork and some bread to toast, old style. Dads distaste for all things police related stems I think from an incident I’ve heard retold many times from when dad was a young man. He had been to Roker Park to watch Sunderland play with one of his brothers. As they left the ground there was a commotion and they saw this copper getting a proper pasting off a group of lads. So in waded dad and dragged these lads off this copper, saving him from an even worse beating. Who gets nicked? That’s right, mon pere cest hero! He saves a copper and gets his collar felt. Well you can imagine he wasn’t best chuffed with that outcome. Subsequent to that dad has always been critical of the police, and I don’t blame him. A more inept organisation has never existed in my opinion. They’re all power hungry wankers. I’ve had mates who became coppers and almost overnight turned into bell-ends. I can tell you some stories about coppers, but that comes later in my life. So you will just have to keep reading if you want to find out what I know.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah! Football related incidents.

Another significant  incident that occurred while I was playing football was the burning down of the Thorney Close school assembly hall. The same squad of lads were having a kick around. It was a summers day sometime during the six-week holidays. It was one of those long hot summer days. Where you struggled to catch your breath. The field was dusty, with not much grass on it, especially in the goalmouths from all the games played during the school year. We had stopped for half time. It’s worth noting that half time was never timed to be halfway through the game. It usually coincided with someone who had brought some dilute orange to drink stopping for a sip. That was the cue for everyone else to stop playing and rush over before it was all gone. Halftime could be anything from ten minutes to an hour. So as we were all lounging around I noticed someone on the school roof running around. The school was built in the 50’s and had flat felt roofing, typical of a lot of schools built around that time. It wasn’t unusual to see kids running around up there, it was just another of the health and safety conscious things we did. Not long after the kid on the roof had disappeared, one of the lads noticed smoke coming from one of the small assembly hall windows. Whilst we all had a healthy curiosity, we were all possessed of an even healthier sense of self preservation, so we decided to scarper.

My house was just around the corner from the school so I had a pretty good view of the huge plume of smoke now rising from the assembly hall. After watching it a little while and after the sound of the fire engine sirens had stopped, there was a knock at the door and it was one of my mates. He told me there was a huge crowd gathered at the school to watch so we should go for a better look. We went back round to the school and stood among the crowds. Sitting on the grass to the right of the main entrance, alongside the caretakers house we had the perfect vantage point. Huge clouds of smoke were billowing out from the windows, you could see some flames but most were obscured by the acrid black fumes spewing out. Hoses from the fire engines were everywhere and there must have been somewhere in the region of 50 firemen there. The heat was tremendous. When the fire was finally put out and the firemen were packing up, the show was over so we headed off home. Later that day there was another knock at the door. It was some detective sergeant from the nearby Farringdon police station. They wanted to question me about the fire. When dad got home from work I was taken up to the police station where I was put into what I can only describe as a meeting room. Sat there with mam and dad, neither of whom looked very impressed with me, I wasn’t feeling very chipper either. The detective sergeant came back into the room and opened a file on the table. Apparently I had been seen running from the school grounds by the caretaker. He had identified me to the police when I had gone back to watch the show. It was bloody obvious he was going to notice me, at the time I was a good six inches taller than all my mates so I stood out prouder than a honeymooners dick. I don’t remember a whole lot about how the conversation went in the cop shop but I do know that they were trying to pin the blame squarely on me. I explained how I was there playing football and I told them exactly who was playing football with me. One thing I didn’t do was tell them who had set fire to the hall. I knew exactly who it was but I wasn’t about to be a grass. Besides the lad who did it was someone who I was regularly bullied by in school and that was a bigger threat than anything this copper could have thrown at me. The accusations continued to fly my way until I remember my dad having had enough of it and sternly and abruptly bringing proceedings to a close. The detective put in his place and we left for home.

A couple of weeks later they caught the culprit. I’m not entirely sure what punishment was meted out, but we never saw him in school again after that. I still don’t know which one of the lads ratted him out, and I don’t care. I wasn’t pursued any further about it and that was all that mattered to me. I really should have had a formal apology from the police but being realistic, if they apologised every time they messed up, they would spend all their time doing that rather than the nothing they already do.

