The Bootle Boy

by Les Hinton

  It had started to rain, the same soft, soaking rain of my childhood that drifts suddenly in from the Irish Sea. I stood under the old railway bridge over which the goods trains used to rattle, belching soot at us.

  Kath was shopping with her mother and had promised to pick me up there at four. As usual, she was late, but I didn’t care. I stood and remembered a thousand things about my family and my life here. My mother’s Bootle, the place she had yearned so unexpectedly for in her final months, had melted away, and so had mine.

  When finally Kath pulled up in the hire car, her mother, Angela, waving merrily at me, I climbed into the back and stared out the window. We passed our lost neighbourhood. Grandma’s place was gone: the aspidistra parlour that was a shrine to her lost children; the backyard, with its weed-sprouting walls, where Bobby the Border Collie spent his life in confinement; the crackling real-coal fire in the back room, where we toasted bread on one side only. Auntie Emily’s had vanished, too, where I listened to those Saturday morning adventures on her giant Bakelite radio set and never once won a game of draughts. The back alleys and the cobblestoned dead-end streets where I ran — Malcolm Street, my birthplace, and Duncan Street — were entombed beneath concrete car parks and a vast grey warehouse. It had become the site of an industrial packaging company called Weir & Carmichael. Near the spot I was born, the company’s proud sign said: ‘Packaging Your World’. It felt like a taunt.

  CHAPTER 3

  There’s a minefield at the bottom of our yard

  I was five when it started, when I first left the familiar comfort of Bootle and the tall, loud uncles who tossed me into the air, and cheered me up with glove puppets when I lay sick on the back room sofa.

  I remember the journey; the world turning from grey to green, from tight and closed, to bright and open. I remember a glistening field on a frosty morning; the evening sun through the sinewy branches of a gigantic tree; and strong country smells. I remember squealing on the back of Mal’s bike as we sprayed through the stream that crossed a lane near us; the shrill of a dive-bombing bird when I found its nest; learning the name of my first flower — bluebells, clustered along the banks of the stream; and discovering that tadpoles turned into frogs. We had a black-and-white mongrel called Patch who could find me wherever I hid.

  It was the first alien place I visited, even though we were only 130 miles away from Bootle, in Yorkshire. Catterick Camp was our first Army ‘posting’ and we were living in a vast military garrison. There were khaki uniforms everywhere, and big, shiny black boots thumping along the pavement. And guns, lots of guns. My brother, Duncan, was born there, and Marilyn fell out of a tree and broke her nose, which remained beautifully bent until she had it straightened 30 years later. German prisoners-of-war were still at the camp, although by now they walked pretty freely. They did odd jobs around the barracks. One painted the outside of our house and drank cups of tea in the kitchen.

  Catterick was only the first stop on the expeditionary life that lay ahead of us. For the next 10 years, we were swept along, wandering extras in a world-changing game, as the sun set on the British Empire.

  Once the jubilation of victory had faded, post-war Britain was a shaky place. Its economy was a wreck, and large parts of many cities were shattered wastelands. As the 1940s ended, the United Kingdom was still bitter and confused that an exhausting victory had delivered no premium in peace.

  In its gilded age, the Empire had embraced twenty per cent of the world’s population. Now the word ‘empire’ itself had been displaced by another — ‘superpower’ — and it applied only to the United States and the Soviet Union. Across the world, Britain’s colonies, possessions, and ‘protectorates’ were beginning to rattle their chains. India, the most prized possession, was to become a constitutional republic in 1950. The country’s leaders struggled on in the belief that sustaining the Empire was the path to recovering power and prosperity. Awakening from this delusion took a while; until 1966, a senior politician had the title ‘secretary of state for the colonies’, which by then sounded like a character from a Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera.

