Marine Engineering Cadetship, Phase One: South Tyneside

It was sometime around April or May of 1978 that I quit the job at DM Mechanisation and began working nightshift as a drill operator for a company called Hunting Hivolt. Given that I now had some decent GCE results I had also applied to the Merchant Navy Training Board for a marine engineering apprenticeship. I’d always been interested in the workings of the internal combustion engine; indeed, on a much smaller scale I had already stripped and rebuilt several motorcycle engines myself. My interest in marine engineering had originally been sparked by an article on drive chains in an engineering magazine I’d read at Worthing Tech. It was the sheer size of the cam-chain on a ship’s diesel that had impressed me, and I thought that messing about with these huge engines was something I’d like to do for a living. Coincidentally, my mother had been speaking to the parents of a former school friend of mine who’d joined the merchant navy as a deck cadet and she suggested that I also might like to consider that option. So we obtained the appropriate forms, filled them in, and my father and I travelled to London for an interview at the MNTB. The man with whom I had the interview told me that at eighteen I was probably too old. Nevertheless, he said, he would see what opportunities—if any—were available and let me know in due course. He never did get back to me, but I wasn’t overly concerned because I enjoyed the job at Hunting and was making some very good money, so I quickly forgot about the merchant navy. Instead, I thought, I would save a load of cash and then head off to seek fortune and adventure in America. I certainly wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life vegetating in Shoreham, that was for sure!

Then out of the blue, on a warm and sunny July day in 1978, came the phone call that would change my life completely. It was mid week and I had just returned home from a trip into Brighton. Normally I would have gone straight home to bed from nightshift, but that particular day for some reason I’d gone into town early. It was mid-morning and the house was empty when I returned. I had just closed the front door when the phone rang. It was for me. The voice at the other end said that he was calling from a company called Comben Longstaff and would I like to come into Hove for an interview? It was completely unexpected and took me aback somewhat: I couldn’t even recall looking for a local job recently, let alone one with a company by that name. Furthermore, given the money that I was earning at Hunting, I was happy where I was for the time being and so almost declined the offer. But for some reason I threw caution to the wind and agreed: I could at least hear what the man had to say. The company office was on the Kingsway at Shoreham Basin, and could I be there in an hour? And so, despite the short notice, in one of the most fortuitous moments of my life I changed into my job interview clothes, walked back to Shoreham Footbridge, and caught the 31 Bus back to Brighton.

I got off the bus just past Boundary Road, Portslade, and crossed the busy A259 to the company office. It was a bland office front that gave no clue as to the company’s business. I don’t actually remember much about the interview, except that it was conducted by a Mr Hislop. Initially I hadn’t a clue as to what it might be about—but I played along until eventually I came to realise that it was an interview for a marine engineering cadetship: Comben Longstaff was a shipping company! I didn’t even know that there was a shipping company based in Shoreham, but obviously so. They were having two 31,000 ton ore-strengthened geared bulk carriers built at Sunderland Shipbuilders on the River Wear in the north-east of England: the Durhambrook (later the Handymariner then Jia Hong) and Devonbrook (later the Aptmariner), and they wanted an engineer and deck cadet for each—was I interested? I replied that I was. In that case, the man said, they had a number of other potential engineer cadets to interview but would be in touch either way.

I returned to work at Hunting Hivolt that night wondering if or when I would hear from Longstaff. I didn’t really care that much to be honest because I enjoyed working at Hunting, even though I knew I wouldn’t be there forever. I was at their Riverside Works in Shoreham, which was a convenient five minutes walk from home. The factory backed onto the turbid chalky waters of the River Adur adjacent to the bridge that carried the Brighton to Portsmouth rail line and on the opposite bank to Shoreham Airport. Behind the factory ran the rail spur to Shoreham cement works where as kids we’d smoke cigarettes and light grass fires, or pick up the track ballast and use it to pelt the passing cement trains. It was actually quite pleasant on a warm summer’s evening to sit on a bench overlooking the river and the South Downs while watching the swallows hawking for flies, the fish jumping and the trains go by. It was a much larger company than DM Mechanisation, and the products much more technologically advanced. As a nightshift drill operator I worked on things that were supposed to be secret: aircraft bomb release mechanisms, other government defence stuff, and some work for the early stages of the CERN project. Often, if I finished my work a bit early, I would go and help out in inspection. I worked 8pm until 6am Monday to Thursday and the wages were eighty-five quid a week—not bad for an eighteen year-old in 1978! I listened to John Peel on the radio as I worked: a mixture of various early second-wave punk bands, punctuated by some of Viv Stanshall’s surreal comedy Sir Henry at Rawlinson End. Life was pretty good if a little dull. I gave my parents twenty quid a week board, which still left me with a significant disposable income. Friday and Saturday nights were spent drinking in the local pubs and clubs of Shoreham and Brighton, doing a bit of speed or weed, and I bought myself a nice big Triumph motorbike to scoot around on. I was also saving for America, although I hadn’t informed my parents about that particular plan.

