Azalea Terrace

I'm up in Newcastle visiting Tom. My old friend from Sunderland Poly, Jayne, has come over to see can revisit the haunts of our student days.

On the metro to Sunderland she reminisced about the stops we went through. I sat there blankly waiting for some kind of recollection. 

In Sunderland I was immediately struck by how small and shabby it is compared to Newcastle. We walked down Toward Road, site of our second year house. The park is beautiful, Toward Road longer than I remember.The house looks the same, a beautiful row of Victorian houses falling into neglect. Elsewhere they'd be worth a fortune. I thought there was a road behind our house where a group of rather intimidating bikers lived but when I turned the corner it was a series of shops. Oh look, cried Jayne, do you remember this place, and that place...?? Again I tried hard to recollect the shops we apparently went to daily. Nothing.

I did remember the walk to lectures though and we set off passed the halls we'd staying for first year, and the old Students Union where we spent a large part of our grants on low quality alcohol and wasted away many an evening. The whole area is full of the most stunning Victorian buildings, all closed or boarded up. Such a shame.

In the town centre we stopped for a coffee. We could only find a Wetherspoons. It was packed with people drinking pints. Later we wandered over to Azalea Terrace, our 3rd year home. Here we lived in a bizarre kind of chaos never quite sure who did live in the house and who didn't. One young man, Pickin, definitely didn't, but took his motorbike apart in our kitchen and left it there for months. 

After I left Sunderland, Jayne and some others stayed on. Some months later they awoke to police sirens. The man next door, in a bedroom the other side of Jayne's had decapitated his flatmate. I was already living in a commune in the south of Spain by then and it would be weeks before the grim news reached me via snail mail.

On the metro back to Newcastle I struggled to remember why I went to Sunderland Poly. Now, aged 50 and working in a team surrounded by those with elite public school and Oxbridge educations I am aware that my BA in Communications Studies from Sunderland Polytechnic makes me stand out, and not in a very good way. My parents were struggling for money then, my mum wanted me to be a cashier in a bank. I wonder why I didn't have more ambition, I was clever and had good grades. My mum once told me 'people like us don'y go to University'. 

I wonder why, as I make opportunities for my children that I never had, they don't have more ambition, to make the most of the opportunities they have. I wonder why, at 50, I have more drive than ever before and why I didn't have that back when I had a life stretching out in front of me, time to make good use of it.

I don't think I'll go back to Sunderland again. My memory is unreliable, but maybe subconsciously I have chosen to forget it too. 

Later on Tom met us for dinner. Jayne told stories about our student days and I watched his interest in seeing his mum as she was before she was his mum. Jayne said what she remembers most was that I had so little money. I got grants for the first two terms but because my father was trying to set up his own business but had no accounts to submit  I never got the third term grant and lived on dry toast for weeks on end. I remember being hungry and not going out when my friends did. I sold my few records, then my record player - there were no jobs really, I just cut my outgoings as much as I could. Tom, whom I'd just treated to £100 worth of M&S foodhall supplies looked somewhat abashed. Student life is very different now.