Barra Boy

by David Yip

I was born in 1971 into a family with a Chinese father and English mother with two older sisters and one elder brother. My younger sister will be born three years later, completing our family of seven. My mum, one of nine, left her home town of Egremont when she married my father and we eventually settle in Barrow.

All of my siblings are born looking identical to each other, with one exception. I’m born with bright blonde hair, unlike the dark black hair of my sisters and brother. My family gives me the name “yellow-head”.

In my teenage years I ask my dad. “Why don’t you like me?“ He answers: “Because you’re the milkman’s”. Upset by this I go and tell my mother who asks my dad why he said it. She simply shrugs and doesn’t reply. Despite my father’s comment, as I grow I become my father’s reflection, with many people saying we are the double of each other.

When my brother, who is only 11 months older than me, leaves to go to school at five years old, my mum tells me I created such a fuss at the school gates, that the head mistress told her she would allow me to start early. Arriving at school for my first day, I noticed someone has graffitied the school wall in white paint with “Maggie Thatcher the milk snatcher”. You can still see faint markings to this day. Starting school at age four instead of five years old confuses the staff and other pupils. Throughout my education; everyone assumes my brother and I are twins.

It was during junior school when I saw my first fight. My brother Martin does not tolerate the bullies and so sticks up for himself. Leaving school one day I hear a commotion in a side street with lots of pupils shouting. I move forward to see that it is my brother and another boy fighting – my brother gaining the upper hand. Until the boy grabs my brother’s head and drags his face across a pebble dashed wall. The fight is over seconds later when a male teacher runs up and separates them. I am so upset by what I saw, but my brother shrugs it off and we walk home in silence.

I don’t make many friends at school and spend most of my break time in the schoolyard on my own. I sit on the steps that lead from the school down into the school yard lost in my own thoughts. One day a female teacher asks “David, why don’t you go and play with the others?” I tell her I don’t want to and that my name isn’t David! Puzzled, she asks what I mean, so I tell her David is my middle name and my first name is Chinese, but no one knows, so please don’t tell anyone.

After the break is over we return to our classes. The teacher I spoke to during the break is at her chalkboard when she announces to the class that we have a new pupil. Immediately we all look about to see who it is. She writes a name on the chalkboard. She tells us that the pupil is already in the class and that we should never lie about who we are. The name on the board is my Chinese name. The children all start laughing and the teacher asks my brother “Have you also got a Chinese name?” Smartly, says no. The pupils now have a way to bully me and I’m teased by the rest of the class who say “when you were born your mum looked at you and thought, why me?” To this day I’ve always hated my Chinese name, which I never use. I’ve learned that trust shouldn’t be easily given.

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After school we are allowed to play out with the other kids in the front street, but told not to go past the top of the road, an always be in by 9pm. If my mum shouts and we don’t respond she knows we’ve strayed too far. Our home in Langdale Grove is part of the Four Groves Estate and we live at the bottom of the cul-de-sac. We join other neighbouring kids to play hopscotch, tig, squares or Kerby.

Squares is a football game, where one person stands in one square of the road and another in the opposite. The object of the game is to kick the ball to your opponent for them to return it with only one bounce allowed. Otherwise you’re out and the next challenger replaces you, the winner staying on. Kerby is also played with a football with one person standing on a kerb with your opponent on the opposite one. The rules of the game are that you throw the football to the opposite kerb trying to get the ball to bounce back at you for you to catch. If you manage to catch the football you can go into the middle of the road and repeat trying to hit your opponent’s kerb catching the football, getting more points until you beat your opponent.

During a swimming lesson at the Abbey Road baths we finish the lesson and go to get changed. The changing cubicles are all held together by an overhead metal bar that runs the full-length. Some boys swing from the bars, their legs coming out of the cubicles before swinging back in laughing and joking. I decide to do the same. Standing on the wooden shelf seat at the back of the cubicle I stretch for the overhead bar and start to swing.

Just then a male teacher enters the changing room and asks what all the noise is about. I panic and try to get down from the bar by putting my feet back on the seat. In my haste I miss and only the tips of my toes connect. Letting go of the bar I fall knees first onto the bobbly ceramic floor tiles.

