by Bishop, John
Had my dad just stood in court and simply relayed the events as they happened, there is a very good chance he would have walked free, or at least only been given a suspended sentence. However, it was felt by many on the estates that people who had moved to Winsford from Liverpool would be unfairly treated by the local police and courts. As the other two men were locals, or ‘Woollybacks’ as we called them (an insult to sheep that I have never really understood), he tried to use the same ploy in court that had worked with the local FA. As both men had ended up pole-axed on the ground, it would be impossible, so the plan went, for them to know which twin had hit them. As the judge could not send both my dad and Uncle Freddie to prison, he would have to throw the case out, and that would be the end of that.
The defence didn’t work and, as my dad was sentenced for violence, he was sent to a closed prison. At first he went to Walton Prison in Liverpool and then on to Preston.
He told my mum not to bring us children to visit him, but by the time he had been transferred to Preston he was missing us too much and asked her to bring us in. I remember that day as if it was yesterday. My Uncle Freddie drove us and we arrived early and had to sit waiting in the car, opposite the prison. There were all four of us, Eddie, Kathy, Carol and I, along with my mum and Freddie in the front, yet I don’t recall anyone saying anything as we just sat and waited.
To my six-year-old self, Preston Prison looked like a castle. It was a stone building with turrets and heavy, solid, metal gates that had a hatch, through which the guards behind could check the world outside remained outside.
At the allotted time, we approached the gates along with some other families, and the hatch opened. Before long, a small door swung open, and we were allowed inside, only to be faced by another metal gate.
Standing just in front of it was a guard in a dark uniform holding a clipboard with a list of names on it, which he ticked off with the expression that you can only get from spending your working life locking up other men. My Uncle Freddie said who we had come to see, whereupon we were duly counted and moved towards the next gate. Eventually, after everyone had met with the guard’s approval, the gate in front of us was unlocked and we were allowed to pass though to be faced by yet another gate.
This process of facing locked gate after locked gate was a frightening and dehumanising experience: we were being led through like cattle. We eventually walked up some metal stairs and entered the visitors’ room. I just recall rows of men sitting at tables, all wearing the same grey uniform, in a room with no windows and a single clock on the wall.
When I saw my dad, I broke free of my mum’s hand and ran towards him to give him the biggest hug I had ever given anyone. My dad reciprocated until a guard said we had to break the hug and I had to be placed on the opposite side of the table like everyone else. I know prison officers have a job to do, but who would deprive a six-year-old boy of a hug from the father he had not seen for months? It was not as if I was trying slip him a hacksaw between each squeeze.
‘Have you been good?’ he asked us all, and we each said we had.
‘Good. Have you been looking after your mum?’ he asked then, and for some reason it seemed like he was talking to just me.
I wasn’t so sure I knew what looking after my mum entailed, but I was sure I was doing it, or at least a version of it.
‘I have, Dad,’ I said.
‘They’ve all been good,’ my mum informed him across the table, which seemed to satisfy him.
‘Good,’ he said, with a smile I had never seen before. A smile that appears when someone’s face is trying to match the words that are being spoken, but not quite managing it.
I don’t recall anything else that anyone said. I just remember looking around and thinking my dad didn’t belong with all the other men in grey uniforms. He was my dad, and they were all just strange men wearing the same clothes as him, many sporting similar tattoos on the backs of their hands.
After what to me appeared to be too short a time, my Uncle Freddie said he would take us out so that my mum and dad could talk alone or, at least, be as alone as you can be whilst being watched by prison officers alongside thirty other families visiting at the same time. To soften the disappointment of having to leave, my dad gave us all a Texan bar each, a sweet of its era: chocolate covering something that was as close to being Plasticine as legally possible, so when you chewed it almost took every tooth out of your head with its stickiness. We didn’t get many sweets at the time, so it was a real treat, even if the trade-off was that Dad was in prison. What I didn’t realise at the time was that four Texan bars virtually accounted for a week’s prison allowance. Not for the first or the last time, my dad was giving us children all he had.
During the year that he was away, I can only recall visiting my dad on one more occasion. It was when he was moved to the open prison at Appleton Thorn. I remember the visiting room had windows so that light flooded in, and hugs were not prevented with the same degree of enthusiasm by the prison officers. Before he had left Preston, the governor there had told my dad that he was the first prisoner he had ever transferred to an open prison: by the time you reached Preston you either went onto a maximum-security unit or stayed within the closed-prison sector till your time was served or you died.
The only reason he moved my dad was because of the support he was given by one particular prison guard, Officer Hunt, who stuck his neck out for him and pressed for my dad to be moved. It would be easy to say all prison guards of the time were bad, but clearly this wasn’t the case. Despite one or two close shaves, I have not needed to visit a prison since.
I don’t recall the day Dad came home. You might imagine it would be ingrained in my memory, but somehow it isn’t. While he was away, I remember that things seemed harder than usual. As a family, we never actually felt poorer than our neighbours, but I was aware that some people just had more.
