I Came Out Sideways

by George Porter

  “Bloody self-starters! If they hadn’t been invented none of them would ever be able to get out of a bloody garage.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about. I was just relieved that the incident had drawn to a satisfactory conclusion. This was a man who could catch a fish with a bent pin and extinguish an incendiary bomb, but could never back a winner, or so he said. This lie was uncovered several years later, when my mother was returning washed socks to a drawer. Underneath some clothing she discovered a cache of brown pay-packets which had never been opened. It turned out that he had had a major win of a couple of hundred pounds, and for a several months had been using this money for housekeeping and as further ammunition to gamble with.

  My mother died young; her last live foray into the street was witnessed by neighbours who noticed her clinging to a set of railings as she was limping towards the bookmaker’s office to lay a bet on for my father who was ‘not well enough’ to get there himself. The next day, at the age of sixty-eight, she died and he cried. He, on the other hand, lived on until nearly ninety, still advising long-suffering residents in a care home on what and what not to do. He called himself the Head Boy, harangued the staff into giving him his own door key, encouraged a squawking seagull to visit every morning by feeding it lumps of Spam from sandwiches provided by his carers (“I’ve never eaten bloody spam in my life, and I’m not going to bloody well start now”), built a putting green in the grounds - but no-one would play with him - and made an irascible irritant of himself in the local pub by insisting on being the ‘pot man’ in return for gin and tonic. The volume on his portable television was so loud that when he was shouting at the horses running sideways it could be heard from the houses next door. There were complaints. “They wouldn’t hear anything if they shut their bloody windows” he said. His hearing aid whistled constantly even when switched off, because he had taken it to pieces to see how it worked, and so confusion reigned among the plethora of misunderstood conversations.

  One of his more novel inventions in the dusk of his years was a contraption he called his ‘suspender belt’, consisting of a pair of braces which he had refashioned to fit around his waist to hold up the elastic stockings that supported his varicose veins. It was confiscated. Likewise a pair of tights, which he wore on his head to keep it warm at night. Speculation among residents in the home that he was a transvestite incensed him. All that he left was a newspaper bill for the Sporting Life and an account from the betting shop for £17.00. I still cannot comprehend how this man with no formal education at all actually produced a blueprint for a rotary engine which preceded the Wankel pistonless engine first patented in 1929, and yet never had the forethought or inclination to patent this work himself.

  “All that bloody nonsense to make wheels go around by pushing pistons up and down. More corners than a bag of nails. All they are doing is losing power that should go straight to the crankshaft”.

  If I had not seen it, I would not have believed it.

  My father applied lateral thinking to his inventions. He devised an unusual but effective contraption for trapping and killing mice by using a bowl of water and a strip of wood, with one end positioned on the floor up against its rim and the other end of it overhanging the middle of the bowl with a piece of cheese attached to it. The unwitting mouse was tempted to climb up the wooden strip in a vain quest to liberate the cheese, but before it could seize it, the mouse was tipped into the water.

  ***

  When my turn came, I didn’t get to the grammar school. I hadn’t taken any interest in the adventures of Biggles. The Dandy was not required reading, drawing of cowboy hats was not considered art, and interminably kicking a football against a wall instead of learning my tables conspired against my intellectual potential to the extent that on the day of the exam, which happened to be a Saturday, I was in a jam. My school was a mere fifty yards from the Odeon cinema, and Flash Gordon was featuring that day in an episode relating to the on-going saga of the rock men who spoke backwards and whose main purpose in life was to keep clear of the giant lizards by camouflaging themselves in canvas suits painted grey, thus enabling them to blend in with the rocks. And I had sixpence. So I decided to sit the exam and then pop into the Odeon on my way home. I did sit the exam for about half an hour, and then in I popped to the Odeon just in time catch the scene where Professor Zarkov, Flash Gordon’s bearded intrepid companion and adviser on all matters scientific, manages to translate the language of the rock men because of his knowledge of their ancient ancestry which originated thousands of years ago in the Gobi desert. He had studied their language and he also could speak backwards.

