Sister Clare came along in 1965, and I adored her. Before child safety outweighed our society’s belief in the health-giving power of fresh air, a Liverpool mother thought nothing of leaving her baby unattended in a pram by the front door for hours while she did the housework. The terraced street pavements were an assault course of perambulator awnings, knitted woollen blankets, chatting wives and flying footballs. I’d climb up onto the side of Clare’s pram and sing snatches of Merseybeat songs to her while the miniskirted mothers strolled by on their way to the shops, their husbands’ cash stuffed into scuffed leather purses. Working-class sixties Liverpool was a patriarchal cash economy. Dad got paid every Thursday in a small brown packet and provided mum with ‘housekeeping’ – the money necessary to fulfil her wifely duties. He never disclosed his earnings, and the idea of a married woman running her own bank account was unheard of. Mum couldn’t sign a hire purchase agreement or take out a mortgage. She was as dependent on her husband as we were on her.
Despite my love for my sister, her birth nudged me out of my mother’s sole affections. I now had to make my own way. It was at this time that my chest began to feel constricted. Nights were the worst – wheezing and coughing and making my brother Mark fret in the nearby bed. The mathematics of three small bedrooms with a family of seven meant that the children always shared rooms. It was a wonderful privation; stacked bunks, four kids together – chatting, whispering, giggling in the curtain-dimmed, streetlight yellow while our parents shushed and scolded. It was the closest we ever were.
Now it was a place where I struggled to breathe. Mum would prop my head up on pillows to aid my airways, while Dad rubbed Vicks menthol vapour onto my chest to clear the sinuses. There were constant visits to the Royal Liverpool Children’s Hospital clinic – hours of crying infants and surnames barked by fearsome matrons with clipboards. Those long appointments gave time for Mum and me to be alone again, chatting and thinking and waiting – her attentions undivided. I loved it. The doctor said that my problem was asthma, aggravated by an allergy to the house dust in my bedroom. It seemed to affect more than my breathing. My weight began a descent from ‘bonny’ to skinny. My little ribs spiked through my pale torso. The other siblings nicknamed me ‘Bone’. Affectionate but blunt. A new identity to go with the new antagonist. Weakling. The names we give to things become the things we are.
Dust wasn’t the only antagonist hanging in the air in Birstall Road. My father’s neurosis and melancholy was a miasma that the McGann children inhaled from their earliest perception. Sometimes you could taste it in the air like acrid smoke – tiptoeing around his chair where he dozed following a long shift, hoping he wouldn’t wake, or else confining our exchanges to careful pleasantries. It wasn’t a fear of violence, or drunkenness, or the brisk lash of rage. My father was never the kind to trouble the police or bring the priest to the door. Instead it was a brooding cloud that seeped through the gaps in our optimism, bleaching the colour from our childish world. Our home life became attuned to his melancholic rhythm – meals without him were clean-lunged breaths of raucous laughter, inane argument, unfinished sentences, school news, clannish conversation. When he was there it was tight-chested bonhomie and watchful glances. Saddest of all were the times when he tried to break through the fog and join in the family laughter. The effort was heartbreaking. He loved us and we loved him, but we were an insufficient lighthouse for the rock-strewn sea of anxieties in his life. Eventually he’d doze in his armchair exhausted from the effort, and we’d escape to play outside with our optimism intact.
Outside. Hours and hours on cobblestone or stone-chipped tarmac – chalked goalposts, skipping ropes, hopscotched paving stones. We were the children born after Attlee and before the microchip age; long hours of outdoor physical activity with free treatment for our broken bones, and without the sedentary temptations of text messages or gaming consoles. There were bicycles and races and matches and chases and vast opposing teams of nail-grimed, pre-teen warriors bursting their lungs to demonstrate prowess in the only way that mattered. Physically.