On the subject of bullying, I was often bullied as a kid. Mainly due to my being a lot bigger than the rest of the kids in my year at school. Schools will always deny that bullying takes place, basically they just don’t want the attention it brings. It almost always gets brushed under the carpet. A lot of people might wonder why or how someone can bully someone who is physically stronger than they are. Well bullying is a psychological thing. Anyone who has been a victim of it knows this only too well. Often the bully will have a squad of hangers-on who themselves are intimidated into being friendly with them. This strength in numbers gives the bully the leverage he needs to intimidate others. It’s a power thing. Little man syndrome. To know you are feared by people who shouldn’t fear you. Almost always as a result of some insecurity, the bully has a need to control others. Once they’ve got you intimidated they turn the screw. The victim loses all self confidence and becomes more easily manipulated and it’s a downward spiral.

I remember one time I raised my hands to someone who was bullying me and I ended up in front of the head mistress. My mam was there too. The headmistress told me that if anyone bullied me I was to tell a teacher, and if anyone ever hit me I was not to hit them back because I could hurt them a lot more than they could hurt me. I remember mam telling her that if anyone hit me I had her permission to hit them as hard as I could. And if they got hurt it was their own fault. See, there really is no mileage in telling a teacher when you’re being bullied. All you get is a telling off for telling tales. So where’s your motivation to ever mention it again? There is none. No! If you’re being bullied your only real recourse is to take matters into your own hands. That may sound a very Neanderthal way of dealing with it, but the truth of the matter is that it’s the only way that yields results. If that’s not how you’re supposed to deal with it then why did it work when I resolved matters that way? Why did it work for my brother when he experienced similar bullying during his school years? In both our cases the teachers did nothing. We had to deal with it and deal with it we did. In later years when I became a dad, I passed on this advice to my son. “If someone bullies you son, just get them on their own and hit them, and keep hitting them until they cry and beg you to stop. Then tell them that if they even so much as look at you in the eye ever again, you won’t stop when they beg next time”. Even if you hit a bully and they overpower you and you get a pasting. You can bet your bottom dollar that they will think twice about bullying you again because a bully is a coward who will not be easily prepared to take a punch for his power-trip.

So apart from being amazingly talented at breaking windows and being the target for bullies, what else did I get up to during my junior school years. Well, reading and writing poetry was one thing I excelled at, singing and acting in school plays I did well and sport.......It’s true to say that in sport there are some disciplines I am suited to and some I am not. Take running for instance. I’m built for short bursts of enormous power. For 20 or 30 yards I’m as fast as anyone. Anything beyond that and I’m gonna finish last. I just am. My only real success in any form of running type event was in the three legged race. I was paired with a lad called Graeme Eccles. He was a good mate back then. We won that race on sports day at a canter. If the distance to cover was 30yards then we must have won by 15. What was our secret? Easy really! When the gun went to start the race, I put my arm around Graeme, picked him up off the floor and ran. Some say it was cheating. Me? I say it showed initiative. I had identified the fundamental weakness in a three legged race and I had applied some lateral thinking and devised a flawless solution. That was the only event I won that day. I wasn’t even allowed to enter the cricket ball throw because in practice I was beating everyone else by an obscene margin so it was deemed unfair to everyone else that I compete at it. This was the first time I had ever experienced a match fixing scandal. In football my cousin David conspired to break his arm so I was elevated to the first team and we went on 2 glorious cup runs as well as topping the league. David recovered in time for the finals which our school won and we finished league champions. As well as my stint in the first team I kept goal for the second team simultaneously and we won the Moore cup. Graeme Eccles scoring a screamer from the half-way line.

In my four years in junior school I had 3 teachers Mrs Conley, Mrs George and Miss Sneddon who married and became Mrs Humble. Easily my favourite was Mrs Conley. She was a tiny woman, she could be strict but was always fair. One thing I always remembered about her was that she never owned a television. This seemed incredible to me. What she did do though was to encourage my love of books. By the time I was in the second year juniors I had finished all the usual school books, so Mrs Conley would bring in more “grown up” books for me to read. Things like The Hobbit by Tolkien. I wrote a lot of poems back then too. Mostly just kids rhyming stuff, but one was published. I was really proud of that. My son later followed in my footsteps and had a poem of his own published whilst he was in junior school too.

