A Friend of Dorothy

In my previous post about childhood memories of Benwell, one of the stones I left unturned was the story of our next door neighbour when we lived there. I was going to skip this because I feel quite guilty still, but on the grounds that it will probably be some form of catharsis I decided to write about it now.

In the other one of The Cottages I described in the previous post there lived an old lady, a spinster whose name was Dorothy Newton. She was already living there when we moved in next door and had, in fact, lived there for as long as she could remember. She had never married and had little experience of children, at least at the start. My first encounter with her wasn’t at all auspicious. I had accidentally kicked a football into her garden and without thinking about it at all, just went in and got it. As I picked it up I saw her looking out and, scared, I ran back to my house. Technically, I was trespassing and I assumed she was angry with me.

A bit later I had the chance to talk to her in her garden and she said she hadn’t minded, but that in future I should try not to trample her roses. I got to know her slowly and eventually started visiting her quite regularly. She became my “Aunty Dorothy”, although she obviously wasn’t actually a relative. This was before I started School so I would have been less than five years old. I’m told I called her something like “Ann Dorry” at that time because I couldn’t manage her full name.

Aunty Dorothy was an invalid, having suffered a fall on a trolley bus some years previously which resulted in permanent problems with both her legs. She got around on sticks at first and then, later on, needed to use a walking frame. If our house was basic, hers was downright primitive. At some point in the past (which she always referred to as “The Flood”) her roof had suffered a big leak and large amounts of water had got in and badly damaged half of her house. Since she never had money to repair it, the right-hand side of her cottage (out of shot in the picture in the previous post) was completely unusable. As she became more infirm she couldn’t manage the stairs and lived entirely from the ground floor room whose window you can see in the first photograph on my previous post. Her kitchen (which she called the “scullery”) was really Victorian in style, complete with old-fashioned walk-in pantry. And she too had an outside loo.

Life for Aunty Dorothy had, I think, always been tough and she lived a very humble existence but she had acquired an almost unimaginable sense of determination over the years as well as the ability to take huge amounts of pleasure from the small things in life. She had numerous accidents around the house – she was very prone to falls, and sometimes these left her lying for days on end before anyone found her – but she always recovered and carried on with her routine regardless. It took her ages to do even simple things but she never gave up and never complained.

As time went on she eventually found it impossible to leave the house, except for a spot of gardening, and lived an increasingly solitary life, apart from visits from the home help (whom she didn’t like at all) and the nurse who, amongst other things, helped her take a bath once a week.

When I started school a sort of routine developed. My mum and dad both worked at that time and weren’t home when school finished around 4pm. Since I had no distance to go to get home I would have to wait outside the house for one of them to return, so instead I called on Aunty Dorothy. We would sit and have tea (usually with jam or banana sandwiches). Sometimes we would watch the children’s TV programmes in black-and-white and sometimes we would just talk, until about 6pm when I would go next door to my own house. We had tea like that most days for about five years.

In the beginning I was, by any standards, an extremely backward child. I was very slow to learn to speak, which I didn’t even start to do do until I was three. I also had various physical problems, including a condition my mum always referred to as “spacky feet” which meant I had to visit an orthopaedic clinic from time to time. I’m not sure which particular deficiency was responsible, but it took me absolutely ages to learn to ride a bicycle. I think when I started School I was immediately earmarked as a likely basket-case from an educational point of view. In those days the slow kids didn’t really get much help; they sat at the back of the class and did raffia. I wonder how often these diagnoses turned out to be self-fulfilling, but I was definitely a misft from the start.

I think my parents might have mentioned to her that they were worried about my performance in school but whether or not they did, Aunty Dorothy started to take an active interest in my education. I didn’t realise it at the time but she did this in very clever ways. She started asking me to run errands for her to the local shops (which were very close). She would always send me for a single item and ask me to make sure I got the right change. I realise now that she basically invented these jobs to help me practice my arithmetic. I’m sure that myriad of little jobs, allied to the confidence that she obviously placed in me, helped me get over my difficulties with sums to the extent that, by the time I was 10, I even looked forward to Mr Martin’s mental arithmetic tests.

