I Came Out Sideways

by George Porter

  “Oh, a man of GOD, are yew? Yews is a bloody big fat clod-hopping busy body, that’s what yews is.”

  Algy bent down, lifted the brick, gently retrieving the toad from its hiding place, and carried it to a clump of weeds in the corner of the bomb-site, where he deposited it. He returned to where he had left his bicycle, replaced the stolen pump on the frame, mounted the bike and wobbled away over the rubble and into the street. He turned his head when he reached the street, nodding momentarily in the direction of the now deflating priest. A tear was trickling down his wizened face.

  “A man of God, ay, a man of God.”

  As he went on his way, he hummed - falteringly - the tune of All Things Bright and Beautiful.

  What I learned that day was that goodness is not necessarily in the eye of the beholder.

  ***

  Albert Faulkner had a dirty face and could draw horses’ heads and cowboy hats. He taught me these skills, and also how to fashion a horse’s head in plasticine. He wasn’t of a very sunny disposition, Albert, and he appeared to get regularly picked on by our contemporaries resulting in adenoidal cataclysmic wailings when he was tied to a lamppost and they danced around him. Nonetheless, he was my friend and he was much more acceptable to my father, regardless of his dirty face and his foghorn-like blasts of anguish when captured by a hunting party on the warpath looking for a paleface to scalp, which was usually him. It was highly unlikely that he would lead me astray, unlike the nomark Littlehales. Besides, our mothers were acquainted and they lived just around the corner from us, about five yards from the lamppost which - when not being used as a totem pole or the upright for a rudimentary swing - I was always colliding with when walking backwards.

  The Faulkners lived in an end-of-terrace at the top of Wesley Street quite conveniently next to a bomb-site. Like the bomb-site, it was devoid of furnishings. The table was covered in newspapers, and I distinctly remember drinking out of a jam jar while sitting drawing the heads of horses.

  Mrs Faulkner was toothless, permanently wore a headscarf and overall, and always seemed to be purposefully shuffling somewhere in carpet slippers. She was a kindly lady, much worn down by strife. Her husband never spoke to anyone, probably not even to her, and walked with his head bent slightly sideways towards the ground as if he were looking for something. I believe he worked on the docks when there was work available, although there must have been many times when he trudged to the docks and found that his face didn’t fit, because at that time getting work there was akin to attending a slave auction. The indignity of being herded like an animal into a shed alongside hundreds of other hopefuls desperate to be accepted for a day of back-breaking work on the whim of a gaffer who had his own agenda, was the probable reason why he didn’t talk and walked with his head bent towards the ground. Mrs Faulkner scrubbed anything she could for other people in return for a few coppers.

  Maisie Faulkner was betrothed to Ivor, an American GI stationed at Burtonwood airbase from where every mighty B17 Flying Fortress bomber that flew in World War II was assembled and maintained to return Germany’s fire with remorseless intensity. I didn’t come into contact with Ivor, nor did I see a great deal of Maisie, although I do recollect her as a willowy figure with long hair and with a bump in the front. I did benefit from her relationship with Ivor in the form of American candy and various other treats filtered down through Albert’s muddy fingers. The muddy fingers were ever-present because of Albert’s fixation with digging in the dirt with ice-lolly sticks in a quest to liberate ants from their underground prisons.

  Not only was Albert a friend and liberator of incarcerated ants (except for the red ones, which bit him), but he was the custodian of a menagerie in his back yard. In an assortment of jars and buckets lived newts from the ponds in the public gardens at the bottom of South Road, frogs and toads reared from tadpoles, one of which was probably the cause of Algy’s rant, and red-throated sticklebacks from the little stream which meandered alongside Sniggery Woods. An assortment of blood-suckers (pond life of indeterminate provenance) acquired from the canal was also incarcerated in an old enamel bowl and had to be approached with great caution. There was a grass snake that was once the pride of the zoo but had escaped and a pigeon with only one leg. Some of the frogs were my property. When they were tadpoles they had resided for a very short period in the decayed bath at 4 Church Road until an extremely serious discussion with my mother about my domestic responsibilities and that should the tadpoles still be in residence when my father returned home the plug would be pulled, they would be flushed away, and I would be severely dealt with by a man who never hit me.