I used to participate in a lot of the school am-dram productions too. I was king Herod in one years’ nativity play. I played the Mayor of Hamlyn in another. That part had a lot of lines and I can happily say I managed to memorise them all. I think my finest hour was playing the Minotaur. I had to wear a brown boiler suit, cricket gloves with big spikes on them and a huge papier mache bulls head complete with horns. I didn’t have a single line in that one, I just had to growl a lot. I remember the final performance. Parents were there as well as kids from the nursery. The first time I roared my way onto the stage, some of the nursery kids were in tears, genuinely frightened. As the show went on they were coming round to me, then they were cheering for the Minotaur and when Gavin Brettle’s Theseus finally put me to the sword there were more tears from the toddlers. This time, in total devastation at my demise at the hands of a kid in a toga. Clearly I’m some kind of genius method actor as I took those kids through a whole gambit of emotion from fear to love to loss. All without a single spoken word or facial expression. Now THAT’s acting.

Something worth mentioning about this performance is that the school video recorded it and put the video on sale. Parents were allowed to take pictures too. This seems to be something that is no longer permitted. I’ve been to watch my kids in various shows at school and every time now the head teacher will open the show by saying cameras are banned. Apparently every parent is now a potential paedophile and might sell pictures of their kids to other perverts on the net. It’s a fucking joke. I can’t take pictures of my own kids doing something like being one of the three wise men or one of the shepherds in a nativity play but the school can allow the local newspaper to come and take pictures of my kids to promote something the school has done. What’s the difference? Oh that’s right, there is none. I’m proud of my kids as I’m sure most parents are and I love seeing them get recognition in the press for their achievements. So why the hell shouldn’t I be allowed to keep my own photographic record of those things too?

When I was seven a huge event happened in my life. My brother was born. This should have been a happy time. For me it was devastating. Not because there was competition for the affections of my parents as some psychologists might claim. No, it was because I now had to share a room again. From the first five years of my life sharing with my older sister, I then had the brief and fleeting period of 18months with my own space before having to share with this crying, eating, shitting thing. I was gutted. But as with so many things in life you just have to make the best of a bad situation and crack on.

From another perspective this was a particularly golden period in the Thompson family home. Dad had gotten a job as a driver with a company called Caterae. His job was to transport chefs and support staff to Aberdeen and/or Great Yarmouth for them to take a helicopter out to oil rigs in the north sea. He loved that job. It was hard graft with really unsociable hours (early starts, overnight stays and late finishes) but it got him away from whingeing pensioners and unruly schoolkids on coachtrips. It also paid him a cracking wage back in the early 80’s. As a result our house suddenly had a lot of new fangled technology. I remember dad buying this huge JVC 4 decked stereo system. We used to record the charts on it on a Sunday evening and dad transferred a lot of his vinyl collection onto tape for when he was driving. We got (amongst other things) a microwave. That cost a bomb but it was cutting edge stuff, so cutting edge that there were no microwave cookbooks or even microwave meals available, so it was mostly just used for warming stuff up. We got a VHS video recorder. That was amazing. It was a huge thing with piano key style buttons on the front and you loaded the tape in a drawer that popped up from the top of the machine. It had a remote control that you had to plug in and the cable was never long enough to reach the nearest chair so you still had to get off your backside to do anything. Unlike with modern things like on demand television or sky+ you could only record the channel the TV was set to so you couldn’t record one programme while you watched a different one. We had loads of blank tapes that got filled up with all manner of televisual crap. And these tapes were kept in plastic cases that were made to look like leather bound books. Probably the most awe inspiring thing we got back then was our first home computer. It was a Sinclair Spectrum ZX48k+ (that was the one with the hard keys), by modern standards it’s a complete heap of useless shit but back then it was the mutts nuts. The games for it were appalling, you had to wire it into your telly and to load programmes you used cassettes. Even the simplest game had a loading time of around 15 minutes and would only successfully load maybe one time in three. So it would on average take 45 minutes to load a game then you had the game completed in about 20 minutes. A bit pants really. Despite its failings I was addicted to it. I would get wrong for playing on it too much. Especially a game called Harrier Attack. You were this tiny harrier jump-jet that flew along the screen and had to shoot other planes and drop bombs on targets. When you got shot down the sound effect was a sharp crack and your plane would literally just snap in half and that was that. Kids today wouldn’t put up with it really but that’s progress. Before the computer, games consisted of monopoly, buckaroo, frustration, connect four and if you were lucky you had a chessboard with all the right pieces. I loved chess, still do in fact. I only ever competed in one chess tournament and I finished runner up. I still remember the final match that I lost. I was playing a kid called Stephen Green and I had him beat then I lost concentration and stupidly moved my queen one place too far and it was taken. Well that was it. With my queen gone I lost the plot and ultimately the match. For a while afterwards, any game I played I would deliberately sacrifice my queen early on so I had to learn to play without it. That way I wouldn’t panic if I lost it at a key point like I did in that final. I’m a big believer in knowing your own weaknesses and working on them to make them strengths. Maybe losing that game is what brought me to that realisation. You live and learn.

