And so, from the age of twelve, I spent many Saturday afternoons on the Kop venerating my champion and honouring his inspired and talented capacity for kicking and heading a ball, alongside tens of thousands of like-minded enthusiasts for the game which was more than just a game. From behind the Kop goalmouth, I had a ringside view before the match of the antics of the Walrus, a beefy bluff red-faced policeman with a bushy moustache and bugger’s grips, waving his stick at the sprightly little grizzled old man in an even older overcoat dribbling a tennis ball into the penalty area and deftly side-footing it into the empty goal. I would join in the eruption of euphoric delight emanating from thousands of men-boys as the little old man scored a symbolic goal, retrieved his ball and raced off the pitch, to be swallowed up by the delighted crowd, followed by the lumbering puffing Walrus shaking his stick at all and sundry, blowing out his cheeks in a mock display of authoritative fury. Then, added to this this dramatic burlesque of fury would come the chant resounding throughout the Kop - “THE WALRUS, THE WALRUS, THE WALRUS, THE WALRUS!” I had never knowingly read a word of Shakespeare until I was seventeen, yet here before my innocent eyes stood his play within a play, the dumb show, before my Hamlet in the form of Billy Liddell had even set foot on the field. Shakespeare was not on the school curriculum for me, but I didn’t miss out because the essence of his magnificence was suffused at Anfield, and the genius for the descriptive power of the English language was also present in the unschooled, but resplendently imaginative, usage of defamiliarising metaphor as a means of displaying the essence of euphoria:
“Der wuz der fukin arms in der, der wuz der fukin legs in der, der wuz der whole fukin bodees in der.”
Quote from an ecstatic fan describing a goalmouth scramble.
I touched Billy Liddell. What’s more, he even spoke to me. I was given permission to travel to Blackburn with a coachload of fanatics to see my team play, and play they did. The final score was a 3 - 3 draw. I was present when Billy scored all three of Liverpool’s goals in what was regarded as the finest hat-trick of the century. One with the left foot, one with the right, and one with the head. This is a fact - one of his shots was so hard that it left four men on the ground before it scorched the net, and the goalkeeper hadn’t moved a muscle. The Liverpool Echo confirmed what I and a cohort of demented red-and-white followers had seen.
At the final whistle I couldn’t resist the exhilarating temptation of nipping over the wall and onto the pitch in a mad dash to catch up with Billy and pat him on the back of his famous muddied number nine shirt before he disappeared into the players’ tunnel. I managed it, but with unforeseen bittersweet consequences. Almost instantaneously I saw stars and for a second wobbled before I felt the sting of a blow to the back of my head, not unlike the pain experienced when walking backwards into lampposts.
“Geroutofit, and don’t come back!”
A policeman, far less substantial in stature compared to the Walrus and of a much less sunny disposition, was confronting me with an arm raised to deliver a further blow. The prodigious Billy Liddell turned in his tracks to face us and spoke in the mildest of tones to the blustering Blackburn bobby.
“There’s no need to be so harsh with the lad. He’s done no harm and he’s only showing his happiness, and what’s so bad about a child being happy?”
That said it all. The policeman faded away, and Billy Liddell looked down at me.
“You must not do this again sonny. Now get off home with you, there’s a good lad.”
In a flash he was gone, and I was left dazed from the blow to my head, but even more so by the fact that Billy Liddell had spoken to Georgie Porter, the next best thing to passing the ball to him.
There is no drama in a play
Only parody sustained by reality
It cannot be taught
It can only be lived
Chapter 8
Scouting For Men
There is no real doubt that strong motivation for the Scouts was the preparation of British men for military service ...
I fell for that, hook line and sinker.
From the age of twelve I became conscious, through my initiation into the Boy Scouts movement, of my social and educational frailties. Most of the budding adolescents I became acquainted with were from the more stable side of the fault-line, and I began to feel uncomfortable about my own background and scholastic inadequacy, especially when taking part in the many activities associated with this undercover military recruitment organisation for working-class boys. It had been instituted by a celebrated national hero who, I later learned, was little more than an imperialist degenerate aristocrat in fancy dress with a self-confessed partiality for photographs of naked boys and an abhorrence of the female form, and who declared that Mien Kampf was a “wonderful book with good ideas on education, health, propaganda and organisation.” Of course I was unaware of this at the time, although I did think it was a bit odd that fully grown men walked the streets in this strange paramilitary garb of shorts, green garter tags, a neckerchief which in an emergency could be used as a sling, a tourniquet or a head bandage, held together by something called a woggle and a strange russet hat faintly reminiscent of the one worn by Roy Rogers. It was just about acceptable for boys to go about dressed like this (unless they came up against the likes of Yocker Spencer), but grown men? And to this day I have never heard of anyone using a boy scout’s neckerchief as a sling, a tourniquet or a head bandage.
