Yet again, the work of North-East writer Sid Chaplin is back in the bookshops. David Whetstone wonders if it will stay there this time. A plaque indicates the terraced house in Jesmond where writer Sid Chaplin used to live, and where his widow, Rene, still does. But a far better memorial to a writer is the availability of the books bearing his name. Sid, who died in 1986, is often remembered in the same breath as writers such as David Storey, Stan Barstow, Keith Waterhouse and Alan Sillitoe who, similarly, came from working class backgrounds and collectively broke the English literary mould in the 1950s and 60s. He was an influence on several of these young men. But it's fair to say that his name will ring fewer bells outside his own region than most of theirs. Last week, had you happened upon the Newcastle City Council plaque in Kimberley Gardens, you then would have looked in vain in the bookshops - excluding, perhaps, the second hand variety - for the volumes which made him noteworthy. This week that is put right. Flambard, the small Northumberland publishing house, is republishing two of Sid Chaplin's novels - The Day of the Sardine (1961) and The Watchers and the Watched (1962) - as "classics of modern literature". With snazzy, photographic covers, they are to be launched on Saturday at the Gala Theatre Studio as part of the Durham Literature Festival. Sid's story is almost as extraordinary as any he conjured out of his imagination. Born in 1916 in Shildon, County Durham, he was a working class lad who pulled himself up by his bootstraps. Despite being an avid reader at school, he gravitated, no doubt like many of his classmates, towards the Dean and Chapter Colliery at Ferryhill and returned there during the war, working as a belt-fitter underground. In the interim, he won a scholarship to a working men's college at Bourneville, intending to study economics and politics with a view to becoming a politician or a union leader. Later he recalled that a long silence followed his first essay before his tutor finally responded: "Well, your economics are not exact but at least they are entertaining; and anyone who can make economics entertaining would be wasting his time on them. I think you should go in for writing." His first story was published soon afterwards in a short-lived magazine. A first collection of short stories was published under the title The Leaping Lad just after the war. Sid moved to the press office of the old National Coal Board and took up writing full time in 1973 - coinciding with one of the periodic resurgences of interest in his writing and the first re-issue of the two aforementioned novels. The novels - written after Sid had moved to Newcastle after a spell in London - reappeared in 1989, courtesy of a company called Scorpion Publishing. Melvyn Bragg supplied a foreword to The Day of the Sardine - and this time does the honours for The Watchers and the Watched. Peter Lewis, who runs Flambard with wife Margaret from their home near Hexham, said they had been planning to extend their fiction list when they were talking to Sid's son, Michael, one-time Journal reporter and now established TV writer. "I think the Chaplin family were feeling rather dismal that nothing by Sid was in print. We talked to Michael and he suggested we revive the two Newcastle novels, which I think most people regard as his best. "We thought it was a good idea because there is something of an interest in regional writing these days." The Day of the Sardine - with a foreword by Alan Plater, one of Sid's collaborators on the hit musical Close The Coalhouse Door - introduces us to Arthur Haggerston, a free-spirited young man with "a taste of my own medicine running through my system". In The Watchers and the Watched, which Sid once said was his favourite, he tells of a young married couple in Scotswood. In both novels you get a very strong flavour of 1960s Tyneside, a time of social change which nevertheless reads like ancient history. When Arthur ventures down "the quayside", he has to dodge shunting engines and mobile cranes. But it's the beginning of the end. Decades into the future were the bars and cultural palaces we now see and the silences unimagined in the days of shipbuilding. Sid Chaplin's writing and his characters, quirky and colourful, merit immortality. In an interview in 1973 he referred to his books as his "bairns" and said: "The nice thing about my books is that, though they don't sell in millions, they do survive." Maybe the "bairns" will be back for good this time. Michael Chaplin will introduce an evening of readings and reminiscences at the Gala Theatre, Durham, on Saturday at 7.30pm. Tickets are £5, redeemable against purchase of one of the two novels, which are both priced at £8.99. On October 28 at 6pm the novelist and critic DJ Taylor will give a talk at Newcastle Lit & Phil, Westgate Road. It is called `Writing from the margins: the English regional novel from Sid Chaplin to Julia Darling'. Then, on November 21, in A City on the Tyne, at Live Theatre, Newcastle, Michael Chaplin will recreate the world of his late father's two Newcastle novels. All in all, a bit of a Chaplin-fest. | 
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