It had almost been a couple of months since my interview with Longstaff and I had heard nothing, so I assumed that someone else had got the job and pretty much forgot about them. Then in true Longstaff style the phone rang one morning and I was told to get myself to South Shields the next day; not easy, considering I had never heard of the place. It was near Newcastle on Tyne apparently and I had been booked into the Flying Angel overnight Friday for an interview at the South Shields Marine and Technical College on the Saturday morning. Make sure you keep the rail ticket and send it to the office for expenses I was told.

The following morning I travelled up to London’s Victoria Station with a bloke from work called Pat. He was going on to Luton for the weekend; I, meanwhile, had to make my way to Kings Cross. My journey across central London had scarcely begun however, when, on the steps of the Underground at Victoria, an elegant and extremely attractive young blonde lady confronted me.

“Hi, handsome—how are you doing?” she asked with a radiant smile.

I was taken aback. I had absolutely no idea who she was or why she had approached me—not that I minded in the least! I was sure she’d mistaken me for someone else, but I played along—as any normal red-blooded hetero man would have done. It wasn’t until halfway into a brief conversation about school and underage drinking in Brighton that I realised it was a girl who’d had a big crush on me at school. I hadn’t reciprocated at the time because she was a gawky and ungainly adolescent with dental braces at that stage of her life. But my-oh-my had the intervening two years seen her blossom into a very graceful and attractive young lady! She was in London studying to be a dancer. I wished her all the best and, unfortunately, never saw her again. I’d scribbled her phone number down on a scrap of paper—but typical of me, promptly lost it. I was disappointed, but on reflection it was probably for the best.

The journey north to Newcastle took about four hours. I’d never been north of London before so it was a new experience for me going through towns that had only previously existed in the Division Four football results: Peterborough, Doncaster, York, Darlington…As for Newcastle, well I didn’t know what to make of it at first. I was introduced to the city by the sprawling Team Valley Industrial Estate at Gateshead. Then the High Level Bridge took the inter-city train over the River Tyne and onto the main station where I got off to board a local train. On first appearance it was obvious that this was an industrial city. To the left stood the huge Dunstan Power Station and as the train left the main station on the way out to Shields it passed the Federation Ales brewery and Swan Hunter shipyards with their towering Goliath cranes on the opposite bank of the river. The further out towards Shields it went the grimier and more industrial it got: Gateshead, Pelaw, Jarrow, Hebburn, Tyne Dock…it was a world away from Brighton and London. Street after street of back-to-back terraces interspersed with the odd high-rise block, I thought it looked like a right dump. Little did I know I was to make many friends—some of whom have remained friends for life—and thoroughly enjoy my two years there. Newcastle remains my favourite British city, and its inhabitants—the Geordies—I found to be a tough, no nonsense yet friendly people.

South Shields itself was a little more genteel than its neighbouring suburbs, and having alighted at the rail station with only an overnight bag to carry, I walked as far as King Street before succumbing to the temptation of a beer in pub called the Criterion—the first of many that I would be drinking in the town over the next couple of years. I then made my way down to the Flying Angel, put my stuff in my room and went downstairs to the lounge. While having a beer I met up with a lad from Brighouse in West Yorkshire who was also up for an interview and the pair of us went into town for a few more. The next day we made our way to the South Shields Marine and Technical College for our interviews, somewhat the worse for wear. I don’t remember much about the interview, except that it was with a Mr Royden Whyte and Mr Bob Taylor. What I do remember was travelling back south with the lad from Yorkshire, and after he got off at York, a Cockney lad from some army regiment or other travelling down from Catterick. We had a few beers and talked crap for the rest of the journey—as you do. Anyway the upshot of the episode was that I quit the job at Hunting and on the 7^th September 1978 signed a formal engineer cadetship agreement with Comben Longstaff of Britannia House, Kingsway, Hove, Sussex—taking a massive pay cut in the process. I was to enrol at South Shields Marine and Technical College in the September of 1978 as a marine engineer cadet.

On arrival at Shields I was allocated a room in the halls of residence—the infamous Dr Winterbottom Hall run by the equally infamous Captain Collingwood and a couple of uniformed neo-Nazi side-kicks, one of whom was simply known as ‘fooken-fooken’ due to his ability to introduce the word ‘fuck’ (or ‘fook’ as the Geordies pronounced it), at least twice into even the briefest of sentences. It was my first real night away from home and I was at once a little apprehensive and yet excited. Initially I was paired up with a fellow Longstaff engineer cadet and although we got on OK we were different types: he was a ‘do homework and then watch television’ type of engineer cadet, I was the ‘let’s go out and get totally annihilated on drugs and alcohol every night and stuff the homework’ sort. Homework, when submitted, was usually late and not always of the best quality: I remember once handing in a technical drawing assignment stained purple with vomit from the eight or so pints of snakebite (half pint lager, half pint cider, shot of blackcurrant) I’d drunk the night before. Anyway, I had my friends, he had his, and we soon went our separate ways.

