The Inside Story of Viz: Rude Kids

CHAPTER ONE

The Beginning of Things

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, was always referred to as Ian ‘Have a Banana’ Paisley when he appeared on TV. Dad’s parents were from Shieldfield, the neighbouring working-class suburb, and from what little I remember of them they had the same sense of humour. Nana Donald took to calling my uncle Jack ‘Lord Shite’ after he got himself a job as chauffeur for the Lord Mayor and started dressing in fancy suits.

From my mum’s side all three brothers inherited an ability to draw. My mum Kay was an artist who had worked as a window dresser in Fenwick’s department store during the 1950s. After giving up her job to start the family she set up her own business, Kaycrafts, making children’s toys. But the MS stopped her from sewing and stitching so she had to give up the business. Instead she buried herself in voluntary work, becoming an active campaigner for disabled people’s rights. As co-founder and secretary of the local branch of DIG, the Disablement Income Group, she fought long, hard and successfully to get state benefits paid to disabled people.

Home life settled down a little when Steve, or the ‘Queer Fella’ as my dad had taken to calling him, left home and went to art college in Bournemouth. At the time Steve was more renowned for his drawing ability than either me or Simon. He’d been given a set of Rotring pens one Christmas and specialized in drawing humorous, slightly smart-arsed cartoons. The only one I vaguely remember involved a Roman soldier, a man holding a gun and a punch-line featuring the word ‘anachronism’. I didn’t get it. Simon and I were more into sound comedy than drawing. Around 1975 Dad got us a music centre for Christmas and we recorded our own comedy radio versions of Doctor Who, Grandstand and Farming Outlook. We would have tried others but these were the only programmes we had the theme tunes for in our record collection. Dad didn’t let any of us read comics. The Beano and the Dandy – along with ITV and any kind of sweets – were deemed to be ‘rubbish’. As a treat Dad would take us to the local health food shop, to buy peanuts, and to the library where he encouraged us to borrow books. I loved books, me. I didn’t read them, I just loved them. I judged books purely by their covers. I’d often take out Heidi, in German, because I liked the cover. The only books I actually read were Tintin books. The drawings were beautiful, colourful, detailed and yet so simple. Equally important, the covers had a uniformity in their design. On the back of the Tintin books there was a list of all the other books in the series, and that appealed to the train-spotter in me. I liked things to be uniform, ordered, numbered and in series.

In November 1975 I launched volume one, issue one, of my very first magazine. It was called the Lily Crescent Locomotive Times and was targeted specifically at train-spotters living in Lily Crescent. I typed it – very hard – on my mum’s typewriter using multiple layers of carbon paper to replicate it. Features included a list of engines recently spotted in our street (for three years I kept a log of every locomotive that went past), a report on a recent trip to Chesterfield and a column from my ‘Heaton Carriage Sidings Correspondent’, a friend called Jim Brownlow.

Jim Brownlow’s family moved from Blackburn to Newcastle around 1973 and Jim was deposited into my class at Heaton Comprehensive School. On his first day I managed to strike up an awkward conversation with him about Preben Arentoft, a Danish footballer who had recently been transferred from Newcastle to Blackburn. We were both football fans and Jim and I quickly became friends. A few weeks later, when I felt I’d got to know him well enough, I let Jim in on my dark secret – that I was a train-spotter. Being a train-spotter wasn’t something you talked about in a large, inner-city state comprehensive like Heaton. Jim came along on our train-spotting outings but he was never totally committed to the hobby. I think he was more interested in the social benefits of train-spotting. Yes. Train-spotting is a very sociable hobby. Sitting with a group of mates at the end of a railway platform for eight hours at a time – with no TV, no radio, no computers – does wonders for the art of conversation. Trains didn’t really enter into it that much. We would just sit there, huddled together at the end of a platform, or on wasteland in Gateshead overlooking the engine sheds, philosophizing, making jokes and talking absolute nonsense.

Jim and I were a bit more socially aware than the other train-spotters around us. We spent as much time observing our neighbours as we did looking at the trains. Obese couples in their thirties or forties with massive lunch boxes would sit and train-spot together. There were veteran former steam-spotters in their fifties, their anoraks covered in dozens of train badges, every one worn with pride, like a medal. Then there were the next generation, high-tech train-spotters, platform yuppies who yelled numbers into Dictaphones instead of writing them down. Audio-enthusiasts with tape recorders who’d stand alongside the locomotives recording the sounds they made. And of course there were the dodgy-looking train-spotters whose attentions seemed to waver between the trains and the nearby gentlemen’s lavatories. You had to watch out for those ones. All of them seemed oblivious to the reactions they got from the general public, blissfully unaware of the disdainful looks being aimed at them from inside passing trains. Jim and I had an overview of it all. When a crowded train went past we’d always hide our notebooks and sidle a discreet distance away from the hard-line anoraks.

