I Came Out Sideways

by George Porter

  Conversation usually centred on her much-maligned husband, a man my mother had never met but who was vilified to such an extent that, when eavesdropping from under the table while hammering small nails into the wooden underframe of my little tricycle with my toy hammer, even at such a tender age I would have been able to stand up in court and give evidence relating to the beast she married in haste without prior knowledge of what sort of a useless bone-idle article he was. On the subject of the climate, in later life she became convinced, being of a paranormal disposition, that all our bad weather was a result of the Sputnik after the satellite was launched and she cursed the Russians for the rain.

  “Oo Jean, I can tell yer ’dis - ’ee’s such an idle bugger dat ’ee sleeps with ’is bloody socks on. Too bloody lazy to take them off. I’ll tell yer dis - If ’ee carries on da way ’ees goin’, I’LL put a bloody sock in ’IM! Eee makes your George look like bloody Superman.”

  I don’t think Mrs Leatherbarrow had ever set eyes on my father, for if she had, her description would not have stood up to scrutiny. He had a pigeon chest, and every vein in both of his legs was varicose. He suffered from chronic pleurisy as a result of smoking twenty Woodbines every day along with a half-ounce of St Bruno tobacco for his pipe at weekends.

  The reading of the tea-leaves usually took place after her offensive ranting regarding the uselessness of Mr Leatherbarrow, and after complimenting me on my skills with a small hammer and nails and my new-found ability to wipe my own bottom, a function she had personally supervised on several occasions when I was caught short, while my mother was busily involved in making the tea and recovering the custard creams she thought were hidden from me alongside the sweetened condensed milk under the cupboard in the back kitchen, in readiness of the psychobabble she was about to be subjected to.

  “Oo, ’ee’s a good lad dat Georgie, isn’t ’ee. ’Ee’s a little smasher dat one isn’t ’ee? I’ll tell yer dis, Jean, dat one’s goin’ ta break a few hearts when ’ee grows up. They’d better lock up their daughters when ’ee’s around.”

  The tea-leaves ceremony always seemed to culminate with my mother in a more extreme condition of nervous debilitation than when Doris Leatherbarrow had appeared as if spirited into the house. She never knocked on our front door; she must have crept up the normally creaking stairs in order to make a mystically theatrical entrance as if to bolster her claim to psychic powers. She was able to enter our house with such covert silence because she was aware that the door key was suspended from a length of string on the inside of the door underneath the letterbox. Her speculative deception was that of a clairvoyant. She clarified the various disturbing implications revealed in the little mounds of spent tea leaves contained in the bottom of teacups. She would turn a lipstick-ringed cup upsidedown in a saucer with an exaggerated twist of her wrists, and drain away the residue of liquid in the bottom of it, close her eyes and mutter a few inaudible words, turn it up the correct way in slow motion and then peer into it through glazed red-crazed eyes. Then she would pontificate.

  “Oo Jean, I can see an ’orse again. Not da same one, mind. Dis one’s got longer legs. Can you see it? And look, der’s a man on da ground. ’Ee’s fallen off it! Look, look, can you see it? And just look at dat fence - da ’orse ’as run right through it!”

  Even at the age of four, I was aware that this woman was a charlatan. She was as well aware as I was regarding the hazardous condition of our finances due to my father’s unremitting ruinous investment in the turf, for when a really bad day of racing investment had taken place I would hear the raised voices of my parents quarrelling well into the night, culminating in sobs of despair and anguish from my mother.