One of the first things that I had to do was learn how to swim. Oddly enough, for someone who was born and raised less than a mile from the English Channel, I’d never learned. This was because I had some ear problems as a child, so I could not go swimming with all the other kids at school. After that it never bothered me; after all who wants to go swimming in the Channel—whatever the time of year it’s too bloody cold! Besides, to my way of thinking there was little point learning to swim as a ship’s engineer because most of the time you are down in the bowels of the ship, so what are the chances of getting out if the worst happens? And even if you did get out and jumped into warm water, how long would it be before you became shark food—or in cold water, before hypothermia got you? Anyway, despite any objections I might have wanted to raise, one evening a week I was forced to waste valuable drinking time attending swimming lessons at the South Shields municipal pool until the Geordie lad that was teaching me deemed me sufficiently proficient to obtain my certificate. Since then, with the exception of my sea survival course, I have never swum again.

Having made it through the first week, we settled in to undertake a mixture of engineering theory and practice: both electrical and mechanical. As engineering apprenticeships went, a merchant navy marine engineering cadetship was among the most highly-prized and sought after, with good reason. It was an OND course like the one I had commenced at Worthing Tech the previous year, but it was much better structured and had better teaching staff. It also had better workshops, more focused on heavy engineering, that included steam turbines and a full-sized Doxford opposed-piston diesel engine—albeit a single cylinder—to play with. There was much more emphasis placed upon practical work: we took such subjects as applied thermodynamics and electro-technology and put the theory into practice. As courses went it was miles in front of Worthing’s effort—not that I applied myself as well as I could have: there were other interests that demanded more of my attention.

Each cadet was assigned a company tutor: a kind of liaison officer between the college and the shipping company. Mine was Bob Taylor and most of the time we got on OK, although I wasn’t one of his favourites. He was always of the view that I wasn’t taking the whole engineering cadetship thing seriously. When he once asked me why I wanted to go to sea I replied that it was to have sex with as many black girls as possible. He didn’t see the funny side—but then I wasn’t joking! Looking back on it now, Bob Taylor was a decent man who genuinely had the interests of his students at heart. I just didn’t see it at the time. The problem, as always, was me: I still retained the vestiges of a dislike of authority from my school days, and in fairness to Bob I could be a fairly sullen little twat when I wanted to be.

A couple of months after arriving at South Shields, Bob Taylor told both of us Longstaff cadets that we were going the ten or so miles down to Sunderland to visit the Devonbrook. The ship had just been fitted out at Sunderland Shipbuilders and was just about to undergo her sea trials when we went to see her. Her sister ship, the Durhambrook, was already in service and sailing mainly between northern Europe and the American Great Lakes. Both were 31,000 tons, 190 metres long, 23 metres wide, and had a draught of 10 metres. Of more interest to me, each was fitted with the new 12,000 horsepower 76J4 Doxford slow-speed diesel engine: an opposed-piston two-stroke, which gave her a service speed of 15 knots. She would have to have been one of the last ships to have a Doxford engine fitted, because the works stopped making engines for good soon after. The old site is probably a theme park or shopping mall now! There was a commanding view of both the yard and engine works from the bridge over the River Wear. The same bridge that, if the rumours are true, one of my classmates at Shields committed suicide from. Like ninety-nine percent of my year’s intake he had no job to go to. This was because he worked for one of the big oil companies which, like many other shipping companies, was given the green light to ‘flag out’ by Thatcher. Consequently they sacked all their British crews and replaced them with Indians, Pakistanis or Filipinos. The Sunderland of the early 1980s was probably the worst place in Britain to be unemployed. The poor bastard obviously couldn’t get a job and ended his life before it had hardly begun. If it’s true then I hold Thatcher personally responsible. What she and her cronies did to the north-east of England was contemptible. How can you call yourself British and take away the livelihood of your own people just to make a political point? The woman was an absolute disaster—she destroyed the Britain I loved and replaced it with something rotten: a socially polarised, balkanised, selfish and ignorant dump! That’s why I left decades ago.

Anyway, ‘Deadly’ Headly Fisher, Longstaff’s marine engineering superintendent, met us at the shipyard. Although they had never met before, Bob Taylor and Deadly Headly hit it off straight away and after us innocent young lads had been safely packed off back to Shields, they made their way across to the nearby Vaux brewery “Brewery Tap”. Apparently a big night was had by both and Bob Taylor fronted up to tech the next day looking decidedly the worse for wear. As for the day itself, we spent a pleasant afternoon and evening being shown around the ship followed by a few drinks at the bar, and I must admit a sense of pride and anticipation in my future role on the big bulk carrier or her sister. But I would have to wait another eighteen months and a lot could—and did—happen in that time.

