Why didn’t I have my camera phone with me when I needed it?

I spent most of last night staring at a young lady gyrating and doing a fair pass at pole-dance-move-heavy ‘throwing of shapes’ in a music bar, not in LA or Vegas, but instead deepest, darkest Hednesford, West Midlands…

Another open mic night but this time without our guitarist as he was in Norway. He deals with ‘the boxes with wires’ – normally referred to in ‘professhnial’ circles as The PA. We were standing in for the normal compére band and had been booked in there on the spot last week after our first performance, which, to be fair was the purpose of doing it, but our drummer had agreed to do it again this week despite our guitarist’s absence and our obvious lack of expertise on setting ‘the boxes with wires’ up. It took he and Rich an hour and a half and two phonecalls to the boxes with wires’ owner to work out how to link the monitors into it as me and the drummer’s missus soaked up the vibe (man) and watched a LOT of Queen videos. Innuendo’s a bit weird innit?

I don’t understand boxes with wires…I have never had to…every band I’ve been in has had it’s own sound engineer experty type or the bass players are usually the one with the dosh (guitarists and drummers are normally spending their spare cash on loads more equipment or too busy setting up what they’ve got and messing with it rather than setting boxes with wires up. Fact. *nods*) and they buy the boxes with wires and like to play with the knobs and sliders and EQ and stuff soooo….I’ve just got up and done my bit and said whether I can hear myself and if there’s enough effects on the vocals and packing up stands and putting my mic in a box and tying up leads is very technical…isn’t it! I don’t want to know about boxes with wires!

Gradually the place filled up and there seemed to be quite a few musicians so as we waited for our dep. guitarist to turn up Rich eyed up who would be using his £2.5K bass rig this week whilst I contemplated beating our guitarist up for not leaving the spare mics that we use on our own blues open mic in Lichfield (did I tell you we are Massive.In.Lichfield? *ahem*) meaning we had to use mine, my own, my precioussssssssssss as I saw the first band get up.

This microphone was bought in 1994 and cost me £109. I have a very sibilant voice and other mics, including the infamous SM58 don’t suit me so having had a hiatus for ten years there was nowt wrong with that mic when we started up again in 2005, apart from my lipstick on it and a bit of foil trim that dangled like tinsel but it is my tinsel and although occasionally it got in my mouth after a particularly large inhale before a big note I like my tinsel!..Our guitarist hates my microphone…nothing he possesses is less than a couple of years old and he blames my microphone for feedback…this is poppycock by the way but I can’t prove it, so I just ignore him and roll my eyes at the drummer’s missus as he throws wobblers. He’s been after me getting a new mic for the last 12 months but we bought Rich the equivalent and it still doesn’t suit my voice as much as mine!

Anyway, not that I’m touchy about my mic or anything *cough* the first band got up and the Kurt Cobain lookalike was gobbing down it within 5 seconds. As I dead-eyed Rich for putting my mic in the obvious lead vocal spot I could see he had his own issues with the bass player who was messing with the knobs on his very.expensive.rig. He was up and down onstage about 5 times in the first song and I think he was ready to smash the lad’s bass up by the end of their set as I blankly stared at my microphone being ravaged…

Next up was a youth who sounded great, a solo artist with an acoustic but he did remind me a little of Cartman singing Sailing Away on South Park after a while and the landlord ended up switching the telly sound up in the end to get him off. He used Rich’s mic.*smug*

Then we had Hednesford’s own version of Dizzeee Tinie Tempah Doggeee Dogg which was an eye-opener to say the least. I don’t think Hednesford was ready for him, and the scooterists in the corner were openly eyeing him up with suspicion; he did look a leetle fazed when he got offstage admittedly. That’ll teach him for coming from America! Damn Foreigner type! Anyway…this was the first time she got up. Lovely looking lass, beautiful body, flimsy white short-sleeved top, spray on jeans and most impressively ‘throwing her shapes’ in 4 inch heels. No one was ready for her either and after some gyrations and ‘teasing’ of the scooterists who hadn’t had enough ale yet, she gave up and sat down when Tinie Dizzzeeee Dogg got off.

