John North: A Rawe deal

ON his wife's 75th birthday they told Lez Rawe that he had cancer of the colon. "We wept together," says Betty Rawe, but they operated and he recovered.

Five years later, liver cancer was diagnosed. Surgeons at the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle not only removed two thirds of his liver but filmed the operation, because he was the oldest person ever to undergo it.

"It was pretty grim for a while but we got over it," says Lez, with the cheery air of a man who hopes bad things don't come in threes.

Last Saturday he was 83. As he does every week, he marked the occasion with a game of mixed doubles - "won the first set, lost the second on a tie break" - and the consultant at the Freeman has asked for film of his star role in that, too.

"He wants proof. Apparently his colleagues just can't believe it," says Lez.

Today, joyfully, he and Betty celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary, a diamond pair if ever. "I believe in being positive," he says. "I just prayed that I might be given the strength to survive."

They met at school in Bishop Auckland - he from Toft Hill, she from Evenwood - boys and girls grammar schools divided by the length of the playing field and by the width of pre-war morality.

At 17 they were secretly engaged, the ring - bought for 17/6d - worn only when they were alone. Friends said it wouldn't last six weeks; 66 years later, the Rawe deal holds as firmly and as affectionately as ever.

The wedding between the handsome young RAF sergeant and the young teacher was planned for Easter 1943 but brought forward with six days notice when Lez was given embarkation leave.

The dress was made by Miss Morton on Cockfield Fell, the material bought from donated clothing coupons. The wedding breakfast, 80 people enjoying ham salad and a small trifle at Evenwood Methodist church hall, was provided communally.

"People were very, very kind, but not just to us," says Betty. "Everyone helped each other."

The photographs had to be retaken a week later after a mistake at the developers, the honeymoon was a night in Wingate, than which there may (possibly) be no more romantic place on earth.

"Gerry was over that night," says Lez. "I remember Mrs Smedley, where we were staying, saying that the poor bairns wouldn't have much of a life. I think she thought I wasn't going to make it."

Over the next three years he served in Africa, Egypt and India, a snapshot of his young wife carried everywhere. In 1946, he returned to teach for 32 years at King James I Grammar School in Bishop Auckland and still lives in the town.

He played football for the Bishops and other Northern League clubs, cricket for Evenwood and Etherley, took up squash when he was 55 ("there hadn't been a squash court before") and this year also marks 50 years as an accredited Methodist local preacher - still active, still passionate, still living testimony to his faith.

Today, all day, there's an open invitation to family, friends and maybe even former pupils like this one, to join the celebrations at their immaculate house and garden in Newlands Avenue.

Refreshments are provided, presents discouraged. Guests may, however, wish to make a small donation to the GI (Liver) Research Fund at the Freeman Hospital.

"They're the people who saved my life and extended a wonderful marriage," says Lez. "I think we're both very glad that they did."

Confessions of a steam train anorak

WHATEVER others keep beneath their beds, Dave Burdon kept photographs, boxes and boxes of monochrome nostalgia.

They'd been laid to rest more than 30 years earlier, images of steam engines in all their dying glory, hunting and shunting around the Darlington area in the early 1960s.

There were streamlined A4s and coal-dusted K1s, express locomotives with imperious names like Lord Farringdon and Cock of the North and locally stabled work horses given names which could never be repeated.

He wasn't, he insists, an expert. "At first I just had a box camera, pointing it in the right direction without a light meter or anything. I'd just take a guess and press the shutter."

At last, however, something has developed. Dave's first book of railway photographs - The Last Days of Steam Around Darlington - suggests that he guessed absolutely right.

He himself had become an apprentice at North Road railway workshops in Darlington in 1957, after passing a cursory English test which involved spelling Edinburgh, Middlesbrough and Scarborough and thus qualifying him for the main line.

Though he'd enjoyed railways as a child it was working with steam engines which really stoked his interest. He became, he says, an anorak.

