Memories of Childhood
by John Appleby

~ 27 ~

The local cinema owned by Walter Lawson ran a free Saturday matinee. The tickets could only be had, in exchange for empty jam jars, at a certain time on Friday afternoons after school, and at a house near ours. A noisy hoard of children would press around the back-yard door, long before it opened. When the door opened these, precious tickets were handed out to the reaching hands. They were shabby squares of cardboard, but they were precious, and we'd run home enriched. The ensuing cinema show would be a scene of early uproar .A man would stride up and down the aisles, whacking the seats with a big stick in a vain attempt to keep order. One or more boys could be seen gnawing on Swede turnips or sticks of rhubarb dipped in sugar. Great screams would herald the arrival on the screen, of Mickey Mouse. Then more shrieks when Tom Mix or Hoot Gibson, cowboy heroes, rode on. You could never be sure that you would not be struck from behind by a half-eaten turnip. From the Badlands we would emerge, blinking into the daylight unscathed, and with enough stories to tell back home.

However there came an event which shattered the happy, familiar and gentle tenor of our young lives. Perhaps by reason of the financial loss suffered during the strike, my father took up an offer of a rent-free colliery house in one of the gaunt malodorous rows in Ashington. This was the biggest coal-mining village in Europe, and was 5-km. inland from Newbiggin. Our belongings were piled on to carts, and our family home was let to some people called Bennett. The man was a butcher and they rented for many years.

I remember walking away with my uncle Alf, an uncle who had recently moved from Durham to Ashington with his two sons and a daughter - he was widowed. He was carrying one of the last bits from home, a picture or something, I imagine, and together we walked to arrive at the back door of 34 Rosalind Street.

A new and more sressful chapter was about to begin!

© 2003 John Appleby, New Zealand

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