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.