My lungs were weighed in the balance and found wanting. My asthma meant I’d always be at the back in sprints, and be left coughing and wheezing by the sidelines in ball games. And it wasn’t simply breathlessness that marked me. I seemed to be too self-absorbed. I’d be distracted and miss a pass, or overthink a catch and drop the ball. I lacked that easy courage that helped the other kids win reckless dares or swing bruising punches to settle disputes. I hesitated on the diving board of the urban childhood to which I’d been assigned. The other kids were perfectly amenable to my lowly prowess – a tribe as accommodating as it was competitive – yet my weakness was now an identifier, to me as well as others. A oneline biography, or the brand on an animal’s skin. A brute synecdoche for my unformed self.
My asthma soon became a placeholder for my childhood personality within the large family to which I belonged. It marked a defining characteristic amongst five children struggling to make sense of their own identities within the knee-scraped arena of working-class Liverpool. It became a label of convenience for parents distracted by their separate needs and their shared unhappiness, and it also became a way for me to define myself. ‘The sick one’. ‘The weak one’. The one of whom too much must not be expected. There was a certain comfort in surrendering to the convenience of its modest expectations. Family identity, however assigned, becomes like inhaled oxygen – an unconscious function of our self-survival.
Sometimes I’d abandon the knee-scraped arena altogether, and return indoors to watch my father work. Dad had a peculiar hobby that absorbed him on free weekends. He’d repair old transistor radio sets – all broken Bakelite dials and cracked motherboards – rescued from some workplace friend or scrap bin. They rattled when you shook them. It seemed an impossible task, but Dad sat there stubbornly in his armchair, week after week, glasses balanced on his nose, fiddling and soldering. I’d sit at his feet and ask him about the different parts. He’d tell me about his time as a wartime telegraphist. Radio had been his technology – the time when his prowess had mattered. He loved it, and I loved to watch him loving something so simply, without shadows.
It was Dad who first told me how transistors worked. Transistors are the building blocks for radios and computers – the tiny alveoli that make our modern world breathe. It’s an electronic switch or amplifier that’s made from a three-layer sandwich of silicon. You put electricity through the silicon layers to make the electrons flow where you want them to. But the secret of transistors lies in their flaws. One must deliberately place impurities into the pure silicon layers in order to make them conduct electricity properly. Without those flaws, the element is pure but unexceptional. By integrating impurity, the power of the whole is amplified and the world listens.
Eventually, after weeks, and without fail, Dad’s old radio set would burst into crackling life. He’d smile with quiet satisfaction, the impurities in his world briefly integrated.
We learned our first vocal harmonies as children from the songs we heard on those radio sets. My family have been credited with various talents, but back then there was little evidence of any innate gift. Except for the singing. As young kids we could harmonise together really well. No one taught us. We’d simply hear a song on the radio a few times, and then one of us would start singing the melody. A sibling elsewhere in the house would join in with a harmony above it. Another would add a third. Then someone else an octave. Finally my sister would find an impossible seventh, or a haunting sixth. By this point the child who’d started the melody would complain of harmonic mugging by a dystopian version of the von Trapp family. The McTrapps?
Our hierarchy of harmonies was an analogue for the subtle hierarchies of age and status that began to impress itself on us all at that time. My sister and I were never the melody line – never the foundation on which the song of our family was constructed. We had to find our own notes in the gaps and pauses left by more established voices. In the crude pecki
ng order of working-class Liverpool family life, each sibling required a label with which to describe them – a sustained musical note allotted to each child in the chorus of family identity. Joe was ‘the eldest’, big for his age, his sensitivity hidden by his stature and frowned on by my father; Paul was ‘sporty’ and ‘confident’, encouraged to hide his fragility and doubt beneath an athletic skill and an assumed nonchalance; Mark was the ‘middle child’, regarded as insecure, but possessing enormous resilience, courage and compassion; me – the ‘sick one’ – my potential both excused and denied by my role as the family’s weakling; and Clare was the ‘baby girl’, her prodigious intellect and academic skill constrained by her relative youth and gender. All of us in our allotted places. None of us adequately served by them. A tight skin we’d each be forced to shed later in order to grow. Looking back, I smile at my own assumptions. I’d considered myself the only child who couldn’t breathe. Yet all of us were gasping for air in our own way.
