Broken Music: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF

Wallsend. My mother was born and raised there on the north shore of the river Tyne, between Newcastle and the North Sea. Wallsend is where the emperor Hadrian decided to finish his wall after A.D. 122, when he visited this desolate northern limit of his vast empire. Hadrian’s Wall winds like a giant snake for eighty miles over the moors and hills between Barrow-in-Furness, on the western shore, to the Tyne on the east. It is popularly thought the wall was built to keep out the Scots and Picts, but in reality it was built as a means of controlling the trade between north and south, and therefore the population of what would become the north of England. Translating the Latin description of
segedunum
into the depressingly prosaic Wallsend makes it sound like the end of the earth, and I suppose if you were a Roman legionnaire posted to this godforsaken wind-lashed spot in your little leather skirt, then you would agree. When the shipyard in our town was extended, in the early twentieth century, builders discovered the remains of a temple in honor of Mithras, god of light, a popular deity among the Roman foot soldiers, and a few years ago when they demolished my old street, they found an entire Roman camp beneath the cobbles.
    When the legions eventually returned to Rome around A.D. 400, the area suffered constant invasions, mainly from across the North Sea by the Saxons, Danes, Jutes, Vikings, and Normans, as well asthe Scots. Political ownership of the region changed hands so many times over the centuries that the local inhabitants began to feel that they belonged to no one but themselves, neither Scots nor English. We called ourselves “Geordies” for historical reasons that are still debated by local historians but have long been forgotten by most of us. What remains is a fierce regional identity supported in its uniqueness by a dialect that at times can be cannily unintelligible to the rest of the inhabitants of the British Isles.
    Some famous ships were built on the Tyne. The
Mauretania
, built for the Cunard Line, held the record for crossing the Atlantic. Her sister ship, the
Lusitania
, was sunk by a German U-boat at the beginning of the First World War, which precipitated the U.S.’s entry into the conflict. The
Esso Northumbria
, in my own time, a quarter-million-ton oil tanker and the largest ship in the world at the time it was launched, was built at the end of my own street, where the shipyard was situated. The ship blotted out the sun for months before it was finally launched into the river and the North Sea, never to return.
    There was something prehistoric about the shipyard, the giant skeletons of ships, and the workmen, tiny by comparison, suspended in an enormous cage silhouetted against the sky. The cranes too seemed like enormous prehistoric beasts, metallic monsters grazing thoughtlessly and moving with unnatural slowness over the busy yards and the acetylene flashes.
    Every morning at seven A. M. the hooter was sounded in the shipyard, a mournful wail calling the workers to the river, and hundreds of men filed down our street in their overalls and caps and work boots. Across their backs many carry ex-army haversacks for their “bait”—sandwiches and thermos flasks. Apart from those who work in the coal pit or the rope works, everyone else in Wallsend seems to work for Swan Hunter’s. As I watched them, I wondered about myown future, and what kind of job I would be able to do. Would I too join this vast army of men and live out my days in the bellies of these giant ships?
    On Sunday mornings my dad would take my brother and me down to the quayside to look at the boats. The
Leda
was a Norwegian steamer that would sail weekly from Oslo to Newcastle and back again across the cold North Sea, plying the same route as the old Vikings. I remember my father gazing dreamily up at the wheelhouse and the ropes securing the bows of the ships to the quay. “Go to sea!” my father would always tell me, but I