by Wade, Calvin
It’s more than twenty five years ago now, so my memories of the day are a little fuzzy. I remember being in Dad’s car, me in the front, James in the back. I remember it was a hilly journey and although it’s only about thirty miles from Ormskirk to Bolton, if that, at the time it seemed like a huge distance. Dad parked a long way from the ground and he took it in turns to carry James and I. I remember when I was aloft, his face felt re-assuredly strong and stubbly. Even on this day of days though, he wasn’t perfect. He stopped at a sweet shop and bought James and I some “Spangles”, then told us to wait outside another shop, a smoky shop, because children weren’t allowed in.
“I’ll just be five minutes”, he promised.
James and I talked. It was obvious to us that this was one of those “bookies” that Helen and Caroline had warned us about. The place where Dad’s bad moods came from. We stood there, crunching our Spangles and pining for our father like a pair of abandoned toddlers. We knew that his mood for the day would be determined by the five minutes spent in this shop. Smacks and hugs were on the line with only one winner. Thankfully for James and I, Dad emerged from that bookies with a grin the size of Burnden Park itself, his lucky streak had extended into a second day and he proudly announced ,
“Today has just paid for itself!!”
I didn’t understand exactly what that meant. Today was Saturday. How could Saturday pay for itself? He must have won money but what did that mean? I didn’t toy with the question for too long though, as Dad was so obviously happy, I just wallowed in his positivity. Me, my Dad and my brother were going to a real football match and didn’t it just feel great!
I didn’t know or care back then, that lucky streaks don’t last. I was naïve to the fact that every gambler has a lucky streak at some point or other, but more often than not it is followed by an unlucky streak that lasts longer and costs more. Is gambling more or less harmful than smoking? It’s hard to say. Ultimately, I suppose it depends on the individual, but they are both slow destroyers. Smoking slowly murders your vital organs whilst gambling attacks the brain, breaks down your self-control and sucks out your spirit. I wish I had known that back then. If only! Back then all I knew was that we were on the crest of a wave and I headed off to the match with a newly acquired black and white scarf and a rattle, full of the joys of spring. Bolton were in Division Two back then. Division Two was a different league then to what it is now. There were no Premierships and Championships back in those days, just Divisions One, Two, Three and Four. Simple! Bolton, I think, were near the top of the league and Wolves were the top, so it was a promotion battle. Bolton scored twice but they were both disallowed, whilst Wolves scored once and it counted, so that was that. Wolves won 1-0. I thought it was fantastic. Twenty thousand excited people captivated by the actions of twenty two. I wanted to go again and again. Dad took footballing defeat better than horse racing defeats, probably because there was no money involved and I remember the three of us walking back to the car with Dad imploring us to tell the kids at school on Monday that we had been to the mighty Burnden Park. I did tell them, but we lived in Aughton, a village twelve miles from Liverpool and a mile from Merseyside so near enough everyone supported Liverpool, who at the time were European Cup holders, with a smattering of Evertonians for good measure, so the boys were about as interested in Burnden Park as I was in kissing Faye Williams (dog breath).
That Saturday was a turning point for me though. As my Dad twiddled the knob on his car radio, trying to get a good enough reception to pick up the racing results, I knew, as well as a seven year old could know, that my Dad was an unreliable sort. I knew this was a one-off and no matter how much I begged him, he would not be taking me to football matches every other weekend. What I also worked out on that car journey home, was where the window of opportunity could be found and the following morning I clambered through it. By eight o’clock that Sunday morning, I was fully dressed and ready to go out. I skipped five doors along to my Nan and Granddads house to recount the story of the previous day. They were my Mother’s parents and were not my Father’s biggest fans, so the fact that my Dad had clambered up off his big fat arse to take us, was a shock to their systems. I didn’t miss a detail, carefully dropping the bait, telling them how great Burnden Park was and how I loved every minute of the whole experience.
“Burnden Park, great?” my Grandad scoffed, “wait until you see Goodison!”
“But my Dad won’t take me to Goodison, Granddad, he supports Bolton not Everton”.