This was the period in my life when I started exploring the city. Days, when a ticket for the bus was 4p and you could literally go from one end of town to the other. Often in the summer holidays we wouldn’t bother with the bus, we would walk everywhere. Many was the time the usual suspects (all the lads in the street) would go for a wander down through Barnes park extension and just keep going til we hit the coast. Then we would spend the whole day at Seaburn doing pretty much nothing at all. Carefree days, everything we did cost nothing at all. If you had a ball or a bat and ball you were occupied for hours on end. Then it was the long walk home. It was roughly a 10 mile round trip, and on little legs it felt further but not a second thought was given. I’m not sure if people have gotten more paranoid over the years or the media coverage regarding paedophiles has placed this particular danger at the forefront of peoples’ minds but I’m pretty certain that there are no more of these vile creatures around now than there were back then, we just know more about them. I wouldn’t have dreamed of allowing my kids to go on the wanders that I used to when I was 8 or 9 but back then it was the norm. I remember making rope swings in Barnes park, wandering up to Silksworth lake, someone had spread this rumour that there was a sunken car in there so we decided to go look for it. We spent hours there, even devising a grid system to organise the search. Needless to say we never found any car. A few tyres, an old shopping basket, the standard bike frame and a few other random bits and bobs, but no car. Disappointing, really. I’m still not sure what we thought we were going to do with the car if we found it but I guess that’s not the point.

In the beginning.

Where do you begin with these things, really?  I think there comes a time in a man’s life when he finally takes time to reflect on what he has achieved and the mistakes he has made in life. I guess I’ve reached that point. Depending on your perspective you could say I’ve had an eventful life and I’ve achieved a lot. On the other hand you could equally say that despite some successes, I’ve been pretty good at making poor choices and failed in things that matter the most.

Whatever your view. My opinion is that I’ve achieved some good things, and I’ve failed in others. All of this has lead me to where I am today. By writing everything down I might just be able to figure out who I am and what I really want. Because Christ knows, until now I’ve had no idea.

So where did I come from?

That’s a good question. I’m a child of the 70’s, born into a working class family, from Sunderland in the North East of England. Once home to the biggest shipyard in the world. Historical home to the ancestors of George Washington (the first president of the United States of America). The first place in mainland Britain to produce ornate glassworks. The Venerable Bede worked between St Peters Church founded in 674AD in Monkwearmouth and a monastery in Jarrow. It was between these two places that he invented the Julian Calendar that is used the world over, to this very day.  My family was the old fashioned type where dad was the breadwinner and mam stayed at home. There’s a lot to be said for having a full time home based parent in my view. I think the reason society is in such a mess these days, is due to both parents having to go out to work. Believe it or not, many parents would like to be at home and be full-time parents, but most have no choice in the matter. The cost of living in Britain being such that two incomes are needed merely to exist, rather than to provide luxuries like holidays and that big flat screen TV, although all the charver scum seem to have them despite being perpetually on the dole.