Our dep. guitarist didn’t show…

A lass got up with an acoustic guitar and a shorts jumpsuit and did a really good job of Adele songs, then we had a Duuuuuuuuuuude doing rock and roll who looked like a cross between Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash and Tommy Cooper who was a legend in the area; I smirked as his bass player thought it cool to diss Rich’s mic to the crowd by asking if it was made by Tandy – Rich winced and then hissed “That’s my mic” at him as he mixed his vocal…Ha!…then we had the landlord’s band who are crowd pleasers. By now much ale had been imbibed by all parties so the scooterists were in full voice as the band did The Jam and our lady dancer got up again. Sit Down by James had our dancer on the floor between the legs of one scooterist who thought his Christmasses had all come at once but the funniest part of the night was watching our dancer and her mate gyrating with their bums a foot from our drummer’s face as he vainly tried to peer around them and over them to watch the band!…Sorry girls!

The singer was however, holding his hand over my mic and ramming it into his face with the lead bent over his hand, feeding back like a good’un as he held it to the guitarists instrument and the landlord’s mouth organ. Can you imagine my face? Rich was weeping as the guitarist, swapped to bass and yanked the live lead out and threw it on the floor after his performance! Then the Nirvana bunch came on again. Dancer Girl started doing a full Tawny Kitaen video to them. If I then told you that the singer attempted to ram his guitar through his amp at the end and then wrenched my mic out of the stand to yell “GOODNIGHT!” to his slightly puzzled audience before ramming it back in the stand but missing it so it hung by the lead and swung gently as he left the stage triumphantly can you imagine my face once more?

We shuffled back onstage muttering and I looked at my still swinging mic. The tinsel had gone. As my anger swelled I looked at the crowd to see Dancer Girl had got her top off and was now posing, page 3 style, with the scooterists in her bra. Me, shaking my head in disbelief and another girl, half my age actually, with her partner caught each other’s eye and she came over to me as I tied the leads up – never met her before – and said incredulously “Why don’t her mates tell her to put her top back on again?”

I have become a Grumpy Old Woman…and the mic mouthpieces are in bleach as we speak…

The truth according to me about driving recruitment in 2011!

We have established 2010 was somewhat disastrous for us previously; hubby was made redundant just as I decided to pack the business I’d grown from 2002 in. Now I am not a quitter, I have built this business up on my own, without help, any finance (thanks banks!) and with me as the Unique Selling Point and succeeded happily until May 1st 2009.

My own theory is that supermarkets run the economy because a week before the 1st May Jamie Oliver was in the middle of the campaign for happy chickens and the shelves were thankfully bare of cheap £3 chooks, but just a week later after ‘The Economic Recession’ first published in the January was deemed to have struck (at the end of the fiscal year amazingly) overnight…poof!…meaning the shelves of Tesco were bare of free range chooks and full of £3 ones again; that’s if you could get veg to go with one as hubby, a keen cook, came home stumped thinking they must be shutting the branch the shelves were so empty.

You imagine then that the warehouses who supply the goods to the supermarket have their orders cut overnight so the immediate impact is the warehouse staff don’t need to pack so much and the drivers don’t need to deliver so much, thus wages get cut and we all have less to spend, hence not needing as much stuff in the supermarket! Overnight therefore, it appeared that supermarkets decided by not ordering stuff that wouldn’t be bought (in their opinion) as we had no money meant they didn’t hold as much stock to go to waste! Move over Panorama…here I am! Chief Economist!

Apart from that let me tell you about driver recruitment. My background is customer service in retail and I came to recruitment simply having been so successful selling furniture I thought it would be more fun to sell men! I started in 2000 and the first job given to me in the branch as a totally inexperienced recruiter was to go to the largest client in the branch and refund quite an amount of money when my newly ‘disappeared’ manager was found to be altering invoices to get better commission and altering the drivers’ wages after we, the staff doing their wages, had left the office. Nice!

I believe that good customer service can overcome bad sales practice and make a happier and more loyal customer because an issue has been resolved. As a result of my efforts I got sole-supply for the agency and the contract was worth over a million a year. I got promoted to branch manager within 6 months.

Unfortunately the rot had sunk in and they decided to amalgamate two branches and the Nottingham manager, with his vaster experience was given my branch to look after too and proceeded to make my life a misery. Let me tell you Stoke on Trent is a unique place; a city made up of 5 towns and drivers round here can often think by travelling from the outskirts of their town to another 5 miles away they may get a nosebleed! In retail there was little understanding of Stoke as well and best practice nationwide just doesn’t apply here! With conflicting ideas from someone removed from the Stoke way I left.