  Regardless of her dissolute chicanery, a still-unexplained phenomenon occurred some thirteen years later regarding Doris Leatherbarrow, when she was still appearing in a puff of Woolworth’s powder - terrifying both the cat and my mother - just in time for a cup of tea. Her alleged remarkable powers of delving into the mysteries of the unknown went into overdrive one day when she saw me walking down the stairs and called out to me. I was wearing, she said, pale blue drainpipe trousers, bronze winkle-pickers with Cuban heels and a scarlet shirt. I had completely ignored her. Unknown to her, when she hailed me on the stairs, I was actually several hundred miles away in Germany serving as a young soldier, having a further operation related to a broken arm, the splintering of which had become a regular habit. There was a problem encountered in attempting to bring me round from the anaesthetic and I was unable to be revived for about an hour. It was during this period that I was supposed to have been seen by Doris Leatherbarrow walking down the stairs. Mrs Leatherbarrow was so convinced she’d seen me that my mother, already in a nervous panic, telephoned the army to check that I had not deserted, “because if he has, please don’t put him in prison because he’s a good boy really”. The military machine sprang into action and located my whereabouts, informing my mother that I was in hospital and I should have let her know of this; therefore, I would be disciplined at a later stage, which I was. Two weeks confined to barracks. All this further aggravated my mother’s ‘nerves, nearly sending her over the edge and resulting in the fracturing of relations with the lunatic who had for many years drained my quota of custard creams.

  No-one could believe this nonsense, except that prior to the rupturing of relations with my mother, Doris Leatherbarrow described to her the clothes I was wearing when she allegedly saw me on the stairs. I should have been in uniform when admitted to the military hospital, but was excused from wearing it because it was the weekend, and therefore I was off duty. I had bought my entire outfit, from the drainpipe trousers to the winkle-pickers, in Germany and had never worn those clothes in England, yet she described them, or so I was told, in detail.

  No doubt my sideways entrance to the world would have been manna from heaven to aid the portentous ramblings of Mrs Leatherbarrow had she known of it. I can just imagine it:

  “Oo, Jean! That’s why ’ee keeps breaking ‘is arm and walking backwards. I think ’ee’s being guided along a different path than us.”

  Perhaps she did know about my sideways entrance into the world. For many years I wondered whether this crone had in fact put a spell on me, and even now I sometimes shudder at the thought that I may have spent my life wandering down a pre-ordained path locked in a force-field emanating from her secreted psyche. We don’t keep any biscuits in our house, and tea bags negate the anxiety associated with the thought of surreptitiously probing the innards of a tea cup for signs of sideways inclinations.

  Chapter 2

  Alfie - The Seven-Year-Old Gynaecologist

  I am sitting shivering on the lavatory. No coal, no warmth. Frost and draughts. My father is standing at the chipped crazed basin lathering his face with a ragged shaving brush that has seen better days and he is singing I Dream of Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair in his rich baritone voice which, when he was a boy soprano at Sefton, had once graced the towering arches of Liverpool Cathedral in front of King George V. His aquiline reflection serenades him from the fogged, cracked, ancient mirror above the freezing taps. Steam spirals up from the dented tin kettle perched on the edge of the battleship-grey crusty bath - a spacious affair which at its zenith would have been the pride of a privileged family, but had since become a forlorn and decaying manifestation of past affluence.

  “Dad”. No reply.

  “DAD!

  “You silly little sod! I’m trying to shave. I’ll cut my bloody throat if you shout like that. What do you want? If it’s your bottom you want wiping, you’re big enough to do it yourself.”

  “Dad - where do I come from?”

  “Bloody Liverpool, that’s where you come from. Now get on with you bloody business and don’t be so bloody daft.”

  “Dad - who made me?”

  “Ask your mother.”

  “She told me to ask you. Anyway, I know
’cos Aflie Littlehales told me.”

  “What do you mean, you know?”

  “Alfie Littlehales said you made me with your tommie by putting it in mum.”

  “Now I HAVE cut myself. Look what you have made me do, you silly little sod. Get out of here and leave me alone or I’ll take my belt to you. And don’t let me catch you with that dirty little nomark or you will feel the back of my hand!”

