Unfortunately Rod Hull’s book can never be published, but I’m hopeful this one will. Because now that Viz has reached its twenty-fifth anniversary, and Roger Mellie has had a few problems with his own TV aerial, this seemed like a perfect time to write it.
Chris Donald
January 2004
We were not rude kids to begin with. When I was ten my family moved to a nice terraced house in Jesmond, a leafy suburb of Newcastle. At the bottom of our new garden was a quiet road where we could play football relatively undisturbed by passing cars, and just across the road was a railway line. On the first day in our new home I joined in a game of football with some of my new neighbours. We’d not been playing for very long when the game suddenly stopped and everyone leapt up onto the fence alongside the railway. Not wishing to be the odd one out I joined in. Suddenly there was a loud throbbing sound from behind the trees and bushes to our left where the railway emerged from a cutting, and a filthy diesel engine crawled slowly into view, a hazy plume of black fumes rising above it. The iron railings in my hands vibrated as the train struggled up the bank, and as it passed us everyone shouted out the number written on the side of the driver’s cab. ‘8592!’ they all said. Naturally I joined in. ‘8592,’ I said, although I didn’t know quite why. From that moment on I was a train-spotter.
Coincidentally this was 1970, the year that The Railway Children movie was released. But there was no old gentleman waving at us from the last carriage – ours was a filthy goods train heading for the Rowntree’s sweet factory at Fawdon – and life for the railway children of Lily Crescent wasn’t quite as exciting as it was in the movie. There were no landslides or disasters to be averted. Instead we passed the time putting coins on the track and watching them get squashed, or smoking cigarettes in an old platelayers’ hut up the line. And rather than steal coal from the station yard and give it to my poverty-stricken mother, I stole Coke bottles from the back of the off-licence adjoining the railway and returned them the next day to collect a sixpence deposit.
The Bobbi figure of our gang was Justin, the eldest and by far the most sensible train-spotter in our street. Alas, he looked nothing like Jenny Agutter. He was snotty-nosed, bespectacled, and had rather greasy hair. Needless to say he wore an anorak, a blue one with toggles, hood and an array of commodious pockets. Justin liked all sorts of numbers, not just train numbers. When we played cricket in the street he kept score, worked out the batting averages, bowling figures and run rates. He administered our local Subbuteo football league, all three divisions of it. He also organized weekly visits to Newcastle Central station and Gateshead engine sheds, as well as outings to more exotic locations, like Cambois.
Train-spotters have always had a bad press and I don’t want to add to that here. Most of the criticism is born of ignorance. Think of train-spotting like fishing. You sit and you wait, often for hours on end, for something to happen. Yes, it’s boring, but as with fishing that’s the whole point. When a train finally appears, one you haven’t seen before, it’s every bit as exciting and fulfilling as catching a fish, but with the obvious advantage that no fish are harmed in the process. It’s a perfectly healthy and harmless pursuit.
Train-spotting also provided me with an escape from home life, which could be a little tiresome at times. My dad wasn’t wrongly imprisoned for spying, but my mum had suffered an equally cruel injustice. In 1963 she was diagnosed with the incurable disease of the nervous system, multiple sclerosis. Her condition was gradually deteriorating and we’d moved to our new house by the railway in anticipation of her becoming totally wheelchair-bound. The plan was that Mum and Dad would live entirely on the ground floor, which left me and my two brothers with the upstairs to ourselves.
My big brother Steve was a bookworm, an eccentric, and led an isolated, antisocial life in his bedroom, building robots and reading vast quantities of science fiction books. Steve was a bit like a robot himself, entirely logical in his thinking, and with no apparent emotions other than anger. When I first watched Star Trek it was a revelation. ‘That explains it,’ I thought. ‘My big brother is a Vulcan.’ Steve had a logical, emotionless take on everything, and a total disregard for other people’s feelings. He got into enormous rows with my dad over tiny little things, like milk jugs. Steve believed that at breakfast time the milk should be poured directly from the bottle onto the cereal. My mum and dad liked it to be served from a Cornishware jug. ‘Clearly it is more efficient to pour the milk directly onto the cereal from the bottle thereby negating the need to use, and subsequently wash, a second vessel,’ Steve would say, deliberately flaunting his intellect and vocabulary in order to bait my dad. Dad’s argument would be less cogent but more forcefully put. ‘Listen, you clever bugger, it’s my bloody milk, it’s my bloody jug, and it’s my bloody house! So I’ll do what the hell I like.’ These pointless rows would kick off once or twice a day and would often spiral out of control. Sometimes crockery would be thrown and furniture broken, and Steve, who simply could not let it lie, would end up having to be physically restrained. He was like a Dalek spinning out of control. Meanwhile my dad was like a desperate Frankenstein, wondering what sort of monster he had created.
Dad often bluffed that he was going to call the police to ‘sort Stephen out’, and during one particularly violent argument he actually kept his promise. I’d gone outside to get away from it all and was playing football when a police car screeched to a halt outside our house and two burly police officers hurried up the path. ‘Look! They’re going to your house,’ said Tinhead, Justin’s excitable little brother. ‘Oh, it’s probably nothing,’ I mumbled, and urged him to carry on with the game.
My younger brother Simon sat that particular argument out inside the airing cupboard and was able to give me a detailed report on the police raid later that day. Simon had no interest in train-spotting, or in picking pointless arguments with my dad. He was a big fan of Dr Who and American comics, and was also involved in a local theatre group. I got on reasonably well with both my brothers when we were alone together. We all shared a similar sense of humour; an ironic appreciation of Peter Glaze off Crackerjack, for example. I think that came from my dad’s side. My dad Jimmy was always a joker and he constantly used humour to cope with Mum’s illness. He introduced us to Laurel and Hardy and the Goons, and before we had our own telly he’d take us to a friend’s house once a week to watch The Morecambe and Wise Show. Dad also found George Bailey very funny. Bailey was a local TV sports reporter who wore false teeth and Dad would fall about laughing as he read the football results. He was forever laughing at people. Jesmond was a trendy, middle-class suburb, full of CND-supporting, Citroën-2CV-driving families, and Dad took great delight in poking fun and laughing at our ‘lefty’ neighbours. He was always giving people funny names too. A long-haired art lecturer who lived along the street was ‘Buffalo Bill’. Then there was ‘Mrs Eating Rolands’, one of our larger neighbours. And for some reason Dr Ian Paisley, the Northern Ireland Unionist politician,