Читать книгу The Eddie Stobart Story - Hunter Davies - Страница 10

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YOUNG EDWARD

The Stobart children were all very blonde when young, but then most native Cumbrian children are born fair-haired. You see them ‘up street’ in Carlisle on Saturday mornings, in from the country and shopping with their mums and dads, being dragged around, little boys and girls, so fresh-faced and fair, like little angels. It’s the Scandinavian in them coming out, leftovers from the Viking Norse raiders.

The Norse influence can also be seen in the rural place names: ‘beck’, meaning stream, ‘how’, meaning small hill, ‘pike’, for sharp summit, ‘thwaite’, meaning clearing. ‘Howbeck’, the name of the little village school in Hesket, is a perfect example, combining two Norse words. This was the school that all the young Stobarts attended, just as Eddie himself had done.

Young Edward, the Stobarts’ third child, started at Howbeck at five years old, and was taken there each day by his sister Anne, aged seven. They walked the one-and-a-half miles to get there, along with their six-year-old brother, John. Edward has no memory of his mother taking him to school; his memory of her during his childhood was that she was ill and very often in bed all day. ‘I don’t even remember her making my breakfast,’ he says now. During her thirties, Nora did have a sequence of illness, such as gallstone problems which confined her to her bed, but she was later to recover her health.

Edward has a clear memory of what he thought about his first day at Howbeck school: ‘I hated it. It was a nightmare from day one. I remember thinking: “How am I going to get through it, so that I can go home and play?”’

By playing, Edward meant watching his father’s machinery in the yard, tipping and loading, or going to his grandfather’s farm and playing with the animals there. His little job each day was to go to his grandfather’s to pick up a can of milk for their family.

Edward’s father had remained at Howbeck all his school life, such as it was, as in those days pupils could stay there until they were fourteen. By the time young Edward attended, Howbeck had become a primary school, which meant that, at eleven years old, you had to move on elsewhere. There were just two classes in the school: Class One, for those aged five to eight, and Class Two, for those aged eight to eleven. Edward reminisces: ‘I remember a Miss Allcorn taking Class One – and what I remember about her was that she had a bubble car. Miss Ashbridge took Class Two and she was the headmistress.’ Kathleen Ashbridge always retained pleasant memories of the Stobart boys. They were not great scholars, but she had no trouble from them.

‘If I was naughty at school,’ says Edward, ‘I did it behind the scenes. But I wasn’t a troublemaker. All I got told off for by Miss Ashbridge was for not doing well. She’d then put me in the corner with my face to the wall. I quite liked sums, that was about all. Nothing else. I spent a lot of time just sitting, drawing cars and lorries.’

According to Nora, Edward was always the most adventurous of her four children, and the one who usually got injured. ‘He had accidents all the time. One of the earliest was when he was rushing into Mrs Jardine’s field to feed her hens. He was in such a hurry that he ran straight into a barbed-wire fence. He cut his whole face; the blood was awful. But that was typical. He was always falling off things or stumbling over things.

‘But he was also very sensitive and generous, would do anything for people. He was always quite quiet; all the boys were quiet, really. Anne was the talker in the family; she was the clever one.’

Anne was the only person to pass the eleven-plus in her year at Howbeck. ‘In fact,’ she says, ‘I was told I was the only one to have passed it for seventeen years – the last one being my Uncle Ronnie.’ She went to Wigton Nelson Tomlinson grammar school at Wigton – alma mater of Melvyn Bragg.

When it was time for Edward to sit his eleven-plus, he had no expectations. ‘I never thought for one moment I would pass,’ he says. ‘I was useless at all school work. In the exam, I couldn’t answer a single question. I just sat there, drawing tractors. I felt pretty disgusted with myself. I don’t remember any one else in my year passing, so we all went to the secondary modern together.’