  Everything was changing, and not only Britain’s place in the world. The country itself would change beyond recognition in the coming decades. The tiny island that called itself Mother Nation to millions of Africans, Indians, and Asians, was itself almost pure white. Property rental ads still advised: ‘No coloureds or Irish need apply.’ Only 100,000 people were of ethnic origin, many of them clustered in port cities like Liverpool and Cardiff. Fifty years later that number would exceed 4 million. In 1950, it would be another quarter of a century before it became illegal to sack a woman who became pregnant. Abortion would be outlawed for another 17 years, until 1967, the year in which homosexuality would also cease being a crime. There were only 100,000 household TV sets, and each year 1.4 billion cinema tickets were sold to see mainly black-and-white films; 60 years later that number had dwindled to 170 million. There was no portable music; even the transistor radio boom was in the future. Heavy, stationary radios played a limited variety of music from the BBC Light Programme; that was it, unless, through crackling static, you could pick up Radio Luxembourg nearly five-hundred miles away, as it broadcast popular tunes and commercials — and, by the mid-1950s, rock and roll.

  This was the Britain I marched away from with my soldier dad to spend years in alien places in new climates, among different peoples speaking peculiar languages and eating strange food. It made a catastrophe of my formal education, but I learned a lot.

  We travelled by sea in battered troop ships; old relics that would be war heroes if ships won campaign medals. They braved the early retreat from Europe, the Battle of the Atlantic, the North Africa campaign, the invasion of Italy, and later Korea, Cyprus, Kenya, and Malaya. Georgic had been salvaged after German bombers sunk it near the Suez Canal in 1941. Dilwara attended the Allied evacuation of Greece 1940, the Sicilian campaign of 1943, and the liberation of Burma. Empire Medway was at the Yalta conference when the United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain re-shaped post-war Europe; American and British delegates had slept in our cramped cabins. Asturias, an armed merchant cruiser declared scrap after a torpedo strike, was reborn to carry troops, and migrants to Australia. We went to Singapore on her final voyage. It was also the last journey of the whisky-breathed ship’s captain; he was buried at sea soon after presenting me with first prize in a fancy-dress competition. I dressed as a robot in cardboard boxes.

  On board these ships, locked gates separated two worlds. We were from the ‘non commissioned’ ranks; Dad was not an officer but a sergeant. A sign warned us to keep our place — ‘Officers and Families Only Beyond This Point.’ We would peer through the grille of the gates from the crowded stern and see well-dressed strollers wandering the empty deck, and a few others in deck chairs, reading books.

  On our crowded side of the fence, bare-chested squaddies would scuffle and banter and increase my vocabulary with words not found in any dictionary of the day. They had tattoos — the old-fashioned sort with rampant eagles, skulls, bloodstained bayonets, and big red hearts, pierced by arrows, declaring love for ‘Mum’ or ‘Doris’. These young soldiers were almost all doing their National Service, the universal two-year military call-up that lasted until 1960.

  As ever, when my father encountered an officer he snapped his hand to his forehead in a stiff salute. In return, the passing officer might give a token tap of his cap with a swagger stick. These officers were often smooth-faced men far younger than my father. Dad said an officer would only salute a sergeant if the sergeant had won the Victoria Cross.

  I would often share with boys my age a six-bunk cabin deep below, near the throbbing engines. Sometimes the cabin had a porthole, but usually not. Baths and showers were salt water. The crew were strange and interesting men. A steward started waiting for me each night after dinner, with fruit as a gift. I was 11, he must have been 30. My unworldly parents thought he w
as being nice, but I soon decided to refuse his fruit. The old cockney steward with shiny Brylcreemed hair and a thin black moustache, who cleaned my cabin every day, told me he had not set foot on land for six years.

  ‘You don’t even get off at home in Southampton?’

  ‘No. This is where I live. I have seen everywhere there is to see.’

  Other stewards were nautical hermits like him.

  There was no real school in troop ships, only a couple of hours of makeshift classes if one of the army wives happened to be a teacher. The closest to a geography lesson was playing the daily contest of guessing how far the ship had travelled by sticking a pin in a large map.

  Ashore in Durban, on the east coast of South Africa, when I headed to the top deck of a local double-decker bus, two firm hands lifted me into the air as the conductor returned me to the lower deck. Upstairs was for ‘non whites’ only. A new kind of segregation.