The circumstances that made me set up In Transit I am terminally proud of and flattered by still! The client I have mentioned above rang me at home and suggested I set up as they liked the way I worked and would use me. I advertised my new agency in July 22nd 2002 with the tag line “Driven to deliver!” In hindsight however, just because I had studied Latin at school didn’t mean that calling the company ‘In Transit’ would not lead to van drivers ringing me up for work when I specialised in HGV1 drivers! You live and learn hey?…

Over the years I remained small enough to be personal to every client and driver because another anomaly of driving recruitment in particular is that there are shocking peaks and troughs. We come in to the clients in large numbers for bank holidays, the holiday season and of course Christmas. The work can disappear after Christmas and it wasn’t unheard of for agency drivers to go on the dole after Christmas until Easter when work picked up again. By staying small I was able to keep the same drivers working all year round as the larger agencies had hundreds of drivers earning money before Christmas and then attempted to keep their drivers by sharing out what work there was after the festivities, meaning sometimes drivers only did 2 days per week. It was therefore another point of pride and indeed a selling point that my drivers stayed with me for years. Something unheard of in this industry!

From 2008 other agencies became more greedy going to the larger clients and offering volume of drivers for less profit margin, also easing the transport office’s workload by them only having to make one phone call to one agency to cover the bookings. I know one agency had meetings about how they would put the competition out of business. I had remained under the radar and made a point of never maligning other agencies when new drivers registered out of principle, but gradually the clients took to the sole-vend solution, which meant that the large agencies got the phone call for the bookings and they rang the smaller agencies, supposedly with 60/40% split but as you can imagine, it was more 99.9% with the other 0.1% actually going to the smaller agencies! This meant that we lost touch with our clients; we had nothing to differentiate ourselves to a client as the charge rates and pay rates were the same for all and then the drivers, knowing this was the case would naturally go to the agency given the first call. If anyone can suggest to me how else to deal with this phenomenon then I would love your advice!

For myself, what tipped me over whether to continue with the agency or not was a local agency that particularly targeted me and a couple of other small but very well-run agencies. Despite staying under the radar of other agencies for the previous 6 years we were forced to go for meetings with the client where all of us, natural competitors, were discussed in front of each other; how many drivers we had in the contract for instance. It wasn’t long before they were targeting my clients and drivers knowing I was only small and when they became sole-vend it was obvious they weren’t going to give my long-term drivers the work they had enjoyed for the previous 5 years via me. Unfortunately the drivers, set in their ways as I’ve described, wanted to continue in that contract so to at least try to stop that particular agency pinching them I let my closest ally take them as, being larger than me they were likely to be able to put a bit more of a fight up against the chosen sole-vendor.

Unfortunately I learnt another lesson; we had agreed that as I was effectively giving them my workforce they would pay me a fee for each driver. I offer £50 to other drivers who recommend new drivers but this agency offered me a percentage of the first week’s income on them as a thank you. After 6 weeks of asking for this money, the director offered me £20 each. I hadn’t put anything in writing! At the same time a driver in my last contract had suggested another small agency with whom he’d like to continue the contract I’d kept him on for 3 years, saying again what an honourable type she was so I contacted her and we agreed a percentage of his first month’s income. I don’t need to tell you what happened do I? Even though it was in writing I had no means to take her to court when she too reneged!

Incredibly, having had great relief packing in at the end of April 2010, my husband was made redundant just 2 weeks later so I had to start up again without any drivers or contracts! It has proved incredibly difficult to start afresh, I defy anyone not to consider that there was a very good reason to pack up in the first place! For instance, a year later, my main client who I had just built up a fantastic relationship once more has gone to sole-vend. Guess who isn’t getting any phone calls now!

I do believe that I offer a fabulous service, I am extremely fussy about the chaps I take on…they come to my house after all (and yes, in 2005 we had a motorbike pinched, which can only have been a driver as we are also off the beaten track) and I maintain there is a place for In Transit in driver recruitment. I do have ideas but I’m buggered if I’m sharing them with anyone after this last year!…Amazingly I still have my sense of humour and a dogged enthusiasm that keeps bubbling back!

One question: Can you help me with any of your contacts?

Growing up in Leek, Staffs. My observations published in the Leek Post &Times

DULCE ET DECORUM EST

Boredom is an evil playmate.

I was in the fourth year at Westwood High School preparing for my O’Levels and we were studying the War Poets, specifically Wilfred Owen today.

The problem I had is that my imagination was vivid enough without having to read the disturbing graphic accounts of these poor men caught up in a War they neither asked for or wanted to be a part of. I understood that they were the news reporters of their time and gave a valuable and searingly honest account, in all it’s bloody, gory details as a lesson for us all back home, to be documented forever in history, but today it was Dulce Et Decorum Est, and I was twitching in my seat appalled at the descriptive comparisons he used to portray the death and tortuous conditions that he and his comrades experienced.

