The North-East Diaries / J. R. Bates (ePub)

Blyth in the 1960s - a north-east town vibrant and bustling with life. With its crowded shops and a marketplace fed by the wage-packets of workers from the local mines and factories, the shipyard and busy docks - it's a perfect place to grow up in, and a great time to be a youngster...but not so easy for some.

Sidney (Hawky) Brown is a ten-year-old Scottish lad suddenly uprooted from his home in Kirkcaldy, Fife, and relocated to Cowpen...a new council estate in Blyth, Northumberland.

This is his story, and the story of his mentor, Charlie Chuck. It is a young boy's struggle for acceptance in a strange town, where a peculiar Geordie dialect is spoken and the way of life is poles apart from anything he has been used to.

Encapsulating the period of summer 1961 until autumn 1963, this tale, predominantly true, is of his struggle for acceptance, his struggle to reach the holy grail of Grammar school, and of the outcast - the 'bad' man Charlie - who befriended and tutored him.

The story is neither autobiography, a memoir, nor a work of fiction, but a fusion of all three. It draws a picture of the contrast between life in those early years of the sixties and life as we know it now.

An underlying thread is the young lad's encounters with truth and falsehood, serious illness and loss, friendship and trust... and eventually joy and success. You almost feel as though you are growing with Hawky as his story evolves.