The Bootle Boy

by Les Hinton

  The bread man’s horse clattered along the street in low-headed resignation, its giant hooves sliding on the cobbles. I would lift my hand with carrot ends and stale bread — ‘Keep your fingers straight, lad, or he’ll bite them off’ — and feel his soft wet lips.

  The coal men’s smiles were white and pink in their blackened faces. They aimed the entire contents of the heavy sacks on their backs exactly down our coalhole. I would help lift the round heavy metal cover on the pavement outside our front door then run downstairs and shovel the stacking lumps so they could all fit into the cellar. It was brilliant and messy fun, but made me cough.

  The chimneysweep covered the hearth with newspaper and made his brush handle longer and longer, and I ran into the street to see its black bristles peep out of the chimney top. The rag-and-bone man would ride past with his pony and cart, crying out and ringing a bell. My grandmother never had anything to sell him. Twice a day, lamplighters carried along their narrow ladders to light or extinguish each gas lamp. Mum said they earned extra in the morning banging on doors to wake people so they weren’t late for work.

  The back room was my Wild West prairie. Bobby the Border Collie was Lassie, but never did what he was told. My horse was the right arm of the torn brown sofa. I was a hard rider and the sofa arm eventually fell off.

  In the mid-fifties, Grandma rented a 12-inch Baby Bush television and sat it high in a corner of the back room on a small shelf above the table. Until then, the only television I saw was through a crack in the lace curtains of the front window two doors down from Auntie Gladys’ in Malcolm Street. I watched the test pattern, waiting for Bill and Ben the Flower Pot Men, who lived in two flower pots at the bottom of a garden and spoke their own dialect. My mother said she couldn’t understand them, but I could, and thought it must be a language for children only.

  Much later, I enjoyed watching a blonde singer named Jill Day, who wore clinging dresses, and, at the end of a song, would turn her back on the camera and wink at me over her shoulder.

  When television advertising arrived, there was one for Gibbs SR toothpaste, which meant our toothpaste was famous. There were other things advertised that I had never heard of. Horlicks was a drink you needed for a good, sound sleep, and Lucozade made sick people better. My mum said these advertisements were not true and, even if they were, we couldn’t afford Horlicks or Lucozade.

  People on television and radio had strange voices. Grandma called them ‘posh’. They also used different words. Dad was from London, and said, ‘Cor, blimey’ or ‘Cor, lumme,’ when he was surprised. Posh people on the television and radio said, ‘I say!’

  I’m not sure what my first memory was; I was told so many stories about being a baby that I’m sure I’ve created mental films about them. But I’m certain of one early memory because no one was there who could have told me about it. I saw a blazing light changing places with the face of a black woman. It terrified me. I remember crying and struggling against a hand planted firmly on my chest. I remember a voice saying softly, ‘Stop, stop.’ A stinking white square was placed on my face, and then there was nothing. The material was cotton wool, the smell chloroform, and the hand was pinning my struggling body beneath the beam of a surgery light. My mother had decided I should be circumcised. I do not know the reason, but it was not religious and, since I was three years old, she left it late.

  It was at Grandma’s that my mother discovered I was a better reader than she thought. I was five, with a copy of the News of the World, when I asked her what ‘sexually molested’ meant. It was a while before I got my hands on another copy of the News of the World. Years later, when I was an adult, the News of the World would get me into far worse trouble.

  School was Bedford Road Primary, which was an epic trek from St John’s Road. When I measured the distance years later, it turned out to be half a mile. This daily journey began with the morning malt ordeal. Each day, a dessert-spoon overflowing with malt and cod-liver oil was forced into my mouth. There was so much of it that I couldn’t breathe properly until it began to melt. Malt was medicine to ward off all ills, I was told, and it was unsafe to leave home without taking it.

  Suitably immunised, I would set off, past the terraces along St John’s Road. Some of these terraces were boarded-up and derelict. At the old bomb site on the corner stood two prefabs — the quick-build homes for families left homeless by the blitz. I would turn right, passing through the echoing cobbled subway under the train lines where, in February 1952, a stranger told my dad and me, ‘The King is dead’ and that Princess Elizabeth, aged 25, was now the queen.