At school Jim and I tended to be loners, slightly too weird to fit into the social mainstream. We hung around with other misfits too. One was Paul, a goose-stepping Hitler fan with a swoop of black hair and, for a very short time, a swastika painted on his school bag. Another was John, a child actor whose life had become a living hell since he’d appeared in a Sugar Puffs advert. And a third was a strange boy called Chris Scott-Dixon. Scottie was short, plump, freckled and wore Michael Caine glasses. On his first day at Heaton he was the only boy in a school of 1,400 who turned up wearing short trousers, and he staggered home that lunchtime his legs beetroot red from slapping. On the face of it he was the dullest, most grown-up and sensible child you could meet – like a little chartered accountant trapped inside a child’s body. But beneath his dour façade he had a bizarre and often comic imagination. Jim, Scottie and myself once had a private competition to see who could write the highest number of deaths into their English essay homework. This ran for several weeks and reached its climax when we were set the innocuous title, ‘A Visit to the Theatre’, for our homework. In my story a bus full of theatregoers got stuck beneath electric wires on a level crossing. The occupants were all burnt alive and then a crowded passenger train slammed into the wreckage at high speed. With a body count of over 300 I thought I’d won at a canter, but I was wrong. Scottie had engineered a calamitous Ronan Point-style gas explosion into his essay. Careless theatregoers had left the gas on in their high-rise apartment and in the resulting explosion an entire block of flats collapsed and over 600 people perished in the rubble. By now our English teacher, Mrs MacKenzie, had noticed the increasing death tolls in our work and rightly guessed that we were having a competition. One at a time she took us aside, complimented us on our imaginative work, but warned us that the examination boards would view anything more than one or two deaths per essay as excessive.

As well as sharing a rum sense of humour Jim and I also shared an ability to draw cartoons. Over the years I’d become the unofficial class cartoonist and often had unwanted commissions thrust upon me. The closest thing to a bully we had in our class was a big lad called Jeff, and Jeff was very proud of his Doctor Marten boots. Jeff’s desk was right alongside mine and every morning he’d hitch up his trouser leg with theatrical style and proudly reveal a highly polished knee-length Doc Marten. Then he’d say, ‘Draw me boot!’ I’d routinely draw a flattering picture of his boot on a scrap of paper, hand it to him, and he would sit and titter at it for a moment or two before discarding it. One day Jeff told me to draw Mr Hesketh on the blackboard. Mr Hesketh was our French teacher, and very easy to draw. He had a flobby, jowlish, slightly over-inflated sort of head with a funny little wiggish haircut perched precariously on top of it, and an extremely big and pointy nose. It was most unfortunate that Mr Hesketh’s career as a French teacher coincided with the advent of the Anglo-French supersonic aviation programme. The tip of Concorde Hesketh’s conk was due to appear through the classroom door at any minute, followed not long afterwards by the rest of him, so I did a hurried sketch on the board. ‘Divvn’t forget his nurz hair,’ said Jeff, casting a critical eye from behind me. Mr Hesketh had long, bushy, black hair billowing from his massive nostrils like inverted smoke clouds, and from my seat near the front of the class I would watch these hairs gradually turning grey due to the amount of chalk dust his frantic blackboard-wiping technique generated. I quickly added a big clump of nasal hair to my drawing then turned to go back to my desk, but my path was blocked by Jeff, smiling menacingly and brandishing a compass point in my direction. At that moment in walked Mr Hesketh, and there was I, chalk in hand, dithering about in front of my portrait. ‘Mr Hesketh,’ said Jeff with a glib smile. ‘Donald’s done a picktcha of ya.’

Jeff wasn’t a real bully, he was a hilarious parody of one. A comic actor. He dressed like a bovver boy in his Crombie coat, sharply creased two-tone trousers and blood-red knee-length boots with bright yellow laces. But he wasn’t violent. The closest to fighting Jeff ever got was tripping up first years at break time. There he was, all six foot of him, flicking his toes gracefully to unbalance these tiny little children who were running around his feet. It was cruel but it was hilarious because he did it with such style and panache. There were plenty of real bullies at Heaton, or ‘hards’ as they preferred to be known. Each had their own hardness rating. The system was a bit like conkers, but instead of smashing someone’s conker to improve your own conker’s rating, you had to ‘kick someone’s fucking heed in’ in order to acquire their points. Hard kids would swagger around the school like gunfighters in a Spaghetti Western, constantly in search of a showdown. The toilet was their saloon where they all hung out, smoking tabs, gambling and discussing the latest hardness rankings. Between the ages of eleven and sixteen I developed phenomenal bladder control, but it wasn’t always possible to avoid trouble. Sometimes if you strayed too far from your pack of friends you’d be picked off by a stray bully and a confrontation would ensue. One second-division hard case called Brian had a very original technique of picking a fight. He’d stand in front of you and block your path by doing an impression of Alvin Stardust singing ‘My Coo-Ca-Choo’. This would involve twisting and turning his fist slowly, right under your nose, in an Alvin Stardust leather glove style, which was strangely hypnotic as his arm looked a bit like a snake slowly rising from a basket. Then at various points in the song – on the words ‘Coo’ and ‘Choo’ I seem to recall – he would punch you lightly on the chin, hoping you would retaliate. He tried it once on me after cornering me above the bicycle sheds, but after a few moments it must have dawned on him how ridiculous he looked, so he made some mumbled excuse and left.