The Bootle Boy

by Les Hinton

  She never wanted us to step out of line. ‘Don’t get into arguments at work — your father did that again and again,’ she would say. She was horrified when my first wife Mary and I provided accommodation for a friend fresh out of prison after serving six months for embezzlement. ‘You will disgrace the family,’ she said. ‘What if people find out?’

  Her children meant more to her than her husband, and she was haunted, as we grew older, by the knowledge we would abandon her. She could never hide her distress when we found other people; no girlfriend or spouse was good enough.

  Mary and I went to Adelaide for nearly a year in 1970. It was by far our longest visit, and Mum was desperate for us to stay, although she knew we never would. When we told her one evening that Mary was pregnant with our first child, she didn’t even smile or look up from her crossword. ‘I suppose you’ll be going back to England to have it,’ she said.

  My parents’ marriage could not correctly be called fiery, with the fire only coming from one side. I remember a story — I think it was a TV comedy sketch — in which a man with a complaining wife had the ability to make himself go deaf. It was about my dad.

  Lilian dominated her husband, but at the same time was powerless in the life he had chosen. Whenever and wherever the Army told my father to go, we followed. She had no choice but to take a back seat to his unglamorous, unpredictable job as a non-commissioned officer.

  Most of the time, Mum appeared to disapprove of Dad, but it was impossible to know why. Maybe it was his gentle satisfaction with life, his low threshold of contentment, his quietness, and his pleasure in solitude; his hobbies — westerns, horse racing, gardening, and the exotic birds he bred for a few years in a big cage in the back garden. It wasn’t an ideal marriage. As a boy, I must have thought it was normal for loving grown-ups always to be in a temper with each other and to sleep in twin beds. That was before I learned their painful history.

  In 1950, when I was six, and Mum was 36, she met a married Army butcher called Freddie. He had been posted to Egypt without his family, and Mum met him at a party in the sergeants’ mess.

  Their affair must have been intense because, when Freddie went back to England, my mother followed him. She walked out on her husband of 15 years, and took her three children with her. It must have been an act born out of great and unexpected love, or desperate unhappiness. She can’t have had much money, so presumably had no doubt that she and Freddie were going to spend the rest of their lives together.

  Mal was 14 and remembers Mum telling her what had happened and that she would have to decide whether to stay with Dad, or leave with her.

  We lived for a year at Grandma’s in Bootle without seeing Dad once. I remember his absence, and I remember Mum being out at night so often and so late that I became terrified she might never return. I couldn’t sleep until I heard her laughing outside and saying good night to people.

  I don’t know whether Mum changed her mind, or Freddie decided to stay with his wife, but at the end of that year, my parents reconciled.

  Grandma must have known what was happening, but no one was going to tell a small boy, so the rift did not shatter me. I knew nothing about the reasons for Dad’s absence, or our year back in Bootle, for 60 years, until I questioned Mal for this book. By then, Mum and Dad had been dead many years. The news would have horrified me when I was younger, but by then I understood more of the foibles of life and marriage, and knew it was mostly impossible to judge the relationships of others. It didn’t cause me to question my parents’ love for me — I never questioned that — but it helped explain my mother’s torment and, possibly, Dad’s acquiescent approach to his marriage. I’ll never know now why she left, or if Dad’s conduct contributed to hers. There was never anything evidently romantic in their relationship that I could see, but it didn’t seem odd when I was a child, having grown up with it. Still, even though the Bruces and Hintons were never families to hang out their emotions and problems, it’s amazing I was never told. I’m not angry with anyone and, whatever went wrong then, they were together in the end for 60 years.

  Mum calmed down a little and, in their later years, I finally saw my parents show affection. It was an easy fondness; they smiled at each other a lot and even touched, but I never saw them actually kiss or embrace. Dad was tenderly protective of Mum after her stroke, and when he died — seven years before Mum — she was bereft.