Almost immediately the pain is excruciating. We are told to hurry to get changed as the bus is waiting to take us back to school. Hobbling towards the bus my teacher says to hurry up and I tell him I can’t walk. ”There was nothing wrong with you before.” he says, and pushes me forward, knocking my injured knee into the metal step of the bus and I cry out in pain. We return to school and I am in agony during the maths lesson. An hour later it is lunch break, I make my way to the canteen using the walls to help me. I can barely carry my tray of food back to my table as I can’t put my foot down. I don’t eat and sit there crying. We are told lunch is over and I can’t stand up. A female teacher asks me what’s wrong as I’m crying in agony and I point to my leg. Lifting my trouser leg. She sees my knee which is now four times its size and purple.

She calls another teacher who picks me up in his arms and again I shout out in agony. North Lonsdale hospital is over the road from our school and I’m carried to their A and E department. They tell me I’ve snapped the ligaments in my knee cap and will have to drain the blood to ease the pressure.

This was done without anaesthetic using large needles that they plunged into my knee cap. My mother says she could hear my screams before she got into the building. My leg is put into cast and I’m sent home with crutches for 6 weeks. After 2 weeks my dad takes the crutches off me and tells me to walk or I won’t get better. When I follow his order my leg now gives way. I have to bend it sometimes to ease the pain I get and it makes a loud clicking noise.

My class is going away camping and because I’m on crutches I’m not allowed to go. I complain to my mum and get upset. The following day, my mum asks me to get out of bed and go downstairs. She has 2 guinea pigs, which are running around a wooden cage. I am sure they are doing this to cheer me up and I instantly forget about the camping trip. We keep them in the outside coal house attached to our house and I enjoy taking care of them.

Returning to school after my injury the rest of my days are even more miserable. Now I’m suffering from horrendous migraines and nosebleeds that last for hours and make me feel sick. On one occasion my mum gets a call on our neighbours phone and is asked to go into the school. When my mum arrive at school the teacher tells her that I am drunk, as she saw me bouncing off the walls in the corridor. My mum is furious and explains that I suffer from migraines. She leaves the office and grabs me from the chair outside the school office and takes me home.

I know that I’m different and don’t know how to explain it. I just know that I can’t tell anyone, so I try to block it out and hope things will work out. It takes me until I’m 28 to tell my family that I’m gay and I feel as though a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders after all those years.

It is the summer holidays before I move up to secondary school. My mum makes sure we are all entertained by taking us on long walks. Children in the surrounding streets are also invited. Sometimes it’s the beach or walking to Furness abbey or to local playing fields for a game of rounders before enjoying a great picnic we have brought along. Barrow park is only around the corner from our house, designed by Thomas Mawson in 1908 it is a huge site covering 45 acres, boasting a boating lake, pavilion and cenotaph. In our youth there was a pets corner, indoor greenhouse, (which you could walk around and see all the exotic plants, I always loved the smell of it as you first opened the doors and walked in), crown green bowling, adventure playgrounds, ice cream huts and peacocks that roamed freely.

I spend a lot of time here too with my brother Martin and younger sister Diane on our bikes which we got at Christmas, racing around the grass humps that surround the lake tearing over the two bridges doing circuits. We would spend hours here returning home starving, devouring the tea either my mum or dad would make.

My mum does a lot of home baking and we enjoy deep filled meat and potato pies, cooked in big metal trays, someone always moaning if we didn’t get the corner with the crust. This is served with pickled cabbage and beetroot with gravy my mum also makes, followed by a huge slab of her sponge cake with custard.

Dad cooks freshly made Chinese dishes and we eat this banquet style, with all dishes spread out in front of us. From pork and potatoes, watercress soup, bacon and eggs, pilchards, crispy belly pork and fried lettuce and grilled whole fresh fish, served with the head on, which my dad always eats, eyes included! We are all given a bowl of rice and help ourselves to the dishes on the table. I take Crispy belly pork (my favourite) and hide it under my rice before getting more and eating that first. The food doesn’t last long with 7 of us all attacking the dishes. I always say this is why I am a fast eater, because if you didn’t eat quickly then, you missed out on the good stuff!! We eat lots of fresh vegetables which we grow in the back garden from marrow, runner beans, lettuce, tomatoes and potatoes and are very rarely given frozen or tinned foods. My mum and dad say tinned food rubbish and bad for you.

