The Bootle Boy

by Les Hinton

  I caught his eye in the rear vision mirror and could see the cheerfulness leaving his face.

  ‘My father was a British soldier. We lived in the Canal Zone.’

  For the next five hours we did not exchange a word.

  —

  The British garrison in Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, became so small that the Army closed our school. The military didn’t care much about leaving children stranded and uneducated in faraway places, and naturally I didn’t complain. For six months, instead of lessons, I went riding on a white horse with a shorn mane called Karushan. I renamed him Silver. I went alone to the stable every day, galloping round the paddock for hours, the Lone Ranger chasing the bad guys.

  Asmara was perched on a plateau more than seven thousand feet above sea level in the Horn of Africa. We went there after Egypt, catching a train at the Red Sea port of Massawa, and travelling through mountains, along the edges of high cliffs, in an open carriage pulled by a slow and ancient steam engine. Dad’s friend Sergeant Chalkie White told me to watch out for the baboons clambering on the side of the train. They were big and unafraid of humans, with huge fangs, frizzy manes, and weird, close-set eyes ‘They kidnap babies,’ he said. When I told him I couldn’t see any babies on the train, he said that was because the baboons had kidnapped them all. Sergeant Chalkie had a big scar on his stomach after being shot by a German with a Luger pistol. The German had been standing at the top of the stairs when Chalkie kicked in the door of a house. He said being shot felt the same as being punched very hard.

  This time, we weren’t living in an army camp, and there were no guards, or searchlights and barbed wire. We lived in a house on a hillside with lots of neighbours. Our housekeeper came to work in traditional dress of colourful robes, like a sari, with her hair plaited in tight, narrow rows that ran back along her head. The housekeeper once plaited my mother’s hair in the same way. It took a long time. She brought her own food to work, and it was shocking at first when she ate everything with her fingers, wrapping food from a bowl in pieces of flatbread. The food looked like the stew from Liverpool — we called it Scouse — but with a different smell. Mum said we should eat our own food — she always said that, whichever country we lived in, except for Germany. It didn’t seem unusual until later, but we virtually never mixed with local people, only with other army families.

  Dad was no longer a cook. He had caught typhoid in Egypt and, because typhoid is so infectious, was no longer allowed to handle food. He now worked as an army store manager. This was the time I noticed a lot of things in the house — like blankets, sheets, and toilet paper — had WD printed on them, with an arrow between the letters. This meant they were the property of the War Department. I think we were supposed to buy our own blankets and sheets, but these were the perks of Dad’s new job. When he was a chef, he came home with large cuts of meat.

  We arrived in Eritrea in early 1952 and were among the last remnants of Britain’s presence. Italy had occupied Eritrea since the 1880s, until Britain drove the Italian army out in 1941. Britain had governed it as a protectorate ever since, but in 1952 gave up control when the country was to be united with neighbouring Ethiopia. There was a ceremony in Asmara, and crowds watched British soldiers marching through the streets beating drums and blowing bugles before the Union Flag was lowered.

  Leaving Asmara was the next scariest thing in my life, after watching my mother run through the minefield in Egypt. We were among the final families to leave, and had to travel in an armed convoy back to Massawa to board a troop ship. My dad told me we had to travel in a convoy through the mountains instead of catching the train because of gangs of bandits called Shiftas. These bandits had ambushed trains and vehicles, burnt villages and crops, stolen cattle, and killed many people. They also hated the British. Dad had been chosen to remain behind as part of the last, tiny military presence, but went with us to Massawa. Dad was at the end of our lorry, holding a submachine gun with a long curved magazine, which he said held more than 30 bullets. The backs of the lorries were covered by khaki canvas, and families had to sit well inside and out of view. A soldier stood behind a heavy machine gun that was mounted on the back of a Jeep that followed us. When we stopped in a village for a break, we had to stay inside the trucks while Dad and the other soldiers searched the buildings.

