Driving Home for Chris

Driving Home for Chris

In the Northlands, where the coal dust from Horden and Easington collieries is washed onto the beach at Redcar by the wild and stormy waters of Mare Germanicum, in the dark night that is very long, the men of the Northlands (and the women of the Northlands if they can get someone to look after the kids of the Northlands) sit with their pints and their rollies in their working men’s clubs even though there’s no longer work in the Northlands for them to do, and they tell a tale...

Their tale is of two men born there by a river that boils with every poison you can think of. Two strange men who ventured away to distant lands but who are still emotionally drawn to the place so they occasionally go back. Two men who may have bumped into each other in a café and had a chat in the old times before the steel mills fell silent and the salmon returned to the river. Maybe they didn’t meet but it’s certainly a possibility and it makes the tale a much more interesting one if they did.

I am one of those men, and rock musician Chris Rea is the other. People of the Northlands (i.e. Teesside) tend to be warm-hearted but also the no-nonsense sort, so we don’t really do idolising, but if we did then I’d probably idolise Chris. He, however, will have never heard of me so his idol, if he were ever to have had one, would probably be Wilf Mannion, a local former footballer who couldn’t exactly be described as an unsung hero but was someone who never really got more than a couple of out-of-tune choruses to celebrate his achievements. So there you go, Wilf and Chris, two reluctant local legendary figures. Maybe Wilf has never been Chris’s hero but it’s certainly a possibility and it makes the tale a nicer, homelier one if he has. Thinking about it a bit more, Wilf Mannion probably hung up his boots long before Chris Rea started following the ‘Boro (i.e. Middlesbrough Football Club), but he’s still far more likely to have been his hero than I am.

A fish would have been sufficient to cure the loneliness of my childhood. Goldfish would come and stay, but they’d leave the next day. So sad! Each time my family went through the solemn ritual of an Ideal Standard funeral in our chilly bathroom with its fish-patterned wallpaper (a popular but, in my opinion, cruel feature of home décor during the swinging sixties) I would grieve internally and privately. I’d ask myself had the poor creature, faced with the prospect of spending the rest of its life in a town famous for its impressive range of airborne toxins, opted to take matters into its own fins with a quick death rather than endure years of suffering in cohabitation with the human population and their incessant coughing.

These instant aquatic friends always looked the picture of health in their little polythene bags filled with clear bright water as they hung from a gantry above the rifle range when the funfair came to town. Once a year my father would secure ownership of one for me by skilfully shooting plastic ducks that were even more dead than those real-life ones that barely got by in Albert Park boating lake, so they were never going to fly away anyway. The hunter-gatherer in him was overstated. We’d walk home slowly, carrying our new arrival with extreme care to ensure it didn’t bash against the sides of its place of confinement where I believed it had lived all its life.

Within twenty-four hours of it being welcomed to our comfortable home and being transferred to the opulent surroundings of a spherical glass bowl it would be as dead as the plastic ducks that had been shot in its honour. There were no poisons that I could think of in the water we gave it to swim about in. It was just what came out of the tap in our kitchen sink. I drank from there every day and I never suffered any ill effects(?). I imagined that it felt intimidated by the miniature castle, wrecked Spanish galleon and mermaid, all of which were made of dodgy-looking 1960s plastic, and finished itself off by poking its scaly little head out of the water. Its time with us would have been so pathetically short that no record was ever made of its name, either written or mental. However, this and a series of corresponding incidents would later be recorded in history as a crime against fish and, for my involvement in such, I hang my head in shame.   

Walking to the end of our street and just a few yards round the corner into Linthorpe Road, I’d find a place called Rea’s Café and Ice Cream Parlour. For probably as many as ninety-six hours during the early 1960s I was the proud owner of a fish of my own, but when I wasn’t I’d sometimes amble along to Rea’s in search of companionship, ichthyic or otherwise. For any of the kids growing up in the mucky industrial boomtown of Middlesbrough, wandering into that incredible place was like stumbling upon a little corner of paradise.

Only posh folks had coffee in their houses in those days, but in Rea’s you could buy it ready to drink from a Pyrex cup with a Pyrex chip in it, and a Pyrex saucer with two lumps of brown sugar in it. Invariably it would have a layer of milky froth on the top. As well as boiling hot coffee and milk, huge clouds of steam and strange gurgling noises came from a machine behind the serving counter. This device with all its pipes, tubes, levers and valves appeared to me as a miniature version of the I.C.I. petrochemical plant just down the road that employed a large proportion of the town’s working population. But from Rea’s machine came the seductive tropical smell of roasted coffee beans which was much preferable to the eggy aroma of the chemical works that dumped every poison you could think of into the river and our unsuspecting lungs.

