Barry Hall’s Blog

Was this Hong Kong, Paris or New York?  No, Jarrow!  But for the first few months it seemed like I was living in a flashing, banging, bustling metropolis  - well, to a 17 year old who had spent his life, from the age of five, in rural Northumberland it did!

It was 1977 and we had swapped our crumbling stone cottage at the end of a remote farm track, for an equally crumbling Victorian terraced house overlooking Jarrow railway station.  So this was urbanlife!  It took months for me to get used to the lamps outside and the strange shadowland they created with their eerie sodium orange glow, slowly sapping all natural colours as dusk set in.  But oh! the luxury of standing in the large bay window and watching dimly lit rail carriages and shadowy silhouettes coming and going in the orange haze, all accompanied with the insidiously pervading smell of a town and its works.

I would relish lying in bed at night, window open, listening to diesel trains rolling to a halt at the platforms, heavy doors slamming, and a few seconds later, footsteps on the wet pavement and anonymous voices passing by.  Sometimes there would be laughter or shouts that would echo up the street - I imagined that they continued to rise, until they took their place in the great archive of collective consciousness - glorious snippets from real lives, filed under ‘happy’, ‘sad’, ‘melancholic’, ‘everyday’.  Real lives were brushing against mine. It was a wonderful and dramatic change to hearing simple silence after sundown.

Then there was the novelty of leaving home and being in a shop two minutes later, any kind of shop - tiny newsagents packed with magazines, sweets and cigarettes. Huge supermarkets where you could browse and buy just a few items without worrying about forgetting something and having to wait a week for another chance. Umpteen bakers, shoe shops, wallpaper shops, chemists, DIY stores and fish and chip shops! - it was all there to experience in the exotically named Viking Precinct.

And right next to the shops, the bus depot and a dizzying array of destinations to be explored for a few pence - anywhere and everywhere! South Shields, Sunderland, Newcastle, Gateshead, the legendary Whitley Bay complete with the great adventure of travelling under the River Tyne to get there.  I loved the liberation that buses offered and took full advantage of the opportunity.  Big city Northern buses seemed more exciting than the rather rural United Automobile Association.  New double deckers with mustard checked upholstery and white interior panels sporting adverts for foreign holidays, The Titbits magazine and gentle but effective laxatives.   The buses were pleasingly regular as well, sweeping in, stopping just long enough to disgorge hot and bothered people with determined expressions.  The whole experience was noisy, smelly and simply breathtaking to me.

It always puzzled me how there could be large patches of land in the middle of a town that no one bothered about?  In the countryside, neglect looks even more appealing than cultivation, but in a town there are random plots of mud and stagnant puddles, all with a liberal sprinkling of half bricks and rusty wire in strange tortured shapes, mirroring the strange tortured things that were attempting to grow alongside. The endless examples of street art were not that appealing either, someone with the call sign ‘Scotty’ seemed to leave his mark everywhere - in much the same way a dog does. 

Now I was born in Jarrow and spent my first five years living near the town centre, so I vaguely recollect talk of a distant world where there was an estuary occupied by a rare birds, ancient walls and the spirits of great men long passed.  (It was in the opposite direction to Hebburn, which I assumed was where God lived).

Was Jarrow Slake really the same place?  A scruffy little corner, now in-filled by other peoples rubbish and rubble?  And the river running by… reduced to a murky lifeless stodge hopelessly anticipating the odd the death-wish-fish.

Despite its appearance Jarrow Slake has always held a unique fascination for me.  Desolate and often very bleak, the music made by the wind in the high pylons and wires was wonderfully unearthly and ethereal.  Maybe the archetypes have voices after all.   

This was however, a different kind of open space.  A kind that was difficult for me to get used to. I began to realise that no escape was possible, at least not of the kind I was used to finding.  No long walks.  No silent places.  No breezes in high trees.  No sandy banks by natural lakes. 

Twenty six years on and I have learned that what you see is not always what you get.  A town cannot be judged simply by how it looks, because, then, you are just judging dust.  It is spirit that counts… and this is found within people.

We all find ways to adjust to different circumstances, at some point the direction of our journey changes - to a journey within. Over the years we begin to discover who we really are, and to do this, we need to know who we are not.  It is said that you can’t know black without knowing white, up without knowing down, high without knowing low.

Over a century ago, people flocked to Jarrow to find work. But the period of mass employment in the shipyards was hopelessly short lived, then tough times took over - yet most people stayed, waiting, coping…this tempered a different kind of mettle and is one of the essential qualities of this great town.

Lifetimes and lifetimes of individual experiences eventually to ooze into large pool of collective spirit - a rich and magnetic spirit that knows both the rough and the smooth.  It may not look like a picturesque lake or a sodium shadowland, but when you sense it, it is just as captivating and when explored… just as liberating!  BH.

Taken from Bric-a-Brack, Arts Advance Press 2003