I Came Out Sideways

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I Came Out Sideways Page 5

by George Porter


  We come along on Saturday morning

  Greeting everybody with a smile

  Keep your sunny side up, up

  Hide the side that gets blue, do!

  If you’ve eleven sons in a row

  Football teams make money you know!

  Stand upon your legs

  Be like two fried eggs

  Keep your sunny side up!

  This, to the accompaniment of the flashing chromium rainbow-coloured gyrating organ, piloted by a nervous keyboard supremo dripping perspiration from his shiny balding pate, with heavy black horn-rimmed spectacles slipping down his nose and a black skewwhiff bow tie, drenched in a shower of apple cores, chewing gum, pellets of silver paper and screwed up sweet wrappers. The Odeon on Crosby Road was a place of learning far more attractive and informative than the dour official educational establishment of Wesley Street Methodist Primary School. I couldn’t spell ‘Odeon’ then and had no idea that the word is of ancient Greek origin. To me the Odeon was the equivalent of the lecture hall I was never to know and life, real life, was portrayed and acted out by cartoon characters, movie star slapstick comics, and serious heroes and villains who won and lost respective trials and misfortunes. The goodie always won, the baddie always lost. Sylvester never made a meal of Tweetie Pie no matter how hard he tried.

  “Well, here we are again children. It is nice to see so many happy, smiling faces.”

  “We want the picture, we want the picture, we want the picture, we want the picture.”

  “Now calm down, calm down. I’ve got one or two announcements to make.”

  “We want the picture, we want the picture, we want the picture, we want the picture.”

  “First of all, I have to tell you that you must not throw your chewing gum at the screen or stick it on the seats. The screen cost a lot of money and if it gets damaged we shall just have to close the cinema. Now we don’t want that, do we children?”

  “We want our money back, we want our money back, we want our money back!”

  The organ again flashed and revolved, then struck up the bright cheery number Happy Birthday to You, and simultaneously a stampede of miniature wildebeest charged the stage all claiming it to be their birthday and therefore their right to a lollipop supplied by the unfortunate manager.

  When the stampede was over and a semblance of relative calm was restored, with the organist revolving thankfully into musical infinity, time stood still for us all as the lights dimmed and the curtains opened. Sometimes the image of a lady in a flowing white gown holding a flaming torch aloft flickered onto the screen to delighted cheers from the audience. Sometimes it was a roaring lion, and sometimes a muscular man beating a large gong. It was time for Ollie to bash poor old Stan and for Trigger to thunder across the screen with Roy Rogers astride him chasing the outlaw in the black hat. The only goodie who wore a big black hat was Hopalong Cassidy. Bluto’s guffaw was silenced once more by Popeye’s bursting physique, transformed after the swift ingestion of a can of spinach. The winsome Olive Oyle was freed from Bluto’s evil and shameless grasp by a blow struck from Popeye’s anchor-emblazoned, muscle-bound forearm, his pipe spinning in his lips, sending the brutal Bluto disappearing skywards, spread-eagled and also spinning. “Toot toot” from the revolving pipe and “yuk, yuk, yuk, yuk, yuk!” from the chortling mouth of Popeye, and a heart-rending “Oh Popeye!” from the delightful and enchanted Olive Oyle.

  After the film show was over, a posse of cowboys would go galloping down South Road to the anguish of tutting old matrons shopping and gossiping. Smacking themselves on their rumps and holding on tight to imaginary reins, the cowboys would be followed by several spitfires swinging to and fro in close formation along the road, with Zorro taking up the rear clad in a flowing navy blue raincoat fastened at the neck with a well-used rag around his face, wearing his cub cap back to front. Lassie ran round and round snapping at passers-by. Thomas Scott’s bakery was on the way home and much fun would be had by telling the lady at the counter to mend her broken biscuits. And the song lingered on:

  Stand upon your legs

  Be like two fried eggs

  Keep your sunny side up

  Until the age of seven most of my time was taken up by pneumonia, yowling, drawing cowboy hats, breaking arms and walking backwards into lamp-posts. Eventually, when I did tentatively put my head through the door at Wesley Street Methodist Infants School minus tonsils and adenoids (the former having been mistakenly removed by an over-zealous surgeon at Bootle Hospital), deserted there by a very thankful mother, I was introduced to a diminutive trusty with a quiff and the shifty look of a tell-tale tit whose tongue should be bit. He was engaged by Miss Waynson, a lanky lady with the regulation corrugated hairstyle of the period and a set of teeth which would do credit to a pony, to show to me the complexities of drawing a house, a smiley face, and a Union Jack. Outside of his official duties he also instructed me in the skill required to pee higher than the top of a urinal and showed me a picture of a woman with no clothes on. He was intent on explaining to me the lack of penis, but my sage Alfie had already imparted this information to me a year or so earlier, and so I was able to explain that his theory relating to the absent penis (in that it was chopped off at birth) was mistaken. He didn’t believe me. Later in the day he told Miss Waynson that I said she had a fanny. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings. Of course, Miss Waynson reported the lie to my mother. On this occasion I was not subjected to the flying slipper, but my pocket-money was stopped and I was threatened with having my mouth washed out with soap and water if ever I were dirty again.

