Sometimes when Miss Johnson’s cousin Emily’s car was not available, which was more often than not, we would walk to Seaforth Sands. There must have been sand there at one time, but when we used to walk the couple of miles there from Waterloo it was the beginning of the docks and the first station along a railway of great repute which was affectionately known as the dockers’ umbrella; the Liverpool Overhead Railway. To travel on this line was a unique and privileged experience the like of which will never be known again, for it was an iron and steel testimonial to the ingenuity and industry of a generation of engineers. It was built by the people for the people and engendered a warmth of feeling which sometimes stems from man to machine and is inexplicably reciprocated by the structures themselves. Like a huge tree, it grew out of the road and spread itself over the docks, providing shelter from the elements for thousands of dockers beneath its rumbling overhead tracks, and its innovative passenger carriages that housed the electric motors beneath the floor which became the forerunners of electric railways the world over; in fact it was the world’s first overhead urban electric railway, and became the revolutionary model which is still employed today on the London underground.
For over six miles we would traverse the docks which harboured great liners and pass by Princes Landing Stage at the Pier Head, another great wonder - the largest floating landing stage in the world when it was built. Because it floated, passengers could embark and disembark regardless of the tides. I have a vivid memory of seeing close up the sad and haunting sight of one of these great liners, the Empress of Canada, wallowing on its massive crumpled side with its enormous funnels smashed on the wall of Gladstone Dock. There had been a fire and she had sunk. My father explained these things to me without cursing, enthusiastically divulging his knowledge to me while I overdosed on aniseed balls which only made me sick when travelling in a car or on a bus - never in a train. Certain information he kept to himself; shielding his knowledge of the internal combustion engine and its workings was his own self-centred realm, something of which we were not to question and which to me is still clothed in mystery.
And therein rests the paradox. This man who couldn’t back a winner knew more than any man, but I was stuck on the fault-line - seeing and learning more than children of a settled background, many of whom I later became friends with, but still looking at them from afar, unable to do my twelve times table. And so it has remained, regardless of my relative success in life - well book-read, travelled and self-educated with a good degree - but nonetheless still with a feeling of inadequacy towards them. I was deemed a failure at the age of ten by the State because Flash Gordon was my Hermes and it was Superman who flew with the gods. An essay describing the endeavours and the moral values of these two giants of my childhood literary admiration would never have been contemplated as a fit subject for an eleven-plus examination. Also, how are babies made? It would not only have been extremely inappropriate, but outrageous to enquire whether a child of ten should even contemplate discussing such things, especially in the colourful but clearly descriptive vernacular used by Alfie Littlehales. Odysseus would have been just the ticket had I heard of him. If I had taken more interest in the fictional life and times of Biggles, rather than the just-as-daft exploits of Korky the Cat or Jack’s Magic Patch, perhaps I would have followed in my brother’s be-capped and rugby-booted scholastic footsteps. But what use would football have been to me when they all played rugby?
The eleven-plus examination, as it was constructed in the early 1950s, has now been discredited by most right-thinking people, but its legacy was a blemished - though thankfully a disappearing - slice of society. I have read that only twenty percent of my generation actually went to a grammar school, and the vast majority were boys who came from the more prosperous sections of society. We who didn’t, on the other hand, were the children of a war-ravaged country who, during our formative years, were encouraged to believe that we were intellectually incompetent, though in fact it was more about our social position, and our inability to understand concepts and mores which were socially beyond our grasp. Most of us were never even given the opportunity to acquire any formal qualifications. I only began to think of myself as uneducable when I realised that I would never be able to learn French and that Latin was not for me. I had seen a Bunsen burner, but never been allowed within arm’s length of one. I had played with some iron filings and a magnet, but for what reason I did not know. Geometry was never mentioned, although my brother had a set of compasses and some sort of triangle with markings on it. Algebra is to this day a mystery to me, not because I would have been unable to learn, but because my career path would not involve acquiring such knowledge, and so it was.
If children completed what education was offered by the age of fifteen, they were given a school leaving certificate. In my case I didn’t even get that. I was allowed, not to say encouraged, to leave school at fourteen to join the Army. We could never aspire to be doctors, lawyers, army officers, teachers or scientists, although a small few did; most of them through dogged determination not to be labelled a failure at such an early stage in life. Ask John Prescott, and he will tell of the struggle he had to achieve his potential, purely because he failed his eleven-plus. From merchant seaman to deputy prime minister, to a peerage. The back-handed compliment “they failed their eleven-plus, but they managed to get on anyway” is all the more galling for those who didn’t ‘get on’ and never realised that they were capable of so much more than they had been told they were worth.