I’ve been a bailiff, a government official, a civil servant, a college tutor, a delivery driver, a nightclub doorman. I’ve been through redundancy, and dismissal. I’ve represented my country in the sporting arena.  I’m a son, a brother, a father and an uncle. I’ve been married and divorced. I have been as fit as a butchers dog, and as fat as butter.  I’m a left-handed atheist with an IQ of 147.

I’ve been in love three times, loved another but was never totally in love with them. I’ve slept with more women that society thinks I should have, less women than I could have, but as many women as made me happy at the time.

 

My father was a coach/bus driver until he retired. A staunch union man, all for the workers and maintaining a healthy distrust of management. He calls a spade a spade and isn’t ashamed to give his opinion, however controversial that might be. Trust me when I say that they can be as controversial as it is possible to be. I’d like to think that is a quality I have taken from him, but I know he would just say I’m an argumentative bastard. When it comes to money, and making the most of a little, there really is no one quite like him. If my dad was chancellor of the exchequer, it’s fair to say that whilst we would all have to tighten our belts a little, the country would be in a much healthier financial state. I always joke with him that we should have been called the MacThompsons. Claiming he is as tight as a Scotsman. But in reality, he is just clever with money. I remember my brother being in a particularly crap situation with debt a few years back. In stepped dad, took over our boy’s finances, took away his bank card, gave him an allowance and within 2 years had everything paid off and had even managed to put enough cash away for my brother to buy a new car. I still joke with him now about how tight he is with cash, but if I am totally honest, I am just joking. I really wish I was more like him when it comes to money. If I have cash in my pocket it gets spent. I don’t think that will ever change.

Despite belonging to a household that never had a huge amount of cash, I like to consider myself well raised. From an early age I was aware of the difference between right and wrong. That’s not to say that I always chose right, but at least I knew what I was doing when I chose wrong. I was never in really serious trouble, at least not with the law. My parents always made it seem like it was far worse than that when I did do something wrong though. My mother is a quiet woman generally so when she raised her voice, you knew you were in bother. My dad was the complete opposite. If he went quiet, there was hell to pay. I always had what I now regard as a healthy fear of my dad. If I was in trouble with mam, she would send me to my room with the threat that she would tell my dad when he got in from work. Well that was the ultimate. I used to sit terrified on my bed (or hiding under it). I remember on at least one occasion, writing “I’m sorry” on a load of paper that I folded into small paper planes and tried to fly them down the stairs and into the living room for mam to read in the hope that she would let me come down from my room and not tell dad what I’d been up to. In my young mind, this was a last ditch attempt at a way out. Desperate times called for desperate measures. Looking back I don’t know why I was really so fearful. I can only remember two occasions when dad ever belted me. To this day he denies ever doing it but I remember them well. And I can honestly say on both occasions I deserved it. Today, the bleeding heart liberal do-gooders would be aghast at this, calling for him to be locked up. Well they can all go to hell. As cliché as it might sound, it did me no lasting harm and in fact I believe it made me a better person. Thankfully, I’ve never had to raise my hands to my own kids, but then they have never given cause for me to do it. I know I could be a little wind up merchant, they aren’t. I’m glad about that because I’m not entirely certain who comes off worse.

My mother made sure that her children didn’t grow up with a strong shipyard Mackem dialect. Yes to some my accent is strong but compared to a lot of kids raised in the same environment, my English is a damn sight closer to the Queens.

So that’s where I’m from in a nutshell really.

Early years.......0 to 5

To be totally honest I don’t remember an awful lot from this period in my life. I remember living in a two bedroomed flat in Shakespeare Street on the Southwick council estate in Sunderland. It was an ok place back then. It’s a total shithole now, largely populated by career charvers, intent on sponging off society for their whole lives. Millions have been spent on redeveloping the place but you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. It’s money down the drain. The vast majority of people there now are neither use nor ornament.

My mam always likes to recount the story of the time when I had just gotten out of the bath, then proceeded to run down the stairs and out of the front door into the street totally naked. I don’t remember this at all. But you know what mothers are like when you take a girlfriend round for the first time. Bring out the embarrassing pictures and anecdotes. Thanks mam.