  On the left, upon emerging, was Auntie Elsie Silk’s corner shop, where customers’ feet had worn a deep curve into the wooden step at her door. I called her ‘Auntie’ but she was only Grandma’s best friend. On my way home, I would pop in to say hello and sometimes she gave me a stick of liquorice, or a Barratt’s Sherbet Fountain, but not often.

  Across Stanley Road, and then Miranda Road, was my school, a red-brick Victorian building with small and narrow windows. There was a concrete playground with no grass.

  When Princess Elizabeth visited Bootle before becoming queen, we had a day off to stand in the street with flags. Everything the princess wore was bright red — her coat, hat, gloves, handbag, and shoes. She made Bootle seem black-and-white.

  Life was not idyllic for the extended Bruce family. There were fights — constant fights — followed by long silences: sometimes one sister against another, sometimes with the family split into factions. I cannot remember the cause of a single argument, but no one seems to have suffered a serious injury — at least, not when I was alive. Before my birth, one of my aunts — as well as Grandma — was married to a man who beat her.

  I think all the Bruces were working-class Tories. If Labour’s 1945 election victory created a post-war sense of working-class liberation and opportunity, word of it didn’t arrive at 149 St John’s Road. Each election day, Grandma accepted a ride to the polling station from the Labour Party and voted Conservative.

  My mother regarded the upper classes with admiration rather than resentment. She said Tory gents, high born and pinstriped, were better to rule us than uncouth workers, with their coarse ways and raw regional accents — people like us. Mum had a forceful way of expressing herself, and it took me a while to shake off this idea.

  My family was Protestant and never spoke well of Roman Catholics. My mother did not like the Sacrament of Confession; she said we should admit our sins directly to God and not via another human being. When the Orange Day Parade happened everyone stayed home. This was a big day for Protestants but my grandmother said we should stay home because Catholics and Protestants would get into fights.

  In 1968, Mum wasn’t happy when I married a Catholic. She would have been in despair knowing I married another in 2009, but it was almost five years after she died. At least my second wife was from Liverpool.

  Edith Emily Bruce, my grandmother, was 66 when I was born. By the time I was conscious of her, she was sallow and old, but still tall, unbent, and never slow. Even then, compared with other women, she wore clothes from another age. Her simple dark-coloured dresses always ended a little above her ankles, and her black shoes had low thick heels and were held on with buttoned straps. Every evening, she draped around her shoulders the same navy-blue loose-knit shawl. Her hair was long, tied in a bun during the day, but brushed out every night in front of the fire. It was white and shining, and stretched to below her waist. She would throw loose hair into the fire where I watched it curl and disappear.

  She always polished the brass top of the front doorstep and scrubbed the step below it. ‘It shows you have respect,’ she said. Each Saturday morning, with her Brasso and a scrubbing brush, Grandma got on her hands and knees at the doorstep to pay homage to her respectability. Her steps were the shiniest and cleanest in the street.

  I last saw my grandmother standing on her gleam
ing doorstep in 1959, the day before we left for Australia. My mother was giving her a long, last embrace. She died the following year.

  Grandma was not a jolly woman. I don’t remember her smiling much, or ever laughing. But she was always gentle with me, with the same soft smell. When she was babysitting we had a secret pact: I could stay up 30 minutes after bedtime — until half past eight.

  I have Grandma to thank for my Bootle liberation. My mother never wanted me to play in the streets at home. I could wander the Egyptian desert by the Suez Canal, watching camel trains wind through the dunes; ride a white horse in the Eritrean highlands at the age of eight; trek alone through the back streets of Tripoli; clamber the bomb sites of Germany; play soldier in the jungly tropics of Singapore, where snakes could kill with a single bite. I could even walk to school, but I could never go out to play. Rough Bootle boys were bad company for little Les.