This was Caldew School, Dalston, opened in 1959, so still quite new when Edward arrived in 1965. It became a comprehensive in 1968, while Edward was still there. There were five hundred pupils, both boys and girls, and lots of playing fields and space, being in a semi-rural situation. Dalston itself is a rather affluent dormitory village, just five miles from Carlisle, facing towards the Caldbeck Fell. Each day, Edward went on his bike into Hesket then caught the school bus for the ten-mile journey to Dalston.

Edward remembers, ‘I was put in the dunces’ class from the beginning, in Mrs Carlisle’s class. William got put in the same class when he arrived. We were both big dunces all the way through our school lives. They called it the Progress Class. But we all knew what it meant.

‘I was never good at writing. If I concentrated really hard, I might just make six spelling mistakes on a page. But usually I got every word wrong. I could never see the point in writing. I didn’t feel thick; I was just a dunce at lessons. I felt older than the others in many ways. At twelve, I felt about twenty. I knew about general things, about how things worked, which they didn’t. I wasn’t street-wise – I never watched television at home, ever, so when the other lads spent hours talking about TV programmes, I didn’t know what they were on about. But all the same, I felt mature compared with all of them.

‘I’m not sure what they thought of me. A bit strange perhaps, eccentric. I was a bit of a loner – I never wanted to be in anyone’s gang and I didn’t have a best friend. At playtime, I’d often go and help the school gardener. Even during lessons, I’d try to get off and go with him. I always wanted to use his lawnmower – one of the big ones, you know, that you can sit on and drive. I thought it was a brilliant machine. But he’d never let me. Instead, he’d let me help on the hedge cutting. I enjoyed it better than any lessons.

‘But I had some good laughs at school, got up to mischief now and again. I once locked a teacher in the store cupboard. The deputy headmaster was Mr Mount. We called him Bouncer – I suppose because he was small and fat and bounced along.

‘I got caught once for smoking by Bouncer. It was me and John behind the gym wall. It was reported to our parents. My dad wasn’t very worried: “Did it make you sick?” he asked me. I said yes. “Same as me,” he said. He was very laid-back, my dad. He gave us a lot of rope.’

Nora worried about Edward’s bad school reports, but always told him that all he could do was his best. ‘The trouble was, Edward never did his best. So I used to tell him that at least he must always be honest.’

Kenneth Mount, now retired but still living in Carlisle, remembers the Stobart boys well. He taught at Caldew School from its 1959 opening until 1986, when he retired. He became deputy headmaster and was indeed known as Bouncer – but not for his appearance, so he says. ‘I was called Bouncer because I bounced them out of school. Oh yes, I could be very tough on them.’

He confirms that Edward went into the remedial form on his arrival at the school. ‘We would have had reports from his primary and knew that he wasn’t very good at reading and writing. No, he wasn’t ESN [educationally subnormal]. We had special schools for those sort at the time in Carlisle. If he’d been really bad, he would have gone there. He was just, how shall I put this as I have no wish to be derogatory? A slow learner. William was even slower. Academically, neither was exactly successful.

‘But you have to understand that they were typical of many country lads. School was an irrelevance to them. They would be up early morning doing jobs on the farm, then working in the evening when they got home. School was just what they did during the day. And if you think about it, it was more interesting for a certain sort of boy to be at home, surrounded by machines and animals, than sitting at a desk in school. But Edward’s character was excellent, and his behaviour. I knew the family; I knew he came from a good Christian home.’

On Sundays, Edward went to Sunday School and to church with his brothers and sister. Given a choice at the time, he would not have gone as he didn’t enjoy it. It was just something he was forced to do, although he did believe in God.

There was some slight social demarcation at school amongst the rural children, between the various farmers’ sons. Many of these were hard up, especially if their fathers were small-holders in rented farms, or if they were farm labourers or farm contractors. Some farmers were, by contrast, quite well off, or appeared well off, especially if they owned several vehicles, as the Stobarts did.