Things I do remember from this period include going on daily adventures with my cousin David who lived across the street. I remember a trip to the corner shop to fetch eggs and dropping them on the way back. My earliest complete memory was going to see Sunderland play at Roker Park with my Dad, Uncle John and David. I remember being totally in awe of the stadium. I was sat on one of the rails in the Roker end terrace with dad standing behind me stopping me from falling off. I remember vividly the noise of 50,000 people, how green the turf was, hot Bovril from my dad’s flask and the best part of the whole experience was when – at half time – people came round and threw signed ball’s into the crowd and dad caught one for me.

I attended nursery in Southwick, with David. Mam and auntie Brenda walking us there on a morning and once a week mam would take me into this little corner shop on the way home and buy me a little matchbox car. I had hundreds of them. None ever stayed in their boxes more than a few feet from the shop, although if they had done I might well be a damn sight wealthier than I am now.

I shared a room with my sister and we had bunk beds. I used to fight with Kimberley all the time. She had hair so long she could sit on it. Same as mam did back then. Long hair like that isn’t really very practical but to a five year old boy it was heaven sent. Even if I couldn’t catch big sis, I could always catch her hair.

Another big memory I have from this period in my life was having the genius idea to make mam and dad breakfast in bed one morning. I used to have two pet goldfish. My granddad had been eating kippers one day and I think that’s where I got the idea from. To me, two goldfish looked like mini kippers. So one morning I’d gotten up early and gone into the kitchen where I proceeded to take the frying pan and tried to scoop the goldfish out of their tank with it. All I managed to do was to cover the top of the water with fat, terrify the fish, and soak myself in the process. I have no idea how I thought I was going to cook them. The cooker was a complete mystery to me. To my mind, mam put things into a pan, left them on the cooker for a while then took them off, put them on a plate and we ate them. How was I meant to know she was applying heat and cooking them? I thought the cooker did it by magic.

I did break my leg at age five, the summer we were moving out of the flat. It was only a few weeks before we were moving and I would be starting a new school. I was playing with some kids who lived around the corner from my granddads house in an estate called Redhouse. It was a lovely place then and some parts of it are still decent now. One of the older kids had this inspired idea of putting an old mattress in the front garden, then climbing out of an upstairs window onto the shelter above the front door. The idea was to jump off the shelter onto the mattress. I watched all the other kids doing it before building up the courage to give it a go. I stood on the ledge looking down thinking it looked miles, then threw myself off. I must have found the only part of the mattress with no springs left in it and hit the floor with a crack. The crack in question being my right tibia, snapped, half way up. I had to wear a full leg cast for ten weeks. I remember missing the first two weeks of school, and an annual tradition was born. Every summer in the last week or two of the summer holidays, I would contract an illness or cause myself some kind of injury which subsequently caused me to miss a week or two of the start of the new term. It was never intentional but it happened that way all through primary school.

 

I remember my dad used to smoke Regal kingsize. I think every bloke in the world seemed to smoke then. One day I was on one of my adventures with David, and I’d found a tattered old umbrella. I had the idea that this would be a good present for mam and on my way home on the corner of our street I found half a cigar, still smoking. I figured as it was still lit it hadn’t been there long so the 10 second rule was applied. (For those of you unfamiliar with this rule, I’ll explain. It was a standard of hygiene when I was a kid. If you dropped some food or anything that was meant to go in your mouth on the floor, provided you picked it up within ten seconds, kissed it and showed it to god then it was still ok to eat). So having applied this important rule, I proceeded to walk home casually puffing on the cigar with the brolly up. I remember thinking this made me a real grown up. That is until I knocked on my front door and mam saw me with it. Both brolly and cigar were slapped out of my hands and I was marched up the stairs and straight to my room. This was one of the first “Wait til your dad gets in” moments I remember.