At 11 I head to senior school, Parkview. Parkview is located behind Barrow park and we are told not to cut across the school fields or park fields and to stay on the paths on our way home. Its reputation gives the school another name Park-Zoo. It’s a much bigger place, with hundreds of pupils in each of the years. My migraines and nose bleeds continue and I feel lost. I am bullied from the very first week, a boy taking an instant dislike to me, taking pleasure in punching me every time he sees me, or stuffing grass down my jumper before throwing me down the steep grass banking’s that surround the school. I can’t wait to leave this place.

My family is poor, we are sent to school with the government’s approved standard uniform and I’m teased for it immediately. Despite the fact that I hate the uniform hating my mum insists we keep it clean as we don’t have spare shirts and skirts and trousers in reserve to wash.

My gym uniform is black cloth rubber plimsolls unlike the posh trainers of my classmates. They call me Hong Kong Fuey (a Chinese cartoon character that wore black plimsolls). The rest was purchased from a second hand shop and despite my slim build, my top is that tight I can barely breathe in it. I hate the gym. I’m always the last to be picked for any team games like football, hockey and rugby and I don’t care, leaving the muddy school fields cleaner than when I went on, my classmates would say. One day a pupil in my gym class, known for being a fighter and bully approaches me after we leave the showers to change. He walks straight up to me with his hair dishevelled and says “give me your comb!” I tell him I don’t have one and he stares at my hair getting angry. I immediately mess my hair up, then take my right hand and starting at the crown on my head I spread my fingers out, then bring my fingers though my hair ruffling it to my fringe then stop.

He takes one look at me and walks off. I still style my hair this way and have never owned a comb. I excel in racket sports and manage to get on the school table tennis team, beating my opponents who have their own rackets which look smart compared to the school ones I use.

I love this class; we are asked to follow a recipe, work to a method and produce many different items we can take home. Unfortunately we are asked each week to bring items in to use for the following week and this causes me an issue. My family don’t have the spare money for me just to buy what I need and I am told if I want to do the dishes then I need to ask our neighbours for the ingredients. Sometimes I manage to get the items needed and other times I am told to use the spare items in the classes pantry, which differ from the recipe. Despite this I look forward to the class each week.

“respect is something that takes a while to be earned but can be lost in an instant

Now I realise the only way I will get the clothes and things the other kids have is to start work and earn my own money. At 13 I got a job as a paperboy, working weekends. The bag each Sunday is very heavy and being of a slight build it digs hard into my shoulder. I race round the start of my route as quickly as possible to ease the weight.

The money I earn I save up wanting to buy a smart sports jacket lots of the other kids wear. After a week my jacket disappears from home and I’m devastated. My mum admits years later that she accidentally put the jacket on a hot wash and melted it.

During the weekends my mum sometimes works landscaping gardens and I ask if I can help as my paper round finishes before she leaves. I help digging out weeds and turning over the grass sods preparing the soil for turf to be laid. My mum shows me how to make dry-stone walls and create borders. In my later years, I transform our garden after the council come in and knock down fences and rip up all paths. I build large raised borders using the smashed up stones from the paths of our home and our neighbours, a pond and create sunken seating areas.

I love to garden and have kept this hobby up, helping out family and friends throughout the years. The fact you can take an empty space and transform it to a plan in your head, then watch it grow and mature has always been something I’ve loved. Walking around Barrow park one day I stop and wonder why the lawns stand out from the plants and look so crisp, then I spot it. The lawns have all been edged with the soil being removed from their edge, before the plants fill the borders, giving the lawn and borders more definition, rather than them all running into each other. I immediately go home and do the same to our garden.

My dad works in a Chinese takeaway in the next town, at 14 I ask if I can go work with him each Saturday when I’m not with my mum. His boss agrees and I start working there, leaving my paper round. We go to work at 3pm and I am given the task of helping prep, this includes peeling and chipping sacks of potatoes. Located in a cold brick outhouse. The bags are too heavy for me and I have to drag them to the machine. The potato rumbler has to have the sacks poured into it to remove the skin, they are too heavy for me to lift up, so I dig out what I can and put them in the spinning rumbler. The cold water inside splashes my face along with the starchy skins until I can close the lid, my fingernails turn black with soil.