  In their old age, they left Adelaide for Canberra, where Mal and Duncan lived with their families. In 2004, Mum died there, aged 90, in a nursing home, remembering Dad, her children, her sister Gladys, and her mother, but not much else. Afterwards, I found every letter I had sent her from London, those blue weight-saving ‘aerogrammes’, neatly preserved in a shoebox. She was buried, as she had wanted, in the same grave as Dad.

  I last saw Dad in 1996, when he didn’t have long to live. He was sitting low in his high-backed chair, his tired old head resting on a white lace-trimmed antimacassar, chest heaving, and an ugly cylinder of oxygen at his side next to a tabletop of pill bottles. Every few moments, he took deep breaths from a mask. His old hands, scarred long ago by years with his kitchen knives, were now covered with marks left from skin cancer surgery. Through the French windows of the living room, he could see his plants and trees blooming beneath the Canberra sun, and the flower beds he would never touch again.

  Of course, neither of us acknowledged we were together for the last time. He looked at me with his pale blue eyes, but it was only a glimpse; Dad’s looks never lingered.

  I kissed him on the forehead, ‘See you, old man.’

  ‘Safe trip,’ he said.

  Two months later, in a hospital bed, gasping but still lucid, he took hold of Duncan’s shirtfront. ‘I can’t take this any more,’ he said. Duncan spoke to his doctors and signed some papers. Dad died the next day. He was 86.

  Back in Australia for his funeral, I found among his things a card addressed to me, dated 19 February 1945, my first birthday and four years before Duncan was born.

  In it, he had written: ‘To my one and only son, wishing him all the wishes I’ve wished myself. Dad.’

  I had never seen it until then.

  CHAPTER 9

  Warm beer, cold rain

  The passage to ‘the old country’ was a rite for young Australians in the 1960s. Britain was an inviting place; its borders were open to Australians, and they could work and vote the moment they came ashore.

  The voyage took a month. It was half happy recklessness, half a grim introduction to life beyond a lucky country’s safe shores. To reach the cultural comfort of Britain, we had to pass through less familiar places; north through the Indian Ocean to Colombo and Bombay, into the Red Sea towards Egypt and the Suez Canal, and on to the Mediterranean.

  We saw the Pyramids of Giza on the banks of the Nile when tourism was so undeveloped the only sign of it was a tiny Coca-Cola stand alongside the Sphinx, which was so unprotected we climbed it and put crumbling pieces in our pockets. But the streets of Colombo and Bombay were desperate. Great Victorian buildings, remnants of British rule, were juxtaposed against seething poverty. In Colombo, crowds of begging children were whipped away by police under orders to make life easier for cash-carrying tourists. But they were so desperate they kept returning until we paid them to go away.

  In Bombay, there was the hot, sour smell of street sleepers, hundreds of them packing the pavements, and prostitutes crouched behind small windows, like ragged mannequins, trapped by their pimps. In Egypt, not much had changed in the 15 years since I had lived there. Beggars with missing limbs still cried for help, and crouching women held out pleading hands, as they cradled undernourished babies, black flies crawling on their faces.

  It was far from the orderly, sanitised world we had left behind, and not new to me. But the girls wept and the boys stood in silent shock. They might have seen brief black-and-white images of scenes like these on
their small-screen televisions, but this was living, reeking real life.

  In the days before instant, all-seeing video, when the world was more isolated from itself, Australia was especially alone. Television newsreels arrived by air from America and Europe long after the event. When John Kennedy was murdered in 1963, television stations made a special effort and were proud to broadcast footage from Dallas a day or so after the event. Newspaper photos from overseas were ‘radio photos’ — so raw in detail that artists were employed to paint it in.

  We would return from these trips ashore to the cocoon of Orcades, where our own reality ruled. Orcades was like every ship making this voyage in the 1960s — a teeming party boat, quiet every hung over morning, and jumping by early evening. Drink was cheap, the bars closed late, and the music was loud.

