Mark craned round at once and Jo lunged for the bugle. Realising he had been tricked, Mark gave her a shove. ‘You little cow!’ he yelled, and hurled the bugle out of the tree in fury. Jo screamed, losing her footing in the fork of the tree, and slithered down the trunk, skinning her knees and chin on the way. She landed with a thud on her back, quite winded. For a moment she could not breathe, and gasped like a fish for air.
‘Jo! Are you all right?’ Mark shouted down, scrabbling out of the tree and dropping to the ground. Just as he did, Colin reached her, having witnessed her fall and his bugle hurtling into the undergrowth.
Colin hurled himself at Mark. ‘You scabby bastard! I hate you!’ he yelled. At once the two of them were on the ground, rolling around, trying to punch each other. They tore at the other’s hair and kicked with their feet. Jo, regaining her breath, screamed at them to stop. But within minutes a small crowd of children had gathered to watch, and word was going round: ‘There’s a scrap down the Burn!’
Jo watched in distress as her brother and her best friend gouged and bruised each other as if they were sworn enemies. How could this have got out of hand so quickly? she wondered in fright. To her relief the fight was stopped by the appearance of her father, who had come out looking for them. Both boys were caked in mud and nearly sobbing with the pain they had inflicted on one another.
Jack marched them all back home, grim-faced, and ordered the boys into the scullery to wash off the dirt and blood. Jo was hugging her ribs, which were still sore, but no one seemed bothered when she tried to describe her dramatic fall from the tree.
‘I’m off to see Matty,’ Jack told Pearl as she dabbed iodine on their cuts.
They sat subdued around the fire, Colin fretting that his bugle might be lost for ever. ‘We’ll search for it in the light,’ Pearl promised him, throwing Mark a disappointed look.
When Jack came back, it was with a harrowed face. He shook his head at them. ‘Your dad won’t have you back just yet,’ he said, keeping to himself the filthy words that Matty had spoken about his son. Jack found it hard to imagine the man could harbour so much hate against a child, even if, as local gossip would have it, he was another man’s son. Mark hung his head, but this time the news was greeted with silence. Even Jo felt too weary to give him comforting words, though she was still feeling guilty about the way she had provoked him in the tree. Everyone else was still too cross with him about the bugle and the fight.
That night, Jo stirred sleepily, thinking she heard something in the yard below. But the sound was so soft; she thought it must be next door’s cat and drifted off to sleep again.
Mark stole out of the back door without disturbing Jack, who slept upright in the fireside chair. He wore three jumpers and carried Gordon’s boots around his neck. Luckily there was a bright frosty moon shining over the dene as he shivered through the dark. Still, it took him over an hour to find the bugle, lodged in a thorn bush, glinting in the moonlight. The thorns pricked and tore his hands as he delved among them to pull it out, cursing his own impetuousness.
Mark gazed up at his chestnut tree and tried to fathom what had got into him. He had been filled with a destructive rage when he had heard about Gordon’s visit and the meagre bag of clothes dumped on the doorstep. Was that what he amounted to? he thought miserably. A pile of old jumpers and a pair of cast-off boots? But that was what he was, a cast-off. No one wanted him, least of all his own family. Or were they his family at all? he wondered. His father did not think so. So where did he come from? Where did he belong?
Now his best friend hated him and even Jo was tired of speaking up for him. How could he have pushed her out of the tree like that? Mark felt shame engulf him. Wretchedly, he trudged back to Jericho Street and, in the dead hours of the night, laid Colin’s bugle on the back doorstep. Glancing up one last time at Colin and Jo’s bedroom, his eyes blurred with tears. Then he was gone into the night.
Just before dawn. Ivy heard the creak of her front door. She was a light sleeper and was about to rise and make herself a pot of tea. ‘Is that you, Poppins?’ she called out to her cat, as she entered the kitchen.
‘It’s me, Nana,’ Mark answered quietly. Ivy gasped to hear another voice and peered short-sightedly through the dark. She saw the huddled shape of her grandson in the chair by the fire.
‘Hinny, is that you?’ she said in surprise, fumbling for the electric switch. Mark squinted at her in the light, his face forlorn.
‘Neebody wants me, Nana,’ he said in a dull voice.
