31 Postcodes - Poem 6

 

Square hole

Shagpile carpets,

an English Setter,

a standard lamp,

a VHS player.

Wogan at breakfast,

Friday’s Tube,

one phone in the hall,

a downstairs loo.

The house was square

but it stretched to fit

teenage heavy metal 

and a huge drum kit.

Smoking permitted.

Drinks in a row.

Suburban shockers.

Shame on show.

Scum and Cabaret.

Derek and Clive.

Growing up grubby

in a slot marked 5.

RF 2021

Video/audio for this one here.

My Mum moved again in about 1979. This was another suburban square house in the north-east of England except this time it actually was in a suburb (Nunthorpe, Middlesbrough) and nearer to our school (financial reasons mainly – to keep my older brother in the same school but not boarding). She stayed in this house till 1983 and even though I was still a boarder at school in theory I did spend quite a lot of time here because from the age of about fourteen (1981) I really didn’t like being at school much and there was lots in town that I did like (Pubs! Clubs! Chelsea Girl!). I came home as often as possible (not always telling my Mum it must be said as there were buses, friends’ older brother with cars, hitchhiking) and there was quite a lot of fun to be had in the suburb too (Pubs! Space Invaders! CB radios! Older boys with cars! Pubs!). I had quite a group of hard smoking, hard drinking friends locally and my Mum (older than the average parent, single) was less freaked out by teenage rule breaking than most parents. As much as anything she just wanted to know where we were (i.e. in a safe place) so she let us smoke in that house (in one particular small room that got very, very smoky). This meant that room was often very crowded (especially when it was raining – so many damp denim jackets steaming in the central heating). The drinking wasn’t technically allowed but that, of course, just made it more desirable. I made some, in retrospect, very dangerous decisions (hitchhiking back from nightclubs on my own at 3am, going to some clubs that were really not suitable for 15 year old girls) but I was on some kind of mission at that point and very dedicated to it. Looking back now I suppose all I needed was a hobby that filled a lot of time but for whatever reason nothing like that happened so vodka/Special Brew and ill advised adventures it was.

Memories from that house include: listening to a lot of radio and music (pop, heavy metal, other rock, funk, disco, my Mum’s musicals LPs, even some country music), our dog having puppies squashed in by the side of the twin tub washing machine in the kitchen, feeling really, really drunk and having no sense of self-respect, my Mum making a lot of trifles, me learning to use tampons (badly at times), watching hours of TV (one Xmas Day I started watching Lassie in the morning, pretty much watched films all day and ended with Cabaret at one in the morning – we only had one TV so I’m not sure where everyone else was). This was the first house where we watched videos (rented from the little shop at the local garage) and I remember sitting on the stairs to listen when my brother was watching things I wasn’t meant to see. I remember watching the first Friday of Channel 4 (5 Nov 1982) when they first showed the music programme The Tube and later that evening the whole Woodstock movie. I was so ready for music festivals – sadly very few local to Middlesbrough around that time. The drum kit in the poem was my brother’s. The house was number 5 in the close/cul de sac.

Tomorrow – London!

This poem is part of the annual Fun A Day Dundee project where participants try to do something creative every day for the month of January. You don't have to be in Dundee to take part and there are other Fun A Day projects around the world. People post as much of their work online as they want to (largely on Instagram but it can be elsewhere too). This year I am posting a whole poem a day (one poem for each of the 31 addresses I have lived at, covering the period 1967-2021). Videos/photos of the poems show the places remembered in the poems but were mostly taken from recent Google Street View. The videos are on my Instagram, maybe elsewhere too. Use the hashtag #fadd2021 on social media to see other people's online contributions.