  The Shiftas didn’t attack us, and we boarded our troop ship safely to sail to our next home, through the hostile crowds on the banks of the Suez Canal, and on to Tripoli, the capital of Libya, on the north coast of Africa. As our ship pulled out of Massawa, heading up the Red Sea, I could see Dad on the dock, standing with the one other soldier from the convoy who also stayed behind. He was smiling and waving, and I kept looking until he was just a dot, worried about leaving him alone in such a dangerous place.

  Considering its history in the decades to follow, Tripoli was far more tranquil than Egypt or Eritrea. Libya was a monarchy and the king, Idris, had been raised to power by the Allies after he rallied locals to help drive out the Germans and Italians during the Second World War. The country had an agreement allowing British and US military bases. American supersonic fighter jets would fly above us, so low that the palm trees would shudder in the blast of their engines. You didn’t hear the sound these fighters made until they had passed.

  Our home was in a block of flats on a road called the Lungomare, the Italian word for ‘seafront’. It was lined with palm trees, and curved around Tripoli harbour towards an ancient fort near the white-stoned buildings of the old city. In the early 1800s, US warships attacked the fort and bombarded the city when President Thomas Jefferson declared war on the Barbary Coast pirates terrorising merchant ships. This campaign is immortalised in the opening lines of the hymn of the US Marines:

  From the Halls of Montezuma,

  To the shores of Tripoli;

  We fight our country’s battles

  In the air, on land, and sea.

  We saw much more of Libya than we had of Egypt. In Tripoli, I don’t remember seeing a single British sentry. Our flat was on the second floor, and our neighbours were Libyan and Italian. The first time I heard the Muslim call to prayer, it came from the high minaret of a mosque in the old city; it was a lilting, beautiful song with no words I understood. The old city was a maze of narrow streets with stalls selling jewellery, gold, carpets, and strong-smelling spices. We could go home in a horse-carriage called a gharry, which were usually brightly decorated. The horses wore shining black harnesses and golden buckles with feathers rising high above their heads.

  An Arab chased me and some friends one day after one of us threw stones at him. It was a stupid, pointless thing to do, and he was furious. His billowing white robe made it look as if he was running in slow motion. I fell off a wall, splitting open my chin, and the Arab caught up with me, lying bleeding and crying on the ground. He said a few angry words then walked with me back to our flat. I had to go to hospital for stitches. I still have the scar.

  Outside Tripoli, we saw troglodyte communities, living in caves carved out of mountains by their distant ancestors. They were dug vertically around circular courtyards, several levels below ground, like inverted blocks of flats. They were basic homes, but these people were not primitive. Some caves had wooden front doors with furniture, pottery, and carpets. They had existed for hundreds of years because they provided insulation from savage daytime sun and cold desert nights. Some were used as shelters during the 2011 Libyan Civil War. Dad bought a small blue-painted bowl from them, but dropped and broke it on the way home.

  I went to school in Tripoli, but it was never as informative as those days wandering the old city and discovering troglodyte caves. I don’t remember the lessons, but never forgot the teacher who demanded I stop writing with my left hand. Whenever I used my left hand this teacher hit it with a ruler. Not the flat side of the ruler, which only stung, but the hard edge. Mum went to the school demanding an explanation, and later told m
e: ‘She said you must use your right hand otherwise it makes the class look untidy. I told her she was talking bloody nonsense, so from now on ignore her.’

  Torn between Mum’s instructions and the hard edge of a ruler, I struggled on with my right hand. This ordeal triggered a contest between the hemispheres of my brain. Today I write with my right hand; bat right, but throw left at cricket and softball; golf right; play tennis and kick left. This must explain why my hand-eye coordination renders me useless at all ball games.

  My biggest discovery in Tripoli was America; it was where I first saw Americans in the flesh. While I waited each morning for a noisy three-ton army lorry to take me to school, they sailed by in gigantic, silent cars with exotic names such as Pontiac, Packard, Studebaker, and Cadillac. These cars were all glittering chrome with big fins and white-wall tyres. I read that America had a lot of cars — 50 million of them — that were enough to stretch around the world at the equator seven times. Dad said he didn’t like American cars because they used too much petrol. But we didn’t own a car at all. No one in our family did, and besides, Dad couldn’t drive.

