Sunderland Echoes

Alan Brien describes his ‘colonial experience’ growing up in the North East; photograph by Duffy

In my mind’s eye, better these days than my body’s eye, I see its sea and streets. Focusing closer, the Docks the Tram Shed, where my brothers worked and where my father worked, twin poles for me of what was practically an off-shore island. Sunderland, origin­­­ally ‘the Sundered Land’.

The sea, the North Sea, James Joyce’s “snot-green, scrotum-tightening sea”, which didn’t stay long in its proper playground, the endless Saharan scimitars of sandy beach or the crane-fringed fort­resses of the quays, but reared up over the town, like a Disney storm-cloud.

Coal fires on sun-glazed summer afternoons. Parlour doors hung with inch-thick layers of plush drapery. Steamy, sweating caves of bed-clothes inhabited by dented aluminium hot-water bottles wrapped in old flannel drawers, or heavy stone jars with heavy stone stoppers. Backrooms of beer-only pubs, where the reg­ulars, sitting so near their thighs interleaved, formed an idol­atrous circle round the totem of glowing pillar-box stove.

Winter promenades along a fume-besieged front, the waves booming like cannons as they thundered under the Hapsburg lip of the beach wall and their spray exploded in great frozen stars of emerald grapeshot. Cold, the Enemy, always in your bones, worse even than the Tories

The last tram on Saturdays almost a jamboree, a cold-climate fiesta, packed with illuminated turn-to-mask faces, passengers swaying and singing inside its hurtling, glassy, goldfish tank, while the conductor gave up jangling his useless ticket punch, and the driver, cut off from us all behind his swinging chain, stamped his clanging bell and groaned us round right-angle bends on his way to the last stop before his terminus, my father’s Tram Shed.

At my father’s funeral, when the sea mist made the sky sag like the roof a waterlogged tent and rose among the grave stones like puffs of smoke, six old tramways-men materialised like genies, immaculate in long moth-balled navy and red uni­forms, ticket-punches gleaming, to carry their comrade’s coffin - a work­ing-­­class ceremonial no Guardees could have out-smarted -­ before vanishing again to take the new-fangled bus home on their pensioner’s travel passes.

Nobody ever goes to Sunderland by accident. No­body ever happens to pass through it. It’s not on the road, or rail, to anywhere, or the centre for anything. An Anglo-Saxon Alsatia, it was still to us, growing up there in the Thirties, a North-Eastern Afghanistan where we were as cut off from that faraway capital of Empire, London, as any other colonial people. We weren’t directly occupied by Southern forces, but ruled instead by proxy, a puppet province subjugated by mass unemployment, pacified by the Means Test; our closed-down shipyards and part-time pits barely worth their exploitation. We were all working-class — even the one in three out-of-work; some, like several of my uncles, since the Armistice of 1918. We grew up in the class war, a war our side had already lost, though. Encouraged by my father, I joined a maquis which fought back at street-corner meetings. Even our middle class — the managers and small businessmen — were working class; though they sided with the oppressors, the absentee Tory owners of all we sur­veyed. But then, the mass of the natives were collaborators too, voting for the enemy — even if they secretly despised their foreign masters.

For everyone outside did seem foreign. Sunderland was England. The North East embodied all other worthwhile points of the compass. Who were the true Northerners, if not us? The Topographical War absorbed, and sublimated, much of the passion which would have fuelled the Class War. Our borders were between Darling­ton and York. Manchester, described by the alien-controlled BBC as Capital of the North was to us the Gateway to the Midlands. They still laugh, up in Sunderland, at Mike Parkinson’s Barnsley being anything but a Potemkin village, run up overnight for the Hampstead tourist trade, full of Berlitz proles in comic costume, speaking a regional Esperanto probably learned off Linguaphone records.

Sunderlanders thrive on para­dox— you could equally say that nobody goes there, except by accident. Today, yesterday, they’re proud and self- pitying, resent you leav­ing, gawp at you coming back. Good with their hands, canny with their brains, tireless, indestruct­ible, con­fident of out-doing Japs, Wops, Krauts and Yanks in anything. Yet inocul­ated against the Work Ethic, always able so find summink bettar ta dee. Never heard of the Problem of Leisure, (something the De­pression gave plenty of), so prodigious and compulsive talkers, footballers, growers of leeks, breeders and trainers of dogs, workmen’s clubbers.

Sunderland is a one-storey town full of tall-storey men, a place flattened into a [?], near-
provincial acres of terraced bungalows giving way only to council estates consisting of serpentine culs‑de-sac, making a walk home over twice the distance in half the time a Londoner would queue for a number 11 bus.

They have an indelible local loyalty, history, [??] idiocies, yet watch the old [??] waste with a cynical apathy towns have suffered a planning [?] transplant, ancient mazes re­placed by solid concrete plugs. Only Sunderland has been disembowelled with gaping holes. Our Big Ben town hall toppled, into a grassy dent which floods whenever it rains, like every Sunday. Our grand­iose Grand Hotel vaporised into a cinder car park. Nowhere have they more cause to hate the Good Old Days, nowhere do they mourn them with such elegiac eloquence.

Home-town love is honour­­able patriot­ism. Sunder­land: my Tin Pan Alley song. The hole in my foot I got vandalising a private develop­ment which dared infiltrate our council estate...the swollen eye-ball from the clod of mud while playing ghouls in the dark…stealing chocolates from Woolworths…seeing how far the tide came up your face in the Holy Rocks…riding our kid’s bike between trams… watch­­ing pigs cut open over the slaughterhouse wall…spouting Bolshevism on a box on the sea front... drinking in the Bede School library, hiding the French-letter catalogue inside Masefield’s Life of Jesus…a girl in Mowbray Park who [?] like Veronica Lake and who looks like Irene Handl and [?] the new generation have no standards

Sunderland, I love it, I don’t have to like it. After all, the people who live there, they do, and they don’t.

© Times Newspapers Ltd. 1976