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In the old fishing village of Cullercoats, much noted for its hardy and quaint characters, Frankie B was well known. Being a small almost isolated community at the time of which I write, and nearly all related, their merits or demerits, oftener the latter, was common talk. So much were they intermarried, that for purposes of identification they nicknamed each other, until it became a fine art – no fancy sparing work, but solid hard-hitting, and none escaped. With them it became a quaint form of humour, and passed for wit, which was handed down from father to son. They were shrewd people, and although somewhat narrow in their outlook on life, they were long-headed enough where their own interests were concerned.
All were very suspicious and intolerant of strangers, and indignantly resented any suggestion that other people might be able to teach them. They swelled with conscious pride as the salt of the earth. In short, they had the virtues and defects of all such people.
The time was father to the man. Woe betide any individual in that community who offended against its code. They were ostracised for life, and after the lapse of almost a lifetime from the offence being committed one would overhear the remark: "There's Frankie B talking to ---,” who so far as I knew had been a decent-living man for years. “Everybody knows - meaning the world of Cullercoats - that Frankie B, is a bad man, has been a bad man all his life, and never pretended to be anything else; but in comparison, with the other his is a bright and shining light, and worthy of a place beside the throne.”
The late Mark Sheridan, in one of his jokes, described a certain type of person as being all right in the wind, but up here, tapping his forehead!
Solid ivory might almost apply to Frankie B, who certainly had as thick and hard a head as most people, with a little extra solidity thrown in to make weight. Once he slipped and fell on the back of his head with such a crash that had he not been endowed beyond the lot of ordinary mortals his skull must have be broken. When reminded of it years after he seemed to regard it as only a slight and trivial affair, hardly worth mentioning. “Why man,” he would say, “That's nothing. Down there you can count the paving stones which I've smashed with my head in my time.”
G. W. L. [Extract from the Northern Weekly Gazette]
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