  This was the reason why I missed two episodes of Flash Gordon, and the shenanigans of the Three Stooges. My blood boiled. In retaliation for his disingenuous and spiteful act, I tripped this child up in the playground. Unfortunately, as has predominantly been the sideways situation for me in life, I chose precisely the wrong moment to release my venom, because my act of petulant and violent revenge coincided with the entrance of Miss Waynson into the playground, briskly swinging her bell. I spent the rest of that day sitting on a stool in the corner facing the wall. It could have been worse. I wasn’t required to wear the dunce’s cap, although Jean Munro sometimes did, merely because she came from Seaforth and ponged, or so it seemed to me. However, Mrs Munro terminated this unusual and barbaric practice when she burst into the classroom interrupting a jolly rendition of Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam. She was a tall muscular lady with lank red hair, a long nose and a colourful vocabulary matched by a threatening demeanour. Miss Waynson was elbowed to one side with a glancing blow, and Jean Munro was taken by her scrawny arm and marched out of the dumbfounded class, picking up the dunce’s cap on the way and carrying it out with her as a trophy. She never returned, and neither did the cap.

  During the short period in which I was acquainted with Wesley Street Methodist Church Infants School, it seemed that when I was not singing hymns I was facing the wall. I was accused of much but was innocent of most. When a good deal of the lead was stripped from Wesley Street Methodist church roof, probably by Yonner home on parole assisted by his apprentice Yocker, both of whom had considerable experience in the liberation of scrap metal and the beneficial disposal of it, I was put in the frame again by the same child. Fortunately for me, this time his lie was unsustainable because I was only about three feet nine tall and even Miss Waynson could not be daft enough to imagine that I was capable of such a physically challenging feat.

  Regardless of the Wesleyan approach to educating infants, I nevertheless learned the basic skills of reading. Janet and John were partly responsible for this, because I can still remember the wonder and awe I felt at the sight of these two scrubbed cherubs sitting in their limousine, their pristine images gazing out of a dog-eared book, with their daddy in a trilby sitting complacently at the steering wheel and mummy, wearing a scribbled-in moustache and spectacles, with a big hat on he
r head, carrying colourful boxes of niceties into the open car door from the adjacent shop with the proprietor at his entrance waving a cheery goodbye. Their images were unreal to me - unlike my hero Flash Gordon, spurting across the universe in a large flaming dustbin-shaped spaceship, Hermes-like, in tights and boots with a Robin Hood hat on his head sprouting a long feather, in his noble quest to rescue the Earth from the evil clutches of Ming the Merciless. Nevertheless, I became able to read expletives scrawled on walls as well as to scrawl them surreptitiously on walls myself in the company of the sage.

  Another recollection I have of this period was the day that my midget tormentor, still obsessed with his misconception regarding the absence of external female genitalia, coerced the daughter of a fish and chip shop proprietor in South Road, to display to us her operation scar in the back yard of her father’s premises. I considered it to be too high up her abdomen to have any connection with genital mutilation. She told us that it was an appendix operation scar. I was none the wiser at this disclosure, but the midget was insistent that the word dick was an abbreviation of the word appenDICK, therefore what she was displaying was her dick scar. The discussion came to an abrupt and unseemly termination when her father appeared at his back door brandishing a frying-pan and threatening to call the police.

  My parents never learned about this incident because I was always sent for my chips to Mr Lloyd, who whistled while he fried. His shop was on the corner of Chapel Street, the street where I had been threatened with diphtheria if ever I set foot there. He was the competitor and a far superior chip fryer compared to the South Road chip shop, and he was also a kindly man who treated us to free chips if we brought in a bundle of old newspapers for him to wrap his goods in. Sadly his generosity was abused, because often these old newspapers were scavenged from dustbins on the way to his chip shop, and the four pennies provided for me to buy chips was secreted in a personal slush fund. It saddens me now to reflect that he must have thought that my parents read such scandalous rags as Tit-Bits and Reveille. It may be for this reason that many Mancunians’ objectionable description of Liverpudlians being ‘bin dippers’ could possibly have a ring of truth about it.

  When I was a little older, I had a humiliating experience regarding the matter of newspapers in exchange for chips in the form of an older brother of one of my soon to be new-found friends from the stable side of the fault-line. He was someone I should have despised, but at the time - in all innocence - I did not. He had an oily obsequious smile and an air of cunning malice. People from his side of the fault-line didn’t exchange newspapers for food or eat jam butties. He confronted me in the road one day when I was on my way to the chip shop with a bundle of newspapers and taunted me viciously about the matter. I hotly denied my intent, but to no avail. This unpleasant confrontation affected me for many years, intensifying the foundations of an inferiority complex, the remains of which still exist. I had assumed that I was acceptable to his family, but a nagging suspicion that he poisoned this friendship still lingers.

  From my first educational experience I learned never to tell anyone anything if it could be misconstrued by a third party, and never to eat chips out of newspaper, because I knew where some of that newspaper had come from. Also, regardless of what Miss Waynson said, you do not need a space suit to travel in outer space as long as you stay inside the spaceship and it stays airtight. I still cannot draw a Union Jack. Cowboy hats are my forte.