L to R: My sister Kimberley (aged 7), Me (aged 5), My cousin Alvin (aged 7)

I think my only other coherent memory from the first five years of my life was being on holiday at a caravan with my mam, sister, auntie Ann and my cousin Alvin. I had these great kiddy speedo’s and spent hours sitting in the nearby river in them. On one of the days I had decided to follow a sheep up a hill which as it turned out was much steeper than I thought, more of a cliff really. I ended up stranded on a tiny ledge about fifty feet up and mam had to get some bloke from the campsite to come rescue me. On one of the other days I slammed the caravan door, shattering the glass in it and injuring Alvin. This was the start of my career as window breaker extraordinaire. I’ve spoken to Alvin about this incident fairly recently and all he can remember is that I was winding him up about something and he had chased me to the caravan. I got there first and slammed the door. He had put up his hand to stop me and his hand went straight through the glass. By all accounts, it hurt like hell and I have been instructed to mention that I could be an absolute twat as a kid. Personally I think that’s a bit on the strong side. Wind up merchant, absolutely, twat, harsh.

Looking back, I’m not entirely sure how any kid born in the 70’s survived really. There were none of the child safety devices available today. Baby cots were painted with lead based paint and as a toddler we no doubt chewed on the cot. The ten second rule was the best form of disinfectant available. We would play in the street all day then have tea without washing our hands, share pop from one bottle with the other twenty kids in the street. Our parents let us play out all day without a care as to where we were as long as we were home for tea.  We climbed trees, built dens, made bows and arrows from bits of privet hedge and elastic bands and shot each other with them. If you were lucky enough to have a bike, the spokes were covered with those square plastic bread bag fasteners and it was compulsory to have a wooden ‘ice lolly’ stick jammed through the spokes to make a motorbike noise when you rode along. If you didn’t have a bike, you make a go-kart out of three bits of old wood, a handful of nails, a bolt, four pram wheels and a bit string. Basic, but effective. Brakes were not a consideration though. I mean, after you had got up a good head of steam, why would you want to stop?

There was none of this internet, games consoles, sky sports, never-mind DVD’s, even video cassette recorders weren’t invented. We had three tv channels, music was on 7inch vinyl and the height of street fashion was Dunlop greenflash or Converse Allstars. If you were really lucky you had a Bukta tracksuit top and some Admiral shorts that were tighter than lycra (also not invented back then). There was no Nike or Reekbok. Puma and Adidas was for the filthy rich. Girls hair was long and boys hair was almost universally cut with a bowl or shaped to resemble a world war two Wehrmacht helmet. Shirt collars were too long and tank tops were too short. Busses had doors at the front and in the middle and a conductor would come round and collect your fare. Fish and chips were the only fast food you could buy. No Chinese or Indian, no KFC or Macdonalds. Although Maws used to do pie and peas. The peas, with gravy in a little plastic bag. Crisps were usually only salt and vinegar, cheese and onion, Bovril, or those plain ones with the little blue bag of salt you could add if you wanted to. If you were really lucky you could find some gammon flavour ones now and then.  As for sweets, well some very stange things were classed as sweets. Imps for a start. I have no idea on what planet you could call them sweets, concentrated little bits of liquorice that burned your mouth. Fisherman’s friends. If you ate a handful of those, you were physically incapable of drinking anything cooler than a cup of hot tea for a week. My favourite sweet back then was the Texan bar. A yellowy-orange coloured bar of chewy something or other covered in chocolate. They were massive. Curly Wurly was another favourite. They too were enormous. These were the days when wagon wheels would literally fit wagons. When Tonka trucks were made of metal and really were indestructible. Janet and John or Ladybird reading books. There were no sunbeds, no fake tan, I’m not sure that deodorant even existed back then, but my dads aftershave of choice was Cedarwood. I’m sure he had some blue stratus, old spice and such like too. In later years he would become a Paco Rabanne devotee, an incident with which, almost cost my (not yet born) younger brother his life. Noone had heard of shower gel. You washed with soap and it was usually Cussons Pearl or if you were lucky it was imperial leather. There was no Radox for a long soak. We did have Matey though and all kids loved a bubble bath (even if I did have to share with my big sis, using the water left after mam and dad had had their bath).

So that was the first five years of my life. Not a lot going on there really, but when you think about it, how much can you really remember from your first five years on the planet?