My disturbed mind sought sanctuary away from the poetry and two flies buzzing annoyingly in the rafters of the mobile distracted me. The mobiles, wooden boxes on stilts that sat at the edge of the hockey pitch and above the start of the course of the Cross Country run…I’d far rather be doing cross country now, yes, even ‘Killer Hill’. The mobiles with glass each side that in summer you fried in and in winter you froze, with small windows across the top, open now and allowing the flies in. They wheeled around in a strange dance around the light fittings, whirling about and meeting up again before flinging themselves to the outer reaches of the room, repelling and attracting each other like a couple of magnets. Before Mrs Donnelly could see me gazing skywards I tried to follow the grim words once more.

“In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.”….

My attention again fled gratefully to our teacher Mrs Donnelly and I immediately felt more comfortable surveying her chosen attire for her teaching day. My eyes moved up from her black patent leather ballet shoes to the inevitable and strangely fascinating yellow and black striped tights. The early eighties was a strange time for fashion and we were all to succumb to it at some point. In her black flouncy skirt and black ‘Sloppy –Joe’ jumper and leopard skin print chiffon scarf Mrs Donnelly looked like one of the Good Witches from The Wizard of Oz with her tightly spiralled black hair and her stripey tights; She distracted me more, however, with her lisp…

“Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues”

…was the killer sentence for her to read for me in my squirming demeanour as I smothered a smirk and threw myself now into doodling…mainly pictures of the stallion that was going to gallop me away from this shocking poem, flaring nostrils, flying mane and tail and the mist of saltwater spray in my face as we sped along a sandy beach somewhere. All at once Mrs Donnelly’s hissing stabbed me out of my daydream and back into World War One.

“Anna, What are you doing?”

I admitted my crime and then winced as my two friends Trisha and Dawn got showered, not in my sea spray but instead a mist of moisture as she spat annoyedly at me “Don’t be such a flibbertigibbet!”

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

Dulce et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, –
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Bituvaketchup!… Down To Eleven. Massive in Lichfield!

Okaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay…so it’s been nearly a year since I last blogged. I know this.is.bad but [fidgets in seat] last year was colossally bad and you really don’t want to hear about the minutiae of a miserable time do you?

I will attempt to cover all bases but feel moved to give you a giggle over the band circumstances first of all! Let’s be a blogger extraordinaire and give you a link to the Facebook page where the info and all our gigs and some of the tracks are: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Down-To-Eleven/117421868319744

Feel free to give us feedback, like the page or even come and support us at a gig as we appear to be Massive.in.Lichfield! *nods*

Based in Stoke, Stafford and Cannock, the band have gravitated towards the south of the county but have played Shropshire and of course Stoke. The problem we have found is that obviously we are extremely aged and therefore, with songs no newer than 1997, ‘da kidz’ are (usually drunkenly) coming up to the band mid-song and demanding Sex on Fire, You Look Good on the Dancefloor and various other male vocal orientated, nasal, flat vocal, northern accented, fizzy guitar, keyboardy songs…none of which two ageing rockers, a supposed bloooooooooooozman and a bit of a funkster on bass have any wish (or ability) to replicate! Consequently the bookings were few and far between in Stoke; the classic being one landlady of a live music venue coming to see us in a pub after hearing our CD, going up to Rich enthusiastically (and maybe a little drunkenly in hindsight) to say I was to ring her the next day as she thought I ‘was wonderful’ and basically drooling unbecomingly. On ringing her, and ringing her again, then going to see her, then going back to see her, then emailing her, then Rich ringing her and reminding her of her unbridled enthusiasm she detachedly said she thought we were too obscure for her pub but gave no further advice on what exactly floated her pub’s boat. Hmmm.

We decided to get some exposure by hosting a blues night in Lichfield every month from February, where we get up for three songs and then let the punters loose on Richard’s v-e-r-y expensive gear *wrings hands* then getting up at the end of the night if there’s any time left. This appeared to pay off and we got a booking at the venue to do our whole set but not before visiting another band showcase night in another Lichfield venue where after four songs, the landlord was buzzing and booked us on the spot!

We have renewed our faith in ourselves, sent him a poster with a catchline of “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something bluuuuuuuuues” (please form an orderly queue to book Rich for any of your marketing needs…) but unfortunately we (quite drunkenly) agreed to do “The One and Only” by Chesney Hawkes for the landlady as it would probably guarantee us bookings throughout the next millennium. I.won’t.be.singing.it. No Siree Bob!..