  ***

  I was soon out of the clutches of the Wesley Street Methodist academy of singing, praying and scaring little children shitless regarding what the devil does to naughty ones, and into the junior department of the big boys’ school on Crosby Road. Although it was called the big boys’ school, I was too short to be considered as such. The bigger big boys, aged over eleven, were stabled in adjoining premises which were fenced off from the smaller big boys for obvious reasons. However, the railings separating big from little were devoid of spikes and barbed wire, and so the occasional early-morning ambush of a hapless small big boy was all too easy. This was one reason why sometimes I arrived late to school and was castigated for it, although to be given a bad conduct mark was preferable to being hoisted over the railings and deposited in the crusher, an experience I managed to avoid until I became one of the big big boys, initially becoming involved in the stalking and catching little big boys at the behest of bigger big boys for them to perform their pants-pooing torture on. Because I purposely never managed to catch anyone, I was punished by experiencing the full and overwhelming agony of the crusher, a rudimentary device which was merely a narrow channel of tarmac between the railings and the big big boys’ toilets, at the bottom of which was a brick wall. The unfortunate captured little big boy was deposited at the end of the channel and the big big boys lined up with their feet on the railings pushing backwards. It probably was not dissimilar to the late Middle Ages’ custom for dealing with witches, although stones were piled upon them and not boys.

  All the while, a very big big boy - the architect of the procedure - would be at the entrance to the crusher on the lookout for Gotch, a teacher with extremely baggy trousers and a Hitleresque hairstyle, who was renowned for his stealth and ingenuity when creeping upon a malefactor, grabbing him by the neck, shouting “GOTCHA” and frog-marching him off to the headmaster for six of the best. Toilet malingerers were easily caught by Gotch, who took pride in waiting until he could see the spirals of smoke appearing over the top of the urinal wall and then pouncing like a lion after gazelles. I was terrified of him even before I was elevated to the big big boys section of school society. I once saw him watching at me over the dividing railings with a beady-eyed frown when I was standing on top of a heap of recently delivered coke, beating my chest and calling out to no-one that I was king of the castle.

  The Rubicon was still to be crossed; I was only eight years old at the time so still had a couple of years before Gotch would be in a position to sink his talons into my neck. In the meantime I had the less formidable, but the more deviously sadistic, Miss Nelson to worry about, coupled with even more singing of unintelligible jingles.

  Miss Nelson was a dour spinster of indeterminate age. She was stern, poker-backed, grey in clothing, complexion and hair - a monochrome person - and she didn’t like children. If anyone coughed they were in deep trouble and were sent to sit outside the hall. The regular coughers were instructed to sit on their hands at the front of the hall and told that if they felt a cough coming on, they must swallow it. There were times when I went purple trying to swallow a cough and on one occasion I filled my trousers. Because the resultant smell seeped into all corners of the hall, it was impossible to tell where it was coming from, and to disguise my guilt in this matter I joined in the general expressions of revulsion.

  “Which one of you has made that disgusting smell?”

  A major coughing fit ensued among the budding reluctant choristers interspersed with cries of protestation resounding through the hall.

  “Sometimes you children behave like animals. You should all be kept in a zoo.”

  She slammed down the lid of the piano, gathered together her music and strutted out of the hall with a handkerchief to her face. Moments later, a grinning caretaker tottered in, opened all the windows and told us we could go home.

  That afternoon I dawdled through the back streets in the uncertain hope that the smell would abate before I reached home. It didn’t, because when I arrived on South Road opposite the railway station, Jack, the diminutive bent-backed First World War veteran paper-seller who wore his campaign medal on his threadbare overcoat, told me so when I asked if he could smell me. He must have felt sorry for me, because he gave me a penny. He was charged by my mother with the onerous task of scuttling across the road with me every day, a dangerous feat for him to perform in view of the fact that his face was bent towards the ground. Because of his bent back he took more time and risks than me, had I crossed the road alone
. And so I accepted that I was in the shit both literally and metaphorically and approached our home with a mixture of fear and apprehension. My anxiety was unfounded. A kettle was boiled and I was debagged, washed down and given a jam butty. My trousers and underpants were taken away for washing and I was kitted out in a voluminous pair of my brother’s underpants. The matter was never spoken of, even to my father.

  Miss Nelson’s piano-playing skills were undoubtedly concert-hall standard, although her renditions of Lavender’s Blue Dilly Dilly, Old Father Thames Keeps Rolling Along and Caw, Caw, the Carrion Crow became lost in the myriad of trills and musical affectations which so overpowered the melodies that they became drowned in an ocean of superfluous crotchets, quavers and demi-semi-quavers, thus causing her even more angst to add to the coughing outbreak encounters and the phantom pants filler. When she was really on form her body would follow her fibrillating fingers all the way along the keyboard to such a degree that falling off her stool became a distinct possibility. A further difficulty which plagued the singers was in the comprehension and transcription of the lyrics to these mellifluous refrains, which were always scribbled at speed on the blackboard by Miss Nelson in real writing, and then erased before anyone could employ their new-found writing expertise successfully.

 

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