  Fortunately she was not at home the day the rat arrived in a cardboard box. It had been captured at the outlet pipe of a sewer disgorging effluent directly into the River Mersey which was an interesting play area for children when the tide was out. However, Martha was in residence and took the matter in hand with hardly a word said. The box containing the rat was stuffed into my mother’s gas cooker and the supply was switched full on. A couple of minutes later the window was opened to disperse the fumes and negate the possibility of an explosion, and then the oven door was opened and out staggered the half-gassed rat. It was finally dispatched with an iron frying pan. My mother wasn’t told of this incident, probably because a rat had been in her oven and her frying pan had been used as the ultimate weapon of destruction.

  “Don’t ever bring a rat in here again, or it will be your head that goes in the gas oven.”

  I sincerely believed she was quite capable of gassing me. After all, she was in league with a butcher who would chop my fingers off and make them into sausages.

  Sniggery Woods is no invention. It really exists, and was a haven for innocent adventure and the gathering of blackberries to be pooled by a group of fantasy warriors equipped with bamboo bows and arrows assembled from plundered canes from the gardens of the local landed gentry. The blackberries were taken back to Wesley Street for the construction of a pie built by Mrs Faulkner, along with the day’s catch of sticklebacks in jam jars. The location of Sniggery Woods, which I thought was secret and only known to a select few, is two stops along the Liverpool-to-Southport line from Waterloo to Hall Road where the posh people lived. To me, people who lived in council houses were posh. It is situated about half a mile along a road from the station and down a narrow track which leads to a small bridge over a stream. This place was a haven serendipitous to a small child growing up on a fault line that separated affluence from poverty.

  When all the world seemed full of fun

  Our childhood was a never-ending dream

  Of castles, kings, and wars we won

  On horses made of plasticine

  Our bamboo bows stretched taut with twine

  Our arrows tipped with sticky roadside tar

  We fought as soldiers of the line

  And won imaginary war

  The bomb-site bricks our forts became

  And slates from blasted shattered roofs our floors

  And stealing milk was thought fair game

  From unsuspecting neighbours’ doors

  The berry’s juice tattooed our chins

  Its piercing thorns our untaught fingers ripped

  The pillaged fruit bounced in our tins

  As home against the setting sun we tripped

  Its carmine shafts expunged our sins

  The blood-red throat of stickleback

  The golden silky skin of flashing newt

  The shiny beetle, oil slick black

  The admirals aboard their moot

  The dog was more than just a friend

  We understood the language of the bark

  He often warned with shouts from round the bend

  “Beware - the keeper of the park.”

  Chapter 3

  Awareness

  Rheumati
c fever came early in my childhood. It came earlier than my friendship with Alfie Littlehales and Albert Faulkner. I recollect little of it, apart from the pain, an inability to move, and my brother prodding me through the rails of my cot. I was nursed at home for about three months by my mother and the attention of Dr Novak, who called in regularly and even brought me sweets. I came to understand later that he was Polish and that he came from a world much more devastated than anything we in Britain could ever envisage, regardless of the near direct hit on Buckingham Palace (giving royalty the cause to brag that they were also suffering the same inconveniences as their loyal subjects in the East End of London), the blazing eruption of Bootle, and my father’s scuffle on the roof of the Lion and Unicorn - next door to us - with an incendiary device which failed in its attempt to scorch to the ground an establishment frequented by the quasi-Apaches of the region, the warriors bloated with fire water and their women daubed in garish war paint. Some of them would urinate in our outside hallway after a night on the warpath. Others would even indulge in carnal activities in the jigger, the corner of which was Algy’s patch during the day. The great sadness is that the Lion and Unicorn is still standing, whereas the German rubble machine managed to reduce to a heap of ashes the red-brick library only fifty yards away.

  “Dad, I found a balloon in the jigger.”

  “It’s not a balloon. Go and throw it down the lavatory now and wash your bloody hands.”

  “It is a balloon - I’ve found one before on the shore but I couldn’t blow it up because there was a knot in it.”

  “I will swing for this bloody child, Jean. IT IS NOT A BLOODY BALLOON. THROW IT AWAY AND WASH YOUR HANDS. Don’t ever pick one of those bloody things up again or you will get a disease and die.”