So, on to the blues night venue where the other unfortunate fashion for us aged rockers is that the bands don’t go on until TEN O’CLOCK and finish at half past midnight. Wha’??? We rolled up at 7.30pm, also to be told we can’t set up until the diners have stopped eating at 9pm so watched the Champions League game over chicken nuggets and chips. Not many people in….our hearts sank again.

By the third song of the first set we had dancers, we had air guitarists and drummers, we had people singing their heads off and…for the landlord, we had beer flowing! As we collapsed outside into the street, sweating after the first set, we had our first punter wanting to book us for her wedding! OK, she wants The Eagles, The Monkees doing I’m a Believer and an Oasis track (Cigarettes and Alcohol I said…you know, the funny nasally, northern accented one *cough*) my only wibble was that she wants Pokerface by Lady Gaga…I don’t even know how it goes (yeah, yeeeeeeah) but we can do THAT! Booked!…

At the start of the second set, the room was packed, water trickling down the walls, more dancers and joy of joys, a bloke asking me if my drink was going to last the set and buying me one…Oh yes!..We’d gone back twenty years where I started off with some appreciation of the music!  By the end of the night I was kissed by drunken punters, our drummer was clapped and thumped in appreciation, our guitarist was told he was a genius and Rich got talking to an Alexei Sayle lookalike who wanted to tell him all about his family tree. Look…you can’t have it all ways…

Please feel free to let The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame know that we are Massive.in.Lichfield!

Right you are!…

I think Leek’s schools were always very proactive at getting their pupils to learn an instrument but as canny seven year olds we learnt to avoid the old wooden recorders with teeth marks on the mouthpieces nevertheless, rushing instead for the new cream plastic ones that came out, torturing our parents with London’s Burning ad infinitum until we were banished to our bedrooms to practice instead.

At Westwood I remember looking in awe at a whole new range of instruments. I remember Ruth Ellis, four years above me, in St.Edward’s Church one Christmas looking like she’d had a nasty accident with some plumbing; a bassoon, and Angela Bunce with what looked like a clarinet with bits missing which turned out to be an oboe. My friend Louise Baxter in Cheddleton already played the trombone and had got to The Albert Hall once as I remember.

Having listened to Terry Wogan advertising the gardens at Alton Towers at the ripe old age of six, I had picked up on the music in the background (Eye Level) and after a queasy trip to my Grandparents in Wales one day, I spent the afternoon playing that tune clumsily with two fingers on my Mum’s old piano. She had given up lessons after accompanying my Grandfather’s singing and getting stage fright, age ten, but I heard them plotting how to get it back to Cheddleton deciding I had a talent for this.

Armed with my Mum’s musty old leather music satchel we were rattling down to Mrs Millward’s farm by the Hockey Club opposite the pear drop smelling chemical works. I’d never been to this part of Leek before and found the smell of Courtaulds quite alarming as we drew up by the hedge and I walked up to the path to the porch where years later Mr Millward would sit in a sun lounger taking in the evening sun after he’d had a stroke and I would always say hello to him.

Inside, you turned right into a room with ornate chairs lined up for pupils waiting to be picked up or who had just been dropped off, an armchair for Mrs Millward to listen to our playing, numerous assorted cats, a huge stone fireplace with two blue glazed vases that fascinated me as they had yellow cobras rearing up to the lids for handles, and of course…the baby grand piano.

We began with scales and arpeggios, then whatever piece we had worked on; right hand first, then the left hand, then both together and later I would marvel at what Mrs Millward could fit into half an hour lesson as we ended by repeating parrot fashion, with no real comprehension of what we were saying “Andante – Slow but not dragging, or at a walking pace…Andantino – Slower than Andante”…

Mrs Millward herself, always in tweeds and brogues or furry boots in the cold winters, with her silver hair in a plait all round her head in a hair net and gold framed half moon glasses must have had the patience of a saint with an endless stream of children coming in and out, having to repeat the same scales and arpeggios at different grades hour after hour. She was extremely quietly spoken and I used to love the sound of her fingernails clicking on the keys as she demonstrated the next series of bars to be learnt for the next week As a result I stopped biting my own nails, as I wanted them to sound just like that! Despite being so quietly spoken she could silence any silliness on my behalf with a touch to her glasses and a disapproving look above the lenses with her clear, calm grey eyes.

I stayed with her until I was seventeen and had got to Grade 8 and I like to think we became friends along the way. I remember us giggling at yet another exam at St.John’s on Belle Vue as a pupil walked in plastered in glaring metallic silver makeup, aged fifteen, no doubt to dazzle the grim examiner into passing her! And they were grim!