  It would not be long before giant jet planes were carrying more than 300 passengers to London in less than a day, forcing passenger liners to rethink their business models. Sea travel would become luxury, slow-going excursions to nowhere, catering to mature passengers looking for tranquillity — the same generation who were in Orcades in 1965, dancing wildly to Tom Jones and ‘What’s New Pussycat?’, and closely and hopefully to The Beatles’ ‘If I Fell In Love With You’.

  I didn’t dance much. It was rutting season in these ships, the sole social interaction involved girls and boys hooking up, and I never quite worked out the rules. Making casual conversation with strange women was impossible for me, at least when I was sober. At home, I would walk around the streets for an hour searching for the courage to phone and ask someone for a date.

  In Orcades, I watched confident — and sober — men strike up casual conversations with pretty women, and by midnight be arm-in-arm, laughing and drinking. It looked miraculous to me — I wondered how they did it.

  When I found the courage, it wasn’t real courage at all; and too much brandy and ginger ale makes you bad at picking the right moment. When The Righteous Brothers were singing ‘You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feelin’’, I thought it was the perfect time to ask a woman, crying in a corner, if she wanted to dance. ‘Oh, please, fuck off,’ she said.

  Rex attracted women without even trying. Sometimes they even asked him to dance. He was lucky with women — even after the car accident that nearly killed him and completely changed his face.

  We were driving too fast along a dirt road in his mother’s sky blue VW Beetle when we were both 17. Rex was at the wheel, and when the car went into a skid he braked, which is never a good idea. ‘We’re going to roll,’ he shouted, and sure enough his mum’s bright new VW made one complete flip before landing on its side in a roadside ditch. I stayed inside but Rex was thrown out. I found him squirming in the dirt 20 yards from where the car had landed. He was delirious — cheering on a football game — and blood was seeping from his head in several places. We were way out in the country, and the only visible structure was a farmhouse about a quarter-mile away. The farmer’s wife gave me a flannel to wipe my face while she called an ambulance.

  I was unhurt, apart from a lot of aches next day, but pretty well every bone in Rex’s face was shattered. He was in hospital for weeks. Even when he came out, his head was locked in a metal cage to keep it in place. His face was so altered that old school friends didn’t recognise him.

  That was the bad news.

  The good news was that Rex’s new face looked pretty handsome, and he was chosen to read the news on NWS 9, Adelaide’s first television station, which Rupert launched in 1959. Three or four times each night, for 60 seconds, he would read the Minute News — right through prime time on the station almost everyone in the state of South Australia was watching.

  Rex became famous, which meant that going to parties with him was complete misery. It also made him very confident with girls. In the ship, only South Australians recognised him, but he had started behaving like a television personality by then, and it was useless to compete.

  At sea with Rex, there were gratifying moments when even the best of the women-catching men knew they were beaten. The ship’s officers changed the game whenever they marched into a room, braid shimmering on the epaulettes of their starched-white uniforms. When the ship’s surgeon showed up, shoulders bright with gold and crimson, everyone backed away as if a twelve-point stag had arrived in the glen. Even Rex was in awe; whenever the surgeon walked into the dining room — tall, blond, and glamorous — Rex would stand to attention, salute, and shout, ‘I honour you’, and the surgeon would look mystified.

  Four weeks is a long time to be sealed off in a cruising village. It leaves a lot of time for romance to bloom and then go wrong. There were break-ups and jealousies and mild scuffling. But everything had a limited sense of consequence simply because we all knew it could not last. The days cooled, Tilbury was getting closer, and when we arrived our perishable world would vanish like a midnight coach.

  The sky was the colour of concrete at the Tilbury dock, and the cold wind forced a thick drizzle into our faces. The puddles on the uneven dockside soaked through my white canvas shoes. England felt wintry, even in June, after sailing through the baking Red Sea.

  We could see Mike Quirk, our Adelaide friend, among the welcoming crowd, jumping and waving. He was wearing a black polo-neck sweater underneath a brown corduroy jacket, and boots with long, pointed toes. We admired his London modishness.