  I presume my mother was trying to protect me from the toughness and difficulty Bootle represented to her. But when Mum was out, Grandma would set me free to roam. When Mum complained, Grandma wouldn’t retreat. ‘It’s not healthy to keep him cooped up in here all day,’ she would say. Eventually Mum surrendered, and Bootle was at my feet. I could walk to Auntie Elsie’s shop to buy my comics — Beano, Dandy, and Eagle — kick a ball in the streets, dash through the narrow back alleys, and play hide-and-seek in the bomb sites. The only rule was no sitting on the wall at the end of Malcolm Street watching the trains, not since a boy down the street fell off and a goods train missed him by inches.

  On Saturday morning, I would visit Mum’s sister, Emily, who lived three doors away in St John’s Road. Auntie Emily was big and always wore the same wraparound pinafore with a print of tiny flowers. When we played draughts, she allowed me to take lots of her pieces, but never let me win. The centrepiece of the mahogany sideboard in her back room was a wireless, domed like a church, made of brown Bakelite with a large dial and big tuning knob.

  We listened to serials like Dick Barton — Special Agent and Journey Into Space. Dick Barton began with a roll of drums and pounding music. Arch-villains threatened the world with weapons of indescribable power. There were flaming buildings to escape, and high-speed car chases. In moments of great danger, Dick would say things like ‘Great Scott!’ and ‘Blast!’ and advise his sidekicks, Snowy White and Jock, to flee by saying: ‘We better buzz off.’ Journey into Space was set far into the future — in 1965. Captain Jet Morgan flew a rocket ship to the dark side of the moon with his crew — Lemmy, Doc, and Mitch — where they were kidnapped by UFOs and taken thousands of years into the future.

  I would lean against the sideboard to listen, head on my arms, right next to the radio, which was so loud you could see the brown fabric cover of the speaker throbbing with the drama taking place inside. I would be so impatient to listen to these programmes that I played with the radio dial, thinking I could find them at any time. Auntie Emily told me that was useless and I had to wait until a certain time — I think it was 11am. I never quite understood why. More than half a century later, technology caught up with my complaint, and we could watch and hear anything any time.

  Auntie Emily was a widow with no children. Her husband Bert dropped dead in a cinema queue. As they stood in line, a woman went by wearing a large hat, and Auntie Emily laughed when Uncle Bert said, ‘The wind is going to take her and her hat in a minute.’ They were his last words; when Auntie Emily looked round, her husband was lying dead on the pavement. Mum said Uncle Bert would hit Auntie Emily regularly until my uncles took him into the back alley one night, knocked him down, and banged his head on the cobblestones.

  On Saturday afternoon, I would go with my big sister Marilyn and our cousin Judith to the matinee at the Commodore Cinema, which was across a blackened railway footpath leading to Stanley Road. Marilyn and Judith never much liked having me around. When they were babysitting, they put the clock forward an hour to fool me into going to bed early. Taking me to the cinema with them was the price they paid for their tickets. Before the main film, there was a short pre-war American serial, ending with an impossible cliff-hanger that hooked me every time. We had to wait all week to see what happened next.

  We bought fish and chips on the way back, wrapped in newspaper, but at home Grandma made us put our food on plates and sit at the table with knives and forks. The crockery was old and battered, and we were not allowed to drink from the chipped side of teacups.

  We had our own delicacies: chip butties — chips, covered with HP Sauce, between two slices of Sunblest bread; bread and dripping — beef cooking fat, laced with tasty brown bits, smeared thickly over bread with lots of salt; sugar sandwiches — bread and margarine sprinkled with Tate & Lyle white sugar. I never kicked the habit of chip butties.

  Our cousin, Neil Brooks, was manager of the Liverpool Empire in Lime Street, the city’s biggest theatre. This made him a family success. Later, he gained legendary status by becoming manager of the famous London Palladium. Cousin Neil would get us free front-row tickets at the Empire, which we could never have afforded. We saw performers such as Guy Mitchell, Lita Roza, Cab Calloway, Alma Cogan, and Winifred Atwell. I had never heard of any of them, but the audience was excited, so I knew they must be famous.

