"Sketches In Me Grandas Pad" - How Childhood Memories Became Poetry
Growing up in the late 1960s in the Teams area of Dunston, Gateshead, meant living in a world that was both tough and tender. Milling Street was a row of Victorian terraced houses—cramped, draughty, and full of life. Eight people might share an upstairs flat, the toilet was outside, and a tin bath hung on the yard wall. Yet for all its modesty, it was a street with a heart. Neighbours sat on their doorsteps, keeping an eye out for each other, swapping gossip, laughter, and the occasional bit of drama.
Those early years inspired me to write The Milling Street Tales — a collection of poems about growing up in a time when the world was changing fast, but the simple rhythms of working-class life still defined who we were. My parents were young and learning on the job, and their good-hearted misadventures became the stuff of family legend.
There was the unforgettable day Mam tried to hoover up a puddle of water after knocking over my baby bath — a moment of pure 1960s chaos that ended in a puff of smoke, a soaked floor, and a singed sense of humour! Then there was the time she filled the kitchen cupboard to bursting with tins of Goblin meat puddings, convinced they’d be our survival food if the Cold War went nuclear.
These stories, told and retold with laughter around our family table, became the heart of The Milling Street Tales. But they also captured in another form —the pencil sketches my Grandad (master draftsman at the Nearby Vickers factory on Scotswood Road) made of Milling Street. His drawings captured the soul of that street — the sloping roofs, the cobbled pavements, the coal smoke rising from chimneys, and the proud but weary faces of its people.
Those sketches were my first glimpse of how art could hold on to a world that was otherwise slipping away. They were the visual memory that matched the stories my parents told, and together they laid the foundations for the poems I would one day write.
Today, when I walk past the spot where Milling Street once stood — now replaced by modern flats overlooking the River Tyne — I can still picture it as it was. I can hear the cries of the trimmers and teemers working down by the Dunston Staiths, where steamships once loaded coal bound for far-off ports. Built in the 1890s, the Staiths were once the lifeblood of the Tyne, a towering wooden monument to the region’s industrial might. They finally ceased operations in 1980, their tipping wagons falling silent after nearly a century of service. Though weathered and scarred by time, the Staiths remain a powerful reminder of the world my parents and grandparents knew — a world of hard work, humour, and hope.
The Milling Street Tales is my way of honouring them — and of saying thank you to a community, and to a Grandad, who taught me that art, humour, and memory can turn even the simplest lives into something worth celebrating.
The Milling Street Tales is now available to order online here: The Milling Street Tales and you can find it in Seven Stories, The National Centre for Children’s Books as well as a selection of regional venues.