  Nobody seemed too concerned that I did not go to the grammar school; in fact it was a foregone unspoken conclusion. My father assured my mother that my bloody brain was in my bloody boots. My brother was relieved that I would not be tagging along with him, and I was content in the knowledge that I would not have to go to school on Saturday mornings, and could therefore continue my usual Saturday morning football training of kicking the ball against the now well-battered doors of the Lion and Unicorn, and then of following the exploits of Flash Gordon, Hopalong Cassidy with Topper his horse and bewhiskered toothless sidekick Gabby Hayes, Abbott and Costello, and Zorro.

  I was shunted over the railings and into the real big boys’ secondary modern school, to continue my faltering educational experience and to face the wrath of Gotch, which didn’t occur. The axiom don’t worry, it may never happen was never more apposite. He taught history and I overheard him talking about the Jacobites to another teacher one day. They seemed as alien to me as the rock men; my brains resided in my boots. It also turned out that he was an extremely mild man whose countenance, although not sunny, was not true his nature.

  Sums, reading and writing were a more necessary requirement for my intellectual advancement; not maths, literature and composition. What I encountered at my secondary school were more songs which didn’t really add up, although an attempt was made to teach me to add up which was not very successful and on occasions resulted in a sharp slap across my knuckles with the edge of a ruler, administered forcefully by a bunioned spinster known as who Ma Stick. A little ferret of a woman ostensibly taught geography by having us recite the names of the Liverpool docks, no doubt in an attempt to point us in the direction of where to go to find a job. She seemed to set great store by having us delve into the wealth of the great British Empire via a textbook which displayed all the produce from around the Empire that was transported to Liverpool. It also displayed line drawings and grainy photographs of black people called ‘savages’ who inhabited some of these far-off countries, and who had not yet been ‘Christianised’. During her time as my tutor in colonial xenophobia, I had suffered a further broken arm via a push in the back while leaping to head a tennis ball in a game of football in the schoolyard, and it was this teacher who described my writing as ‘infantile’ after forcing me to write with my left hand while my right arm was suspended in a sling for six weeks.

  And then there was Woan. He still lives simultaneously in both a literal and a metaphoric gothic tower as retired organist and choirmaster of Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral, feted by many but despised by me for sinking almost to the level of the midget, not because of the daft unintelligible songs he had us sing but because he actually broke my treasured copy of Elvis Presley’s Hound Dog.

  “This is NOT, nor ever will it be, music.”

  Justification for my resentment came recently from the disclosure that this man was such an iconoclast that at the same time as he was maligning Elvis Presley, he could not recognise that the young Paul McCartney’s voice was destined for far more musical acclaim than he would ever aspire to; he judged him to be unacceptable as a chorister for his cathedral choir. There was another occasion when this man unjustifiably - and with some measure of malice - marched me by the ear to the headmaster through the battlefield/playground, much to the relieve
d amusement of the hooligan who had thrown a banger into the music room.

  Mr Riddick was a headmaster who caned serious miscreants in front of the whole school. Other children whose crimes were not so serious were not humiliated in such fashion, but nonetheless caned in his office, or so I - and Woan - believed. The truth of the matter is that Stanley Riddick was a man who knew full well the quality of mercy. Although a stern advocate of corporal punishment, he was not without restraint in such matters.

  “Mr Riddick, I want you to cane this boy. He has just thrown a firework into my room.”

  Riddick was a tall slim man with a kindly face and a gentle manner, regardless of instilling discipline with ferocity when he believed necessary. He eyed me from a great height and detected the quiver of my lower lip. He then looked at Woan and back to me.

  “Well, what have you got to say about this, boy?”

  “It wasn’t me sir, I didn’t do it.”

  “Well then, who did do it?”

  “I don’t know sir.”

  “But you were there?”

  “Yes sir, but I didn’t do it.”

  “Well who did?”

