Hey Peeps,
Greetings to you all.
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Hoping that life is still treating you kindly.
(A timely word to you denizens of The Web who are looking at this post in your office. The highlighted import when you click on ‘The Animals’ is Very Loud music….which may not be a good idea in that particular environment!)
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Have you noticed that big backcombed bed hair seems to be back in again.
Of course it is nothing new to me.
When I was a teenager we used to backcomb our hair till it was a regular rat’s nest and then smooth a comb gently over the top surface to smooth it, before clipping it up in a massive beehive about a foot tall.
Then we would glue on long black eyelashes and apply lashings of pale pink lipstick, sometimes even drawing on a black beauty spot with an eyebrow pencil too.
We looked way cool!
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There is a very strange story of a certain brash and noisy young lady, who worked in a factory next to the Jarrow shipbuilding company that Big H worked for, which was called called Hawthorn Leslies.
Big H’s firm was mostly fit young men, so they would all play football every lunchtime, against some huge burly blokes, who worked at another factory called Samsonite Resistors.
It must have been funny to see, because all of the Hawthorn Leslie guys would be dressed in Italian trousers, suede desert boots, and shirts that were either collarless or with pencil thin ties, while the other guys were in their blue boiler suits, some with the tops tied around their waists to showcase their huge musculature, and big safety boots.
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Such a gathering of males proved very enticing to the girls in the Patons and Baldwins factory, which, strangely enough, had a big beehive painted on their signboard.
Every lunchtime their doors would burst open and out these young ladies would pour.
They would all be wearing little mini skirts, tight tops and little checkered pinnies, their hair teased up into big, lacquered beehives.
They would visit a little shop nearby to buy mars bars, cigarettes, newspapers and food, usually in giggling groups of three.
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They would then stand and talk to the footballers, as the guys stood around waiting, in their various positions on their makeshift pitch.
One little blonde girl would always chat up Big H, accompanied by her noisy brunette pal, who had the biggest beehive of all.
It was of magnificent proportions indeed.
Apparently, she had not combed combed or washed it at all, since she started working at the factory. She would just smooth it over in the mornings and apply tons of lacquer spray, so that it was as hard as a rock
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One day only the blonde haired girl appeared, so Big H asked her where her friend was.
He was informed that she had terrible pain in her head, so she had gone to visit her doctor because she could not bear it any longer.
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The result was, that the doctor had needed to cut into her beehive, in order to look at the painful area that she was complaining about.
He found that the huge structure was an empty shell, full of insects, that had eaten off all of the hair on the top of her head, along with the top layers of skin, leaving it all raw and bloody, because all these insects were living, breeding, dying and feeding there.
Her hair had to be removed, and her skin treated..
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When she returned to her factory the next day, after her shocking experience, she was a changed and very chastened girl…. who was at least a foot smaller!
And, she was wearing a headscarf, which was needed to cover her little, round, newly bald head.
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My friend Valerie and I were always going out to clubs in those days and life was good.
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One of our favourite places was the Club A GoGo in Newcastle.
We used to queue to get in for ages and when you did the doormen would stamp your hand with indelible ink so that you could go outside for a while.
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I think that the band I enjoyed most in those days was The Animals, with Eric Burdon singing in his gravelly rough way.
The House Of The Rising Sun was really brilliant.
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It was one one such night that we got more than a little drunk and eventually fell into a taxi and headed for our respective homes.
I got back about extremely late and desperately needed a pee.
Normally I would have avoided that like the plague because we lived in an upstairs flat and there was no indoor toilet.
This meant opening the back door and carefully going down a flight of stairs, in the pitch dark, and then going across the concrete yard to use the toilet,
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It was a horrible horrible place . Even in the daytime you could see big spiders and insects in all of the corners, and on the ceiling, and I was always terrified that they would run on me. Or that there would be a rat hiding in there.
And god knows what was living behind the toilet because I never dared to look.
In those day, just after the war, we did not even have toilet paper. We used to tear up a newspaper into squares, then stick a darning needle threaded with twine through one corner, before hanging the loop onto a big nail hammered into the brick wall.
We wiped our bums on all kinds of famous people in those days!
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There was supposed to be a streetlamp in the lane but I can never remember it working even though I was born there…at a very young age!
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That night I can remember sitting there feeling really terrible and then chucking up violently all over the floor. I was as sick as a parrot
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The next morning dawned and I opened my bleary eyes …and nearly died of fright.
I was lying on the concrete floor, curled around the toilet pan, with my head squashed into the corner of that horrible little place.
I had obviously been so inebriated, that I had passed out completely, for the remainder of the night.
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Horrified, I dashed out of there and went back up into the flat, where I was pleased to find that it was so early that everyone was still asleep in their beds.
I went into the bathroom and glanced into the mirror, only to see that all of my huge, lacquered, bouffant, beehive hairstyle was covered in dust and spiders webs.
Not only that, it was also pressed into a strange pointy right angled shape that would have fitted exactly into the corner of the toilet, and was well stiffened with vomit.
Oh god, it was cringe making.
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I had a bath in such hot water, and scrubbed myself so many times, that I am surprised I did not do myself a lasting injury.
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People can tell you not to get drunk and stupid when you are young, but that is in no way as effective as spending a night outside with the spiders is!
I behaved myself for ages after that experience.
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Ah, the sweet pleasures of youth. How I miss them.
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LOL
J
PS. On Tyneside we used to call the toilet a’ Netty’… but don’t ask me why.