It was when I started junior school at Willow Wood that I was first exposed to people who had more than me – basically, people who did not live on our estate. My two friends from school were Christopher and Clive, and both were posher than I was: Clive lived in a house that had an apple tree in the garden. Despite being at least three miles from where I lived, I would happily cycle or walk there to play. By the time I was in junior school I knew the estate inside out, so leaving it to go on adventures seemed natural.
Clive was clever, and I recall his dad coming home from work once. He was wearing a suit and didn’t need to get a wash before having his tea, which I thought was a really odd thing for a dad not to have to do. I liked Chris because he could draw, which I also enjoyed doing. He lived on the private estate and, to my eyes, he had the perfect life: he was the oldest, so he didn’t have an older brother who always won fights; and his mum didn’t seem to work, so when we played there she would sometimes make us chocolate apples, which is basically a toffee apple but with chocolate instead of toffee.
My mum was great at making cakes and I did get pocket money to spend at the mobile shop on the estate, which was a van in which a bloke sat selling all household goods from pegs to sweets, but I had never come across the concept of the chocolate apple. Chris also seemed to have more toy cars than I could imagine it was possible for one child to own. We would play with his Matchbox cars and, occasionally, I would slip one in my pocket. Once, as I did so, I saw his mum looking at me. I guiltily pulled the car out but I knew there were going to be no more chocolate apples for me. I was not invited around again.
CHAPTER 2
MY DAD AND CARS
In the 1970s, on every council estate, men were to be found under cars. It seemed to me that being an adult man meant you needed to be fixing something, and my dad was constantly fixing something for which he wasn’t qualified. Because he would never give up till what he was mending actually worked, he usually managed to get things to work in such a way that nobody else on the planet was ever able to repair them again, as nobody knew what he had done. Most of the time my dad did
n’t know, either.
This was always best illustrated by the range of cars we had. Money was tight, but cars were a necessary luxury, so my dad bought what he could afford, then spent time underneath it trying to make it do what he needed it to.
One car that stands out for me was the Hillman Imp. The name does not inspire much confidence – any name that is one letter away from ‘limp’ is surely not a title to give something that is supposed to transport people around. The Hillman Imp was developed by the Rootes Group to make a small car for the mass market. The fact that most of you will have not heard of either the car or the company tells you all you need to know about its success.
The car had its engine in the back, which would be absolutely fine if you couldn’t smell its workings whilst sitting there. The front bonnet was for storage. If you packed to go on holiday, this had the effect of turning any luggage you put there into a sort of early prototype airbag of clothes and knickers, should you have the misfortune to have a head-on collision. Whereas, if you were hit in the rear, a steaming engine would smack you on the back of the head, forcing you through the windscreen because, as it was still the seventies, nobody wore seat belts.
I recall a conversation with my dad about seat belts and the fact that he never wore one. His rationale was that if you ever drove into a river, the seat belt was another thing you had to deal with before climbing out the car, and that delay could be vital. He was also of the firm belief that if you rolled down a hill, there was always a chance that the belt could trap you in the car when the best thing to do would be to open the door and allow yourself to be thrown free. Needless to say, none of these theories has ever been tested and my dad now does wear a seat belt, but amongst the various jobs he has had in his life, safety officer was never one of them.
Our Hillman Imp was grey with an off-white roof – the best way to describe it is as something smaller than a single bed and less attractive than your average washing machine. And the reason that it stands out in my memory amongst all the other cars my dad had was because of one camping holiday we took in the Welsh hills when I was eight. The tent and various pieces of luggage were housed on the roof of the car as the bonnet was filled with clothes and tins of food: my mum was convinced that the camp shops would over-charge, so instead of being ripped off for tins of beans, soup and corned beef, she had stocked up and loaded the car. The fact that all this extra weight probably slowed us down to the point that we were using more petrol never entered the equation. There was no way she was going to allow anyone to rip us off.
My mum and dad sat in the front of the car, of course, while in the rear was me, 8; Carol, 9; Kathy, 12; Eddie, 13; and Lassie, 35 in dog years. Lassie was a white mongrel that I can’t ever remember not having as a child. She was white all over, apart from a black patch on her eye. Every time someone new met her, they would immediately say, ‘That’s a nice dog – is she called Patch?’ to which we would reply, ‘Don’t be stupid. She’s called Lassie,’ as if it wasn’t obvious enough.
She was a brilliant dog who would dance on her hind legs for biscuits, allow you to dress her up in girls’ clothes for a laugh, and was not a bad footballer. I am not joking about the latter point: Lassie could play. She wasn’t one of those dogs that would see a ball and then want to bite it. No, Lassie would join in by using her nose to win the ball, and then, once directed towards the goal, would keep nosing the ball till she had dribbled past everyone and scored. Because she had more legs than anyone else on the field, she was faster than any of the other players, so she was very good at dribbling. The only problem was that she was not really much good at anything else, and if she did score she didn’t have the awareness to stop, and would carry on running all over the estate, still nosing the ball, unless she became distracted by food or a cat. Also, her distribution was rubbish, so we never let her play with us too often. There is nothing worse than a greedy player, even if they are a dog.
