Berking Terrace

Well, well, well. Here I am at age 56 embarking on one of the most ambitious projects in my whole life! What the hell was I thinking???

I was born in Leeds at St James hospital on a cold December afternoon in 1963. I was an ugly little cock-eyed thing with limbs like pipe-cleaners and a face like a rancid slapped arse. Perhaps this was the reason behind the breakup of my parents' marriage just six months later. Mum, older sister and myself were left living in a tiny 2-up, 1-down back-to-back terrace house in Leeds 9. Berking Terrace was situated off Temple View Road at the bottom end of York Road, not far off Leeds City Centre. There were only three houses on either side of the street with a high wall at the end abutted by an outside toilet, or 'lavatory' as the more discerning residents referred to it. To flush the toilet, via the high-level cistern, one had to pull down on a hanging chain. However, that luxury had long since vanished by the time of our tenure in the street, to be replaced by a hardy piece of string. To this day I still refer to flushing the modern (and indoor) loos as, 'pulling the string'! Berking Terrace was just about as basic an accommodation as it was possible to live in, but it was home and, although we moved on in the July of 1966, I still have many fond memories of the place. I loved it. I loved the uncomplicated existence. I loved the sparse furnishings, I loved the tin bath, the cobbled street, and the gas lamps, and I loved it that there was a shop on virtually every corner of every street in the area. I loved it when great Uncle Fred came and poured sackfuls of coal through the outside grate into the cellar beneath. I loved the rawness of the area and the dourness of the streets when it rained, and the bleakness during the cold, raw winter evenings. I loved the sound of distant church bells on a Sunday morning and the commotion from the drunks and pissheads stumbling home from the countless local pubs during the early hours. These were my earliest memories and amongst the fondest of my whole life.

'So what? what's that got to do with owt?'

Okay, so the purpose of this blog is to chart the journey from those happy, far-away days in the distant past, as a little toddler without a care in the world, to where I am today (February 2020), and more importantly where I'm heading! Nature or Nurture? Nurture your own future before it's too late, that's what I think. Only time will tell. By the time one croaks one's last pitiful gasp, we may ask whether we could have done better, or done more, or righted our wrongs with more vigour, more gusto. That time will come to us all and a recurring dream has served to highlight this inevitability.

'Well so what? What's this Lonely Ballerina thing about?'

Ah, yes. Lonely Ballerina. It's a book I've written about a couple of, on the face of it, ordinary Northern families, working-class Northerners in East Leeds. Available soon on Amazon. (It's not a tale of meadows and butterflies, it's not a love story and it doesn't involve the bedtime drinking of Horlicks!).

Berking Terrace, our little 2-up, 1-down back-to-back. Ours was the house on the far left (next to the toilet yard), and my bedroom window was the second one from the end.

( Photograph courtesy of West Yorkshire Archive Service, Leeds, LC/ENG/CP/Box 110/2, NO. 109 - www.wyjs.org.uk/archives )