Jonathan Dee has written a book all about his memories from ‘Commodore 64 joystick-waggling glory to the gentle art of watching the grain bins’
Jonathan Dee has penned Sardines & Conkers; Jonathan pictured as a young boy at Butlin’s Minehead, in his Hull City kit and wearing footballer Peter Osgood’s England cap(Image: Jonathan Dee)
An East Yorkshire-born man says he is “equal parts proud and terrified” about publishing his first book. Jonathan Dee’s Sardines & Conkers is a look-back at his early life spent in Driffield and Wetwang, up until leaving home for university.
He said: “Over the last year I’ve been capturing memories of growing up in the mighty Wetwang, and it’s turned into a book. It’s full of funny stories, 80s nostalgia, and little moments that still make me laugh now.”
Jonathan, now living and working in the Midlands, said that some poignant words spoken at a close friend’s funeral – and there being “three minutes to sum up someone’s life” – were what prompted him to start recording his memories, which in turn have become a self-published book now for sale on Amazon. All profits received in the first three months will be going to the Sue Ryder charity.
Jonathan said: “In the book, I go back and revisit when I started school in the 80s and there are lots of funny stories in there. I talk about the time a brown Grundig TV set was wheeled into school for us to watch the first Space Shuttle taking off and for when it was the Royal wedding.
“There are lots of reflections from my time at Wetwang Primary School and the old playground games we used to play… British Bulldog, Block 1-2-3,” said Jonathan, acknowledging the lifestyle he experienced as a child is not what youngsters of today get to enjoy.
“A lot of the stories come from the freedom we had growing up,” he said. Readers can expect tales about early computer games using the Commodore 64, the Spectrum and the Amstrad – “unbelievably exciting” at the time.
“You’d have to wait half an hour for a game to load and you’d get five minutes of play before the cassette had to be turned over or it went wrong.” There are recollections of visiting Boothferry Park with his dad.
It is where the sardines of the book title come in. “Stan McEwan used to take the penalties for Hull City and I’d be standing there hearing the crowd chanting what I thought was ‘sardines’, and that’s what I’d be chanting along with them – to a seven-year-old that’s what ‘Stan-ley’ sounded like.”
As for the conkers, that is a toe-curler of a memory that can still bring a blush to Jonathan’s face now as he recounts it. He had his whole class in stitches when, as an “innocent 11-year-old just starting at Driffield School” he wrote and read out a story about conkers and “getting my conkers out and bashing them against my friend’s conkers”.
He said: “There’s the story of me being locked in the car with Viking Radio on while my dad went to hunt records out at Sydney Scarborough’s [the leading music store in Hull for decades]. There’s personal stuff of my time in Wetwang with my grandparents, who also lived in the village, and some of the board games I used to play with my grandma – Escalado, Lexicon and Risk.”
Jonathan once had a week’s work experience with the Hull Daily Mail in the early 1990s – “there are stories about how that went in the book” – and he recalls making a quick exit with a reporter when “an angry man with a large Alsatian” answered the door when they were chasing a story at Bransholme. “It all leads to the time when Dad was packing up the car to take me to Leeds University in 1993.”
Jonathan saw his daughter dictating into her phone for her English GCSE studies and, after the experience at the funeral, he “started talking into my phone”. He said: “I realised I’d spoken 75,000 words and I thought, there’s something in this. It took me about four months to put it into some semblance of a story and to edit it.
“My wife read it and she said ‘it’s really good’. She was crying and she said ‘it’s learning all that about you and reading about a time when things were very different’.”
Jonathan works for a design company whose chosen charity of the year is Sue Ryder, and he decided to support its work personally by donating profits from early sales of Sardines & Conkers to the cause. He said: “My family have all enjoyed reading the book and people who are not connected to me have messaged me – I knew a friend at university for only a year and he’s said how it’s really inspired him.”
Jonathan, whose four-year-old self appears on the book cover, said: “I’ve started writing notes for volume two – it will be from arriving at university.” Of the whole experience, he said: “It’s been quite the process to go through. I thought to myself, where WAS all this stuff?”
Amazon describes the book as “a laugh-out-loud journey through a Yorkshire childhood in a village with the best name in Britain – Wetwang”. It says: “In Sardines & Conkers, Jonathan Dee returns to the tiny village where UFO sightings were taken seriously, sheep occasionally got ideas above their station, and chickens ruled the roost.
“From Commodore 64 joystick-waggling glory to the gentle art of ‘watching the grain bins’, these stories capture how growing up somewhere small could feel absolutely epic. So whether you’re an Eighties nostalgist, a fellow village veteran, or simply someone who enjoys a good laugh, Sardines & Conkers might just be the book that you never knew you needed… until now.”
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