AN AUTHOR has gone back his childhood roots in Hull's Hessle Road for his new book.
Ian Newton is best-known for writing an account of the amateur efforts of a group of nightshift factory workers to sell stories about the then Deputy Prime Minister and Hull East MP John Prescott to the national newspapers.
At the time, allegations over property dealings and claims of secret files being removed from a stolen dustbin outside Mr Prescott's house made front-page news.
However, nothing was ever proved and no one was ever charged, although Mr Newton voluntarily handed himself in to the police as the media frenzy reached a climax.
Now, he is back with a very different book about growing up in the heart of Hull's fishing community in the late 1950s and 1960s.
It is packed full of stories about selling junk retrieved from slum clearance properties, stealing bike parts, chicken-rustling and ambushing courting couples in Division Road cemetery with peashooters and horse muck.
Needless to say, there is plenty of fighting and swearing, too, amidst the grinding poverty.
The 56-year-old admits the autobiographical Hessle Road Scallywags was partly inspired by his evolution into a grumpy old man.
He said: "In middle age, there is a tendency to fear change and become grumpy old farts, moaning about immigration, dodgy politicians and bankers, you name it, and I think, at this moment in time, more than any before, we have very good reason to.
"I have to admit, like many of my age, I do not like the times I am living in and the way the country is changing.
"As I slide slowly towards oblivion, one of the few things that does bring a smile to my face is my childhood days in Hessle Road and I think about them more and more as time relentlessly marches on.
"I do have regrets about some of the things I did as a child and a teenager and, looking back, some of the antics may have gone too far.
"But on the whole, I think most of it was merely extremely mischievous fun and I cannot remember anybody getting physically hurt by us.
"Unlike today, the sense of right and wrong was very clear-cut when I was growing up and there was no room for confusion."
The son of a British mother and a seaman from Yemen who died before he was born, Ian says the lack of a paternal figure in his mixed-race family was never an issue because he never knew his father.
"My dad popped his clogs a few months before I was born and ended up being buried in Cuba, or so the story goes.
"I did ask my Mum why they didn't bring him home to be buried in Hull and I will never forget her reply.
"She said that the deep freeze on the shop had broken down and by the time they would have got him back to Hull, he would have stank the ship out, so they buried him in Cuba instead. I was always an inquisitive child."
Hessle Road Scallywags is published by Riverhead and available at all good bookshops for £9.95. Ian Newton will be signing copies of the book at Waterstones in Jameson Street, Hull, on Saturday, from noon to 2pm.