‘I knew my father was a contractor, with about four or five people working for him but, no, I never felt well off,’ says Edward. ‘We did have a car, a Morris Oxford, but I never had a new bike. I always had a second-hand one. We did have a summer holiday, but never abroad. We usually went to a guest house in Cornwall or Devon.

‘The pipes once got frozen at school and we were all told to bring our own drinks to school. I took a bottle of water. Some people brought bottles of lemonade. I remember thinking, well, they must be well off …’

Edward was fascinated by money from an early age and was always looking for jobs that would earn him something. From about the age of eleven, he did what his father had done as a boy, chopping up wood to sell as kindling sticks. He seems to have had it better organized than his dad, making an attempt at mass production. Edward got his dad to order a load of old railway sleepers, which he paid for, then had them sawn up into lengths. He chopped them into sticks and bagged them in old animal-feed bags he got from his Uncle Ronnie’s cattle-feed mill. Each day, he would take two bags of sticks on the school bus to Dalston, thereby getting free transport, where he sold them to teachers at three shillings a bag.

Very soon, Edward’s earnings mounted up. He always kept his money in cash, in his pocket, and when the coins grew too bulky, he changed them into notes. By the age of fourteen, he was carrying around with him £200 in notes: an enormous amount for a boy of fourteen in 1968. Today, of course, we would immediately suspect a schoolboy with such a sum of selling drugs. Not Edward, though, from his God-fearing family, in rural Cumbria.

Edward isn’t sure why he didn’t put the money in a bank or the post office, to make it earn a little bit of interest: ‘I don’t know – I just liked the feel of it. I always kept it in this trouser pocket, at the front, all the time – even when I was at school.’ Nor is Edward sure why he didn’t leave the money at home, if only under the bed. ‘Perhaps I worried about burglars,’ he muses. ‘It just seemed safe, always having it on me.’

Edward didn’t, however, leave the money in his pocket when he changed at school for PE or games. ‘Oh, I took it out of my pocket then. I’d hide it in a secret place: in my satchel …’ That must have fooled everyone. Yet Edward insists that he didn’t even half-want people to know, to be aware that he was a boy of means. ‘I never told people. I didn’t go around boasting at school. My parents didn’t know either. I can’t really explain it, except to say I just liked the feeling of having my money on me.

‘But it wasn’t the money itself that was so important. It was the sign that I’d achieved something. I was always like that, setting myself little aims, to sell so many bags in a week, make so many pounds in a month. I liked beating my own targets which I’d set for myself. No one else knew.

‘My older brother, John, also did jobs around the place; he wasn’t lazy, but he was never at all interested in money. Not like me: I’d agree to wash my dad’s car for a certain price and try to do it in a certain time.

‘It felt good, to watch it mount up. I didn’t spend it, well, not much of it. Perhaps some clothes as I got a bit older. As it got bigger, I told myself I was saving to buy my own car but, really, I was mainly saving the money because I liked seeing it mount up.

‘I suppose you could say I was insecure, which I probably was. Having money made me feel a bit more secure. But, then again, nobody ever knew what I’d saved, so how did I gain by that?’

There is one other explanation why Edward got such secret satisfaction out of salting his little earnings away; why having a stash in his pocket, on his person, made him feel good, perhaps even better than most others. It happened when he was aged seven. At that time, work was being done on the house and the family was living in a caravan on the site. ‘One day,’ says Nora, ‘Edward decided to climb up on the roof. I’ve no idea why. That was the sort of thing he was always doing – to see how the slates fitted, I should think. Anyway, he fell off and was badly hurt. And that was when it all began. The shock of it brought on his stammer.’

Edward clearly remembers the day of his fall. ‘It wasn’t the house roof. It was the roof of an outside toilet. The builders had left stuff lying around, so I just decided, for no reason, to climb up on some oil drums they’d left; take a look at the roof. It was a slate roof with a big hole in it where they were repairing it. And I just fell right through. I wasn’t seriously hurt, not that I can remember. But, in about a day, I realized I’d developed a stutter. Fear, you might say. That’s what caused it suddenly to happen like that.’