“Of course he won’t Richard, but I will! Next season you and I and your brother if he’s interested, are all going to have season tickets at Goodison Park!”
For the following four years everything revolved around football. I started playing for cubs, (Aughton St Michaels 40th Ormskirk pack -“Tuesdays” - there were also 40th Ormskirk “Wednesdays”, the rivalry was fierce!) and the school team and every other Saturday, Granddad and I went to the Everton match. James was offered the opportunity too, but he turned it down. James was into other things such as Lego, Meccano and as he grew older, Dungeons and Dragons. I hated all of them with a passion. He was the practical one, I was the sporty one.
My lifelong love affair with Everton Football club started to gather pace in 1978 and over the following four years it became so strong, girls were not given a second thought. Then, in 1982, things changed. Rachel Cookson, seemingly overnight, grew the most fantastic pair of breasts I had ever seen in my entire life and football, for a while anyway, became a secondary passion!
Jemma School was boring, but school on Fridays was particularly boring, especially when you were going to a party after school and you just wanted the day to end in double quick time. First lesson was double English with Miss Caldicott. Now how was that meant to go in double quick time? For our “O” level, we were doing one novel, Jane Eyre, which in my opinion was the dreariest book ever about the dreariest romance ever, one book of poetry by John Betjeman and a Shakespeare play, which for us was “Julius Caesar”. Betjeman and Shakespeare were boring too. The other English sets got to do Oscar Wilde, which sounded more exciting, although Miss Caldicott could have turned a trip to the moon into one big yawn. Anyway, the Friday of party night was Jane Eyre, so I spent half the lesson trying to carve my name off the desk with a compass. Just to explain, in a previous English lesson, I had carved a heart with my name and Billy McGregor’s into the desk and as we were now finished, it was time to get rid of it.
Billy and I had split up on the previous Thursday. A mutual decision of sorts. The lack of sex had become more and more of an issue for him, so much so that I was expecting his head to pop off like a cork and his body just to fizz out millions of gallons of sperm like a massive ejaculating firework. He had just passed his driving test so he had this newly found freedom he wanted to exploit, as well as me. His Mum and Dad, Mr & Mrs Middle Class, had bought him a Vauxhall Chevette for his eighteenth, so he had wanted to take me out on the previous Friday to the Astra cinema in Maghull, to see “Beverly Hills Cop”. No doubt he had some elaborate plan to take me to Clieves Hill, or somewhere equally desolate afterwards, but Vomit Breath put paid to his plan as she would not let me go, well not unaccompanied anyway. Vomit Breath, as you could probably guess, was not the world’s most protective mother. If I had told her I was off to play chicken on the M58 motorway, she’d have just said,
“Well, don’t you be expecting me to come up to A&E to see you when you get run over, its quiz night at The Ropers tonight.”
The Ropers is about two hundred yards from Ormskirk hospital. So, when I asked her on the Wednesday night if I could go to the cinema on Friday, she surprised me when she said,
“Course you can, love”.
I wasn’t expecting that. I threw in another line.
“I’ll be back about eleven”.
She just kept dragging away on her Marlboro Lights, unconcerned. “No problem, love”, her voice rasped out in between inhales.
Shocker! Oh my god, w
hat was going on! Then reality bit, small chunks at first, then bigger ones.
“Who are you going with?”
Vomit Breath didn’t do niceties. The air was now full of suspicion and vomit breath. We traded questions.
“Billy McGregor. Why?”
“Who’s he?”
“My boyfriend. Why do you want to know who I’m going with?”
“Is he a nice lad?”
“He’s OK. Why?”
And then the answer,
“Because if he’s a nice lad, he won’t mind taking Kelly too. I’m off to the Kingsway on Friday night. There’s a coach load of us going. We’re getting picked up at the Kwik Save car park at nine. You’ve got Kelly.”
“ I’m not taking Kelly on a date!”
“Jemma, you either take Kelly with you or you don’t go, simple as that.”