Aunty Dorothy was also keen on horse-racing, which she liked to watch on the telly. When I was a little older, she would sometimes ask me to work out the odds for her. I realised only later that she knew perfectly well how to work out what her winnings would be and this, like the little trips to the shops, was just a way of getting me to work things out myself. At the time, though, I was chuffed to feel I was helping.

Later on, when the dreaded decimalisation happened in the early 1970s she asked me to help with that, although this time I don’t think she was faking it. The pound was no longer 20 shillings, each containing 12 pence, but a simple 100 “new pence”. It may seem simple now but it was a difficult transition for the older generation. The old pound notes were still legal tender for a time, but some coins and rarer notes had to be swapped for the new versions, such as the ten-bob note (10 shillings) which was replaced by the 50p coin. The old shilling coin became the new 5p and the 2 bob was 10p, but there was no longer a place for the old threepenny bit or the sixpence (tanner). Aunty Dorothy once sent me to the post office with a couple of ten bob notes and brought her back the two coins, but she didn’t like them. Somehow you feel richer with paper money.

And then there was reading. I was very behind in developing my reading skills, just like everything else really, but here again Aunty Dorothy helped me enormously. Her eyesight wasn’t great but it wasn’t as bad as she pretended it was when she asked me to read carefully selected items from the Newcastle Evening Chronicle (which now has its own website) to her. On Sundays she got the Sunday Post, a Scottish newspaper which was quite popular on Tyneside in those days. It had a kid’s supplement which was really good, and I would avidly read the cartoons, especially Oor Wullie and The Broons, and do the puzzles.

After a time I had caught up with reading in class and eventually managed to read just about every book the School had to offer, including the Diaries of Samuel Pepys which were for some reason on the shelves in Class 2 and which I was allowed to borrow. I don’t think anyone had read them before so nobody, including the teachers, knew how rude they were. I had no idea at that time that less than ten years later I would be studying at Magdalene College Cambridge, site of the Pepys Library where the orignal diaries are kept as well as the rest of Pepys’ own collection of rare books.

Aunty Dorothy and I were close for many years, during which I underwent a transition from dimwit to high-flier (or at least the closest approximation to such a thing that Pendower School had ever produced). It wasn’t just her that helped me succeed academically – I also had many good teachers at Pendower School – but she certainly played an important part.

In due course my family moved from The Cottages to an ordinary semi-detached house (with an inside toilet) in Hodgkin Park Road but I carried on going to Pendower School, which was only half a mile away, and visiting my adopted Aunt as often as I could over the next few years even though I was no longer living right next door.

I remember during the time of the Miner’s Strike in 1974 when the country switched to a three day working week for a time, sitting in Dorothy’s house with only candles to light us, listening to her stories about the wartime blackout. She also told me that the strike was a good thing because it would probably bring down the hated Conservative government of Ted Heath. She was certainly right on that count.

I also remember that she had a peculiar suspicion about thunderstorms. If there was any sign of lightning in the area, she unplugged all the electrical equipment in the house and switched off all the lights. That much I think I can understand but, for reasons I never figure out, she also insisted on putting all metal objects (such as cutlery) away into drawers or covering them with a tablecloth if there wasn’t time to do that.

In 1974 I took the entrance examination at eleven-plus for the Royal Grammar School in Jesmond and was recommended by the Governors for the award of a scholarship. This was effectively a private school but the City Council paid the fees for a limited number of pupils who did well in the entrance examination. I therefore got a free place which is just as well since there’s no way my family could have afforded the fees. The following year, the new Labour government scrapped the arrangement and the School became fully independent but the Council agreed to carry on paying the fees for those students who were already there. I had got in by the skin of my teeth.

However, the RGS was (and is) in Jesmond, which is on the other side of the city to where I was living so I had to get the bus there and back every day, a journey that took over an hour in each direction. I also had lots of homework to do every night. The frequency of my visits to Aunty Dorothy decreased. Although I had promised to keep in touch with her as best as I could, I didn’t keep my word and after a year or so I stopped visiting her altogether.

I found out in 1978 that she had died in hospital after suffering yet another fall at her home from which this time she hadn’t recovered. I never had the chance to say goodbye and had never taken the time to tell her how grateful I was for all the help she had given me over the years.