  “I don’t know sir, but I didn’t do it.”

  Woan primed himself for a verbal onslaught.

  “I know this boy Mr Riddick. He’s a trouble maker, and he copies other people’s work. He’s always kicking balls against windows.”

  This was untrue. I had not copied anything. Everyone compared notes when Woan was otherwise engaged with the intricacies of a gramophone, upon which he would play The Duke of Plaza Toro and While we were Marching through Georgia or some similar jingoistic songs, and upon which my recording of Hound Dog came to such a violent end. The way I saw things was that to compare was not to copy. The notes I was alleged to have copied were in fact musical notes - crotchets, quavers, and minims with which I was already acquainted through my induction into the church choir.

  “I’ve also seen him on the dinner hut roof throwing lumps of coke at the Merchant Taylors’ boys.”

  This regular early-morning pursuit of making the kids who wore straw boaters run the gauntlet through a hail of cinders on the way to their exclusive school half a mile further down Crosby Road was not unknown to me, although I had only been on the roof once and that was to retrieve my treasured football which had landed there because of a toe-ender, the like of which Algy had painstakingly instructed me not to do. At this final nail in the coffin of a twelve-year-old, exceedingly misunderstood child instilled with the upright fibre of the great Billy Liddell, Mr Riddick nodded gravely to Woan, although I discerned the slight intimation of a smile.

  “Thank you Mr Woan. Leave him here with me, and I will do what is necessary.”

  Woan left me to my fate, although I was unaware of his footsteps fading along the corridor.

  Stanley Riddick looked at me perceptively, no doubt noting the scuffed shoes and muddy scabbed knees.

  “Well, you cannot deny that you spend a lot of time kicking a football, can you?”

  Then something totally unforeseen occurred. He reached into the oak glass-fronted bookcase and took a cane out. I began to shake, and he began to smile. He put his finger to his lips, slowly shook his head from side to side looking at the closed door and with a conspiratorial wink proceeded to give six smacks to the one of the leather arms of his chair. He then winked at me again and pointed towards the door. As I left the headmaster’s study, through the haze of my welled-up watering eyes, I thought I just caught sight of Woan disappearing around the corner of the corridor.

  The outcome of this encounter greatly enhanced my reputation among my footballing contemporaries, one of whom was the banger thrower, a boy whose ability I would have given everything for, and who had flattened me when I was trying to head a tennis ball. He didn’t even own a pair of football boots, so I willingly lent him my prized rugby boots when he was selected to play for Lancashire Schoolboys. This was no mean sacrifice, but Fairclough was something special. What he could do with a tennis ball at his feet had to be seen to be believed. The great sadness was that he treated this natural ingenious talent with disdain. Some years later I met him carrying our dustbin out to a cart. He seemed happy in his work, although when talking to him he told me that he had been signed as an apprentice at Everton, but gave it up because part of the job was to clean the boots of the first team players. I would have willingly cleaned the boots of the groundsman for such an opportunity, even if it was Everton’s groundsman.

  Just when you think the ball has crossed the line

  It curves, and back it comes again

  Relief is stung by grief

  When you find

  You are offside

  Once more

  Chapter 7

  The Spion Kop

  “Behind a paper-strewn desk high in Liverpool University Students’ Union building, two famous feet twitched. Feet that belonged to the original, uncrowned king of football lore - Billy Liddell. Feet of power and romance that longed for the old days as their owner reflected on past affairs of plunder.

  “It is said that when Liddell called at the Anfield ground one day last year - five years after the close of his career - work stopped on the new stand that was being built. ‘There’s Billy Liddell’, a navvy gasped. To a man they removed their industrial helmets, clutched them reverently to their waists and bowed their heads. The old master was passing through.”

