Uncle Freddie's Bumper Book

When I was a squalling bairn, born in Jarrow-on-Tyne in time for the Great Depression, I lived with Our Mam and Our Dad in three rooms upstairs at 1, Hurworth Place. My parents' ambition was Respectability. We had a kitchen, a sitting room referred to as the Room, a bedroom, a cupboard on the landing and a bookshelf. I slept in the Room. Our Dad, lacking a leg from the Great War, worked the nightshift at the C.W.S. bakery and slept in the bedroom by day and Our Mam slept there at night. My sisters were in domestic service at Panhacklety House beyond Carlisle in Farthest Galloway and rarely came home. Downstairs at number 3, in two rooms and a scullery, lived my best-ever friends, Auntie Bella and Uncle Freddie, an unemployed shipwright. Palmer's Shipyard was closed forever and Jarrow was dead or dying. The sisters, Our Mam and Auntie Bella washed, ironed and delivered other people's clothes and scrubbed their floors. Granny and Grandad Fergie would come to stay and slept in a box bed in the kitchen. I loved them both most dearly. Granny was a wise woman who read our future in the tea leaves and had a magic potato she used when darning called Gustaf the Third Marquis of Metz. She was born in a town called Sarragamiens in Lorraine and her father worked in the pottery. When the Germans invaded in 1870, the family became refugees.Grandad had a wonderful singing voice and played the violin. He sang old Irish songs, heartbreaking melodies. He sang in the street outside the Ben Lomond. As a child, what I didn't know was that my Grandfather was prone to alcoholic binges on a mixture of red wine and methylated spirits called red biddy. What I don't understand is why we were happy when we had so little.