  The threats were empty threats. For all the bluster he never raised a finger to me, save for the day when - again under the influence of my guide and mentor through my early childhood, the nomark Alfie Littlehales - I boldly leapt in front of a hearse carrying a corpse on its journey to the fires of oblivion. It was a typical game of ‘chicken’ we were engaged in, but unbeknown to me the driver of the hearse was my father. The cortège came to an unscheduled and undignified standstill on the corner of Church Road and Wesley Street. Out from the driver’s seat jumped an extremely angry man while I stood mortified, rooted to the spot like a rabbit trapped in bright headlights. Alfie, on the other hand, was away down the road at an ass’s gallop. As I said, until that day my father had never raised a finger to me, and even at that juncture it was his foot that just scraped my rear end as I regained sensibility and ran. When I arrived home I didn’t mention the event to my mother but mooched about the room for the remainder of the day in a haze of apprehensive foreboding.

  “Do you know what this little bugger’s been up to, Jean? He’s taken to jumping in front of bloody cars. Not just any old car, but bloody funeral cars. Not just any bloody funeral car, but the one I am driving loaded up with a bloody body! If I catch him with that little nomark again, I’ll take the bloody skin off his backside.”

  And that was it. As usual, he didn’t take his belt off to thrash me as was normally threatened in situations of a similar nature, but I made myself scarce nonetheless.

  The undertaker my father worked for lied to me that he kept a turkey behind his office door to gobble up naughty boys. He wore a black bowler hat and a button-popping waistcoat with a gold watch and chain and pin-striped trousers. He was a spherical little person of the W C Fields variety who rolled when he walked. When I first met him I didn’t know what an undertaker was. I assumed that he undertook to do things for people and made boxes for them. In a sense I was correct. Outside his little office, on one side were housed the big black limousines which my father maintained and drove, and on the other side was the box-making department. The unique blend of oil, petrol, varnish and sawdust is an aroma which still lives with me.

  The undertaker’s wife was a buxom woman who towered over him. She wore an enormous black fur coat with a matching hat rather like a cooking pot without a handle. The shoulders of the coat were so wide that she had to enter the office sideways. One day she grabbed me and kissed me on the cheek, leaving a big red damp smudge on the side of my face. It was she who informed me that there was no turkey behind the office door, and the noises I heard coming from his office were sounds made by the undertaker himself to keep me out of his office because he did not want my sticky little fingers on his typewriter keys, or the machine clogging with chewing gum. Also, there was the issue of the disappearing typing paper and pencils.

  His office, garage and workshop were ideally situated for his profession, for it was opposite the back-to-back infested dwellings of Chapel Street, a street I never set foot in for fear of becoming a victim of a disease called diphtheria and dying, or so I was told on numerous occasions. Also close by was the mortuary, which had served his business well during the recent war years. When I was a little older, I would scale the outside wall after business hours, in the morbid hope that someone had left the odd corpse lying around. I sometimes played with the children I knew from this area but I was aware that they lived a harder, more brutal, existence than me. I was sometimes called a ‘proddy dog’, not knowing that this was a Catholic abusive expression for a Protestant. Nevertheless, we rubbed along in a guarded fashion.

  ***

  There was a little boy who used to come and visit his grandmother at the bottom of the mean cobbled street next to our house. It was near a bomb-site and an air-raid shelter which had been reborn as the unofficial headquarters of a motley assortment of the children of seamen, dockers and labourers. There they would ‘play’, and one of their favourite games was tormenting this little boy whose name I do not recall, but whose sad little pinched face is etched bold in my memory.

  He looked much like his contemporaries, but at an early stage in life I learned that appearances can deceive, for this little boy was unable to speak. He would wring his hands and contort his face but the only sounds that he was able to produce were whining noises interspersed with grunts. The more excited he became, the more frequent the grunts tumbled from his lips.

  However, the games he assumed he was playing were sport for others. A sport more entertaining than squashing frogs, pissing in letterboxes, or even dancing around swearing and spitting at old mad May, a poor demented soul. She manifested all the physical signs of a troubled and disturbed mind. Her hair was arranged in an institutionalised fashion, cropped just below the neck with no attempt at styling and her sad but watchful eyes were constantly darting about bird-like on the lookout for imagined and sometimes real attacks on her person. She wore a long grey raincoat which trailed at her feet and she muttered incoherently as she shuffled along the street in her carpet slippers. At least she could shout at her tormentors. As for their supposed playmate, there was no fear of reprisals. They could poke him, pull his ears, kick him, pinch him and much, much worse. Speech came from his eyes, for his mouth was merely an opening for food, and the words that tumbled hotly down his crinkly little cheeks said, or so I believed, “Please don’t - I want to be friends.”