This was never going to work. How many cool points would Billy lose if he took his sixteen year old girlfriend and her thirteen year old sister to the cinema? If he was spotted, it would look bad. Furthermore, devious plans to go to Clieves Hill or any other “Lovers Lane” would be out the window if a thirteen year old was tagging along. I knew next day at school, crisis talks were needed.
Ormskirk Grammar School in the 1980’s, was still stuck in the Victorian era. Boys and girls were not allowed to play together at break times or lunchtime. There was a designated area for boys, the playground and a designated area for girls, the mud and tarmac that divided the school buildings! How sexist was that? That was just one of many strange rules. My favourite was that girls were not allowed to step over puddles in case the boys should happen to see the reflection of their knickers in the water! Classic! There were plenty of others too, like girls were not allowed to roll up the sleeves on their shirts as this would have mentally, sexually energised the boys! They were teenage boys, did the staff not realise they were already mentally, sexually energised?
The girl/boy divide was not really a deterrent to seeing Billy though as he was in Sixth Form and they were handed special privileges. These included not playing out at break times and just hanging around the Sixth Form block. The block was pretty much slap bang in the middle of the girls designated area, so it was easy for me, at Thursday morning break, to get a message to Billy via Liz Malthouse, who had nipped out for a sly fag in Coronation Park, that I wanted to meet him outside the Sports Hall at one o’clock.
One o’clock came and went. No Billy.
Ten past came and went. No Billy.
Twenty past came and went. No Billy.
The bell was due at half past and I needed to see him, so I just marched into the Sixth Form, which was “Out Of Bounds” to Fifth Formers. We were easily spotted by teachers as we had to wear a proper uniform, Sixth Formers just had to dress smartly, but this lunchtime, thankfully, no teachers were around.
I pushed past a few of the plebs in the cloakroom and there, sat in the middle of the Common room, was Billy McGregor playing poker with about four mates. I was livid.
“What are you doing?”
“What does it look like I’m doing? I’m playing Poker.”
“I wanted to meet you at one o’clock.”
“I didn’t want to meet you.”
“Why?”
“Cos we’re finished.”
“I know we are. That was why I wanted to meet you. To tell you it was over”. I lied.
“Too late”.
“Tosser!”
Out I stormed. Turns out the smoke signals about Kelly playing gooseberry had reached Sixth Form. Kelly had told her mate, Jenny McManus and she had told her Sixth Form sister, Georgina McManus and she had probably blabbed to everyone, including Billy McGregor, who was no doubt trying to maintain his reputation as universal heart throb by finishing with me. Billy had decided credibility was everything. So, Friday night was spent babysitting Kelly, rather than being felt up by Billy McGregor, which was probably a better option anyway. Good looking lad but he had dirty, jagged fingernails.
When she was thirteen, Kelly was great. I could already tell that she was going to break hearts when she was older. My eyes are pale blue and lifeless but Kelly’s are really green and sparkle like diamonds. She has really long eyelashes too. Even at thirteen, she was stunning and I knew if she was all dolled up, she could get away with being sixteen. Her hair was a bit mousey but I told her I’d pay for blonde highlights for her once I was working full time. I knew she’d be even more beautiful then. She was intelligent too and was mature enough to have an adult conversation too, unlike Billy McGregor. The Friday of the cancelled date, we had a great evening. We stuffed our faces full of Maltesers and watched loads of great stuff on TV like Cheers and The Word.
By the time that Friday night was over, Billy McGregor was out of my system. I tended to categorise people into two teams, those I loved such as, Kelly, Rob Lowe, Amy Perkins, my best mate and those I hated, Miss Caldicott, most of the girls at school, Vomit Breath, “CC” - Deputy Head at School, real name Miss Turnbury, Tut and Billy McGregor. I vowed that when I was older and rich and famous, Billy McGregor would watch me on the TV and think,
“if only I’d met her that time outside the Sports Hall and taken her and her sister to the cinema!”
Actually, I realised it would probably be Kelly that was famous, I thought maybe Kelly would be a famous model and I would be her manager and Billy McGregor would think,
“I could have taken both of them to the cinema, if I hadn’t been such an idiot!”