So that was four kids and a dog on the back seat; two adults in the front; a six-berth tent along with deck chairs and a table on the roof; and in the bonnet we had clothes, sleeping bags, tins of food and the camping stove with bottled gas. All of this in a car under which my dad had spent hours making sure things like the brakes actually worked when requested to, rather than when they liked.
I cannot possibly imagine embarking on such a trip now. My kids have been brought up with rear-seat TVs and iPads: at the very least, they put in earphones, listen to music and get lost in their own world. They’ve never travelled for hours on holiday in an overcrowded car to one of the wettest countries in the world, where you are camping in a borrowed tent which, when you get there, takes all night to put up as there are no instructions.
We had to cram into the car, with me by the window due to my propensity to throw up every ten miles of any car journey, let alone one where engine fumes were mixing with those of dog farts. I was often given barley-sugar sweets, which were supposed to help car sickness, although how eating something that tasted of sick mixed with sugar was supposed to stop you from being sick I have never understood.
In all the excitement, we never worried about the potential dangers of being in a car that had dodgy brakes and was massively overloaded with tinned food housed under the bonnet next to gas canisters – therefore having all the potential to turn into a dirty bomb at the moment of impact. We were going on holiday and, as my mum and dad played their favourite country and western songs, we prepared to go to the only foreign country I ever visited until I reached adulthood: Wales.
The holiday was great. My memory of it was of sunshine and the beauty of Bala Lake, albeit strangely mixed with the dread of any approaching hill. Early on in the journey it became clear that, despite its name suggesting it was ‘a man of the hill’, the Hillman would not be able to carry us up any slope of substance, while perhaps the ‘Imp’ part of its name was just the start of the word ‘impossible’, because that was what every hill became.
Once we approached the periphery of Snowdonia National Park my dad knew that if we were to stand any chance of ever reaching our destination the weight in the car would have to be reduced. This meant that on the approach to any hill we would all climb out and, along with the dog, begin the long walk up whilst my dad slowly drove the Hillman Imp to the apex. There he would wait for us all to arrive. That said, he didn’t always get there first: on more than one occasion we walked faster than he could make the car go.
There is nothing more humbling than seeing your dad at the front of a procession of cars, willing his own vehicle onwards, while you arrive at the top of the hill faster than him by walking. The frustration of those caught up in the procession was matched only by our collective desire for the Imp to make it to the top. Failure to do so would only result in the embarrassment of being forced to do a three-point turn in an over-laden car in the middle of an ascent, and start again.
When we had all reconvened at a peak, we quickly reassumed our positions in the car and would be rewarded for our efforts by a trip downhill at as much speed as the Hillman Imp could muster. It was like being in a toboggan as we weaved around the bends, until the gradient changed and we all had to get out and start walking again.
One little-known fact about my dad is that he invented the people carrier. Although his version may, by today’s standards, seem rather primitive, he certainly has to be credited with the concept of taking a van and putting people in it.
After the Imp limped to an early grave, it was a red Ford Escort van that my dad brought home next. The fact that it had no seats in the back never struck us as strange; we had owned vans in the past and all we did as kids was climb in the back and sit on a few cushions.
It seems a successful way to travel until you travel with the childhood version of myself, one whose propensity for car sickness was not helped by such a mode of transport. Being in the back of a van with no windows and a vomiting child is not really the place you want to be.
I don’t know if it was the car sickne
ss or just a wave of inspiration, but my dad then decided that he did not want a Ford Escort van. He wanted a family car, and for that to happen he either had to buy a new car or change the one he had, the latter being the most sensible thing due to our lack of money.
Using an angle grinder, my dad proceeded to cut into the side panels of the van. Even in a road where people working on cars was not an unusual sight, the image of a man with an angle grinder attacking his own car so that sparks were filling the air created a fair amount of interest. After all, in a world of only three television channels something as crazy as this was bound to create a lot of interest. Oblivious, my dad just carried on. He was like Noah building his Ark: my dad had a vision, and even if the rest of the world, including my mum, thought he had lost the plot, he was still going to realise that vision.
Once the side panels came out, my dad then produced some windows that he had ‘found’ in a caravan. I have written ‘found’ in inverted commas because when I recently spoke to him about putting the glass in to replace the side panels he wanted to put me straight right away. Glass would have been dangerous (I never thought I would hear my dad say anything was dangerous when it came to cars), and what he had, in fact, put into the side panels was Perspex, which he had taken from a caravan.
‘A caravan?’ my mum asked. ‘What caravan?’
‘A caravan I found,’ said my dad, and that was the end of that.
As you can imagine, your average caravan window is not made to fit exactly into the shape left behind in a Ford Escort van after the side panels have been removed. So, with the aid of welding and tape, they were customised to the space and made to fit. A seat was added in the back from another car of a similar size found in a scrap yard and, after this was bolted to the floor, my dad stepped back. The people carrier had been invented, although it was probably the most illegal vehicle I have ever ridden in.