Home Sweet Home

I grew up on the North East coast, in Whitley Bay, a town that has always been a bit confused about its identity. When I was at school we were told that we lived in a dormitory town, a place which provided homes and easy transport links for all the important people who worked in Newcastle. It was a conservative (and Conservative) place, an aggressively middle class outpost surrounded by mining, fishing and shipbuilding communities. It was a seaside resort, with a picturesque lighthouse, a beautiful beach and the Spanish City amusements and funfair. For 2 weeks every summer it played host to a Glaswegian invasion. It was called Scots Fortnight and was one of those typically English uncomfortable compromises, like the Queen opening Buckingham Palace up to the punters. We needed their money but we'd dress it up as some kind of cultural event, with a sports festival on the Churchill Playing Fields, rather than admit that it was a 2 week piss-up. For the rest of the year it was pretty much dead, with the main drama in the local paper usually concerning the one-way traffic system or the ongoing battle with dogshit. And yet, in keeping with the confused nature, on Friday and Saturday nights it was a crazy all-fighting all-drinking orgy, with pubs and bars in the town centre and on The Esplanade offloading drunken revellers on to the streets.

For those of us too young to get into the pubs and bars it was a bottle of cider from the off-licence and a teens only Saturday night disco at the Alletsa, an old dance hall along the seafront. The mayhem wasn't up to the X rating of the adult violence, but it could still get pretty tasty at times. I remember walking my girlfriend home one Saturday night and encountering a crowd of skinheads from Shiremoor. They ranged from 10 and 11 year old wannabees up to 16 year old nutcases, one of whom was giving a hammering to an older 'hairy'(speaks for itself). Beaten and angry, the older guy kicked the nearest thing to him, which happened to be a car which was slowly cruising by. The car stopped, the driver and passenger got out, and then a fight started up between them, the hairy and the older skinhead. The younger ones spotted me and my girlfriend and were sizing me up as the next course. On this occasion, and on many others, I was saved by the fact that I played football with one of the older lads and had played against a few of the others, so a few minor insults were exchanged and we were allowed to pass. Thank heavens for the beautiful game.

People are always talking about how things are getting worse, especially with regard to the young. When I look back to the early 70s bacchanal and boot boys cocktail that formed the backdrop to my impressionable teenage years it seems to me that only the clothes have really changed.