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I went to a book launch in a swanky book shop on Piccadilly, for a hot new debut author. I’d love to say that the literary world was so taken with the RHLSTP Book Club that they had invited me along, but the author is my brother-in-law’s partner, Tom. Actually that’s better. But it was nice to mix with the literary elite and I bumped into
Malcolm Gaskill who was on RHLSTP Book Club a few weeks ago, but who I’d never met in person and who I recognised but couldn’t place until he introduced himself.
That was all fun, but I also met lots of Tom’s family for the first time, a good proportion of whom are from Middlesbrough, where my mum and dad both grew up and where I’d often go as a child to visit my grandparents. We talked a little about where they lived and how cool Bob Mortimer was and how Rod Liddle also hails from Middlesbrough (which I didn’t know but wasn’t so happy about, but apparently he’s a big champion of the place). I mentioned that my grandad had been a headmaster in the city.
“Not Mr Herring from Green Lane?” asked one of the ladies. Chances were that it was though and I said “Yes”.
“Oh he was horrible,” said the lady, with a candour that others may have swerved from, but not an honest Boro lass. She told me how she’d seen him giving the cane and how scary he was and how once he’d been telling someone else off, but it was so frightening that she had cried as if he was the victim of his ire.
This didn’t really match up with my memories of the gentle man that I recall my grandad being, but I was mainly a bit freaked out that someone my grandfather would have taught was still alive. He’d died back in the 1995 and was 90 years old then, so it felt like his teaching days would have been too long ago. But assuming he’d worked into his 60s, I suppose he might still have been headmaster until the late 60s and he was a primary school teacher (making his use of corporal punishment a bit more icky, but I recall kids getting the dap at my primary school in the late 70s and I believe my dad had a cane too, though it became illegal to use it in the early 80s, if my memory is correct). These ladies were a little older than me, so could have been infants in the 60s or late 50s and so it all checked out.
The coincidence of this connection more or less made up for the unpleasant memory (I have googled the school and his name and the only other comment that comes up is that my grandad was nice and that the head who followed him, Mr Jardine, was very scary, so it wasn’t everyone’s experience). I guess that a lot of teachers seemed scary to me as a 5 or 6 year old and it’s society’s fault that children used to get beaten, not my grandad (though I still hope she had got him confused with Mr Jardine).
I forgot to ask her if she remembered my grandad ever bringing Ally into school. He definitely used it at school. Perhaps they’d conflated grandad with the puppet.
I think all three of them had been at the school at the time (and I liked them very much and they all looked like the proper Middlesbrough ladies that I remember) and seemed to agree my grandad had been scary. I do remember him being quite strict and old-fashioned and as a little kid their house seemed a lot less kid friendly than my other grandparents, so I am sort of surprised he was a primary school teacher. He did buy me my first ever Wispa (which were released in the North East before anywhere else in the country to test their popularity) and we ate a pomegranate together using a pin and I made him little fake newspapers called “The Fishian”, but he seemed more comfortable with me or maybe I appreciated him more when I was a teenager. He gave me the money to buy my first word processor when I left university and was supportive of my endeavours, though hurt when he listened to one of my radio shows with his friends, one of whom commented “What a waste of a good education”. Which maybe should be a stand up show title. I know that would have hurt him though and still feel a little pang of pain on his behalf.
Anyway, I had a night out in a social situation and unusually enjoyed myself, though the car next to me in the car park had parked a bit too close and I popped off my wing mirror guard as I reversed out of the space. So that was annoying.
Never go out.