In the meantime, January 1979 and a new term saw me share a room at Winterbottom with cadet from South Wales. He was much more my type: an asthmatic pot-smoking rugby player who enjoyed a beer. By September and the end of the first year, however, Collingwood had had enough of us both and we were told to go and find some digs in the town. I moved to some digs nearby with a Scots friend of mine and another Welsh lad. The landlady was a slightly mad Geordie woman who also liked a drink and we got on famously, even though when we first met she told me she that hated ‘cockney twats’. The Geordies used the term ‘cockney’ to describe anyone from the south of England, even if—like me—they weren’t true cockneys. Having been on Tyneside for a while by then I was used to it, so it was all water off a duck’s back. After she’d finished slagging southerners off, I asked her, with mock indignation, if the moon cared whether the dog howled at it—but I think that one went through to the keeper. Anyway I told her that irrespective of her views about southerners she’d soon come to love me—and I was right. Like many northerners she soon found out that I wasn’t the average stuck-up southern ponce—especially when the monster drinking binges started to get out of hand. One time I met her while I was out shopping and the pair of us got so blind drunk in the infamous Mechanics Arms that as we spilled out onto the street I got hit by a taxi. We all had a good laugh about it and ended up taking the same taxi home. She even had the cheek to ask for a discount. That was a lunchtime session I’ll never forget. By the time we’d finished drinking I’d forgotten what I went out for!

There were a few other blokes sharing the same digs: one from Manchester who was a good lad that enjoyed a beer, and two others less well liked: one a miserable git from North Yorkshire; the other from Liverpool. At first I was mates with the Scouse lad, but things were never the same after a punch-up in town. My Welsh mate had got himself into a fight with some local Geordie lads, and although he could be a pain in the arse at times when he was drunk I nevertheless steamed in to help without giving it a thought—as you do. After all, a mate’s a mate. Anyway, while we both got into it, this Scouse bloke was suddenly nowhere to be seen! Pissed and outnumbered as we were, we floundered around hopelessly—incapable of landing a decent punch between us—while he hopped into a cab.

“Where the fuck was he?” I asked when we got back to the digs.

Apparently he had slunk off to bed. He was bigger than both of us too! The same sort of thing happened a couple of years later in Grangemouth, Scotland: I was out drinking with a guy—likewise much bigger than me—who thought it would be a good idea to start some trouble on the way out of one of the local pubs. But although he started it, when we were confronted by a couple of cars full of Scots lads I was the one that turned round ready to make a valiant last stand. I thought he was behind me at first, but soon realised that he’d taken off and was nowhere to be seen. As it turned out, the Scots lads were quite impressed by my willingness to fight all eight of them and we ended up shaking hands over it. They told me to tell my accomplice that he was a “fucking chicken-shit wanker” and, exact words, “a disgrace to the English”. I was happy to oblige, but the irony was that he was actually Scottish—though raised in England. My embarrassed accomplice pleaded and swore me to secrecy over the matter and so shall remain nameless.

I remember very little about the OND college course that I undertook except that I always arrived hung-over and tried to get the lecturer to finish the last class early so that I could get back to my digs in time to watch Deputy Dog. Life at Shields was one big party for me: a two-year blur of drugs and alcohol—my Scots mate and me often woke up with such raging hangovers that we’d have to drink some cider before our breakfast to settle ourselves down. I remember him, the lad from Manchester, and me looking at each other one night in the realisation that we had been blind-drunk and stoned every night for over three weeks. We decided to take a night off the booze but all had vivid nightmares that we tried to alleviate by sharing a spliff. It was horrible—and the last time we went dry for sometime! And all the do-gooders today—probably the same hypocritical bastards that got wasted in the ‘60s and ‘70s, or perhaps the sad acts that never did—whinge on about the current generation and their so-called binge-drinking.

The nearest pub to my digs was The County on the Sunderland Road, and that’s where we spent most weeknights. Me and my Scottish mate were usually in at opening time and were always there until closing time. Not long after becoming a regular, one of the barmen, Trev, started mocking my southern accent in a friendly way and I reciprocated with my best Geordie. We soon began talking and discovered that we shared a mutual fondness for illicit drugs. Not long after, he suggested that I stay back after the pub had closed and when he’d finished clearing up we headed back to his place. After a ten-minute stroll, we arrived at his flat on the Chichester Road. It was the upper floor of a typical two-storey Tyneside terrace. He opened the front door and we made our way up the dark, narrow stairs onto a landing. The flat itself was a bit dingy but nonetheless it sufficed for his purposes. Trev put some suitable music on the record player and we lit one up, then another, and another, and drifted off into a different reality.