"When I got the bug I got it really badly. We were all over the place photographing steam, not just Darlington, and in places where we hadn't even permission to be.

"I've been kicked out of loads of places in the middle of the night but the worst of all for getting into was Darlington sheds. I don't know if it was psychological, but I was terrified of going to Darlington."

Dave, now 61, lives in Hurworth. We chat at Darlington station, where a cup of coffee is now £1.35 and they no longer have penny platform tickets, either.

Darlington engine shed closed on March 26, 1966, a few weeks after North Road workshops and on Dave's wedding day. "Not unnaturally this produced a conflict of interests," he says, and the conflict deepened because Darlington were chasing promotion and beating Barnsley at home the same day.

Dave, who did his own printing - "there were so many, I couldn't have afforded it otherwise" - dived back beneath the bed after being made redundant in 1998. The bug, if not the bed bug, bit again - "it just gets in your blood," he says.

In the past few years he has travelled to photograph steam operation in Germany, Poland and twice to China - from where he returned last week.

"Some of them had never seen westerners, what they call Long Noses. At first there were just a few curious people, then around 150, then the police, then the suits. They were all right once we'd tried to explain."

His book is much closer to home, steam's decline and fall overflowing with mucky for some memories. A transport of delight.

The Last Days of Steam Around Darlington by David Burdon (Sutton Publishing, £18 99.)

On the trail of big foot

OUR obituary two weeks ago on Bindy Lambton, wife of Lord Lambton, noted that her father took size 24 shoes. Harry Watson in Chester-le-Street thinks the column may have put its foot in it big time. His cobbler, he adds, thinks it's a load, too.

Shoe sizes were standardised by King Edward I in 1305, an inch defined as the length of three contiguous dried barleycorns. A common children's length was 13 barleycorns, hence size 13.

Several American basketball players take size 22 but the biggest ever shoe belonged to Robert Pershing Wadlow, who was 8ft 11ins tall, weighed 490lbs, took a size 44 and a half and died when he was 22.

Bindy's poor dad was small boned by comparison.

Long lost friends

MATT Hutchinson, the 85-year-old former polliss whose lovely little autobiography we featured last week, has heard from many long lost friends as a result.

Among those was John McCrea, with whom he started as a young constable in West Hartlepool in 1939 and who later became Hartlepool's mayor.

John was also there when chief constable Sir George Morley turned up at a cordoned off bomb site, was mistaken for a nosey parker and ordered to get his rear end out of it by someone identified only as War Reserv e Bostock.

The stranger, in mufti, identified himself as the chief. Matt Hutchinson's recollection is that Bostock told him: "If you're the chief constable, I'm the king of the Belgians."

Though agreeing that he didn't look much like top brass - "sports jacket, gaiters, old Lagonda" - John remembers the confrontation a little differently.

What War Reserve Bostock actually told Sir George was: "Come back you silly bugger. You'll get yourself blown up."

Ample sufficiency

THE Bishop of Durham, encountered at a do last week, reckoned that he and his wife Brenda had 27 similar dinners before his retirement on April 30.

"It's wonderful that so many people want to say their goodbyes," said the Rt Rev Michael Turnbull, though he still may not have as much on his plates as John Pritchard, the suffragan Bishop of Jarrow.

Bishop John, it will be recalled, walked barefoot over hot coals last week to raise funds for a hospice in Durham. Once he'd done it, the pesky photographers demanded that he do it all again.

No longer a tenderfoot, the bishop cheerfully obliged.

Adie's deafness

WARRIOR queen Kate Adie OBE, formerly of the BBC and still a heroine in Sunderland, revealed at an Oldie magazine lunch the other day that for years she has been completely deaf in both ears.

"It meant she concentrated far more on exactly what people were saying and the expression on their faces," says the Oldie.

Kate, whose first outside broadcast was from the front at Evenwood Football Club, will be 58 in September.