  “Well what is it then?”

  “Never you mind what it is or what it bloody well isn’t, just do as you are told. And stay out of the back entry.”

  From this disjointed verbal exchange I learned that things may not be what you think they are, regardless of whether they are identical to what you think they are, added to which you can catch a disease if you pick something up in the road and will probably die. I still pick things up in the road but am very circumspect regarding the manner in which I pick them up, and many years ago came to distinguish between a contraceptive and a balloon.

  My father sincerely regretted his hand in the fate of this house of drunken dissolute blood-letting and mawkish off-key singing. I enjoyed listening to it late at night. Irene, Goodnight Irene and Cigarettes and Whisky and Wild, Wild Women wafted through our bedroom window and are still contained in a rusting filing cabinet in the cluttered vaults of my brain. For me, a fortunate aspect concerning the pub next door was that I was never ever reproved for the many happy and constructive hours I spent kicking a football repetitively against the back doors of the Lion and Unicorn in the optimistic and unfounded assumption that one day, as a result of my constant and diligent practice, I would play inside-right for Liverpool alongside the great Billy Liddell. An added attraction to my training area would be the arrival of the draymen with their barrels of beer. Instead of chasing me away, they would take a break and put me ‘in goal’, kicking balls for me to practise my non-existent goalkeeping skills and giving me tips on how to head the ball.

  “I should have let the bloody place burn down for all the bloody good it’s done.”

  When I was probably at the recovery stage from rheumatic fever, one day my mother told the broom to stop walking up the wall. Whether I was hallucinating or not I do not know, but what I do know is that she disappeared from my life for a short period. I believe, although I am not sure, that she had a nervous breakdown. I distinctly remember my father cleaning the grate and laying coal for the fire - something he had never done.

  No doubt the combination of my illnesses - rheumatic fever, three broken arms before the age of seven and two bouts of pneumonia, to say nothing of severely abscessed ears, tonsils and adenoids removed, perennial bouts of impetigo, biddy infestation and boils on my neck as big as bloody gob-stoppers (according to my father) - was reason enough to mentally disturb my mother. Add to this the matter of my father’s gambling on horses that ran like crabs and it is little wonder that she took too many Beecham’s pills and tranquilisers, though to little effect.

  And then there was my brother, over three years older than me and extremely smart. I could only draw cowboy hats, but he could draw speedboats and make paper aeroplanes. He also read books. Biggles was his favourite, which he read avidly. My weekly periodical was the Dandy. I thought he disliked me with an intensity which still stings, but in retrospect perhaps he had very good reason. I was a pain in the arse. I was always ill. My nasal passages were congealed with a substance not unlike candle wax; my ears discharged a smelly yellow gelatinous substance and I yowled a lot. To top it all, he was forcibly pressed into being my carer whenever we went outside to play cops and robbers in the street until I was about six years old. Because of my delicate medical condition he was sidelined in the parental care stakes and this no doubt caused him to be less than hospitable to a toddling whinger with various sticky substances running down the front of a shirt that once was his property. “MICHAEEEEL! - where’s our Georgie?” was a cry which still subsists in his head to this day. He also took the blame for my proclivity for walking into lampposts backwards, getting covered in shite (some of which was the effluent disgorged from the business end of Spike), falling into ponds and getting stuck in the mud of the River Mersey when the tide was out.

  As we grew, so did the mutual antipathy fuelled by my father, who was of the opinion that my brother should get his nose out of his bloody books and get out and emulate his younger brother who was in serious training to be Billy Liddell’s right-hand man. His approval of my footballing aspirations and his unjustified denigration of my brother’s literary aspirations gave me the edge in the skirmishes of our sibling rivalry. This was odd, because such a tirade of nonsense came from a man without any formal education at all, yet who not only owned Winston Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples but had also read it, to say nothing of a whole set of The Listener collected throughout the period of World War II. He was a man who could quote Shakespeare, Longfellow and Tennyson, but he could never back a winner. He knew every bird and the markings of their eggs, he could catch a small fish in the canal with a bent pin on cotton baited with a piece of bread (which remarkable feat I evidenced), and he could take a Rolls Royce’s innards to pieces and put them together again, which he did surreptitiously over the period of a week when he was given charge of one to service in the lock-up garage of the owner. The set of Churchill’s History was stowed away among the treasures of my grandfather’s store of souvenirs, until one day I noticed it was there no longer - Rosie’s junk shop had gone upmarket, and I was sent by my mother with the shopping bag to load up with compressed coal-dust briquettes from a man at the railway sidings. Stowed away in the cupboard in our bedroom were my father’s pin-striped trousers, a long white silk scarf and some very natty patent leather dancing shoes. They disappeared at about the same time as the books and no doubt took the same journey.