  My mother was a smuggler. She never failed to sneak through British Customs with more cigarettes than the law allowed. She always had a victorious smile after getting through with her contraband. Breaking the rules excited her. When we arrived in Southampton once, and Mum was attempting to avoid paying duty, I told the Customs officer she was wearing a new gold watch. Mum wasn’t pleased. I could never explain why I did it, but I was only eight. I don’t think my mother had a criminal mind, although in the sergeants’ mess once, when her fountain pen disappeared from the table where she had been sitting, she promptly stole a different one. ‘Someone stole mine,’ she said, ‘so I’m stealing someone else’s.’ Mum seemed happy with this logic, although even as a boy it seemed dubious to me.

  We went to Egypt when I was six, and lived on the edge of an army camp. There were four single-floor houses and nothing much to see but sand and ships sailing across the desert half a mile away — we could see the ships from our house, but not the Suez Canal. When the wind blew, the sand was whipped into a stinging brown fog.

  When Dad and I walked in the dark one night towards the garrison gate, a soldier raised a rifle to his shoulder and shouted, ‘Halt! Who goes there,’ and started counting loudly: ‘One. Two. Three …’

  ‘Stay here,’ said Dad, and he marched forward and showed some paper to the gunman who was threatening us. The sentry smiled down at me as we passed and stroked the top of my head. Dad said the soldier was there to keep us safe and counting to ten gave Dad time to prove he was not an enemy. ‘But what happens after he counts to ten?’ Dad didn’t answer me.

  When we approached our house at night, a searchlight beaming from a tower would follow us to our front door like a giant cinema usher guiding us to our seats. When I went to school each day, on a hard bench in the back of a three-ton Army lorry, two soldiers travelled with us carrying Lee–Enfield .303 rifles.

  We had a ‘houseboy’ named Hassan, who wore a bright-white robe, made perfect strawberry-jam tarts, and scoured the kitchen pans with sand outside the back door instead of the Brillo pads Mum bought at the camp store, the NAAFI, which was short for the Navy, Army, and Air Force Institutes. Returning from school one day, I saw him standing near the garrison gate, a soldier holding him by the arm. When I shouted and waved, Hassan only looked at me sadly. Mum said the Army wouldn’t allow Hassan to work for us any more.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They say it’s not safe to have him here.’

  We lived in the Suez Canal Zone near Ismailia in a place called Gebell Maryam. At the time, Britain controlled this zone under an agreement reached with Egypt before the Second World War. It was a shaky deal whose days were numbered, and the reason we were all in Egypt.

  When we visited Ismailia, it looked very poor. Egyptians lived in huts made of pieces of tin and palm fronds. People tried to sell us things, and beggars followed us along the street. Every time we went to Ismailia, I saw a man with no legs who sat on a piece of wood with wheels and pushed himself along with his clenched fists.

  It was in Egypt I taught myself to swim. We went to a small lake off the canal, where I would stand on a diving board, throw a rubber ring into the water, and then jump. I would sink into the dreamy underwater silence, look up to the light, locate the ring, and float up to it. My parents never worried — Dad couldn’t have helped because he didn’t swim either. Eventually, I jumped without the ring. My little brother said his first words there. Some of them confused my mother until she was told they were Arabic.

  My own personal sandpit covered acres. There were birds and chameleons and many insects, but ants outnumbered them all. They built cities outside our front door, thousands and thousands of ants in orderly lines, carrying objects many times their size. It amazed me how organised they were without anyone telling them what to do. I once found some candle-like sticks in the sand near the barbed wire around the barracks. Years later, when I told Dad, we agreed it was most likely dynamite. ‘There was a lot of trouble going on there,’ he said. Camel trains would pass outside the barbed-wire perimeter of our garrison. When they rested, the camels would drop to their knees and sink into the sand with their legs folded, and I would fit myself through the barbed wire to get close to them. They were huge, haughty-eyed, and odorous. The Arab camel handlers would let me pat them and lift me onto their backs. I never smelled anything so bad as a desert dromedary.