Some monster sessions subsequently occurred at Trev’s flat and I spent many a night getting well and truly wasted there after drinking beer in the pub all night. I quite liked one of the girls that used to turn up regularly. She was tall, thin, and had her hair cut in a bob, but the trouble was that by the time she turned up I was usually too whacked to do anything about it. Some of Trev’s sessions went for the whole weekend and usually if you were trapped in Trev’s place there was no hope of straightening out until the weekend was over. It reminded me of one of those old Shanghai opium dens into which the smokers would disappear for days at a time.

I hardly ever went home on weekends, being at the other end of the country it just took too long—besides which I actually preferred the North. On one of my rare ventures south I met a girl I hadn’t seen for a long time. Anyway the inevitable happened and I returned to Shields covered in bites and scratches, much to the amusement of my fellow cadets. On another foray south I met a Shoreham girl I’d been through both primary and secondary school with. She was my first crush at age five, and it was one of those crushes that never really goes away. She knew I liked her and would play on it every now and then to get me to hand over a cigarette when we were teenagers. I hadn’t seen her since school and we’d run into each other purely by chance at a pub in Worthing, where she was then living. Anyway, after a few drinks she asked me to walk her home. We cut through a park near to her place and at her suggestion stopped to sit on a park bench. I asked her what I was doing there. She replied that she’d always had a soft spot for me and often wondered what had happened to me in the years since we’d left school. She also said that she knew I liked her and wondered why I’d never asked her out. Oddly enough it was a question that I couldn’t answer, although looking back on now I think I kind of put her on a pedestal and was a little in awe of her. Apparently though I’d matured into a good-looking young man and she would like it if we became an item. So there it was, the girl of my dreams offering herself to me out of the blue. And I refused. Basically I knew that if I took it up it wouldn’t end there and I would probably not pursue my merchant navy career any further. A vision of me stuck in Shoreham again, working a dead-end job and going nowhere flashed before my eyes. She’d made it clear that she was not into one-night stands and because we’d grown up together, and I thought too much of her, I decided not to go down that particular road. I feigned tiredness, went home, and never saw her again. It was a difficult choice to make on the spur of the moment, and I almost gave in, but sometimes, to get what you want, sacrifices have to be made!

            Up north, when not in Trev’s company, weekends would commence in the County before heading into town and doing the rounds. Often, the highly verbose ‘Billy Meths’—one of the local dossers—would entertain the pub-goers by peering through the pub window while ranting and swearing to the encouragement of the drinkers inside (Billy was barred from all the local pubs). There are numerous wild drugs and alcohol related tales I could tell about my two years in South Shields, but to do so would fill a volume by itself. My first ever Saturday night out in Shields would be typical. It began with a couple of black bombers, then off to the County, continuing in the Criterion, the Ship and Royal, the Voyager, Balancing Eel, and some other town centre pubs before hitting Rupert’s nightclub when none of us could physically hold any more beer. Having gone downstairs into the disco, I decided that I would start as I meant to go on and ordered a double Southern Comfort with vodka. This was what we called a “fuck-off” drink: three shots in the one glass. The effects of this concoction were interesting as I was to find out after knocking back a few. Sitting at a table getting quietly slammed I was approached by a fairly attractive bottle-blonde Geordie girl who asked me if I wanted a dance.

“Sure” I replied, “just let me finish my smoke”.

I invited her to sit at the table and we made some small talk of which I remember nothing except that she was from ‘Jarra’ (Jarrow). I stubbed the cigarette out, reached across the table to take her arm just as the DJ spun A Taste of Honey, and as I went to stand up the big drink worked its magic and I fell flat on my arse. She was not impressed and stormed off—another opportunity squandered! But my mates thought it was hilarious and so did I.

“Fucking brilliant…my legs aren’t working!” I exclaimed with a big drunken grin on my face.

They pissed themselves laughing, and laughed even more when I began moving my arms and legs as if I was dancing while my arse remained firmly planted on the floor.

“If you think that you’re too cool to boogie oogie” went the song. I wasn’t too cool to ‘boogie oogie’—just physically incapable of doing so! Nor could I get myself back to Winterbottom unaided, and after dragging me back the mile or so to Winterbottom my classmates were beginning to lose their sense of humour. Still, drinking in the seventies was great: no one gave a toss how slammed you got as long as you didn’t cause any trouble. I regularly got as pissed as a fart in Shields but was never thrown out of anywhere. You only ever saw the bouncers when a fight broke out and at that stage of my life I was much more the clown than the fighter.

            Once I remember waking up on a freezing cold Tyneside morning among a load of dustbins behind a local nightclub called the Chelsea Cat. I have no idea how I got there although I do seem to remember entering the joint sometime the night before. I woke up on another cold Tyneside morning flat on my back on a building site with cold chicken chop suey running down my neck from the foil take-away carton lying upside-down on my chest. Then there was the time I’d scored some ‘nembys’—a really powerful, in fact often lethal, barbiturate called Nembutal which me and my Scots mate popped before a night out on the piss. We did this to enhance the effects of the booze, but how the hell we didn’t kill ourselves I’ll never know—especially as we were on snakebites that night. Well it enhanced the booze all right, so much so that my last memory is of my mate attempting to take a shot at the pool table and falling backwards as he did so, cue remaining at ninety degrees to his body throughout. Next I remember waking up peering up at a colliery winding tower.

