And that’s about all I can remember of the little big boy’s school. What I learned for the future is that being late can be advantageous to one’s health regardless of the disadvantage of censure, that to embellish music is to destroy melody, and that sometimes if you believe you are guilty of what some think is an offence, you may not be, and you might not be punished. Indeed, you may well be rewarded for your fortitude.
Chapter 5
The Paradox
My father cursed constantly, unless he was being very, very serious and then articulation poured out of him with scant use for expletives. Although the word ‘bloody’ was of a minor significance in offensive terminology, it was the source of much embarrassment to me when friends visited. We lived, until Martha absconded with her alleged treasure, in primitive surroundings close to - but never part of - the small pocket of poverty on the one side and the relative material comfort on the other. Why was this? At the time I didn’t know and really didn’t care. Happiness to me was contained in a tin of condensed milk. Just off Church Road ran a leafy suburban lane occupied by people with brass signs outside their doors - late Victorian and Edwardian town-houses surrounded by spacious and well-tended walled gardens whose apple and pear trees were ideal plunder for the likes of Alfie Littlehales with me in tow.
One day, alone in a quest to liberate some apples from the garden of one of these houses, I was confronted by a tall graceful old lady with half-moon spectacles, her silver hair arranged in a bun. I had seen her quite often leaving her house with her shopping basket and striding purposefully along the road. Her house had a brass plate on the door. Her name was Miss Shaw, and she had the letters BSc engraved alongside her name.
“Come here young man, I’d like a word with you.”
I didn’t run away, but stood my ground transfixed on her lawn. She didn’t seem in the least surprised to see me standing frozen under her apple tree. It wasn’t the first time I had climbed over her wall, and she must have observed my juvenile criminal activity from her window. Over a long washing line was thrown a large carpet. She had a cane carpet beater in her hand and was peering at me in a stern fashion over her spectacles. I assumed the carpet beater in her hand was going to be transformed into a trouser beater, but my instinct for self-preservation abandoned me and I remained rooted to the spot.
“Do you think you could beat the dust out of this carpet for me? If you can, then I will give you sixpence.”
I couldn’t believe my luck. Not only did she give me sixpence for my feeble attempt to beat her carpet, but a glass of home-made lemonade and a biscuit. This fortuitous encounter became a regular source of private income and biscuits. Miss Shaw became a trusted confidante who would sometimes talk to me of her past travels, the places she had been on the other side of the world, and how the world shows many kindnesses regardless of the horrors of war. I didn’t really understand what she meant then, but now I do, having in later life been entertained at Madam Hoo Ha’s canteen with palm wine, ceremonial kola nuts and bats’ head soup in a mud hut village deep in sub-tropical African bush by good, caring and much-maligned people. They once tried to make Biafra independent from the nonsense of a country cobbled together and composed of many disparate African nations and cultures, devised by a white man and named Nigeria by his fanatically colonialist wife. Three million of them perished whilst the British government under Harold Wilson, of all people, blockaded humanitarian aid, secretly supplied enormous quantities of arms and ammunition to the corrupt and inept federal government and watched as food rotted on the quayside. John Lennon, to his everlasting credit, returned his OBE in disgust and said why. These people lost not just limbs but whole families, yet even now still manage to retain their sanity.
What I did learn from Miss Shaw was that some of those who are privileged by fate to live on the comfortable side of the fault-line are not without genuine concern for those who, because of the throw of the dice, occupy less privileged territory. Unfortunately, there are not enough of them.
The barrier between the sedate dwellings of Miss Shaw and her neighbours and the adjacent small area of dismal little cobbled streets was the Winter Gardens picture house - Gomorrah without the sodomy. This place smelled bad, and fleas were definitely part of the programme. The odd rat had also been allegedly been seen on the premises, cruising the aisles. We lived just fifty yards from this pit of lurid cinematography which would show films that would now be rated as fairly mild titillation, but to Alfie Littlehales were the bedrock of his source of information regarding the nature of all things carnal. Of course, a spindly spotty child suffering from impetigo would never have been able to con his way through the door, regardless of the relaxed attitude of the management. So industry and cunning overcame the obstacle of the doorman in the form of a nail, which he used to bore a tiny hole through the rear exit doors, small enough to take in half the screen but not large enough to be noticed by anyone cleaning the place, unlikely though this was. Sound was a problem, but a minor one. More important for Alfie were the moving visual images of ladies in swimsuits.