Ivy’s heart squeezed at the sound of his pain. She bustled over to him in her billowing nightgown and thrust her arms around him, feeling a sob catch in her throat.
‘I want you, hinny,’ she told him, hugging him fiercely, ‘don’t you ever forget that.’ Mark buried his weary head in her large comforting bosom and let himself cry. Ivy felt her own tears brimming over as she vowed, ‘Let others think what they want, but I’ll never turn you away, bonny lad, not ever!’
Chapter Five
1968
A year after Mark went to live with Ivy Duggan, they began to pull down the end of Jericho Street. Jack remained adamant he would not move until forced, and the demolition went on around them, the street cut in half like a loaf, the upper end a scavenger’s paradise of planks and bricks and discarded trinkets. Jo and Marilyn laid claim to an old sofa wedged in the rubble below an end wall that still wore shreds of flowery wallpaper. The whole summer of 1968, they had it as their den, dressing up as flower people in Mrs Leishman’s curtains and Auntie Pearl’s chain belts. They rang bicycle bells and pretended they were meditating with the Maharishi like the Beatles.
Jo had created this new world of make-believe in retaliation for the boys shunning her company. Once Colin and Skippy had gone to the grammar school they no longer wanted her hanging around them. ‘Nick off, Wig!’ Skippy had said, using the derogatory nickname that had stuck ever since Gordon had coined it. He had chased her away from their football game, and this time Colin had not defended her. By then, there had been no Mark to stick up for her either. Once he was living down in Nile Street, he was never around to play football in their back lane.
Although Colin and he had made up after their quarrel, Mark avoided Jericho Street and they began to see less of him. Norma would call to see him at Ivy’s and take him shopping for new clothes, but the day of his return home was always put off until the next week or the next month, until finally no one mentioned it any more. The Duggans were the first to move out of the street, taking a semi in Walkerville as a compromise between the docks and a new estate. Matty could still get easily to work and Norma had a patch of garden where she could sunbathe. Jo never saw Mark’s mother with a black eye again, but then she hardly ever saw her out at all. Norma never came back to visit any of the neighbours and never answered the door when Pearl tried to call.
Pearl blamed Matty for the rift. He would cross the high street rather than talk to any of them. ‘He’s got Norma terrified of speaking to us,’ Jo’s aunt declared in disgust.
‘He’s never forgiven us for taking her and Mark in after that fight,’ Jack commented. ‘Shamed him in front of the neighbours. That’s why he avoids us like the plague.’
Pearl snorted. ‘Matty wouldn’t know what shame felt like if it jumped up and bit him.’
Once Mark had started at the secondary modern, the drift away from his old friends increased further. Jo began to see him hanging around with his old enemy, Kevin McManners, and an older group of boys. He was friendly enough when she went to visit Ivy’s and teased her about the scarves she had begun to wear around her neck. But both of them had stopped climbing trees, and when Jo went to the park now it was to try out the new tennis racquet that her father had bought her for her eleventh birthday.
That September of ‘68, Pearl was on leave for Jo’s birthday. At Jo’s request the girls stayed over at her aunt’s flat and Pearl took them out to a new Chinese restaurant, where they sat under coloured lanterns eating chow mein and fe
eling grown-up. Pearl wore a purple silk dress she had had made in the Far East and Jo had on her first miniskirt, made of green suede, which buttoned up the front.
‘You suit your hair longer,’ Pearl told her in approval, as she picked up food deftly with her chopsticks. The girls were allowed to use forks.
‘I’m growing out me fringe too,’ Jo said. ‘I can’t stand it getting in me eyes any longer.’ They talked about the rumour that Paul McCartney had an American girlfriend, and discussed the new musical, Hair, that Pearl had seen in London.
‘Is it true they take off all their clothes?’ Marilyn whispered, not wanting the waiter to hear. Pearl nodded and the girls smirked.
‘But they do it behind this netting stuff,’ she explained.
‘Fancy being naked in front of all those people,’ Jo puzzled. ‘What they want to do that for?’
Pearl laughed. ‘Well, I promised your dad there would be nothing like that tonight.’ It had been her aunt’s idea to take them to a play at a local hall after the meal, instead of to the pictures. Jo had been dubious, not having been to the theatre before, but she was infected by her aunt’s enthusiasm. Pearl went to musicals in London and took Jack to watch seaside players at Whitley Bay in the summer. This was just a local amateur group performing Time and the Conways, but Pearl promised they would enjoy it. ‘Not Burton and Taylor, but you’ve got to start somewhere.’
