Legendary Huddersfield journalist and author DENIS KILCOMMONS is a natural storyteller who brings everyday subjects to life in his own inimitable style. Denis wrote a hugely popular column in the Huddersfield Examiner for 34 years until his retirement in 2023. Now he’s back from a break and writing for Huddersfield Hub.
A year after Maria and I were married we took our honeymoon abroad. The first one had been cancelled and we spent it in a boarding house in Camden.
We flew to Spain and the then undeveloped resort of Tossa de Mar (1968) and met Barry and Sheila Gotham, a couple from London who became lifelong friends.
We first noticed them at Luton Airport. A beautiful girl and a smooth guy with total self-confidence. Both had grown up in the East End.
Barry was a salesman for Xerox copying machines. He rose to executive management and a consultancy when he retired. Sheila, who was bilingual, was secretary to a French university professor.
We bonded as if they were the southern version of us. A brilliant two weeks. Late evenings we’d lie on the sea wall by the Miramar Bar and stare at the sky, trying to spot the latest Apollo satellite while singing Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds. This was without the aid of weed or acid. Just beer and good vibrations.
On visits to London we got the alternative London tour: the Isle of Dogs and Queenie Watts’ pub The Iron Bridge Tavern in Dockland, a Sunday lunchtime listening to a blues band in The Blind Beggar where Ronnie Kray had shot dead George Cornell three years before. Great pub, good band.
Barry always wore Ben Sherman fitted shirts. I’d never seen them before. Quality cotton and button down collars. He took me to the shop he used on Bromley High Street and I bought six, one in every colour available.
We holidayed with them, visited each other. We had two daughters, Siobhan and Sian, they had two boys, Paul and Jonathan, with the same age difference. On a holiday in Majorca, Siobhan and Paul got on so well we wondered ‘what if?’
Siobhan went on to university where she met Ronan, an Irish musician, and they live in a farmhouse in Donegal. Paul had been approached to be a male model but went on to a career in banking in Singapore and New York.
Maria and Sheila were convinced our lives ran in tandem: same highs, lows and problems overcome. They spoke on the phone every week and Barry and Sheila have been with us on every important family occasion.
The last time we were a foursome together was at Maria’s funeral 18 months ago. They were closer than family because we chose each other.
Catch up with Denis’s previous blogs HERE
Times then changed for us as Maria and I became parents.
“Why don’t we have a baby?’’ Maria said. “I’ve seen a lovely pram in denim.’’
So we did and Maria was soon an eye-catching sight in hot pants and knee high suede boots pushing Siobhan around St Annes where we lived at the time as I was a journalist on the Blackpool Gazette.
Having a family meant leaving our swish first floor flat and buying a three-storey Victorian semi-detached house in Lightburn Avenue that was 100 yards from the sea. I use the term euphemistically. First there are sand dunes at St Annes, then the beach that stretches almost to the Isle of Man, and then the sea. But a lovely spot.
It cost £2,000 and was in need of repair and conversion.
We had the ground floor: a snug living room with the famous Athena poster of a girl tennis player showing her bum, a bedroom with French windows and a front room kitchen-diner. The first floor was converted into a bedsit, plus a spare bedroom, and the third floor remained under conversion until we left.
Siobhan Lucia was born in St Annes maternity hospital and thus gained the tag of being a sand grown ‘un. She was baptised by the same young priest that we drank with at St Cuthbert’s Catholic Club who fell in love with a lady in the choir and soon after drove off with her in his Spitfire sports car to a new life.
The location of the house was a delightful place to live and the birth of a child didn’t stop us socialising with our St Annes crowd.
At every party we attended one bedroom was set aside for carry cots. Deposit baby and collect at midnight when you went home, making sure you took the right one.
So you could say our daughter Siobhan was a party-goer from a very early age.