Chapter 6
New Perspectives
I began to realise I could never eradicate my past: that the circumstances of my birth would dictate my position in the world, just as it did for someone from a more established section of society. It was nothing to do with brain-power. In the words of Popeye - I am what I am. At the age of eleven I became aware that I bestrode a fault-line - my world contained things that were unknown and inconceivable to many of my new-found friends at Sunday school, in the church choir, or in the boy scouts, who came from more stable backgrounds. I began to cast off my old friends who lived on the fringes of our humble society and - sad to say, but it’s the truth - I became embarrassed to be seen in their company. I now had newer, less unkempt children to associate with.
Albert was refused entry to the church choir when I tried to enlist him, not because he could not pitch his voice in tune with a note from the piano, but because he still had a dirty face. Alfie, the nomark, disappeared off my radar because he wore boots and would have no truck with Protestantism wihout really knowing what it was and so bolstering the ignorance of prejudice, and Yocker probably followed in his elder brother’s footsteps. In short, I became a walking contradiction, because my societal horizons were broadening but my ingrained conceptions of where I fitted in the world were embedded in my mind, and have remained so ever since. Sunday school, the choir, and the boy scouts were initiated into my rather hectic schedule of football practice, limb breakages and keeping my sunny side up by my father, who - although a stranger to all things outwardly religious - I had sometimes seen kneeling at the side of his bed saying his prayers in his shirt-tails late at night, assuming I was asleep. Perhaps, I thought, he was praying for the elusive winner.
Sunday school didn’t last too long. I was hit over the head with a very heavy Bible by a religious maniac called McFie, because I questioned that a man was able to walk on water. Also there was the matter of the broken window in the church hall, the outcome of a misdirected tennis ball with a toe-ender. McFie was mad enough to call round to 4 Church Road and confront the man who knew everything and prayed late at night in his shirt-tails. My lack of faith, coupled with a propensity for vandalising church property, was his opening denunciation of me, followed by his professed concern for my safety in respect of my spirited pastime of wall-climbing. My father received McFie seated by the fire in his decaying creaking armchair dotted with darned cigarette burns, amid clouds of smoke and rivu
lets of ash running like a volcanic emission down the front of his jacket. The Sporting Life lay sprawled on the floor. Grimaldi, the black witch’s cat, whose main purposes in life seemed to be digesting left-overs and defecating in various corners of the house regardless of an ever-open window to allow him to come and go as he pleased, was curled on my father’s knee in hissing mode. McFie, who must have thought he had entered a court of Beelzebub, turned pink with discomfiture.
“Are you the one that hit my son on the head with a bloody big bible?”
“Yes - he doubted the word of God, and I am sure you wouldn’t approve of that.”
“I don’t approve of anyone hitting my boy; I don’t even do it myself. His mother does sometimes if she can catch him.”
“That’s probably why he is so wayward.”
“Wayward? What I call bloody wayward is hitting a child over the head with a bloody big bible. Do you know what I call that? I call that bloody sacrilege, that’s what I call it. It would do you some good to read it rather than beat bloody children with it. I know it says something about suffering the little children. And don’t you give me any of that spare the rod and spoil the child nonsense either.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you at church, Mr Porter.”
“No you haven’t, and you’re not bloody likely to either, although I’ll lay you a fiver that I know more about the bloody bible than you ever will - I had it rammed down my throat, not slammed over my head. Now bugger off.”
I cringed. McFie departed chastened. Then the man who didn’t hit children turned to me.
“And you, you daft little sod, behave yourself or it will be more than a bible you’ll get over your head - it’ll be my belt across your backside.”
I was thenceforward relieved of my obligation to attend Sunday school, and it was just as well because there were several other matters which may have come to the fore. Had McFie been made aware of my alleged involvement in the incident regarding a boy’s cub cap and the bear pit at Chester Zoo on a Sunday school outing, even more flak would have flown.
***
Martha had died when I was nine. She and her alleged substantial trove of treasure, including the piano which purportedly creaked with concealed fivers, was gone. One day nearing the end of her life, the piano had been spirited away in a furniture van by my mother’s sister, a lady I barely knew, but who was physically on a par with Mrs Evans. Although the way she dressed clearly placed on her affluent side of the fault line, she was still more than capable of frightening the horses. Bessie Braddock, that remarkable Liverpool MP of great fortitude and charisma, who once called Churchill a drunk to his face and forcefully carried a visiting high-ranking Tory politician from a house especially prepared cosmetically for his visit into a neighbouring slum, could well have been her doppelganger. Although they looked alike, Bessie Braddock’s face did not match the rigid set of this woman’s attempt at a smile, nor did it betray the distinct aura of haughtiness which surrounds a certain type of northern matron depicted so admirably by the late Les Dawson. She was my aunt, and I can remember only meeting her on two occasions, but she may well have been a contributory factor in my mother’s mental malaise. My grandmother died in a Liverpool hospital which had, in earlier days, been the workhouse from whence she came - or so she believed - and her last hours must have been a dreadful experience for that reason. None of the contents of the groaning piano found their way back to 4 Church Road, nor were they spoken of again.