Why did our loving parents permit this blunt shorthand to take hold? Was it convenience? Oversight? Or was it us who needed it? The only way that the kids we were, crammed into an enforced proximity of bunk bed and shared bath, could carve out some space of our own?
Soon I carved out my own unorthodox space away from the pecking order. As a young child I was forever in and out of hospital. But I loved it. It conformed with my role as the sickly one in the family, yet also gave me time to be alone. To read and think and breathe. Hospitals weren’t supposed to be pleasant places and, yes, sometimes it involved the inconvenience of needles, anaesthetic or operations. But there were advantages too. I was fussed over at strict visiting times, given toys, sweets and kind words, and then left to my own devices. The sixties National Health ward was a regimented barracks of care – spotless floors, starched sheets, fearsome ward sisters, the clank of silver bedpans and the enduring aroma of disinfectant. There was warmth and security in this orderly kindness. It was in hospital that I first found solitude and a sense of self. I could hide in plain sight – an anonymous child amongst the oxygen bottles and the beakers of Lucozade. I was free.
Not for long. Once back on my feet it was time to attend school. St Anne’s was a gothic sandstone institution of polished wooden floors and stern, black-cloaked nuns, close to the tenements that my father’s family lived in. It catered for inner-city Catholic children from infancy to factory age. All of the McGann children went there, although it involved a near-mile walk from our home. Mum and Dad valued its educational standards, and we quickly realised how important this was to both of them. Our parents shared so few things. They rarely socialised, and their conversations were often conducted with a caution and mutual incomprehension that ended with heavy silence. Any physical contact between them was brief, and agonising to watch. Yet there was our education; their mutual aspiration for us to do well and progress to a grammar school. It united them in a way no other part of their lives did. And it was an aspiration that we could do something about.
The Tripartite System of state-funded secondary education in the UK was now in full flow following the Education Act of 1944. This grand post-war experiment made it possible for children from our background to be fully funded at a selective grammar school if we passed a single key examination at eleven years old. Any young child failing this test was filtered either to a vocational technical school or, more likely, to a ‘secondary modern’, an academically unchallenging environment that prepared its pupils for motherhood or the unskilled workforce. It was opportunity measured out in the blunt binary logic of sheep and goats.
It was clear which flock our parents wanted us to join. They greeted every glowing report the children received with a hope and pride that lit the room. My mother still cherishes a handwritten poem penned by my brother Paul back then – rhyming couplets in wide-looped primary-school cursive. Paul pays ostentatious tribute to his recent academic results, and those of his siblings. It’s tender and funny on first reading, but becomes more moving on reflection. The poem isn’t written in conceit, but with a wide-eyed eagerness to please. Paul is offering our academic success as a collective gift to our parents; a peace offering to fill their silences with a noisy new pride and purpose.
I progressed fast at St Anne’s, as did my whole family. I excelled in my school reports, yet found the rough social world hard to adjust to. The catchment area for the school was diverse but socially deprived. Bright and gentle children shared desk space with kids whose homes were battlegrounds and whose lives were scarred by neglect. There is a particular smell to poverty in children that I still remember from that time. A warm-biscuit odour of unwashed cotton and low-level depression. The halitosis of young untended teeth. The dried sweat of endless subsistence with permanently narrow horizons. My home, though simple, was always safe. There was love and order in it. My baby teeth were brushed and my clothes were ironed. Yet that biscuit odour in my nostrils could easily have been my own if circumstances had been slightly different. The McGanns were only inches from their past. This was the odour of my recent ancestors. It was the smell of the kind-hearted but luckless school friends next to me. Those who think poverty is just a want of money have likely never been required to breathe its air as an equal.
By the time I got to junior school, my asthmatic frame and teacher-pleasing character singled me out for punishment in the predatory hierarchy of the playground. My dinner money was often stolen, and I was a constant target for the calculated cruelty of small boys in large numbers. I remember once trying to fight them back. It still brings a wry smile. There was a genuine amusement from my tormentors – an admiration for the wheezing runt of a bear they baited – until, patience thinning, they kicked me harder for my impertinence. I was left choking for breath on the cracked tarmac.