“Where the hell am I?” I thought.

I staggered aimlessly around for a while until I met a milkman on his early morning rounds.

“Excuse me mate, where the fuck am I?” I asked.

His face broke into a broad grin.

“Bolden Colliery marra” he replied.

“How the fuck did I get here?” I murmured aloud to myself.

“Aah divven nah marra…ya moost have been geet pissed” he smirked.

I jumped into his milk float and he dropped me off on the Shields Road where I spent the next couple of hours shivering in the freezing cold while waiting for the first bus back.

A similar thing happened to me once in Copenhagen. Copenhagen was always an excuse for me to drink enormous quantities of my favourite lager, Tuborg Grøn. Obviously this particular night I had drunk a lot because I woke up completely naked in a strange bed in a flat I’d never seen before in my life. The morning winter sun was streaming through a skylight overhead and I could hear female voices. I couldn’t find my clothes so shameless as ever I walked, completely naked, in the direction of the voices and found two Danish girls talking excitedly and giggling. As they saw me standing in front of them they burst into fits of laughter.

“It’s not that fucking small” I exclaimed.

No reply.

I then asked for my clothes but it was obvious to me by then that they didn’t speak English. In the end I had to make the motions of dressing myself. It was like an absurd game of charades: me bollock-naked miming as if getting dressed, them shrieking with laughter. What made it worse was that I was busting for a piss. Anyway eventually the message got through and I was led into another room where my clothes were neatly folded in a pile with my wallet and keys on the top. I got dressed, took a leak, checked my wallet—all OK—and left. I don’t know what happened that night or how I ended up where I did, or even more worrying, who undressed me and folded my clothes; it certainly wasn’t me—I never folded my clothes! The girls never explained, my crewmates told me that they had left me alone in a bar drinking beer, I wasn’t robbed and I hadn’t had sex. It remains one of the great mysteries in my life. Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself.

At least once a month I would travel down to West Yorkshire for the weekend with the lad from Brighouse. When we arrived we’d catch up with his cousins and embark on some monster beer drinking binges. It was purely lads on the piss: drinking and drinking only, with the odd meal thrown in. I don’t think that I ever once spoke to a Yorkshire lass during my whole time there—mind you, the Yorkshire Ripper was still at large so you could understand the local girls being a bit cautious. I liked West Yorkshire, the people were welcoming and unpretentious: typical of Northern working folk. It was an industrial area, although most of the wool industry that the area was famous for was gone and the mills closed. All that was left was the odd chimney and the black soot stains on the sandstone buildings. After knocking off from tech, we would make our way to South Shields station, then to Newcastle Central where we’d jump on the Liverpool train. The Liverpool train took us directly to Huddersfield which meant that we didn’t have to change at York, and on arrival in Huddersfield we’d get a bus to Brighouse, say hello to my mate’s grandparents, then get another bus to Salterhebble. It was here that the boozing would begin: quietly enough in the now sadly demolished Calder and Hebble, but soon degenerating into an all out massive beer-swilling session as we moved on to Halifax town centre. The amount of beer we consumed during these escapades was extraordinary. Every weekend in Yorkshire was a weekend of beer and excess: Tetley’s, Sam Smith’s, Theakstone’s or Websters—pint after pint, it was relentless. Being the only Southerner among Yorkshiremen meant that I had to prove my beer-drinking prowess, and in the company of these big beer-drinking blokes I honed my capacity even further. This would continue until pubs closed when we’d make our way back to either Brighouse or Luddendenfoot.

The next day, of course, would begin with a dry mouth, full bladder and throbbing head—eyes squinting while peering out the window onto the hilly West Yorkshire countryside, or out of a Brighouse window onto some old workers’ cottages. Beer drinking would re-commence at morning opening time and continue until afternoon closing when we’d get a bus back to Brighouse and fall into a drunken slumber while watching The World of Sport. But there was no respite because at around 5.30pm we’d get woken up by a load banging on the door to ensure our prompt arrival in Halifax for evening opening time where we’d again continue drinking until closing time. Then it would be a bus back to Brighouse where we’d wake up late on the Sunday morning, spend the morning in a pub in Brighouse before eating a beautifully prepared Yorkshire Sunday roast lunch. After lunch it would be time to catch the bus back to Huddersfield and then the train back to Shields. We’d arrive in Shields by about 8.30pm and head straight to the County. The perfect weekend away! The one problem though was that the lack of exercise and heavy booze intake took its toll on my once fine physique and after about a year of such activity even a fit young man begins to soften up and look a bit chunky.