They bought a box of chocolates and settled into their seats. ‘It’s a play by J.B. Priestley,’ Pearl explained. ‘He was fascinated by time.’
Jo thought this sounded particularly boring, but once the lights dimmed and the curtains were pulled back, she was transfixed by the lavish costumes and scenery. Before her mesmerised eyes unfolded a tale of family strife, a privileged olden-day world. It was like eavesdropping on a family’s intimate secrets, except she felt no guilt, for these people were revelling in the telling. Jo agonised for them, sharing their joys and tragedies, wanting to turn back the clocks for them so they could avoid the sad future that lay in store. Imagine if the real world was like that! thought Jo. She could go back to a time when her mother was alive, or before Jericho Street was knocked down, or when Mark was Colin’s closest friend…
At the end she stayed in her seat, overwhelmed by the experience.
‘Never seen you so stuck for words,’ Marilyn teased.
‘Did you not enjoy it then?’ Pearl frowned.
Jo dragged her gaze away from the stage and looked at her aunt. Her eyes shone with emotion. ‘It was fantastic!’ she gasped. ‘So real. I felt I was right there in the room with them. Not like at the flicks where you know it’s just made up.’
Pearl was delighted. ‘Do you want to go round the back and meet some of the actors coming out? You could get their autographs on your programme.’
‘Magic! Yes, please!’ both girls chorused.
They waited by the back entrance to the hall, feeling bashful, but Pearl pushed them forward when two of the actors appeared.
‘You’ve won two new fans tonight,’ she told them.
‘Would you sign me programme?’ Jo asked, thrusting it in front of the woman who had played the mother. The actress seemed taken aback by the request but was quick to oblige, signing ‘Martha Jones’ in huge capitals.
‘If you’re interested you should come along on Wednesday evenings when we have readings or rehearsals.’
‘Oh, I’d be no good at that.’ Jo blushed.
‘Yes you would,’ Pearl encouraged. ‘She’s got a voice as loud as a hooter when she wants.’
‘We can always do with helping hands behind the scenes if you don’t want to act,’ Martha smiled. ‘You’re very welcome.’
‘Ta,’ Jo grinned.
‘I might come along myself,’ Pearl said, giving Jo an affectionate hug. ‘I used to tap-dance at your age, you know.’
That night, at Pearl’s flat, they chatted late into the night about the performance. Jo found it almost impossible to sleep. She wanted to go back and see the play again, and she imagined herself on the brilliantly lit stage, acting in front of a packed hall and signing programmes for eager fans. This was even better than playing at being the Beatles, she thought drowsily, as sleep finally claimed her.
Throughout the winter, she dragged Marilyn along to the Wednesday-night meetings of the Dees Players, and at Christmas they had a walk-on part in the pantomime as the cow in Jack and the Beanstalk. The girls argued over who should be the front end, until Martha decreed that they should take it in turns. To Jo’s disappointment. Pearl was away, but she thrilled at the thought of her father and Colin in the audience while she sweated inside the cow’s head.
Jack came every night, and on the final one, Mark and Ivy turned up too. Jo was embarrassed that she was playing the back of the cow that evening.
Mark teased her afterwards. ‘It doesn’t say anything in the programme about you being the cow’s arse.’
Jo gave him a shove. ‘I’ve been the front end an’ all.’
Mark whistled. ‘You’ll be in next year’s Royal Variety Performance at this rate.’
Jack treated them all to fish and chips back at number eleven. Jo glanced at Mark as they walked past the space where his home had once been, wondering what he was thinking. But his face was impassive.
‘Do you ever go over to your mam’s place?’ she asked him quietly, as they lagged behind the adults.
‘I’ve been a couple of times − when I’ve known he’s been at work,’ Mark answered stiffly. ‘It’s a lot smarter than Jericho Street. Mam says Matty’s bringing in better wages these days.’
Jo noticed how he referred to his father by his first name and no longer as Dad. ‘Do you see much of Gordon?’ she asked.
Mark pulled a face. ‘Na, he doesn’t bother with me or Nana. I asked him to teach me the guitar, but he’s too scared of him coming back and finding me there. So I have a play on his guitar when neither of them are around; teaching myself.’