So why was I in this indeterminate area of no-man’s land, sandwiched between feast and famine? We weren’t poor, but we didn’t have money. My father, to his ignominy, would come home on some Friday evenings and stand in a corner of the room with his back to us, counting out from his wages what he thought would be sufficient for our needs the following week and handing it to his benign and nerve-wracked wife. When this did not happen it was probably because he had lost most of his wages on a horse before coming home. What was left was fodder for the bookmaker, whose carpet had been bought with my father’s wages, or so he said, via the horses which, like me, came out of the stalls sideways. We didn’t own a carpet until much later on. Until the day she died, my mother never owned a washing machine or a fridge. Milk was kept cool in a bucket of water and a vacuum cleaner was something which other people had and was hardly a necessity anyway because of the lack of a carpet. Hot water only ran on some Sundays. Much to my lasting shame, I took on board my father’s misogynistic paternal attitude towards domestic requirements, unaware of the basic needs of a family until later life and experience showed me the error of my ways, but by that time it was too late to show normal parenting skills regarding what a family needs and what a family wants. But he knew things, and he never hit me.
One thing he did know was that under no circumstances were we going to leave the home we had, crumbling though it might be. The way he saw it - although I had no idea at the time - was that the fault-line, for all its inconveniences and social uncertainty, for me was a far, far better place to be than living on a faceless estate even if the house there had hot water, three bedrooms, an upstairs lavatory, a garden and electric sockets. For this reason, when we were offered a place near the top of the post-war re-housing waiting list, he refused without telling my mother, opting to stay put. At least we were close to the shore and the relative urban decorum existing in Waterloo generally. Besides, he had several retainers in the area maintaining motor vehicles.
One of these retainers was for a lady who was in effect one of the reasons why my childhood was as happy as it seemed to me. Irene Johnson was the proprietor of G W Johnson, Builders’ Merchants, and she was our landlady. The flat above her offices in which we were ensconced was her contribution to the war effort. As my parents had been ‘bombed out’ of their home in Bootle, Miss Johnson had come to the rescue. The place was crumbling, there was no doubt about that, but her generosity was such that the rent she charged was a pittance.
She was an enormous lady who spilled out over her bicycle when she laboriously plodded along Church Road as stately as a galleon in her olive-green overcoat and basin hat with a flower in it, from her home on the verge of Marine Crescent facing the Mersey, the most delightful aspect of Waterloo which was once home to Victorian sea captains and shipping magnates of Liverpool, the most famous of whom was Thomas Henry Ismay, founder of
the White Star Line and owner of the Titanic.
Miss Johnson looked for the entire world like a good friend of the 1950s British film comedy actress Margaret Rutherford, and she had a certain manner in her speech and facial affectations which affirmed this. She lived in comfortable and genteel surroundings with Emily, a lady I believe was her American cousin, who was of similar although slightly less unwieldy construction and who once tried to dose me with a tablespoon of syrup of figs because she believed I was ‘looking off colour’. In their garden was a large oak tree which I climbed up and refused to come down until the syrup of figs was replaced in the kitchen cupboard. They both ate vast amounts of chocolate, some of which came my way whenever I paid a visit.
They were both Christian Scientists, and were adamant that the body could heal itself without the aid of medicine men. Miss Johnson once confronted the medical profession head on, when her bicycle wobbled a little too far, hit the kerb, and all twenty stone of her crashed to the ground outside the offices of the Crosby Herald. Both to her dismay and anger a passing young journalist witnessed the incident and a report was duly filed with his editor. Despite a broken ankle and severe bruising, not only did she refuse medical assistance but got back on her bike and wobbled off home. She was in her eighties at the time. The broken bone was never set and the twisted limb became a deformity which she refused to acknowledge. I believe she went on to live well into her nineties.