  Our first stop was a pub, the first English pub I ever set foot in. It was a heart-sinking moment.

  ‘A lager, please.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A lager. Really cold.’

  ‘We’ve got bitter. You can have a pint or a half. But it’s not very cold, mate.’

  These were the first two unpleasant surprises awaiting all Australians: rain and warm beer. In the 1960s, cold beer was overwhelmingly the favoured drink in Australia. It represented three-quarters of the country’s alcohol consumption. In British pubs, the only beer on tap was room temperature. In bottles, the most popular was something called Watney’s Pale Ale. It had a medicinal taste, but Brits seemed to love it. The closest to home for a beer-loving Aussie was a Carlsberg, a Danish invasion that was kept on a ‘cold shelf’ that managed to chill slightly the bottom quarter of the bottle.

  But London was a dream of familiar sights, most of which I had never seen. The wandering old River Thames, St Paul’s Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, Horatio Nelson glowering from his mighty granite column; the grey importance of Whitehall sweeping towards the Gothic Revival limestone of Big Ben and the Palace of Westminster; the Mall, wide, red, and flag-lined, heading long and straight to Buckingham Palace; the diesel grumble of black cabs; the high, narrow red buses. I was in a film set.

  Much of central London was a sprawling memorial to its triumphs and pride. A country had to have felt good about itself once to celebrate its success in such a glorious, permanent way.

  But in 1965 the people living amid these everlasting monuments were going through a historic update. A new generation, conceived in the relief of peace, was through adolescence and into adulthood and the world was tilting towards them. They liked different music and clothes, but above all they were gripped by a dawning sense of possibility and iconoclasm that reached deep into the country’s working-class.

  The sclerotic class system I had seen as an Army sergeant’s son was not looking so invincible. The Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, had a rich Yorkshire accent, even if he did amplify it in public; bright new playwrights such as Arnold Wesker and Harold Pinter, were East End boys; film stars and high-profile photographers like Albert Finney, Michael Caine, and David Bailey were the sons of bookies, porters, and tailors. Jean Shrimpton, a former typist, was the world’s most famous model, and Sandie Shaw had quit her job in the Ford factory at Dagenham to reach number one in the hit parade. A new kind of self-esteem was rising, it was said, to replace the lost grandeur of empire.

  It was more than their music that ma
de The Beatles a triumph. They were class liberators, too. As a Liverpool boy in Adelaide, I watched these rough-tongued Scouse lads on television acting cheeky and confident with the Royal Family. No one had done it until them, and they talked just like me.

  Time magazine, in the days when it had a serious influence, would soon make Londoners even more pleased with themselves by coining a description that would stick for years — Swinging London. ‘In a once sedate world of faded splendor, everything new, uninhibited and kinky is blooming,’ it said. ‘London is switched on. Ancient elegance and new opulence are all tangled up in a dazzling blur …’ The Rolling Stones, it ruled, were ‘a new breed of royalty’.

  It turned out that this era was not so much bringing down elitism as redefining it. We re-distributed our wealth upwards to rising musicians, shilling by shilling, and forgave them when they left their tenements and pebbledash semis and disappeared into Surrey mansions in the back seats of psychedelic Rolls-Royces, raising their own dynasties and sending their children to private schools where they grew up without provincial accents and led pro-hunting protests. We forgave them because, while our money made them rich, their music made us happy. It was a trade we understood, just as we accept the wealth of modern footballers — we can see what we have paid for with our satellite subscription and season ticket.

  Socialism was on the march in the 1960s, and capitalism was on the defensive, but few complained about the wealth of our new working-class heroes. For us, the sinners were complicated corporations and banks, and tycoons whose abstract fortunes we couldn’t understand.

  Although our heroes may have joined the upper crust we had loved to see them mock, because of them it never seemed so inaccessible again.

  You could see in the streets, in the fashions, how old traditions were crumbling — miniskirts and bright colours confronting staid bowler hats and striped pants. There has been a clear victor: 50 years later, skirts are still short, and the bowler hat extinct.