In Scouting For Boys, Baden-Powell’s definitive and multi-million selling textbook on matters relating to adolescent development, and his theory that boys should be trained to be good citizens by living a life as close to tribal mores as possible, there was a passage, now abridged, relating to “beastliness”, the remedy for which, if one suffers an attack, is a cold shower. I had no idea what this man was referring to. I thought it may have something to do with the cat. Taking account of the sort of unsavoury circles this venerated warrior moved in when visiting his old public school, with his repugnant penchant for poring over photographs of naked boys with his old headmaster, or possibly even his over-familiarity with a junior officer in his regiment he always referred to wistfully as his “boy”; he must have spent many fraught hours having cold showers. I certainly was not going to ask my mother what beastliness was, for even though I was developing, the airborne slipper had not yet become a distant memory. Besides, although we had plenty of cold water to wash in, we didn’t have a shower. I did ask my scoutmaster, a pious and cheerless individual with a love of singing daft gibberish songs - Ging Gang Goolie Goolie (penned by Baden-Powell himself) being one - but he just went red and told me I would learn all about it when I was older.
Of course, in common with many of the boys of the Hitler Youth, an organisation which Baden-Powell is on record as admiring in the months before the war, even fostering an exchange visit, I was ideal potential fodder for future military service. I was a serious contender for scouting success as a patrol leader with my khaki shirt festooned in badges and was on course to achieve my Bushman’s Thong to be worn around my shoulder, not knowing then or now what it was or is, but was unable to vault a five-bar gate, thus negating my probability of winning such an award. I believed that my lack of formal education would be no major impediment to joining the military. The noble ideas on health, propaganda and organisation so blatantly declared in BP’s manifesto was music to the ears of a recruiting officer aiming his sights at thirteen-year-old working-class boys with scant education and little prospect of progress in any other field. There was I, waiting to be hooked, and what better periodical could there be to advertise this imperialist propaganda than The Eagle? So it was goodbye to Korky the Cat and Freddy the Fly, and hello to Digby, PC 49 and The Mekon - a very tame adversary in comparison to Ming the Merciless.
It went unheeded that a comic aimed at young boys was able to display large advertisements on behalf of the Army for the enlistm
ent of boy soldiers for a term of twelve years. Weaponry in the form of air pistols, rifles, aluminium catapults and knives were also advertised on facing pages which were conveniently placed to further the emergent warrior instincts characteristic among many developing boys. The advertisement that registered with me and many contemporaries - apart from those who had been pressed into twelve years’ service by toadying magistrates as an alternative to Borstal, to the pleasure of the armed forces recruitment controllers - was one which showed a grinning freckle-faced boy swinging across a river dangling from a rope, with a weapon, dressed as a warrior and having fun while presenting an image of a wholesome youth “doing his duty for God and the Queen” as the scout promise articulated it. When I was just thirteen years old, my mind was made up. I was going to be a soldier and continue my scouting activities in a manner which would give me kudos and mitigate to some extent my problematic lack of education. I would be able to swing across rivers on a rope and kick footballs unimpeded. I would shoot guns. I would obtain prestige. My father who, because of his health had never served in the armed forces although he lost two brothers in the Great War, was elated when I told him of my plans for the future.
“Three square meals a day. See the world. Make a bloody man of you. They’ll make you straighten your back and walk forwards.”
He could have added to this response that I would be one less mouth to feed, although he did say that just because I was going to join the army, it didn’t mean that I was not going to send any money home. A boy soldier’s pay at the time was the equivalent of seventy-five pence per week. Subtract from that the cost of Blanco, boot polish, Brasso, dusters, toothpaste and the odd pork pie to stave off hunger pangs, there wasn’t a great deal left to send home. The reference to walking forwards was disingenuous, because I had stopped walking backwards by the age of eight. My mother appeared less enthusiastic about the notion of her Georgie with a gun in his hands, and my brother scoffed. He declared himself a pacifist the nearer the time came for him to be conscripted, which by a fluke of circumstance relating to his date of birth, he managed to avoid. Nevertheless, humiliation of a most disconcerting kind lay salivating for him in the wings.
There was a problem with my military aspirations because I was still a schoolboy and unable to leave school before the age of fifteen. The recruiting sergeant seemed unconcerned and filled in my paperwork stating that my current employment was ‘scholar’, and told me to approach my Headmaster with a view to leaving school as soon as possible, because boy soldiers still have to study anyway: what I discovered when I eventually joined my unit was not exactly Janet and John again, but not a great deal remote from them. Stanley Riddick was persuaded - probably because he was, I believe, a retired army officer and because I was unlikely to advance any further beyond my twelve times table and nouns and adjectives - that I could leave school when I was fourteen, so I completed my schooling some six months before I was finally enlisted.
***
Meanwhile, my brother had finished his education in a haphazard manner, for although he went to the grammar school, residing on the fault-line was still a sociological burden. He was, to my mind, growing stranger by the day. He had taken wearing his V-neck pullover back to front under his jacket, wearing horn-rimmed spectacles without any lenses in them, and listening to traditional jazz when Elvis was blaring out everywhere else. This was in the pre-Beatles era, when Kenny Ball and his Paramount Jazz Band were pulling young punters in at the Cavern wearing their pullovers back to front and being ‘sent’. To say that my brother scorned Elvis Presley would be an understatement. Woan would have been impressed. He had also acquired a set of bongo drums, and a small camera with which to capture arty-farty pictures of the cat, whereas my personal accessories consisted of an air rifle, an untunable battered guitar with two strings missing, and an autograph book containing Billy Liddell’s copperplate signature alongside the scribbled mark of the Flying Pig - Tommy Lawrence, Liverpool’s elephantine airborne goalkeeper. The air rifle was bought from a secondhand shop with savings from my milk round from which I’d recently been fired because milk was appearing on the wrong doorsteps due to genuine misunderstandings of a geographical nature. I tried to explain the full picture to the gruff proprietor of the dairy, but he would not listen.