I didn’t get nervous about ballet or tap exams as such, but these people were so serious! We’d traipse into the vaguely chip fat smelling kitchen filled with doom, clutching our studies and going through possible theory questions. It was always chilly too, which was hardly conducive to fluent fingers for four octaves of chromatic scales on top of nerves!

Mrs Millward would have half an ear to the echoey plinking you could make out in the main hall and I would occasionally see her wince as someone restarted a scale where they had tripped over their fingers. She would then have to concentrate on the pupil waiting, trying to calm their nerves before a slightly shocked looking candidate would reel out of the exam room and get debriefed as you waited with creeping death to be summoned whilst the examiner finished their paperwork. Before mustering the courage to step into the fateful room you would get a consolatory nod from Mrs Millward and a “Right you are!” as encouragement then you would try to say good morning to the examiner without the giveaway quiver in your voice. The rest of the exam would thankfully fade into obscurity but I do remember however, the regular series of notices in the Post & Times as yet more pupils belonging to Mrs.M.E.Millward were congratulated on passing.

The Show

The town hall’s interior in Market Street was a forlorn shabby building by day occupied by faceless clerks who took money off you for rates, but at night was transformed into the equivalent of The London Palladium. A huge staircase led up into the function room from the humble stairs off the street that took you to another world!

The occasion this time was Sylvia Royall’s School of Dance Showpiece and I was thrilled to be included as I had my first proper tutu! A confection of yards of scrunched up net complete with frilly knickers and a real satin bodice of which I was extremely proud. It had been made to measure and despite my diminutive stature I remember the shock registered on Mum and Dad’s faces at the cost of it! I was doing two performances; one with my ballet class and the other with my tap class which was a dramatic gypsy dance where we were all dressed in bright flouncy skirts, mine a work of genius by my Mum who had sacrificed the net underskirt of her hand painted dress from the fifties that she had kept for years as it was so beautiful. We also had tambourines, bought from the music shop on St.Edward Street, and they were garlanded with yards of brightly coloured ribbon that trailed behind our every move making us look like those Olympic gymnasts.

We’d practiced and practiced and done a dress rehearsal which consisted of us stampeding around the stalls and going up and down the spiral staircase into the slightly musty upholstered balcony, stopping only to watch the next performance as Mrs Royall shouted instructions from the stalls and Mrs Machin tirelessly played the piano accompaniment ad infinitum.

I always saw Mr and Mrs Royall as possibly the most glamorous couple in Leek, Mrs Royall in her fur coats and big gold Range Rover with her hair pulled tightly back into a bun and with bright red lipstick, always enthusiastic and smiling urging us to smile for the imaginary audience, for the examiners or for her, and Mr Royall the organiser and choreographer for the yearly scout shows, the first gentleman I’d seen wearing a cravat, which I thought was terribly swish, who herded us about to ensure some sort of organisation and smooth operations between performances.

The night had finally arrived and the excitement was overwhelming! All our class were in line waiting to be grease painted by Mrs Povey. It was so cold as we shivered in our tutus in anticipation and the greasepaint was freezing as it was sponged on! As it dried, my face became stuck in a mask of mild surprise as I stood in line to have the seams on my ballet tights checked for straightness and my hair net and hair band to be severely hair-gripped in place now giving my face a mildly shrink wrapped look as yet another mother dotted our inner eyes with red spots to stop us looking cross-eyed in the spotlight, we were told.

We tip-toed into the wings watching my school friend Sam finishing a beautiful solo piece to Mrs Machin’s Clair de la Lune, on points in a long tutu (for which I was momentarily jealous) as she was two classes above me, and then I caught my first glance of the all encompassing darkness of the seating area punctuated by the odd polite cough and the thrill of anticipation once more rippled through me as my eyes got used to the gloom and I could see the first couple of rows of faces lit up by the spots. The audience!

Suddenly I was shaken back to reality as I saw Sam curtsey to rapturous applause and then it went quiet and the familiar music that we had worked to for months broke out for our entrance. Mrs Royall shepherded us on stage with the last hissed order of “Don’t forget to SMILE!”

“Pimpernel Petroleum was a a bold, bad ‘bass’”

Our teacher was ill.

The boy beside me had a constant dribble from his nose and was alternately sniffing loudly and wiping his nose on his jumper sleeve. Mr Grey was looking grim as he tried to read a story in verse about a bus called ‘Pimpernel Petroleum’.

In the hall at All Saints Primary School in his clipped accent, the headmaster, covering for our absent teacher, delivered the first line to the row of children sitting obediently with arms and legs crossed.