  I never actually met an American in Libya; I only saw them in their cars and at the cinema. They talked louder than us, which annoyed Dad, and walked differently. The men had crew-cuts, checked shirts, and Levi jeans. They leaned against the wall outside the cinema with thumbs sticking in their pockets, chewing gum much more obviously than we did. They lived in bigger homes farther along the Lungomare, and had their own special store, called the PX, which sold things you couldn’t buy anywhere else.

  This was around the time my cousin Jean started sending me packages of American comics. Cousin Jean had married an American GI in Liverpool after the war and now lived in the Gulf Coast town of Pascagoula, Mississippi, which sounded exotic. The comics she sent were filled with stories of superheroes — Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel, the Flash — and cowboys with two gun holsters — Tex Ritter, Gene Autry, Lash LaRue, Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers. The cowboys were great aims and also humane — they only ever shot guns out of the hands of the bad guys.

  The comic stories were fine, but the advertising was really exciting. American children could buy Daisy air guns that looked like Winchester rifles used by the US Cavalry, and Bazooka bubble gum that was, according to the advertising, capable of inflating into gigantic pink bubbles. A man called Charles Atlas, who had sand kicked in his face when he was skinny, had built himself into a muscle man no one could push around, and was offering to do the same for all skinny American boys. The Schwinn Phantom, bright coloured and silvery, was the ‘swellest’ bicycle. One ad said it was the most popular kids’ bike in the world, but I had never seen one.

  I decided in Tripoli that one day I would live in America and drive one of their big shiny cars; it took me a while.

  CHAPTER 4

  Don’t mention Hitler

  Münster was inside the post-war British Zone of Occupation, and the British Army of the Rhine had a large garrison there. By the time we arrived the ‘occupation’ had ended and we were part of NATO forces protecting Western Europe against the Soviet Union.

  I was 10 years old when we moved to West Germany and I met Joachim. It was an officially arranged friendship; Joachim was German, it was nine years after the war had ended, and the British Army and the city authorities of Münster were clearly thinking ahead.

  Joachim and I were paired, along with dozens of other children, in a scheme to further Anglo–German reconciliation. A teacher, explaining it to me, talked gravely about the importance of healing the wounds of war and, before my first meeting with Joachim, recommended: ‘It’s best not to talk about the war or to mention Hitler.’

  Avoiding the subject wasn’t difficult — Joachim couldn’t speak English and the only German I knew were a few phrases needed to go shopping for Mum: ‘Zehn pfund kartoffeln bitte’ (‘Ten pounds of potatoes, please’); ‘sechs eier’ (‘six eggs’); and ‘ein kleines brot’ (‘one small bread’). My German reached its peak when I managed to tell our housekeeper the complete story of Little Red Riding Hood.

  Joachim was a quiet and fastidious boy with his own bedroom, which was always in impeccable order, with impossibly tidy bookshelves, and walls with maps and, for some reason, lots of photographs of snow-capped mountains. He did not appear to possess a single toy, but spent hours drawing elaborate pictures with crayons, or leafing through his stamp collection. He gave me a number of stamps bearing Hitler’s head; I gave him a set commemorating the Queen’s coronation. We visited each other on Sunday afternoons until I went to boarding school 30 miles away. By that time, we had learned to communicate in a fractured dialect mixing English and German. He would write letters in beautiful calligraphy on paper like parchment, with complicated drawings around each page. Mine were written in plain fountain pen on small blue Basildon Bond pages. I still have the Hitler stamps he gave me.

  I didn’t know much about Hitler before arriving in West Germany. I knew he had bombed our town and killed many people, including my Uncle Bill, the tailor. I had no idea why the war was fought, only that Dad had told me Hitler was an evil man and crazy. It was easy to understand why an evil and crazy man would drop bombs on people’s houses, but it was a shock to discover we had done the same thing. Münster looked a lot like Bootle; Allied air raids had destroyed two-thirds of the city.

  A few years later, in my teens, I picked up a book by George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn, published in 1941. I’m not sure I ever finished it, but his first sentence reminded me of that mystifying, childish discovery of what two countries had done to each other: ‘As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.’

