Newcastle almost became a car city, I tell W., but it avoided this fate. I take him to see where the famous T. Dan Smith lived, who wanted to turn Newcastle into a Brazilia of the north. An unlikely ambition! But he persisted, driving a motorway through the centre of town. He wasn't a traffic Canute, Smith said in his autobiography; he didn't think he could turn back the great tide of traffic.
Whole swathes of the city – including the whole of Jesmond – are accessible to the pedestrian only through a number of underroad pathways, which W. particularly dislikes. My part of town, and this is its glory, has no such restrictions. He would undoubtedly be a traffic Canute as a town planner, W. says, turning back the tide of cars.
Last night, our taxi driver told us how T. Dan Smith used to pick him up as a paperboy, driving him back up Richardson Road to his home. He was a kind man, he said. He didn't deserve jail for what he did. Smith was the fall guy, said the taxi driver, as he pointed out the towerblock flat that became Smith's when he came out of prison. He must have lost his three-storeyed house that looked out over the Moor.
I show W. where I'd been knocked to the ground by local youths. They kicked me in the head, I tell him. – 'It's only what you deserved'. And I show him the route to the pubs in the Ouseburn Valley that I had travelled so many times in my lost weekend, as W. calls it.
I was out every night, W. remembers. I lived in pubs. I was drink-sodden, but happy. I came late to drinking, W. says. Mind you, so did he. He studied Hebrew and played classical guitar. What was I doing? Writing, W. says. Locked up in a room and writing like an idiot, though I had nothing to write about. - 'What's ever happened to you?', W. says. Why have I never understood I'm not Kafka?
Still, I made up for them latter, my reclusive years, W. says. I came out of my room, ready for the pubs! I went straight from my room to the pubs, Didn't I? He's forgotten my monk years, I remind him. Ah yes, my monk years, W. says. My Manchester years. He had forgotten them.
We find the spot where the Ouseburn re-emerges from the wooded cliff of the filled-in valley. How could have the river, a trickle in its wide channel, have formed such a valley? The Ouseburn was, of course, fundamental to the Industrial Revolution. Factory buildings – many of which are still standing – line the river as it opens into the Tyne. They used to make glass here, W. says, as we pass gaily-coloured boats marooned on mud banks. The Toon-tanic, W. reads on the side of one of the boats.
We stop for a pint at the Tyne, and for another in the garden of The Free Trade, looking downriver to the city. Why did the monks take me in, W. wonders. What did they see in me? W., too had his monk years. He joined a Trappist order as a novice. He was marooned with his brother monks on the Isle of Man, but he could never really surpass his own atheism, W. says. My atheism never bothered me, of course, W. says. I fitted right in with the monks. I was right in the thick of it, saved from poverty …
W. admires the view. We look upriver to the Millennium Bridge. You need to leave your city periodically, W. says, if only to understand how much you are part of it. How much it is part of you!
Moving to Newcastle was my great opportunity, W. says. Prior to Newcastle, in my Manchester years – my monk years – I was full only of a sense of life's impossibilities. That's what had drove me into the arms of the monks, W. says. His monk years were entirely different, W. says. He wasn't fleeing from the world, he says. He was looking for it.
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