‘Good for you,’ Jo encouraged ‘So might Gordon let you be in his band?’
‘Not a chance,’ Mark snorted. ‘Not that I’d want to be; not after the way he’s sided with Matty.’ His face looked bitter for a moment and then he smiled at her. ‘Anyways, I’ve only learnt three chords so far; not exactly Jimi Hendrix yet.’
‘Might get on the Royal Variety next year then,’ Jo teased back and was glad when he laughed. ‘I sometimes see Gordon in the distance at school. It’s good he’s staying on to do A levels.’ Then she blushed to think of how Marilyn teased her when she craned for a view of Mark’s brother walking past the classroom windows, his hair defiantly long and his tie triple-knotted. But it was the wrong thing to say, for mention of his brother exasperated Mark.
‘I couldn’t care less what he does. I’ll not be stopping on to do more exams − waste of time,’ he said dismissively. ‘Three more years and I’ll be out in the world.’
‘What do you want to do?’ Jo asked, as they neared home. ‘Get an apprenticeship at the yards?’
‘Na! I’m not stopping round here. I’ll go to sea like me great-grandfather, or to London,’ he answered, his dark eyes fierce. ‘As far away as possible.’
Jo felt heavy inside at his words, and a little hurt that he should want to reject them all. She could understand him wanting to get away from his father, but he seemed to be dismissing his friends and their shared past too. She could not imagine leaving Wallsend and all the familiar places. Jo loved it all, even the half-torn-down Jericho Street. She glanced away from his burning look, not sure what she was supposed to say, and led the way into the house.
***
The following summer, Jo was in the chorus of Hello Dolly. She spent much of the holidays riding her bike down to the coast with Marilyn and swimming at Whitley Bay. Pearl was home briefly and they went together to watch a touring show do an Agatha Christie thriller in Newcastle. Coming home late on the bus, they gazed up at the moon, full of wonder that Neil Armstrong had walked on it, which
sparked Pearl into singing ‘Paper Moon’ along the high street.
That August, there was much debate about where they should move to, for the rest of Jericho Street was about to be knocked down. Jo was secretly relieved that they would not have to suffer another winter of half-dug-up road and traipsing through a sea of liquid mud to get into the house. It also worried her that her father had been plagued by a bout of arthritis in his hands during the cold weather, and she knew he found labouring increasingly tiring. More of the burden of running the house was falling on her shoulders, and she decided to add her voice to Pearl’s campaign to get them to move to the flats. Time spent doing housework or cooking was wasted time in Jo’s view.
Pearl came round one evening full of excitement. ‘I’ve just heard on the grapevine that the caretaker’s flat is going to be vacant soon. Old Nelson’s moving to be near his daughter. It’s ground floor, two bedrooms, Jack. You won’t even feel like you’re in a flat.’
‘Caretaking job would be good, Dad,’ Colin encouraged. ‘Regular, and less grafting.’
‘And you’d always be home when we come in from school,’ Jo enthused.
Jack looked at them all suspiciously, then burst out laughing. ‘Seems like you’ve made up your minds on this one. Maybes I’ll take a look at the caretaker’s flat.’
‘Good,’ Pearl beamed, ‘’cos I’ve made an appointment for you to go round on Friday and talk about the job.’
Jo asked Pearl if she would come round and help clear out the yard shed and sort out the cupboards, as Jack could not bring himself to throw anything out. Colin dragged out the mouldering contents of the old wash-house: a rusting trunk, a battered pram, some worn clippy mats and a clothes horse. Everything was caked in coal dust and cobwebs, making them cough and splutter.
‘Better look through your dad’s old trunk before we hoy this lot out,’ Pearl said, sneezing loudly. ‘He must have had this at sea.’
Colin helped her haul it inside then disappeared to play football. Prising it open, they found its contents covered over with Jack’s old seaman’s duffel coat. But underneath were piles of women’s clothes: utility dresses, a stiff net petticoat, a mauve twin set and tweed skirts. Jo saw Pearl go pale as she covered her mouth with her hand.
THE TYNESIDE SAGAS: Box set of three dramatic and emotional stories: A Handful of Stars, Chasing the Dream and For Love & Glory Page 90