Despite the enticing scent of cappuccino, many people chose to drink Pepsi Cola through paper straws straight from the bottle. Other options were the freshly made milk shakes, also topped with froth, and synthetic orange juice dispensed from where it festered in a chilled vat agitated by metal blades at the top of which had been fixed bright orange-coloured plastic half oranges to make the drink look natural and alluring. From the ice cream menu customers could choose to eat heavenly-looking strawberry sundaes, banana splits or knickerbocker glories which, in my young mind, must have been what the angels had for their tea when they got home from work each day. Competing with the sound of gossip and chatter, the jukebox on the wall entertained all those present, but especially me, with the latest recordings by Gerry and the Pacemakers, Dusty Springfield and, of course, the Beatles.

Despite not having even a ha’penny in my pocket to pay for any of these things, I enjoyed watching, listening and sniffing. In fact, with my sense of envy filling in for my unrequired sense of taste, I had five senses working overtime to take in what was going on in the café environment.

Lovely as it all was, the big attraction for me was the small grotto and pool built in a corner some distance away from the hubbub of the serving counter. There I’d sit, lost in my thoughts for what seemed like hours but which I’m sure was significantly less because my parents would have gone mad with me for being away from the house so long. I would have been around seven or eight years old at the time. These days I wouldn’t let my cat out on its own in that part of the world. Mesmerised, I’d watch water from the small fountain sparkle as it was propelled vertically by a poorly hidden and very noisy electric pump. Up into the dim electric light and dense cigarette smoke it would rise before trickling down a gully between carefully positioned rocks to return to the pool in a perpetual cycle.

To enhance the spectacle, the pool contained more than just water. In Middlesbrough’s answer to the Trevi Fountain there were goldfish, and enormous beautiful looking ones at that. I thought they must have been very old because they were much bigger than the poor suffering little things that my father would collect as trophies at the funfair. They were even bigger than the frozen fish fingers that my mother bought from Hinton’s supermarket across the road from the church on Fridays. I loved those fish, and I knew they loved me because whenever I dipped one of my own fingers in the water they would swim up and kiss it. A show of affection perhaps, but I was pleased that they didn’t have teeth.

Also in the water I could see coins. During one of my fish-watching sessions I roughly calculated that there was enough money lying on the bottom of the pool to buy a frothy coffee, a banana milkshake and one of each of the fruit sundaes on the menu. Most of the coins were ha’pennies and pennies but occasionally a brass threepenny bit might have glistened from between the straggly pondweed. I once saw a shilling lying there almost obscured by the multi-coloured marble gravel and plastic sea shells. I marvelled at the likelihood of there being someone living in our neighbourhood who was rich enough to part with a shilling in such a carefree way.

Over my shoulder came a voice, ‘I’ve been looking at that shilling too.’ It came from a boy who was probably five or six years older than me but still young enough to be wearing shorts. ‘But I think the water could be a bit too deep to get hold of it without us falling in. And besides, someone made a wish when they threw it in and it might be dangerous to mess up their wish’. We talked for a few minutes about how good it would be to have just one coin of our own that we could throw in enabling us to make wishes. We laughed when we both said at the same time that we’d wish we could have all the other money from the bottom of the pool. Then he dashed off behind the counter when somebody shouted his name, a name that regrettably I’ve never been able to remember. I also regret never seeing him again. How wonderful it would have been to have a friend who lived in an ice cream parlour, then and now.

Over the course of the past forty years or so I’ve just about convinced myself that the boy in the café was the reluctant rock star, Chris Rea, in his juvenile form. I’ve often heard him talking in interviews on television about his family’s ice cream business and chain of cafés in the Teesside area, and I’ve spoken to other people who grew up there who have confirmed that my claim to fame isn’t an unreasonable one to have made.

These days Chris Rea’s achieved fame around the world for his song Driving Home for Christmas. It gladdens my heart to know that so many people love this record but I wish they’d recognise the fact that in his time Chris has produced a great wealth of music of a much higher standard than this. He’s frequently stated that he doesn’t like it, and that he’d pleaded with record company bosses back in 1988 not to release it because it didn’t reflect his distinctive slide-guitar blues style. I didn’t like it either at first, and there are dozens of other tracks of his that I prefer and regularly listen to, but it’s become so symbolic of the man in recent years that I’ve grown to love it.

So whenever I hear Driving Home for Christmas playing on the radio, which is about three times an hour during the final six weeks of any year, I think of him motoring up the A19, flying past the twinkling lights of Thirsk and Northallerton in a dash to get his feet on holy ground in Middlesbrough. And I think of frothy coffee in chipped Pyrex cups, goldfish the size of a North Sea haddock and that elusive shilling.

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Chris Rea died on Monday 22 December 2025, two days after I'd started writing this piece. There’s a strong possibility that I was writing about him and our home town of Middlesbrough at the very moment that he passed. Thinking of this adds to the sadness I feel. I had a funny ending lined up but it doesn’t seem appropriate to include it now. So I’ll just say that whether it was him that I met by the little goldfish pond in the corner of the café on Linthorpe Road one afternoon round about 1965 or not, I’ll miss Chris Rea me.

Image:

Welcome to Middlesbrough, twinned with Chris Rea and me. My own photograph.