“Pimpernel Petroleum was a bold bad ‘bass’” he boomed.

I started to grin. In my attempts to smother the grin I started to squirm and then my friend beside me who accidentally received a pointed elbow in her neatly folded arm glanced annoyedly at me. Meanwhile I had successfully stifled another giggle only to be replaced by shoulders going up and down in silent mirth and the boy sniffed and wiped his nose on his arm, and Mr Grey said “bass” again…That awful feeling, like your tummy has turned into a vacuum as you try not to make a noise but desperately need to exhale or you will surely asphyxiate…I must have been bright red by now with giveaway tears in my eyes and then, horror of horrors, my friend’s shoulders started going up and down in savage mimicry as she too gave way to mirth!

The trouble was, if Diana started, I started, only she could be silent but as the pain continued in my belly and I struggled to breathe it was only a matter of time before that totally involuntary long drawn out painful groan, that if you have been winded you are only too aware of, would issue from my constricted and contorted body. Worse now, the girl beside Diana was elbowing her friend, and mine and Diana’s anguish was distracting the whole line as we struggled to remain silent. The boy sniffed, wiped his nose and Mr Grey looked up, beginning to be aware that a ripple of dissent was travelling through our ranks. Hopelessly, Diana exploded into a cough to disguise her laughter but I gurgled instead, which only made matters worse.

At first break we were lined up again in the hall. Our headmaster, eyes slightly popping in annoyance as he administered a detention to Class Six. His attempt at entertainment had dissolved into a struggle of wills as he had vainly tried to control us giggling helplessly.

I’d never been in detention before and felt slightly guilty at being the cause of all our troubles. Outside we could hear the rest of the school running around the playground squealing and shouting, doing childish things as we stood silently, fearing to breathe facing the wrath of Mr Grey. Standing upright, chests out, arms by our sides, like soldiers to attention; grim masks for faces, we braved the punishment meted out to us for five whole minutes before we started slumping, shoulders drooping. Someone sighed too loudly so as Mr Grey barked “What’s the matter with you? You’re like Rip Van Winkle’s 100 day asleep school!” Diana and I exploded again…

Joe, The Watchman

Without needing to scratch my chin sagely, I can honestly say that I remember a place in Leek when it was just fields: The Ladydale Estate opposite the Cemetery on Junction Road!

We had lived at the Police House opposite Birchall Playing Fields and were able to look on to those same fields from our house back then. Fields that stretched into the dark green woods of Ballington, it was used as grazing for horses. Six years later, in the long idyllic hot summer of 1976 we were to move there; one of my first recollections being my Mum and Dad excitedly choosing their preferred colour of bathroom tile offered by the show-house, now the first house on the left as you enter the estate.

This work-in-progress estate was absolutely the best playground my brother and I could have wished to be set free on and at that time we were the only children there. With complete abandon we were free to jump rafters between floors, to use the scaffolding as a climbing frame, and until my brother fell into the fibreglass lagging mounds enveloped in polythene and scratched for two days after, they made the best trampolines!

The only dark cloud on this childhood Valhalla was Joe, the Watchman. Expected to supervise the mountains of bricks on pallets and massive sand dunes, to make sure that the bags of Blue Circle cement did not disappear and to keep an eye on the estate and the dumper trucks and JCB’s in general, he was a silent surly man of Polish descent who marched onsite as the day lengthened toward evening. In a tweed jacket with leather patches on his arms and hob nail boots he materialised from Fynney Street down the path to the estate with his torch that began as a disembodied glimmer in the distance but became a sweeping, probing beam of grim suspicion searching out potential wrongdoers, he surprised us many a time jumping off rooves on to piles of sand studded with half ends of bricks that we could have cheerfully endangered ourselves on daily. As twilight approached, before our tea was ready, we could be caught crawling through pipes and sliding down semi-complete banisters to flee in pseudo terror from Joe, who had stomped up on us unawares.

With the vivid imaginations of a ten and twelve year old we built this icon of authority into a forbidding Child Catcher who terrorised us for the next couple of years until the estate’s completion, by then with many more children to keep his hands full with as we scattered on sight of him; impossible for him to catch.

Nativity Play

I had been a bit nervous about going into Mrs Savage’s Class 3. My brother who was two years older than me had given me the impression she was capable of living up to her name. There was a palpable difference from the comfort of Mrs Deaville’s Disney festooned windows into the sombre austerity of a serious learning centre!