Vomit Breath was a nightmare that weekend. In the early hours of Saturday morning, I heard her stumble out of the taxi. I looked out my window and there was some fella with her and he was probably intending on coming in to see what he could get (VD probably!), but when she zig-zagged out the taxi, took four steps and threw up, he was back in the taxi before you could say “gonorrhoea”.
So, on the Saturday, my mother well and truly lived up to the “Vomit Breath” title and a “Bear with a Sore Head” was putting it mildly! She didn’t get up in the morning, so I took Kelly into Ormskirk to have a look around the market, but there was nothing that took our fancy. I did bump into Amy though. She was off to Dorothy Perkins with her Mum. Amy was my best friend at school and, if I’m honest, probably my only real friend. She was one of those girls that everyone likes, unlike me, because she was very tactful and would not say a bad word about anyone (again unlike me!) They say opposites attract and Amy was definitely a calming influence on me. Her surname was Perkins so I asked her if she was going to Dotty P’s to keep the business in the family, but she looked confused so I had to explain.
Amy told us that she had been invited to Joey Birch’s party in Halsall on Friday night. Joey Birch was in our year, he was in 5 Left. There were six classes in total in our year, North, South, East, West, Left and Right. I was in 5 North. “Left” and “Right” was our school’s very tactless way of branding two classes as “not quite as bright”. Joey didn’t try much at school. He wanted to be some sort of mechanic that worked on motorbikes, his two older brothers each had bikes and he had started riding them too, as he had been sixteen the previous month. His Mum and Dad had gone to Canada for their Silver Wedding anniversary, so the three lads had decided to have a massive party the following Friday! Not to celebrate the Silver Wedding I wouldn’t have thought! Joey and Amy used to get on really well, so he told her to come along and bring some (and I quote) “fit mates”! My first thought when Amy told me this, was that I wouldn’t be allowed as Mum would be out with her mates and I’d have babysitting duties for Kelly.
Kelly must have thought this too as she said,
“Jemma, if Mum’s going out, I’ll make arrangements to stop over at a friend’s, so you can go out too.”
She was a little star, Kelly. The problem was, for many years after, I wished she hadn’t been so kind hearted and I had never been to that stupid party!
On the basis that Kelly was sorted, I agreed to go. The rest of the weekend was spent keeping out
of Vomit Breath’s way. Despite staying in bed all Saturday morning to sleep off her hangover, on Saturday afternoon she tried to get rid of it, by drinking her way through it, but this just meant that Sunday was a carbon copy of Saturday, except it started differently, as some ugly, bearded bloke left her room on Sunday morning. It was back to school on Monday and as Friday grew nearer, Amy and I talked about nothing else other than Joey’s party. So, in Miss Caldicott’s lesson on Friday morning, I wasn’t paying much attention (surprise, surprise!), I was just trying to get my name off the desk and thinking about the party that evening, what I would be wearing, what make-up I’d put on and how I was going to get back from Halsall to Ormskirk before “Vomit Breath”.
At one point, I was carving away on the desk and I somehow felt the glare of thirty pairs of eyes on me or forty really as there were about ten kids with glasses in our class, so they counted double. Then, I felt an icy shadow over me and looked up to see a very unimpressed Miss Caldicott. It’s hard to describe Miss Caldicott. I suppose the best way is to say that if there had been a competition for “World’s Ugliest Woman” in 1987, she would have come a close second to Vomit Breath! She wasn’t that old, thirtyish, but had greasy black hair, glasses and lots of moles and warts with hair coming out of all of them. Someone once said she looked like she was “spawned by the Yeti” and that’s just about the perfect description!
Anyway, Miss Caldicott, half English teacher, half Yeti, growled angrily at me,
“What do you think you’re doing, Miss Watkinson?”
“Don’t know, miss”.
“You don’t know! Surely you know what you were doing, you have a compass in your hand”.
“I was cleaning the desk, miss”.
She didn’t like that. Steam came out her ears and if you’d have tipped her head to one side, with a mug and a teabag beneath her, you could have made a fine cup of tea.
“It didn’t look like cleaning to me! It looked like vandalism to me.”