  At the bottom of our sandy backyard, a skull and crossbones sign was attached to a barbed wire fence. Mum said that if we ever, ever climbed over that fence we would be blown to pieces and die. We lived next to an uncleared minefield laid by the British. During the war, Rommel’s army invaded Egypt and intended seizing control of the Canal. In 1942, seven years before we arrived, Montgomery’s Eighth Army defeated Rommel at El-Alamein, which was 240 miles from our house. It was an important early victory for the Allies, prompting Churchill’s famous remark: ‘This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is perhaps the end of the beginning.’

  Outside our back door, to the left, beyond our next-door neighbour, was a stream where we had our own rowboat, which was blue and leaky. My friends and I would row along the stream and fish. Once, the boat began to sink, and we shouted for help. Without pause, Mum leapt the fence with the skull and crossbones sign and ran across the ground we had been warned we could never tread without dying. The barbed wire had torn her dress and streaks of blood were running down her legs. I kept shouting, ‘Mum, jump in the water,’ and when she finally did the water was waist deep. My fearless mother walked to our rescue and towed us home in our sinking rowboat. This was when I knew my mum loved me, but also was brave and perhaps a little crazy.

  We bought a dog to take the place of Patch, who had been given to friends in Catterick. It was a German Shepherd puppy, and my sister called him Pepper. Pepper had a short and unlucky life. He never stood a chance; he was a martyr to the English class system. The camp adjutant, a captain, lived next door, and Pepper didn’t like him. Each day, he greeted the captain home with barks and growls. The captain might have been frightened of dogs, but I could not understand why Pepper’s conduct deserved the death penalty. Nor did I work out why my father took me to the execution. Pepper was tied to a barbed wire fence and a young soldier with a revolver, who did not have a good aim, started firing at him from a distance. After several shots, with Pepper howling in pain, my father took the revolver from the soldier, walked close to Pepper, and fired one shot. My dad didn’t speak afterwards, but there were tears on his cheeks. I don’t know whether I cried, but I have always believed that Pepper died because my father was out-ranked by the man next door.

  Dog lovers who hear this story are inclined to become emotional, sure that it must have been a deep childhood trauma for me. If it was, it’s stayed well buried. But I never again formed a close attachment to a pet. The shooting of Pepper was my first experience of death, and irretrievable loss.

  I don’t think we ever ventured beyond the Suez Canal Zone and I never made a single E
gyptian friend. The British Army was isolated and unwelcome. That’s why our desert neighbourhood was hedged with barbed wire and guarded by searchlights and shouting sentries. The Sphinx and the Great Pyramid of Giza were only 80 miles away, but we never saw them.

  Soon after the Army moved us to our next posting, rioters killed British civilians in Cairo, and in Ismailia, a few miles from where we lived, British soldiers with tanks fought Egyptian police and armed militia — Fedayeen — killing dozens.

  We were there during the final years of British control of the Suez. It ended in 1952 when the military overthrew the monarchy, declared a republic, and forced the British to leave. Soon after, I saw Egypt again from a troop ship passing through the Suez Canal. Everyone was instructed to stay below decks, but from a porthole, I saw crowds of angry people shouting from the banks and throwing things at our ship.

  In 1956, Gamal Abdel Nasser, the country’s new president, nationalised the Canal, and the armies of Britain, France, and Israel tried to seize it back. The invasion provoked international outrage, led by the United States and Soviet Union, and a rapid withdrawal of the invading armies. The Suez Crisis was the swansong of the British Empire.

  It was 1965 before I finally saw the Sphinx and the pyramids. I was on my way back to Britain from Australia, seeking my fortune in Fleet Street, and the ship had docked for a day or two in Egypt. A couple of us hired a taxi to take us there, and our driver was cheerful and talkative and spoke good English.

  ‘Where you from?’

  ‘Australia.’

  ‘Ah, beautiful. I drive many Australians. Nice people.’

  ‘I’m originally English. I lived in Egypt as a child.’

  ‘English? Why were you here?’