“Bugger off and don’t come back. If this carries on I’ll be ruined. And you’ve been nickin’ the orange juice, so I’ll knock that off your wages.”
This was a slur. In point of fact I had accidentally dropped a metal basket containing six bottles when I tripped over a kerbstone. I thought it wise not to make a clean breast of it, coming as it did so soon after the incident in which my extremely overladen and wobbly-wheeled handcart came into contact with the rear end of a stationary Ford Anglia parked on a downward slope in the road at five o’clock one Sunday morning, giving rise to an early start to the day for the local residents.
The air rifle had become a matter of considerable distress to my mother and foreboding to my father.
“You can get rid of that bloody thing before you put somebody’s bloody eye out with it.”
Of course, he was right. The thought of a fourteen-year-old with delusions of becoming a frontline warrior in possession of such a weapon says a great deal about my mind-set at the time. Our decaying home also began to suffer a further burden when the cracked ceiling began to develop pockmarks, due to the numerous pellets embedded in the plaster, many of which contained the gory remnants of slaughtered flies. My protestations that I was decimating the fly population to the betterment of our health went unheeded.
“If you have still got that bloody thing in the house when I come home tomorrow I’ll break it to bloody pieces, army or no bloody army!”
So I traded it in for a threadbare tennis racquet in the doubtful optimism that I might be able to inveigle my way into the company of Janet Watson, a thirteen-year-old siren who regularly played tennis in the park. However, this was not to be. Not only did she belittle my service, which often seemed to go sideways over the fence in the same way as my toe-enders went over the bar, but she had a boyfriend who took every opportunity to blast his tennis balls at my abdomen.
My brother had meanwhile become a potential high-flyer in the bakery and grocery industry, where he was earmarked as future management potential by Thomas Scott’s Bakery - the home of good bread - a family-run concern that was well established throughout the Liverpool suburbs. And this is where our paths crossed.
Since I had finished school six months before enlistment, full-time employment was considered necessary, although impossible to acquire for several reasons, the prime ones being that I was under age and I still couldn’t do my twelve times table. What’s more, most full-time work required attendance on Saturdays, and this would greatly interfere with my football fixation. Nevertheless, after many fruitless evenings looking through the vacancies column in the Liverpool Echo for a potential employer, the difficulty was overcome - for me at least. But for my brother, with his reverse pullover, traditional jazz, glassless spectacles, bongo banging and cat photography, things were not so rosy, for it was he who was harassed by my parents into arranging an interview for me for a job in the grocery trade. This was a definite boon, especially with my knowledge of the dairy industry, yet for him a situation of grave injustice and severe embarrassment. We had never seen eye to eye, my brother and me, and this intrusion into his personal sphere of employment could not have helped matters, me being - in his eyes - little more than pond life.
And so I attended the head office of Scott’s Bakery for the first interview of my working life. A cheery little man, rather rotund with black slicked-back receding hair, rosy cheeks and an appropriate blob of dough for a nose, was the person who would decide my future career path. I noticed he was wearing an Everton FC badge in his lapel and a blue tie, both of which caused a certain degree of trepidation before I had even spoken.
“Don’t just s
tand there son, take a seat, I won’t bite.”
He seemed a jolly person, and this surprised me, considering the fact that he was wearing the blue-and-white emblem of the left-footer rock cakes, terms of derision for Evertonians which I had heard from some Liverpool supporters but had no idea what they meant. I now know that a rock cake is abusive terminology for a Roman Catholic, and likewise a left-footer is so called because it was believed that Irish Catholic labourers used their left foot to push a spade into the ground, whereas Protestants used their right foot.
“Now, you’re Michael’s young brother, aren’t you? A bright lad is Michael; he’ll go a long way.”
“Yes sir.”
“Are you as bright as him?
“Yes sir.”
The first lie of what was to be many through the years of interviews and consultations, tripped off my juvenile tongue with brazen alacrity, and the second one followed in swift succession.
“How old are you, George?”
“Fifteen sir.”
The second lie was tangible, but the first was open to enquiry, and enquire into my audacious assertion that I was as bright as my brother he did.
“Tell me George, what do threepence halfpenny and two shillings and sixpence halfpenny make?”
I was struck dumb. This was an unexpected assault on my mental arithmetic skills, which had been severely challenged by Ma Stick in the past. I wasn’t expecting to be required to add up - especially with fractions involved. I looked to the ceiling as though I was pondering a correct reply, but after about half a minute, which seemed to me to be more like an hour, my interrogator spoke.
I Came Out Sideways Page 9