Dieuwertje Fisk
I first met my husband Tom when I was staying in a youth hostel in London. He was originally from South Moor in Stanley but was then living down south. When we got married in 1967, Tom wanted to return to the North East. He was a schoolteacher, so when a job became available at Easington Colliery Primary School, he jumped at the chance. The job came with a house in Peterlee. This was on Dart Road. There was no choice in the matter. I moved to Peterlee from Noordwijk in Holland, so everything here felt strange at first. Even simple things like the vegetables you could buy. Back then the cauliflowers from the greengrocers were brown! What I’ve always liked about Peterlee, however, is the green open space and the proximity of Castle Eden Dene.
Though the house had three good size bedrooms, two upstairs and one on the ground floor, the kitchen was tiny. When you bent over to take something out of the oven your behind would touch the wall, it was that narrow. The heating stove was in the room next to the kitchen. There was a serving hatch between the two. We used this as our main living space because it was the only warm room. The ‘living room’ had a small built in two bar electric heater, which wasn’t very effective. None of the other rooms in the house had heating. We routinely had the fire brigade out because of chimney fires caused by a build-up of ash from the stove. Worst of all, we discovered water would seep inside from under the windows whenever it rained, and snowflakes would fall through the vent in the bathroom skylight. It didn’t surprise me when they later knocked down most of the houses in Dart Road. They were very poorly built.
We’d been living there for fifteen months when Thomas was born. Thomas was two when we left Dart Road and bought a house on Eastdene Way, where I still live. Emma was born a couple of years later and soon after that Tom got a job at North Blunts Primary in Peterlee where he taught until retiring early in the 1990’s.
Thomas and Emma are both musically gifted. They played together in The Rye and toured all over Britain, Ireland, and Europe. I kept a scrap book of all the newspaper cuttings and mementos they sent me when away on tour.