“Now Georgie Porter, what have you been up to? I saw you climbing a wall yesterday. You weren’t stealing apples were you? I have already told you we have an apple tree and you can collect the windfalls whenever you want.”
“I wasn’t, Auntie Reenee.”
“Well then, what were you doing on that wall?”
“Practising climbing, Auntie Reenee.”
“You’re not telling me a fib are you, Georgie Porter? You know I have told you before that Jesus won’t be happy if you are fibbing.”
“No Auntie Reenee. I was practising climbing.”
“Well here’s sixpence, go and buy an ice cream and be a good boy.”
Whenever she saw me, there was always a possibility that she would give me sixpence, so I made it my business to make myself available every time I caught sight of her lumbering along Church Road. She was aware that Algy, the mendacious bookie’s runner, plied his dodgy enterprise from the corner of her business premises opposite the Lion and Unicorn, probably because he had a loyal and regular patron in the form of my father, and I would sometimes see him beating a hasty retreat on his bicycle with his coat tails flapping in the wind, pursued by a very large elderly spinster also on two wheels, but unable to catch him.
On Christmas Eve I would wait excitedly for a surprise at the bottom of our dank stairs, and was never disappointed. After the shop closed, two small brown envelopes would be dropped through the letterbox, clattering to the floor, one addressed in fine copperplate handwriting to my brother, and one to myself. They contained two half-crowns for each of us. No message or card. Just the half-crowns, but I knew who had posted them, for I would see her substantial frame in the porch through the frosted-glass front-door window as she bent to post her glad tidings to two little boys.
Her generosity didn’t end there. Not only did my father service her cousin Emily’s car on Miss Johnson’s behalf, but sometimes it would be lent to him to take us all out for a day at weekends. This is where we crossed the fault-line into the world of affluence and became posh for a day, driving along the Dock Road through wastelands of bombed-out buildings, some with people still - after four years - enduring life among the debris. Pinched women in headscarves and curlers hobbled through the muddle, some dragging bespattered little bundles of children along with them to and from I knew not where. Groups of ragged men with their necks hidden by mufflers and caps would stand around open fires fuelled by splintered wood. These were the people who never even got a foothold on the fault-line, the destiny for most of them being even more uncertain than mine. But for the grace of Irene Johnson and her crumbling remnants of Mr G W Johnson’s Victorian merchant’s residence there walked I, though little I knew it at the time.
On we would travel through the spicy aromas of cargoes delivered from around the world and into the jaws of the smoke-blackened magnificent city, along past St George’s Hall, Liverpool’s strident reply to Athena’s Parthenon, and the mighty Royal Liver Building which was the first skyscraper in England, with its pair of mythical Liver Birds attached to the tops of its twin towers. My father said that they flapped their wings at one o’clock in the morning to try to escape but that they would never be able to because he had bolted them down securely so that they couldn’t fly to Germany. I believed him. Later in life I discovered that his tale (“that’s one with a lid on it!”) was pertinent to the construction of these world-renowned beasts. It is a strange but true irony that the man who created the eighteen-foot tall copper creatures, half gull and half cormorant, was a German. Carl Bernard Bartels, who came to Liverpool in 1887 at the age of twenty-one, took up British nationality, but nonetheless was sent to a prisoner-of-war camp during World War I and then was repatriated to Germany at the end of the war, having to leave his family behind. Not many people in Liverpool were aware that the Liverpool blitzkrieg was being watched over by a pair of mythical birds designed by a German.
Sometimes on the way in to Liverpool we would catch a close-up glimpse of the Mammoth - then the largest floating crane in the world. I had often seen her from the shore a couple of miles away because her home was the Gladstone Dock and occasionally she would venture out into the Mersey. From a distance she looked enormous and when we got close, her two-hundred-foot high jib made me feel like an ant. My father, the fount of all knowledge except for the winning capability of race-horses, said she could lift two hundred tons in one lift and he equated this to about one hundred and fifty cars. He told me that she was sunk in an air raid during the war, but Winston Churchill said that even though she was so enormous she had to be refloated, because we couldn’t win the war without her. She was, and we did.