One weekend, five of us crammed into a car and headed down to Hartlepool for the day. The drinking began as soon as we left Shields, and we soon ran out and had to resupply ourselves at a place called Easington before continuing on. We arrived in Hartlepool just in time for the pubs to open for lunch. I had spent the morning drinking Carlsberg Special Brew so by then I was totally and utterly smashed and thought it would be a good idea to begin a loud conversation about the relative merits of hanging monkeys before standing on a table and declaring that everyone in the pub was a cunt. The pub was full of dock-workers who, fortunately for me, took me for the drunken idiot that I was, and let it pass. By the time we arrived back in Shields me and my Scots mate—the two most pissed members of that particular little posse—had passed out in the back of the car and while we were sleeping it off they’d stopped at someone’s digs. Suddenly I was woken by the loud thud and crashing noise of the car being rammed into the back of another. My Scottish mate had woken from his drunken slumber and thought it a good idea to re-park the car; he’d put it into gear and—pissed as he was—promptly smashed it into the car in front. Within seconds some Geordie bloke had come running down and a confrontation started.

“You’ll fooken pay for that pal”, said the Geordie.

“I’m paying fuck all for that wreck” replied the Scots lad.

“It’s not a wreck, it’s a fooken brand new car” came the angry reply

“Well it’s a fucking wreck the noo” declared the Scotsman.

I, meanwhile, was laughing so much that I nearly pissed myself. Then the South Shields police arrived.

I have to admit to having a bit of a soft spot for the South Tyneside coppers of the late ‘70s—I always found them to be pretty decent blokes, even though they had been accused of beating a guy called Liddle Towers to death while in custody. Recognising that they were dealing with a couple of drunken idiots they completely ignored my being an arsehole and sorted everything out. With our mate’s car also un-driveable, they drove us back into Shields proper.

“Where do you want dropping off lads?” one of the coppers asked.

“Here will do” I answered as we approached The County.

Much to the amusement of the coppers we went straight inside. My Scots mate, meanwhile, was taken down to the station and charged with various drinking and driving offences and I later had to go and bail him out. We headed straight back to The County.

Another episode that involved the South Tyneside police happened when a few of us had been to an Indian restaurant in Laygate. I had agreed to pay, but had forgotten my credit card and (typically) none of us had any cash. The owner had obviously encountered this before, and even though I genuinely intended to pay, he got irate and called the police. South Tyneside’s finest soon arrived and in all fairness to them they were pretty good about it: they drove me back to the digs and when we got there, there was my Scots mate hanging out of the window puffing on a monster Bob Marley spliff. There was no wind, so the smoke was hanging in the air and whole place stank of it! I ran in, grabbed my card and quickly left. The copper, meanwhile, didn’t say a word even though it was obvious what was going on. On a separate occasion me and one of the Welsh lads had gotten a bit bored in The County and after a few drinks decided to jump in his car and embark on what we called a “motorised pub crawl”. I should have known better—this was the same lad that, on a previous occasion, had driven his car into a muddy County Durham field when we were both drunk, and got it stuck in the mud. We had no chance of moving the thing, so we lit up a joint and got wasted until morning, when the farmer—who was convinced that we’d stolen the car and was determined to get us out before the police arrived—pulled us out with his tractor.

Anyway, on this occasion, to lend the car a more ‘party’ atmosphere we decided that in the absence of real party balloons we’d buy some coloured condoms and inflate them instead. Well, after visiting a few pubs and smoking a few spliffs the inevitable happened and we got pulled over. The copper told us to get out of the car and as we opened the doors a couple of the inflated condoms fell out into the road shortly before we did. The copper looked down at them poker-faced and told us to pick them up. We tried, but as we were both stoned and pissed, and because there was a bit of a breeze, the damn things were proving elusive and difficult to catch. Finally the wind caught them and lifted them high up into the night sky.

“For fooks sake”, said the copper, “alreet, leave ‘em and get yersels here.”

We staggered back to the car.

“Yooze two are fooken pissed aren’t yers?” he said.

My mate, who was driving, looked at him sheepishly and admitted as much.

“Yesh offisher, I’m pished out of my head I’m afraid” he slurred.

“Reet” said the copper, “park the car over there and get the bus home. If I see the fooken thing moved before tomorrow yooze are nicked—understand?”

Like I said, as coppers go they were a pretty decent bunch back then: they concentrated their efforts on real crime.

