Transporter of Delight
In Dad’s day, people didn’t need gyms or jogging because everyday life gave them all the exercise they needed. In fact, it gave them more than enough to burn off any extra calories produced by a few pints of best, and bread and dripping too. His working life in shipbuilding sounds like a proud history book of Hartlepool, and his former employers like Richardson Westgarth, Central Marine and Gray’s will stir memories in the minds of many who remember the great days of Britain’s shipbuilding industry. For some of his career, though, he worked in Middlesbrough (his first trip abroad) and, proving my point about natural exercise, every day included a 25 mile round trip by bike punctuated by serious physical effort. My Dad’s favourite story was about his friend Jack, another Hartlepool lad who went to work across the Tees every day, including, of course, a few minutes on the famous Transporter Bridge. Jack had been late for work twice in a week and was warned (no tribunals in those days) that one more offence would earn him the sack. He set off especially early one dark January morning facing the kind of horizontal wind and rain that only the Tees Road can produce. Through sheer hard work on his rusty bike, he was making good time when, five minutes from the Transporter, it had a puncture. With amazing determination he threw the bike over his shoulder and ran the last mile. As he reached the banks of the Tees, half blinded by rain and sweat, he saw that the almost full gondola deck was about six feet from the edge. With his job on the line, and Olympic skill, he jumped the chasm with his bike still over his shoulder. He made it, though his foot caught the gate and he landed face first on the wet wooden deck. Smiling through a bleeding nose, he looked up at the conductor and said: “Marvellous son” came the reply, “we’re just coming in!” Of course, that kind of working day sounds like ancient history to many youngsters, and a look in any town centre on a weekend night will prove that many young men would be hard pushed to run for a bus, never mind cycle to Middlesbrough and back. The strange thing is that in our patch, and most other towns too, there’s a curious split in attitudes to keeping healthy. The growth of fitness facilities shows the demand from some quarters, but there’s still a fatalism about overeating, oversmoking and underactivity from a large chunk (no pun intended) of the population. Perhaps part of the problem is an understandably hidden memory of the time when you really could eat and drink as much as you wanted because the old active working life (in the home as well as the shipyard) would burn off more than you could ever consume. I’d never suggest giving up the good things in life – an existence without a pint of Cameron’s or a Morrell’s pie wouldn’t be worth thinking about. I was convinced some years ago by an American writer who talked about the “80% rule” – if your lifestyle is right 80% of the time, the other 20% doesn’t harm you.
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My late Dad was always capable of a sharp comment on some of the daft things we do in modern life. In fact, on hearing that I was in the habit of driving right to the door of a fitness centre, and then walking a few steps to an exercise bike, he didn’t say anything at all; he just rolled his eyes in disbelief.