And then we would drive into the exciting undersea vault of the Mersey Tunnel, which at the time was the longest underwater tunnel in the world. This, for me, was the most exciting and yet unpleasant part of the day out. Travelling underneath the River Mersey for two miles in a motor car twisting and turning through a giant shiny tube and popping out at the other side to look back over the river and see the Liver Birds standing with their wings outspread and the massive sandstone soaring gothic bell tower of the Anglican cathedral, the largest bell tower in the world, gave a graphic indication of just how far we had travelled underwater. Halfway through the tunnel I would be violently sick. I dreaded this regular occurrence on our outings and a paper bag was always at the ready to deal with the regurgitated aniseed balls which were one of the only sweets not on ration.
“I can’t bloody stop here. I’ll swear he does it on purpose. If he makes a bloody mess on the seat I’ll skin him.”
“It’s coming out red George, he’s coughing up blood.”
“It’s not bloody blood, it’s the bloody rubbish he’s been bloody eating.”
And of course, it was. As well as knowing everything, he was perceptive.
An hour or so later, after a further aniseed ball crisis against the walls of Cammel Lairds shipyard, we were in North Wales and heading for the Horseshoe Pass, a world away from the debris of Scotland Road; a biblical vista breathtakingly awesome to the eyes of one so small, with its magnificent green crescent sweeping steeply downwards from the grey twisting ribbon of the road, dotted in the far distance with the white specks of sheep on patchworks of different shades of green. Then I would be told things from the man who knew everything but who couldn’t back a winner. Through a haze of cigarette smoke he would show me the quarry (where all our depleted roof slates came from) gouged out of the pass, how the men worked and lived at the
quarry, talk of the purity and sweetness of our Liverpool water courtesy of Wales’ Lake Vyrnwy, point out Snowdon’s peak, the Seven Sisters hills, Denbigh Castle which dated back seven hundred years, and more.
On other days we would travel north to the Lake District, but always to my regret by-passing Blackpool on the way. “No. You are not going to Blackpool. It’s a bloody den of vice.”
The Lakes then had not been completely besmirched by the motor car or Wallace Arnold. I would be taken to Grasmere, visit Wordsworth’s grave and Anne Hathaway’s cottage, eat Kendal mint cake and be sick again. My father would show us the host of golden daffodils, recite the relevant snatch of Wordsworth, and drive right over the giddying heights of the grey-bouldered Honister Pass, the car struggling all the way up and whining in second gear all the way back down, with my mother grimacing on the tortuous winding descent. He would point to a soaring brown buzzard, a skylark, or a speckled song thrush and stop to sample pure silver Lakeland river water.
Five or six years later I would travel there alone at weekends on the bus to Ambleside from Crosby bus station and lose myself high up in the magnificent wilds of Hellvellyn and sleep in the open among the rocks by the tarn just below the summit, careless and safe in a world which no longer exists for children, occasionally woken amid the iridescent blaze of the stars by an inquisitive sheep and wonder if a man would ever travel among those stars like Flash Gordon. I didn’t have a tent, but it never seemed to bother me. I wrapped myself in a blanket. In the morning I would knock on a farmer’s door to buy some milk and eggs and would occasionally be given them free of charge by his wife with a warning to take care on the fells. I would build a little fire from twigs, boil my eggs and then heat up some beans. Due to my father’s inexhaustible supply of information about everything, I learned to distinguish between ash, elm, birch, beech and alder. Ash was the best to burn and birch was a close second. Asleep one evening on a bench on the little green in Grasmere I was woken by a policeman concerned for my wellbeing, not to harangue me, but again to warn me to take care and to be a good boy. I did, and I was. Those days of singular carefree delight are gone and shall never return. To have known those days is a blessing, and it still warms the blood in my silted-up arteries whenever I think of them, despite the many years of good and not-so-good experiences which have intervened.
I Came Out Sideways Page 6