During my time at Shields I travelled extensively around the British mainland. I watched international rugby at Murrayfield in Edinburgh, spent time in South and Mid-Wales, visited Durham, Middlesbrough, Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester, and got extremely drunk in Glasgow. I also managed to squeeze in a trip to Toronto, Niagara Falls and Michigan. But the one trip that really sticks in my mind was the trip that ended up in the middle of nowhere. The Welsh lad that I shared digs with had bought a Ford Escort van, even though he couldn’t drive, and one Friday afternoon decided to take it down to Wales for the weekend. In total five of us went with him: my Scots mate, a lad from Bristol who was doing the driving, two other Welsh lads and me. It all began well enough as we set off down the A1(M). We even stopped at Rotherham for a beer before continuing south. But soon after we left Rotherham the van began to make strange noises and lurch violently. We pulled it over to the side of the road and then the thing stalled. After letting it cool down we restarted it, but it was obviously in pain and so it was decided to turn off the A1 completely and try and find a garage first thing in the morning. By now it was about nine-thirty in the evening and, faced with the prospect of many hours of boredom, my Scots mate and I decided to try and find a pub. Eventually, after walking for some twenty minutes we came to a rural hostelry and made our way inside. We ordered a beer and sat down. I turned to the nearest patron:

“Excuse me mate, where the fuck are we?” I asked.

“Sutton-on-Trent” came the reply, after the initial laughter had died down; apparently broken-down travellers were commonplace in the vicinity. My Scots mate an I looked at each other in total bemusement; neither of us had ever heard of the place.

“So where’s the nearest big town?” I asked.

“That would be Newark lads” came the reply. Again we looked blankly at each other. We were informed that there was a railway station at Newark and that we could get a train to London from there.

            At closing time we made our way back to the van. It was spring so none of us had any cold-weather clothing, but pretty soon the night temperature began to fall and within a couple of hours it was down to around freezing point. The six of us tried to sleep sitting up, but it was extremely uncomfortable and furthermore the inside of the van was bare metal, devoid of upholstery. With six of us inside, condensation from our collective breath soon formed on the cold metal wall and roof panels and begun to drip down on us like rain. It was impossible to sleep and it remains one of the longest nights of my life. In the morning we took the thing to a garage but because it was Saturday the mechanic told us we would have to wait until Monday before he could get the parts he needed. The Welsh lads, and the lad from Bristol decided that it would take too long to get to their respective home towns and headed back to Shields. The Scots lad and me got the train to London and spent the weekend in the South.

Meanwhile, on the serious side, we also had to undertake some external courses prior to our going to sea, one of which was the notorious marine fire-fighting course—although this was only the three day basic, not the big scary one. I did mine during the third week of September 1979 down by the River Tyne. It wasn’t as bad as I’d been led to believe and pretty soon the local firemen had us handling the gear like real pros. We had to fight real fires though—and big ones at that, but once you overcome the initial fear it’s quite fun really. There was also the sea survival course to do. I did mine in January 1980, and it mainly involved being dunked underwater in various boats and life rafts, being capsized, and then told to right them. There was also a course on sabotage delivered by a nice Royal Navy officer who told us how to make bombs, detonators and timing devices—stuff I wished I’d known when I was a fourteen year-old kid! Finally there was a fairly in-depth first aid course to undertake. Having completed them all I was at last ready for life at sea as an engineer—albeit a greenhorn cadet—and was itching to get onboard the Durhambrook, the ship to which I had been assigned.

Then, just as my time at Shields was up, out of the blue I was called into Bob Taylor’s office to be informed that Comben Longstaff had been taken over by F. T. Everard. It was OK, I was told, my job was safe, but the Durhambrook and Devonbrook were to be sold off. Everard would be keeping Longstaff's fleet of smaller vessels, and these, or Everard's own small ships, would be the ones I would be working on. To say that I was disappointed would be an understatement, in fact I would say that it still rates as the biggest disappointment of my entire life! For almost two years I had been dreaming of travelling the world on one of those two ships, and now that dream had vanished in an instant. So I left Bob Taylor’s office that day totally disheartened, knowing that I was never going to sail on the ships that I was originally employed to work on. For days afterward the lyrics of Gerry Rafferty's Get It Right Next Time—a recent hit—kept echoing in my head:

Life is a liar,

yeah, life is a cheat,

it leads you on then pulls the ground from underneath your feet!

It was one of the major turning points in my life, and to this day I often wonder how things would have turned out if fate hadn’t intervened in the way it did. I truly believe I would have led a completely different life; not necessarily a better one, but certainly different. This was because my life on the two bigger ships would have been focused on North America, whereas Everard was a predominantly north-western European operation. So there it was: I was to be stuck on a poxy little ‘yellow peril’. It was like being promised an Aston Martin only to find out that you were getting a Morris Minor! The fact that I was one of only a small handful of cadets in the entire intake to still have a secure job was of little consolation, and from that point on my interest in the job itself declined dramatically; henceforth it was only ever a vehicle for pursuing different objectives. Nevertheless I decided I would complete my cadetship, get some experience, and then look for a job with another shipping company. With that thought in mind, I completed my exams, had one last massive piss-up, said goodbye to my landlady, and left for Shoreham.