My dad comes to check on me and sees my clothes are covered in soil and dust, telling me to work smartly so that doesn’t happen. Once the skin is removed the rumbler is emptied with the potatoes falling into cold water. I am told not to leave the potatoes in the rumbler too long as I would be wasting them, making them too small by removing too much skin. Any skin that is left on the potatoes I am to remove with a hand peeler, dipping my hands into the cold water to dish them out. The potatoes are then fed into a chipping machine, exiting into buckets of cold water where they will remain until being cooked. By the end of this my hands are blue with cold. The next job is to peel sacks of onions, I instantly start crying, which doesn’t stop until I’m finished and my eyes sting. I am shown how to slice, dice and cut them into chunks for the various dishes on the menu, my dad ensuring I am holding the knife correctly. He tells me to work quickly and cleanly, tidying as I go so I’m not working in a mess. My dad then gives me boxes of raw king prawns. My job is to peel and clean them. I twist the head to remove it before taking off the shell and legs. Then I slice along the back removing the vein, which contains waste and toxins before rinsing them in cold water and placing them into tubs. Again my dad is there telling me, get a system, work fast and cleanly. The potatoes I have spent hours preparing have to be cooked. They are drained from the buckets before being deep fried on a low heat to blanch them, being emptied into large trays.

The next job is to prepare big tins of bamboo shoots and water chestnuts. Bamboo shoots are drained then cut into smaller sizes before being cut into strips. My dad tells me they are all to be the same size and uniform and doesn’t want to see any waste. The water chestnuts are to be halved across the middle or sliced into three depending on their size, again they are to be the same size.

My job during opening time is to seal all the foil tubs of food my dad cooks, again he shows me how to do it quickly and cleanly so there is no mess. I am also responsible for the fryers. Cooking prawn crackers, sweet and sour pork, chicken and king prawn battered balls, spare ribs and the chips. The balls are to be coated the correct way with the chicken and pork being round balls and the king prawns longer. My dad shows me how to do this so again they all look the same. When putting the chips into bags they are emptied onto a tray and sprinkled with salt before being bagged up. I ask what I use to do this and my dad says “your hands!!” The chips are red hot and my dad tells me I am taking too long and to speed up.

Before the takeaway opens at 6pm I can eat what I like from the menu. My favourite meal is a mixed meat chow mein which my dad cooks. We eat sitting on the unopened sack of potatoes or on upturned buckets on the floor. After a couple of weeks I am fed up with eating from the takeaway and ask my dad if I can go down the road to the chippy. He isn’t happy!

After closing we cleaned the kitchen and all the equipment, sweeping and mopping the floor removing all rubbish out into the bins at the rear of the building. My dad’s boss takes us home, it’s 11.30pm and I’m shattered.

Despite knowing our neighbours for many years, we are told to only address our friends parents as Mr or Mrs and never by their first names. Our parents telling us to show respect at all times.

In my French class, my teacher tells my parents at parents evening that I’m always polite and engage during the class. It’s one of the subjects I enjoy and I dream of visiting France one day. During one class some of the pupils are being disruptive and egg me on to join in, which I do. They are immediately told to go to the head’s office. My teacher tells me to wait in the corridor. Five minutes later she comes out and says to me “respect is something that takes a while to be earned but can be lost in an instant, you should remember that the next time you are asked to join in mis-behaving”. I never play up in class again and it is something I have never forgotten and have told others throughout my life.

I am now in the fifth year at school and spend my breaks sitting in my head of department’s office, hiding from the bully who has never stopped seeking me out.

At 15 I drop out of school, leaving with no exam results. When I think of that time now, I don’t know if it was due to my parents’ marriage coming to an end or if I was just fed up of all the bullying. What I do know, is that I was happy to be free of the place.

A disagreement with my dad ends my employment, but I take everything he taught me and train to be a chef a year later. He has taught me how to work fast in a clean environment and ensure I am prepared. Catering to large amounts of people is only daunting if you haven’t done the preparation beforehand, the service part and large banquets, weddings etc I go on to cater for all go seamlessly due the preparation being done in advance. And that’s down to my father’s teachings.

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