  We were the first to leave Bootle, and Britain. Working-class people did not leave the country much in those days, and everyone back home thought our lives lucky and adventurous. When we went back, everyone looked pallid against our deep tans.

  My widowed Auntie Gladys, Mum’s twin, married a bank clerk called Harvey Gibbs. Her first husband was the Burma veteran who died from a tropical disease. Uncle Harvey was posher than us, and my aunt moved away to a pebbledash semi-detached at 33 Willow Avenue in Huyton with a garden in the front and back, three bedrooms, a separate dining room, and a garage for their black Ford Popular.

  Streets had the names of trees: Laburnum, Cypress, Sycamore, Lilac. Auntie Gladys and Uncle Harvey ate with serviettes on their laps and we had to do the same when we visited. Between meals, they kept their serviettes rolled up in silver rings carved with their initials. When Uncle Harvey was a child, his parents would not let him talk at the table. After meals, he had to go to his room and couldn’t sit with his parents in the living room. We called our evening meal tea, but Auntie Gladys started calling it dinner.

  The Willow Avenue house overlooked a big field and woods, but in the 1970s the new M62 motorway cut right across it. The tentacles of the new motorway system were spreading across the country, and when my aunt and uncle found out their bit of country was to be sacrificed, they bought a bungalow in an even nicer place, near a nature reserve by the sea, in Formby.

  We would visit Auntie Gladys and Uncle Harvey on Sundays. Uncle Harvey loved routine and precise timing. Afternoon tea was always 4pm. He would drive us home at night at exactly the same time, and through the window of the corner house we passed, the television always seemed to be showing the finale of Sunday Night at the London Palladium, when all the performers waved from the revolving stage.

  No one was more important to my mother than her twin sister Gladys. Gladys and Lilian had epic fights, yet talked of their closeness as if it were something mystical. Once, when they lived more than 10,000 miles apart in Adelaide and Liverpool, they went into hospital on the same day with heart trouble. Old stories of people struggling to tell them apart were repeated more and more as they aged; their delight in telling them made it impossible to be bored.

  My mother missed Gladys deeply when they were separated, which was for most of their adult lives. She talked of her constantly. They never spoke by telephone; we didn’t have a telephone in the house until Australia. There was a constant back and forth of letters and photographs. Important news of birth, illness, and death arrived by telegram.

  I never lived in Bootle again after we went to Australia. I became afraid of going back. I drove there many times without getting out of the car. The poor, cold, da
rk streets and houses had once been the only familiar place I knew on earth.

  But in Australia, in her warm and safe Adelaide suburb, Mum talked about our leaving Bootle as if we had made a lucky escape, as if going back would have doomed us all; that nothing her children made of themselves would have been possible. Many people, when they improve their lives, talk fondly about the rough streets where they began. Not Mum. She made Bootle sound like hell, and I think, in her own mind, that’s what it was — full of the memory of grinding unhappiness, of poverty and hardship and grief.

  Even going back to Liverpool for a long time made me feel as if I were tempting fate, walking among dangerous spirits, heading into a trap that would never let me go. The prospect of every visit depressed me. This feeling made no sense, and I shook it off years ago. Kath, my second wife is a south Liverpool girl, and I go back often, even to the few remaining Bootle pubs.

  Forty years after settling in Australia, as Mum’s old mind began to wander, she talked about going home. Every time I visited, she said the same thing. Take me back home with you, she would say, I don’t like it here any more, I want to go home. She must have meant Bootle, there was nowhere else, but it was too late to remind her how desperate she had been to leave. Her mind was full of dreams by then — reborn memories of lost people, of imaginary visitors to her care-home room. Maybe moments of Bootle happiness surfaced through the confusion.

  There was nothing left in any event. She was the last of her generation, and every house in our stretch of St John’s Road had been razed. The last time I visited Bootle, I spent that day alone, wandering the streets — past the derelict Commodore Cinema, the boarded-up shops, and the new but already run-down estates. I had a pint and a microwaved pie in an empty pub, and chatted to the barmaid who, incongruously, came from Los Angeles. She missed the sun, she said.