Punk in the Gym (eBook)

Andy Pollitt (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2016
Vertebrate Publishing (Verlag)
978-1-910240-70-0 (ISBN)

Infos

Andy Pollitt is as close to a Hollywood A-lister as the climbing world will ever get. He had the looks, and he starred in all the big roles in the 1980s and 1990s - Tremadog, Pen Trwyn, the big Gogarth climbs, Raven Tor and the cult Australian adventures. Alongside co-stars like Jerry Moffatt, John Redhead and Malcolm 'HB' Matheson, he brought us sexy climbing - gone were the beards, the woolly socks and the fibre pile. Andy was all skin-tight pink Lycra, vests and brooding looks. For those watching, Andy Pollitt had it all. But Punk in the Gym gives us the whole truth. The self-doubt, the depression, the drinking, the fags, the womanising, the injuries, the loss of a father and the trouble that brings, and a need for something - for recognition, a release for the pain, and, for Andy, more drinking, more tears, bigger run-outs.With nothing held back, Andy tells his roller-coaster story from the UK to Australia, exactly as it happened. Exposing his fragile ego and leaving us to laugh, cry, marvel and judge, this is a sports autobiography like no other. The legendary routes are all here - The Bells, The Bells!, Skinhead Moonstomp, The Hollow Man, Boot Boys, The Whore of Babylon and Knockin' on Heaven's Door. And the route that broke him and robbed the climbing world of its Hollywood star - Punks in the Gym.

Textauszug

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Stuck in the middle. With Dave and Sa at Walden Cottage.

Born at Chatsworth House Nursing Home in Prestatyn, North Wales, on 26 October 1963, I was raised at Walden Cottage on Upper Foel Road, Dyserth – the highest of the roads traversing the lower flanks of Moel Hiraddug. Spectacular northerly views drew the gaze beyond rolling rural greenery towards patchwork coastal plains, out across the resorts of Rhyl and Prestatyn, then onwards to the grey-green Irish Sea. The outlook way off west featured Llandudno’s Ormes and the jagged heights of Snowdonia – two places where a large chunk of my future lay in wait.

Dyserth was a small village – but thriving. It had a large quarry with a quaint miniature train that took high-quality dynamited limestone via an iron bridge above the High Street to the crushers and kilns, there to be pulverised into gravel and baked into powdered lime to make cement products. Whilst I don’t recall the quarry employing too many men, it was (apart from farming) a major local employer.

We had our primary school – Ysgol Hiraddug, a draper, ironmonger, baker, greengrocer, butcher, post office, chemist, barber, fish and chip shop, doctors’ surgery and veterinary clinic. A library, police station, numerous pubs, a little cafe at the famous waterfall, two banks and an off-licence with a stainless-steel cigarette vending machine on the outside wall. Inside they sold tins of ale (all unrefrigerated of course), providing that your dad wanted either Guinness or Double Diamond, and wine for the ladies – two types, a red one and a white one, and Pomagne for special occasions. There was a petrol station, a few motor mechanics and a builder-cum-electrician/plumber, all dotted about amongst various little general stores, and – of course – the usual supply of churches and Welsh chapels.

The old piggery had been forced to close when foot-and-mouth-disease visited the district and all the animals had to be slaughtered and burned. Stank the village out for days, but before long the piggery was hosed out and back up and running – as a food depot! The proprietors were Jack ‘The Cake’ Dean and his business partner John Poole. Jack gave Justin Smart and me a few hours’ work in the evenings, reloading the vans when they returned from daily deliveries. Payment was some broken bickies, or an out-of-date cake to take home for our families, no matter whether we worked two hours or six.

Justin was my classmate who lived at Tirion Cottage, a house just along the road – almost identical to our Walden. His father, an architect, had designed us both similar cottage extensions, but along with his wife he lost his life in the Stockport air disaster of 1967, leaving Justin and his brother Simon and sister Susan orphaned; the entire village was seized with shock and grief.

When school broke up for summer holidays we both ended up on the daily runs around the seaside towns or inland countryside; payment for the entire summer was twenty pence a day – one pound per week. I asked Jack if he’d please save it up for me and give it to me at the end of the season – lest I fritter it away – and so finally he owed me a fiver. He gave me six pounds, rumpled my hair with that friendly – I don’t know what you call it – but that ‘thing’ where you open your hand and go ‘wiggle, wiggle, wiggle’ on a kid’s head (you know the one) and then said I could grab some chocolates from the ‘market shed’ as well. Three Milky Ways for little sister Lizzie, some Fruit Gums for big brother Dave – he loved them – and a packet of McVitie’s Jaffa Cakes and Jacob’s Fig Rolls for the biscuit tin.

‘Is this too much, Jack?’ I asked, showing him.

‘Nah, go on.’

‘Ooooh, thanks Jack.’

Five weeks’ work. Six quid and all these treats. Proud as punch me when I got home for tea!