  To know is not to be

  There is no question

  Knowledge is not power

  But it can switch on a light

  Chapter 4

  The Scholar

  Zorro, Flash Gordon and Popeye-v-Socrates

  The ferry creaked against New Brighton’s quay, disgorging snotty kids with scabby legs, curse-wise and cock-sure in their innocence. “We haven’t paid you, we haven’t paid you you fat old bastard, we haven’t paid you! “Scaling the pier to frighten New Brighton; pint-sized Vikings marauding in the sun. Scab-faced, pockmarked, rowdy dockers’ offspring with boils on their necks and lice in their heads. Protégés of Empire’s glorious sham and spawn of war’s magnificent broken vows. The truth behind the lies which promised much, th
e lies behind the truth that war was won.

  Let them be. Don’t anger them, let them be. They’ve never been held, they’ve never been kissed. They’re off to New Brighton to see the rat as big as a dog with teeth like a horse. They’re off to New Brighton to fight on the beach and dig for some gold beneath the silt. They’ll beg for a tanner to buy an ice (a Pendleton’s Twicer is twice as nice). They’ll bully the bourgeois from Blundellsands and yocker their phlegm at the maiden aunt. They’ll frighten the donkey to make him jump and stamp on the crabs because they’re alive.

  Then they’ll go home to a plate of cold scouse. Back to the city of Tate and Lyle’s gold and into the realm of the world of the slums. Running from the bizzie down the jigger, laughing at the strength of weakness.

  Cursing creation and the love of Christ.

  Yes, when I was about ten this was the world I knew a little of. I wasn’t like them, but I shared guilt by association. I wore my brother’s shoes, but never boots. My stitched-together trousers were washed, and the holes in the elbows of my brother’s handed-down pullover were neatly darned.

  There is a sort of wisdom that grows with age. It is more precious and much more painfully gained than the born-wise variety. It is self-realisation, not self-belief, and it always comes with hindsight. I had no idea I lived on a social fault-line which would be the catalyst for my pre-ordained journey through life. The words of Socrates, which I did not read until much, much later, rang true to me at the age of 10 through the heroic deeds of Flash Gordon - it is not living that matters, but living rightly. While Cherie Blair, who later lived around the corner from me on the other side of the fault-line, was doing her prep and the vitriolic soon-to-be-alcoholic Anne Robinson was learning all the withering skills of a pseudo upper-class poseur in Blundellsands - her mother was a market stall holder - I was learning philosophy from Popeye - I am what I am, and that’s all that I am, morals from Superman - I stand for truth and justice, and ethics from Billy Liddell. I didn’t learn much that made sense to me at all at school. Ethics from Billy Liddell? Yes, indeed. Zorro also lurked in the background, but cannot be categorised. I suppose I saw him as an example of triumph over adversity. To me, the exploits of Flash Gordon were no more fanciful than the adventures of Homer’s Odysseus or Virgil’s Aeneas. The ethics of Billy Liddell still ring true and in accord with those presumed to have been penned by Aristotle. Superman flew with the gods and made mock of mortal morality and feeble insouciance. The Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers were my introduction to the plays of Aristophanes. What is so advantageous to the unread is that in their world ancient Greek and Latin translations by Victorian academics are no requirement to getting the message; in fact the dusty archaisms associated with them cloud it. The magic of the silver screen turned the abstract declension of which I knew nothing and still know little, into the legitimacy of a language which did not require Greek and Latin translations to grasp the elemental force of literature. To enjoy rhyme and metre, and indeed to write it, one doesn’t need to know anything of the mechanics of dactyls or assonance. They are-ever present in our language. The iambus is merely a heartbeat. Paul McCartney and Chuck Berry are living breathing evidence of this.