Earlier that year my brother had become one of the few who had actually passed the entrance exam to the grammar school (“by the skin of his teeth” grudgingly acknowledged by my father) where he became involved in singing bizarre songs. Nymphs and Shepherds Come Away, The Raggle Taggle Gypsies Oh and something about jolly boating weather were cases in point. What was a nymph and where were they all coming away from? I was very excited for him, although I was unaware of what this fuss about a grammar school meant. I did, however, link this achievement to his fixation with Biggles, which he read avidly to the detriment of his footballing skills and the despair of our father. With his elevation to the higher echelons of learning came a smart uniform, a cap, a satchel, and a very natty sports shirt. Also he was given a present of a Newmark watch which, for a reason that baffled me, he refused with disdain, and it lay in the drawer of the sideboard in its box until the day I cleared the remnants of my mother’s meagre belongings many years later, after she had died. I was soon to learn that on one side of the fault-line Newmark watches were prized possessions, whereas to the children on the other side, where the posh people who subsisted in council houses lived, a Newmark watch was not acceptable.
“Where we’re going to get the bloody money from for a uniform, I don’t bloody know. And rugby boots! He couldn’t hit a bloody barn door from ten bloody yards.”
As usual the grumbling was bluster. A uniform did appear, including a cap and a pair of rugby boots. Out of malice I sometimes hid his cap just when he was about to leave for school. The boots were handed down to me a year later in pristine condition, but a size and a half too big. Nonetheless I was very proud of them and wore them with the toes stuffed with newspaper, disregarding the contemptuous chants of ‘Charlie Chaplin’ from my brother and his posh council-house friend (who was the proud owner of a Timex watch) as I hurtled along the imaginary touchline, about to lay the ball in the path of the imaginary Billy Liddell, which he would run onto and blast one of his thunderbolts past an imaginary immobile Jimmy O’Neill, the Everton goalkeeper. Then Billy would turn and run towards me with a big beam on his face, his hand outstretched to shake mine and selflessly congratulate me for ‘making’ the goal. In truth my pass would have been either too short or too long, for in reality I have always made short or long passes through all of life’s attempts on goal, never a perfect one, but nonetheless have managed to survive well into the second half with a couple of injuries but without being substituted.
There was an upturn in our living arrangements after the departure of my grandmother. My brother and I had a bedroom to share: what had been my grandmother’s living room became our living room and the so-called kitchen became the dining room. The back kitchen became my mother’s sole occupancy for the first time and the Victorian range was dismantled. Electricity, which until then had only been installed in the lighting circuit, became available through two wall sockets. We invested in a second-hand electric iron which was easier than keeping two flat irons and heating them on the gas ring. The fault-line became more indistinct, although the cracks were ever-present. By this time Algy had gone to meet his maker and betting shops became licensed, much to the heartfelt approval of my father.
Power from a light socket caused a near-death experience for my brother. In an effort to alleviate the effects of cold and damp in our beds, my father constructed a ‘bed warmer’ which consisted of a long length of cable with a light socket plug on one end and a light socket at the other. Other people would have bought hot-water bottles. The end with the light socket was fed through a biscuit tin with a hole cut into it and then a bulb was plugged in. Hey presto! A modern version of a bed warmer, powered by the heat from a light bulb as opposed to hot coals. It worked, but was dismantled after my brother decided to investigate its construction and it went off with an enormous flash, fusing the lights and discharging a pungent smell of burning rubber.
My father, who possessed the ingenuity to strip and assemble a Rolls Royce, was a man of surprising and novel inventiveness when it came to matters mechanical or electrical. When I was about eight years old I was walking with him in South Road when we came across a broken-down Austin Seven with a policeman under the bonnet trying to get it started. He just couldn’t help himself, and without even a nod of introduction he elbowed the policeman away and poked his head in.
“What’s the matter with it?”
“I don’t know. It just won’t start and the battery is
dead”.
“No wonder it won’t bloody well start, you’ve flooded it! You wouldn’t be able to start if you were drowned, would you?”
I cringed, believing that an arrest was imminent.
“Get the bloody starting handle and give it a turn, and be careful you don’t break your bloody thumbs.”
The policeman was a very big man, and he pulled himself up to his full height with a quizzical expression on his face.
“I’ve seen you, haven’t I? You drive a hearse. You’d better be careful or you’ll find yourself in the back compartment with somebody else driving YOU.”
“Just bloody well do it and you’ll be on your way. Give her a turn and she’ll go nice as ninepence.”
The policemen did as he was told, the engine jumped into life, his thumbs remained intact, and he was on his way with a face like an Easter Island statue.
I Came Out Sideways Page 7