Milk was delivered daily on an electric float, the bottles left at the doorstep where the birds would peck through the foil tops and pinch the cream. Coal was carted in by dust-black men hauling great sacks over their shoulders, and the round metal bins were all carried similarly then emptied into the open side of a cart by the dustmen. For several years my brother David was the ‘upper’ village paperboy. Once in a while a rag-and-bone man wheeled a rickety, timber cart around by hand, crying out, ‘A … E … I … ’ (any iron) as he trudged along. Most summers when the ‘gyppos’ and ‘tinkers’ and their caravans were passing they’d come knocking to sell you clothes pegs they’d whittled from sticks.[1]

Charming, innocent and unsophisticated times indeed. Crime was virtually unheard of in Dyserth and we kids would be out playing footy and climbing trees or whatever – often well after darkness had fallen, me only ever in my trusty wellington boots.

I don’t think I was ever late for tea either. Mum had this ‘call’ you see. I always told her which general direction I was going – the playing fields, the old quarry we called Ghost Canyon (where in the future I’d go on to lead a bold new route I called Genesis having put in a home-made peg near the top), or to the woods, or down to the waterfall and the limestone cliffs and caves up the back.[2]

I’ll never forget. I was eleven years old and went for a picnic with a tiny little schoolgirl friend of mine the same age. We sat by the stream underneath what is now the Dyserth Waterfall Crag. She told me something truly bizarre: if she went somewhere it was crucial to go back precisely the same way. Otherwise it’s a ‘bad way’. I felt exactly the same! Only in the back of my mind though, but how weird was that? Anyone?

Anyway, Mum’s call. She’d simply put her open palms either side of her mouth, point herself in the right direction, take a deep breath and call ‘Aaaaandroooooo’ with a little upturn in the intonation for the ‘oooooo’ bit. Honestly, she had the audible accuracy of an Exocet missile! If I was playing goalie she’d land it right between the posts and the defenders wouldn’t even have heard a thing. Bit like penguins returning to land I suppose?

Our mum wasn’t a disciplinarian by any stretch of the imagination, but she did insist we all sit at the table together for our evening meal. No ducking off to watch telly, eating off our laps; no way. ‘That’s common,’ Mum would say. She’d turn on our (highly collectible, I know now) Richards wireless, rotate it on its swivel base for best reception, and play BBC Radio 2 (though we were allowed Pick of the Pops on Radio 1 over our Sunday roast).

However, things were to ‘head south’ for Dyserth: on the morning of 11 February 1972, our school and immediate surrounds were deluged in stones when a quarry blast went awry. Rocks came crashing in through the classroom roofs and we all scrambled beneath our desks. It could have been carnage, but miraculously only a few children were affected by cuts and grazes. That incident was the catalyst for the quarry’s later demise – though they did cart out the huge mounds of gravel to use for road building (the ones I used to scramble up) before laying off the workers and padlocking a meaty chain across the gates.

Walden, our place, was originally three quarrymen’s cottages, later knocked through and extended. A hundred-odd years earlier the landowners would offer small plots on their estates to the labourers. Get four walls and a roof up and if there’s smoke coming out of the chimney in the morning ‘it’s yours’. Apparently that was the arrangement. The walls were up to four feet thick, made from roughly hewn rocks stacked all higgledy-piggledy, but at least they’d been repointed sometime in the past. Great exposed timber roof beams with hundred-plus-year-old meat-hanging rails and wattle and daub ceiling beneath Welsh slate tiles. It still leaked terribly and was draughty as heck, but it was home. The title deed was on actual parchment and had a majestic red wax seal. We had what Mum told me (winding me up no doubt and feeding my youthful imagination) was most probably a priest hole – a throwback to the sixteenth century Protestant Reformation when Jesuit priests were persecuted! Dad had ripped out an old fireplace insert – one of those precast concrete fireplace-shaped things – and there it was: a concealed chamber between the walls. Enough for an adult to crouch in and iron rungs running all the way up the vast chimney above. Must be for the sweep’s boy I figured, as I could never imagine how a fleeing priest would fit through the six-inch, T-shaped clay pot plonked on top. An arm out of each wing and head poking out the top – spluttering from the soot? How very Laurel and Hardy.

For some unknown reason I was a slightly ‘troubled’ child – Mum even took me to see the doctor once in an attempt to figure out my odd behaviour. Perhaps the telltale signs and the early onset of the ‘condition’ I’d go on to develop in the future? You see, I’d sometimes fly into a rage for no apparent or logical reason. I had a loving mother, two sisters and a big brother I looked up to (not that I’d ever really show it) – a totally stable family life, with Jack as a surrogate father figure (no connection to Mum!) and a big garden to play in. A few particular memories remain with me to this day, but doubtless there’s at least as many I’ve forgotten where I lashed out, unprovoked, at David. We had a big ornamental copper kettle that sat on the ‘tumpty’ – a little brick ledge on one side of the lounge room fireplace. One day I grabbed that kettle and swung it with all my might; David’s knee took the full brunt of the blow, which sent him...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 15.3.2016
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Sport
• Schlagworte: Arapiles climbing • Australia climbing • climbing biographies • climbing books • gogarth • Grampians climbing • Jerry Moffatt • Johnny Dawes • Malcolm Matheson • Punks in the Gym • rock climbing in snowdonia • rock climbing in wales • Ron Fawcett • tremadog
• ISBN-10: 1-910240-70-2 / 1910240702
• ISBN-13: 978-1-910240-70-0 / 9781910240700