Nora took Edward to a speech therapist in Wigton for several years but it didn’t seem to help that much. It didn’t help William either. ‘Oh yes,’ says Nora, ‘the same sort of thing happened a bit later to William. So I was then taking both of them. It was bad throughout all their childhood and youth.’

Around 1.2 per cent of children (about 109,000) in England and Wales between the ages of five and sixteen develop a stammer each year. No one has ever conclusively explained the causes or the triggers or why, over the decades, the figures have stayed roughly the same. It occurs throughout the world, across all cultures, all social groups. And everywhere it shows the same remarkable characteristic: four times as many boys are afflicted as girls. Hard luck on the Stobarts, having it happen to two of their number.

Edward’s own theory is that it’s all to do with trying to speak too quickly: ‘That’s when I always have trouble, when I want to say too much, all at the same time. I start one sentence before I’ve finished another, so it comes out as a stutter. I’m thinking too far ahead, that’s it. Same with eating: I eat far too fast. Always have done. I used to bolt all my meals – in fact, really, I didn’t like eating. What used to happen was that I couldn’t really taste what was in my mouth, so I was rushing to the next bite, to see if that tasted better. I used to say I wished they would invent pills that would save the bother of sitting down and eating.’

Edward doesn’t recall his stutter being a particular handicap at school. ‘It was just embarrassing, that was it really. I don’t think it got me down, not that I can remember. There were certain words and sentences I couldn’t say. When you see them coming, you try and say something else. Which means you often don’t say what you want to say.

There was one word I couldn’t say: Stobart. I always hesitated on that. It’s better now, because most people down South pronounce it “Stow-bart”, not “Stob-burt”. I find “Stow-bart” easier – it probably is the proper way. Having a stutter does make you try to speak properly. If anyone ever did try to tease me at school, then I tried to get in first. Take the mickey out of myself before they could.’

Nora says Edward’s stutter has greatly improved over the years, though she notices it can still be bad if he gets overexcited. ‘Perhaps it will go in the end, now he has much more confidence. After all, Eddie conquered his.’

Eddie, too, had a stammer, although to hear him today, there is no trace of it. He so clearly loves talking, telling stories, anecdotes and moral tales. This is in contrast to Edward who, even today, clearly doesn’t like talking, especially about himself. ‘My stammer arrived when I was about ten years old,’ says Eddie. ‘It happened in much the same ways as Edward’s – after an accident. I caught my thumb in a door and the shock made me stammer from then on. But it left me at the age of seventeen. And I’ll tell you exactly how. It was the first day I was ever asked to stand up in chapel and talk. I didn’t want to. I was scared to, because of my stammer. But God took me by the hand. God helped me to cure it.’

During the years he had his stammer, Eddie can’t remember being worried by it. ‘A stammer can be useful, you know. When I was queuing up for sausage and chips, I would say s-s-s-sausages and ch-ch-ch-chips p-p-p-p-please, and I would always get given two more sausages than the others!

‘I’ll tell you a little story about a man with a stammer. He was a Bible seller, going round the doors, selling Bibles. And he was a great success, this Bible seller, the best Bible seller in the region. Naturally enough, all the other Bible sellers wanted to know the secret of his success, how he could possibly manage with his stammer. “It’s really very easy,” he said. “When they open the door, I say to them ‘Would you like to b-b-b-buy a Bible, or shall I r-r-r-read it to you …’”’

Eddie laughs and laughs at his own story, eyes twinkling, as merry as the little gnomes in his garden. This, again, is a contrast to his son Edward. Even as a young man, Edward was always the serious one, devoted to hard work rather than God, to getting on; determined to beat his own targets, whatever they might turn out to be.

The Eddie Stobart Story

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