  Our home was in Hüfferstraße, overlooking woods and a moat with green water surrounding a castle. It was easily the most spacious place we ever had. The kitchen was nothing like my gran’s scullery. It was so big and the floor so smooth that I learned to roller skate there.

  Germany was like Bootle in many ways, in addition to the ruins of war. The weather and the smells were familiar, and the people looked more like us than Egyptians and Eritreans, although men clicked their heels and bowed at the neck when they were introduced, and married women wore wedding rings on their right hands. There was no television but we listened to radio on the British Forces Network. Educating Archie starred a dummy and its ventriloquist, Peter Brough. It didn’t occur to me then how odd it was that a ventriloquist could be a radio star. I watched television only once in all the time we were in Germany. We crowded into the sergeant’s mess at Dad’s barracks in front of a small black-and-white set to watch Grace Kelly, an American actress, marry Rainier, the prince of Monaco, a pocket-sized principality on the Mediterranean coast. It was the first wedding I remember, on or off television, and I was surprised at how excited the mothers were about Grace Kelly’s dress.

  Münster was where we owned our first car, and I became interested in newspapers. When my father said we were buying a car, I remembered the long red-and-white Studebaker that had been my favourite American model in Tripoli. But we bought a second-hand German Opel Olympia, coloured beige. It was a 1951 model, but looked very old-fashioned, with the spare wheel attached to the outside of the boot. Dad said the Opel Olympia hadn’t changed shape since before the war. He learned to drive in it at the age of 44.

  At primary school in Münster, my class was assigned to write an essay in the form of an autobiography. Having just read that some species of butterfly have a lifespan of only days, I wrote ‘My Life as a Butterfly’ about a beautiful creature doomed to counting out its life in hours as humans did in years. My butterfly was depressed about this, which made the story implausible since he lived as long as every member of his species and would have known no better. A few days after submitting this story, the door to our classroom swung open, and in marched the headmaster.

  ‘Which of you is Hinton?’ he called, in an irritated voice.


  ‘Me, sir.’

  He waved a piece of paper above his head. ‘Did you write this story about a butterfly?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I said.

  He frowned. ‘You wrote it all by yourself?’

  ‘Yes, sir, I did.’

  He looked at me for another moment in silence. ‘Really?’ he said, and left the room.

  I did not hear another word about my essay and never got a grade, but it was the first inkling in my life that I might be good at something.

  Music lessons at Münster always meant singing American songs such as ‘The Black Hills of Dakota’; ‘Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better’; ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business’; and ‘The Deadwood Stage’. They were all songs from the musicals Annie Get Your Gun and Calamity Jane, which I had seen at the Commodore in Bootle. Our pretty, young teacher said they were her favourite films, and we sang these songs again and again while she played happily at the piano, singing in what she must have thought were approximations of Doris Day and Betty Hutton. The music teacher wore her shiny black hair back in a bun; she was slightly overweight and had a large, soft, white chest.

  I never felt popular at school. I was once caned, to the acclaim of my classmates. Our teacher was reprimanding us for skating on the school balconies, and warning that the punishment for doing so was a caning. As he spoke, a girl interrupted, ‘But, sir, Hinton did it first and we thought it was allowed.’ For some reason, this accusation led to a chorus from the rest of the class alleging other misdemeanours. Unfortunately, I was guilty of all of them. Mr Bryant, a short, small-framed man who always wore a brown Harris Tweed jacket, shook his head sadly. ‘Well, I think the jury has spoken,’ he said, and picked up the long cane resting in the corner behind his desk. The pain of betrayal lasted longer than the sting of his two quick strokes, one for each palm.

  At the age of 11, I was separated from my family for the first time. Dad had often been absent, travelling ahead to new postings — he was gone for longer when Mum fell for the army butcher. But I had never been without my mother and big sister, or my brother since he was born when I was five. Münster did not have an Army secondary school, and I was sent away to a boarding school. I was not happy. My life was a constant migration, but I could depend on those four familiar people: the sister who bullied me but hugged me, too; the brother who shadowed my every step; the fiercely caring mother; my remote but always loving father.