I’d soon have more than wheezing to contend with. In the early months of 1971 my chest started feeling more congested than usual. A terrible pain in my left lung kept me awake. It felt different to the normal breathlessness. Sharper. A devil I didn’t know. The doctor was called. It was severe pneumonia. He called an ambulance, and I was escorted to the back of it on a stretcher, wearing a look of saintly stoicism while the neighbours watched from nearby doorways. This was the sport I excelled in. Peak weakling.
By the time I arrived at the hospital, my mother’s ashen face told me this was no ordinary rest break. I was very ill. I couldn’t stay awake. They put me in an oxygen tent – a large polythene enclosure placed over my bed to encourage me to sweat out my fever, into which they pumped oxygen-enriched air to help me breathe. It was unbearably humid and my sheets were soaked with my own perspiration. The movements of the nurses were reduced to ghostly, condensation-smeared silhouettes through the plastic barrier. Every few hours, a nurse pulled back the plastic sheet, turned me over, and injected my buttocks with intravenous medicine. I’d cry with each injection, my resolve evaporating by the hour. One night the nurse pulled back the sheet again to reveal my father sitting there. He’d been keeping silent vigil. His look of worry was washed by an expression of such gentleness. The nurse prepared the needle again and I began to cry. Dad placed a tender hand on my head. ‘Shh. There, there, son,’ he said. ‘It’s penicillin. It’s wonderful. It’ll make you better.’ I looked into his face, so often clouded by melancholy and doubts I never understood. There was no doubt. Just love and certainty.
Penicillin was the one thing in my father’s life that had never disappointed him. It had been the gentle hand on his own head when he’d most needed it. Now it was back to save his son. Penicillin was the messenger of a larger mercy. The McGanns were no longer a pestilence to the country they were born in, diseased and incurable. Joe McGann’s son was worthy of the finest attentions of medicine. It was a right he fought for and one that his children could now assume without violence or cost. Penicillin was dignity and gratitude. It was ingenuity and compassion. It was the sound of a civilised society breathing. It was a child’s life.
I lived. My lungs cleared. I return
ed to my junior school and continued to do well academically, although my asthma became worse and my absences more frequent. Looking back, there was more to my wheezing than simply allergy or genetics. I was progressively more anxious and unhappy at school, which gave my asthma a psychosomatic dimension. As the crucial eleven-plus examination approached, I punctuated bouts of fruitful work with extended sick days. I was acquiring a habit of escaping the stresses of my life by seeking the security of home.
When the eleven-plus finally arrived, I was calm despite the pressure. It tested our intelligence in the narrow puzzle-based style of an IQ test – a format I found easy. We were little lab rats running within the maze walls of uncomplicated metrics. If we sniffed out the correct path with sufficient accuracy we would be deemed worthy of reward and transferred to a more gilded cage. If not, the bars that confined our lives would be reinforced. I was deemed sufficiently accurate. I passed my exam well and was offered a place at a Catholic grammar school in Liverpool’s leafy suburbs. It was a bus ride from my home, but a million miles away from the life I’d known.
All of the McGann children passed their eleven-plus examinations, and all were educated in suburban faith-based state grammar schools. It’s no exaggeration to say that in a century and a half of McGann family history, the education that we received as a result of those exams was the single decisive factor that transformed our family’s fortunes. More than any talent or occupation; more than any wage or medicine or mortgage or experience. It was the education that mattered. Education as ideas. Education as other worlds. Philosophy and physics and the sound of a bow on a violin string. Debate and doubt and challenge and poetry and the endless possibility of books. It was the thing my mother had tasted, and the thing my father had been denied. Without it we’d never have been able to dissect a script or build a character. The brutal method of selection by which children like us achieved our education and others didn’t has rightly been criticised. But the fact of it can’t be denied. It changed everything for my family, and everything that followed came as a result.
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