  After an hour or so, his sister would come out into the street to take him home, and she would mistake the words pouring out of his eyes for common tears. She would tell his tormentors in the guise of playmates that he was tired and that it was time for him to go home. As he toddled off up the street clutching his sister with his tiny hand, unable to discharge the belly-sized sob held inside him, the assumed friends of this little boy would snigger.

  Later in my bed, I would cry common tears, not words, and ask God why the little boy could not talk. I never received a reply.

  ***

  Alfie Littlehales was a string bean of a child, of the species which grew up after a war he had never experienced, but which made him what he was - rickety, malnourished, myopic and very spotty. Also he tended to accumulate boils on the back of his neck. Because the stark facts of his circumstances were neither known - nor cared for - by him, he was living, breathing evidence that regardless of what obstacles life can throw at some of us, our lives are not meaningless; nor need they be dismal and cast by worry. He whistled. Incessantly and discordantly. He emanated a peculiar odour of stale biscuits. His NHS spectacles with their pink-encased wire rims always seemed not quite to fit, and thus he was prone to jerk his head spasmodically sideways, to get them to slip back into position. His thin legs were slightly cabriole and his feet, which were rather large in contrast to the rest of his build, were made even more prominent by the addition of a pair of heavily scuffed boots which were several sizes too large for him. They were scuffed to the extent that the black leather on the toe end revealed patches of a grey fuzzy substance that resembled cardboard more than leather. He kicked everything - tin cans, bottles, stones, cigarette packets and anything else in the road that was kickable. These boots had metal rims on the soles at the toe end and at the heel, and if he scraped his heel hard on the pavement he could make sparks fly, a trick he performed regularly for me. The backs of these boots were also ruthlessly scuffed as a result of many idle hours spent sitting on a wall swinging his legs backwards and forwards against it. I was jealous of his boots. They were manufactured to be indestructible and to give lifelong service regardless of the size
of the feet of their occupants. They were boots designed for the poorer sections of the community and were considered to be one up from the lowest caste - that of those who wore no footwear, like Joey Dewsbury who once tried to kill me because I was a Protestant, or at least that is what he was telling me when he was throttling me on the ground. My mother used to threaten me with imprisonment in a pair of these supposedly imperishable boots if I didn’t stop scuffing the toes of my brother’s oversized and scuff-free cast-offs, although I knew even then that I would never be so fortunate as to own a pair of them, for pride was redolent - regardless of the lack of finances due to jockeys falling off horses and blind horses running into fences.

  I was walking on the big field when I met Alfie kicking broken bricks and throwing a chair leg for Spike, a local terrier of unknown provenance. The field wasn’t really very big and wasn’t really a field. It was a lumpy patch of wasteland and broken bricks, with rough hillocks of grass growing over the remnants of what once had been buildings. Some outside walls were left still intact despite the Luftwaffe’s futile attempts to flatten Liverpool and were ideal training areas for practising climbing garden walls. Spike the dog, however, was not interested in the chair leg. He had caught the attention of a saucy little female who was playfully dancing around him. Off they went across the big field on a journey of desire and sociable exhilaration. We followed at a leisurely pace; I was oblivious to what was to be the outcome of this peculiar behaviour by Spike, who was usually only too happy to retrieve chair legs. Alfie, on the other hand, seemed to be in possession of some clandestine intimate knowledge regarding Spike’s perplexing and irrational conduct. Eventually we encountered the two dogs in the middle Church Road about thirty yards from my home. They were adhered together. I was puzzled and a little unnerved at the sight, but Alfie seemed shrewdly nonchalant.