My favourite festival was just past – The Harvest Festival, where we took our offerings to All Saints Church for the occupants of the almshouses by the traffic lights at Compton, and other needy people. Some took a couple of tins that they could spare and others took wrapped fruit and veg; pumpkins always looked glorious, in big wicker baskets adorned in ribbons and crackly cellophane, but all was appreciated by whomever I’m sure, as we gaily sang All Things Bright and Beautiful.

Just past that, Mrs Savage was already planning towards the next festival and was trying to organise the cast for The Nativity Play for the school’s Christmas Show. I looked sulkily around. Samantha; blonde and extremely pretty was a given for The Angel Gabriel, Sian; tall for her seven years with a beautiful spoken voice would be snapped up for the Narrator. Mrs Savage had chosen Simon, Gareth and Charles, all mates, for The Three Kings and had just named James Tew as Joseph. I sat, dismayed as she told James to pick his own Mary and continued mulling on my plain-ness and resigning myself to the chorus for all the other also-rans, or at best, a tea-towel adorned shepherd or a donkey or a sheep in a silly costume when I heard my name.

Stunned into silence for once I looked at James. He’d chosen me? Some mistake, surely?

The rabbit in the headlights look dissolved into a smile and then a grin of sheer amazement as I pointed to myself for confirmation. Mrs Savage clapped her hands once to gain everyone’s attention once more and moved on to the hapless shepherds while I sat glowing with delight, deaf to any more proceedings.

It was the night of the play and Compton’s assembly hall was full. I had one line and my heart was pumping in anticipation as James, in his flannelette sheet was asking dramatically behind his cotton wool beard if there was any room at the Inn. Sam was sparkling in the background garlanded in a white shift dress and a tinsel halo and Sian’s measured voice was the only thing keeping me calm as time seemed to pass in slow motion leading up to My One Line…

I was grinning at my Mum and Dad and it was possible that I had waved at them mid play, yes. I could see encouragement from the smiling audience and I could just make out Mrs Savage in the murk at the foot of the stage, ready with a prompt if necessary. Mrs Bourne the dinner lady was also smiling at me as I puffed my chest out, took a deep breath and opened my mouth…..just as a fire engine, full sirens blaring wailed past the school probably on its way to another fire at Cheddleton Hospital and drowned me out completely….

Ballington Woods

I consider myself to be a naturally gregarious person, but then I look back to the times I would go to Ballington Woods on my own at the age of ten, practically from dawn till dusk. My especial favourite place was the path leading up to the woods. At the bottom of Ladydale estate where the paths converged behind Ashenhurst Way, running parallel to Compton School’s playing fields, the path that lead from the bottom of Ashenhurst Way where it simply ran out of tarmac into the familiar red sandstone of Leek, and the path that ran round the bottom of Pickwood Hall’s land by the small brook where it met Ladydale with a foreboding 5-bar gate that oozed “Do Not Trespass”, all the way round to the path leading up to Fynney Street, off Southbank. Here I imagined ghosts to walk at night. Wasn’t there a story about a monk walking down what looked like a sunken path? – Somehow the sun never shone there and it was a dank and gloomy place that I avoided without knowledge, just the instinct of a ten year old. It was a regular rabbit warren! Once the estate was close to the completion of its houses, the children were pushed closer to the outskirts of the estate to play and my special place was further up the path towards Ballington. You walked by the 5-bar gate over the concrete footbridge where the tiny brook evolved into a fully fledged stream from it’s tributary running from the wood – sometimes barred by barbed wire into private territory, but mostly accessible to paddling in muddy boots, or barefoot in Summer – Halfway up the path to the woods, having been hemmed in on one side by holly and brambles and the unmistakeable heady aroma of angelica, whilst on the other side, barbed wire, sometimes with clumps of cow hair where they had idly scratched the bothering flies away, the path widened into an open space where the stream meandered into a U-shape. This was the haven for me. I could jump the banks, poke about at strange insects and animals inhabiting the water, climb a tree that sat over the stream, I imagined, guarding some secret in the prickly hedge behind it; Most of all I used the pebbles and rocks to make dams, urging the water reluctantly into lagoons and silencing its burbling until the pressure built up and it forced it’s way past my clumsy efforts as if not to be denied, and once more trickled noisily away from me – I could almost hear it laughing. My favourite CS Lewis books about Narnia would inflame my imagination into believing I would find talking beavers who would no doubt give me their best advice on the art of dam making, whilst perhaps a faun like Mr Tumnus would gently remind me that I mustn’t stop the water for long or the cows further down the stream at Birchall would surely expire from thirst! Only the grumble of hunger would remind me of the passing time and I would head off home leaving my wrecked dams probably until tomorrow when the water would once more beckon me…