  30 November 1966 - from Sunday Express

  Billy Liddell imparted life skills by shining example. Do not give up. Never be afraid of trying. If you are knocked down, don’t stay down unless you are unconscious. Never cheat. Be generous in your applause for a worthy rival. Of course he never said these things; he exemplified them by his own actions. The myths about him which circulated in my generation were not myths at all. He did break a crossbar with a powerful shot. He did burst a ball with a blistering header. He did burst the net. He did fracture the arm of a goalkeeper with a shot from a free kick. He did plead with the referee not to send a player off the field for a violently brutal attack on him, and he won this strange yet gracious appeal. Unlike his legions of fans he never swore, and he was respected because of it - not for being a pedant but for his self-control. He didn’t drink alcohol and yet he never reproached others for doing so. He never committed a foul on purpose. He ran a boys’ club and was a magistrate. He became bursar of Liverpool University. He walked on water, and he epitomised everything that should be taught by example and not learned by repetitious written rules.

  The first time I saw him play was at Anfield when I was eleven. Liverpool was a second division team then and the opposition was Grimsby Town. My father took me - not into the famous Spion Kop (named after the disgraceful shambles of the Boer War battle) which would cram over 27,000 supporters into its roaring cavernous hooded vault behind the goal which, from the upper terraces, resembled matchsticks with the players like marauding red ants - but into the lesser chaotic seated area known as the paddock. The swaying ocean of red and white and the wonder of so many men shouting with one voice ‘GIVE IT TO LIDDELL’ sent a shiver down my young spine. Then came the thunderous roar and the clattering of thousands of wooden red-and-white rattles when the ball was passed to Billy to do his best with. He always did his best. He never, ever, let them down. His spirit survives in the adopted anthem which is bawled out by thousands and thousands all over the world - You’ll Never Walk Alone. Bill Shankly, the world’s legendary ambassador of football-speak who managed Liverpool during the glowing embers of Billy’s career, called him his personal Exocet. Like me, hundreds of boys were transported to a level of understanding of the game of football and of life which surpasses the on-field battle. Shankly embodied this notion in his famous oft-quoted proclamation that football isn’t a matter of life and death; it is much more serious than that.

  Another l
ess celebrated Shanklyism rings true for me: Me having no education - I had to use my brains. School was a place I went to for sums and spelling; Anfield was a college of knowledge and enlightenment. Good manners were more than holding a knife and fork in a way which conformed to social principles. Good manners were the practical concern for your fellow beings, no matter how improper in polite society. Good manners, inspired by the example of Billy, were to applaud the opposition off the field if they managed to win a match at Anfield. The call of Roll up yer footie Echo wack, from a burly docker replete with three chins and a broken nose, is a case in point. What do you do in a crowd of fifty thousand when you want to pee? You roll up a newspaper and pee through it vertically to avoid splashing anybody. If one was too short to see the game, another supporter would lend his lunch box for him to stand on and his shoulder to lean on. Boys were transported over the heads of men down to the front of the terraces for a close-up view of the Liddell magic, and were told by rough, unkempt dockers Dat’s da way to do it lar, when Billy came charging through. Often when he scored a goal into the Kop end he would turn, not to the deafening thunderous roar of the crowd to crow his achievement, but to the opposing defeated goalkeeper to pat him on the shoulder and console him in a display of generous and genuine sympathy, as if to say you tried, and you can do no more than try.

  Short of Jesus Christ Almighty, who could be a better example to a child growing up on a fault-line of how to live life, regardless of our personal frailties? To be a Pilgrim just didn’t ring my bell. Baden-Powell’s boy scouts were a force to be reckoned with, but the power, humility and all-embracing togetherness fostered by Liddell on the Kop were unsurpassable. Life, with all its fragilities, burdens and unforeseeable future, was welded together by a thread of euphoric excitement and played out in front of my enchanted eyes, in an arena where Christians were never fed to the lions and war never killed anyone. Romantic idealism from a twelve-year-old who would rather kick a ball than go to school and who couldn’t figure out long division, but could instinctively judge the trajectory needed to take an in-swinging corner kick and place it on the head of the magnificent Billy Liddell? I’ll say!