Liverpool Stories
The stories on this site are not included in my book.
The tales are snapshots of my life in Liverpool, the home of the Beatles, and the echo chamber of the Mersey Sound that in the sixties resonated around the planet like an acoustic Tsunami. The stories cover a period of 50 odd years and so they touch on every aspect of my life from the rites of passage to the passing of youth. I hope you enjoy them.
Baby love - A labour of love
By
John Williams
My experience of being an expectant father spans four decades as my eldest son was born in 1966 and my youngest in 1991. The difference between the two events was quite extraordinary because in the intervening years a sea change had occurred. In 1966 I was not required to attend the birth whereas in 1991 the presence of the father, while not mandatory, was most definitely customary.
In 1966 the nearest maternity unit was at Ormskirk hospital and for all the involvement that was required of me it might as well have been located on the dark side of the moon. Indeed, the instant my whey faced young wife was settled into a bed a stern faced nurse curtly informed me that I could go. So, waving an uncertain hand in my wife's direction, I headed for the bus stop to take me back to Skelmersdale. On the top deck of the empty bus I quietly wept at the memory of the eighteen year old mother to be with her pale features set in a mask of apprehension.
Four hours later, while at work, I was informed that we had a son. It was midday and my work-mates persuaded me to 'wet the baby's head'. It is a sad truth that a cultural requirement for Britons is that they can 'hold their ale'. Now I am fine at holding beer, but actually drinking the stuff while remaining relatively compus mentus was beyond me and so when I turned up for the evening visit I sat down heavily and promptly fell off the chair scattering my bouquet of flowers across the polished floor. The same stern faced nurse I had encountered earlier gave me a deserved look of contempt but as I was intoxicated both with beer and the prospect of being a dad her sharp stare merely glanced off my alcohol induced armour.
My second son was born two years later in Liverpool's Mill Road hospital and, as was the prevailing custom, I was again deemed superfluous to requirements. In those days that a man's contribution to the whole thing was confined to the conception and quite often took up about as much of his time as the average contraction did for his partner.
Several years later I was divorced and I was convinced that my days as a sire were numbered but as another Liverpudlian once remarked,
"Life is what happens when you are making other plans"
In 1985, in my fortieth year, my second wife became pregnant, but by then the presence of fathers at the birth was de rigeur and so I, who had spent a lifetime fleeing madly from televised images of childbirth, was suddenly contracted to attend birthing classes!
1985 proved to be a traumatic year. Quite apart from the impending birth, my uncle Teddy was diagnosed with terminal cancer and it had fallen to me to fly to Sweden and help him through his last few weeks. Teddy was the glamour aspect of our extended family. At the age of sixteen he had decided that a daily descent into the bowels of nearby Cronton colliery was not for him and he de-camped to London where he gained employment in the world of theatre and television. He used to regale us with tales of the on set workings of the early comedy series 'The Army Game' and then he emigrated to America.
Teddy was always well dressed and led a happy life in such diverse places as Jackson Hole Wyoming, where he was employed in a place called the Pink Parrot, to the golf courses of California where he learned to play near scratch golf. He also managed to marry and divorce two lovely women, one of whom was a jewellery designer who made their wedding rings. All in all he was a visible success story.
So you can imagine my surprise when, in 1969, during my enforced sojourn in Sefton General's psychiatric ward, in walked a long haired and bearded man who looked like Jesus, but was in fact Teddy who had abandoned his old life for that of the flower children.
I laughed aloud with the delight of recognition and it was the most cheering moment of what was the most depressing period of my whole life and so when, many years later, I arrived at his apartment in Stockholm, where he was being nursed by a group of loving women friends, and observed his emaciated face I was already on the way to another bout of clinical depression.
He only survived three more weeks and I was left to stumble home via rail, ferry and train once more. My son's birth was due in twelve weeks from my arrival at Harwich and I was in a race to find mental equilibrium once more.
With medical intervention my depression had eventually lifted to the point where I could not only contemplate attending birthing classes but also nurture the idea of buying tickets to see Van Morrison sing at the Empire theatre. Thus it was that on Saturday the 28th of September 1985 my wife and myself were excitedly looking forward to attending the Van Morrison concert on the following Monday and our first birthing class on Tuesday.
Life is what happens...
Late on Saturday evening we decided to take the portable television to bed so as to watch the movie version of Graham Greene's novel, 'Brighton Rock'. We had just settled down to watch Richard Attenborough's chilling portrayal of 'Pinky' the mini gangster when my wife sat bolt upright, slid out of the bed and race to the bathroom exclaiming that her waters had broken. It was six weeks ahead of schedule. Startled, nay, panic stricken, I leapt up to get dressed and was suddenly paddling in spilt amniotic fluid. Wet feet notwithstanding I rushed to the nearest public phone box and within minutes an ambulance was whisking us off to Mill Road hospital.
The doctors decided that since the waters had broken my wife would have to be induced and so she was placed on a drip. By eight o'clock the following morning she hadn't begun to dilate and so the nurse told me to go home and get some sleep. After a fitful sleep I went back to hospital where my wife was in great distress as she was still undilated and the chances were that the baby would be in danger.
I consumed several cans of lager that I had brought with me and began to labour under the delusion that my role consisted in part of cracking jokes and generally being chipper. Only a woman could understand what an utter plantpoat I must seemed to her but she did her best to smile at my inane, not to say insane behaviour and all the time the clock ticked on. It ticked on through the epidural until finally it was 2 am on Monday morning and she was delivered of a vernix covered and strangely silent boy child.
The attending consultant, a heavily built African woman, took the silent infant in her arms and pronounced that she 'didn't like the look of him' as his lungs were flat and despatched him to intensive care.
My wife was distraught but asked me to leave her in order to see how our baby was doing. I found myself in the intensive care unit holding my baby boy who was by then breathing normally. I was dimly aware that my wife wanted to breast feed her child and so I innocently asked the nurse if there was any expressed milk to spare so that I could feed him.
The nurse, apparently voted at one stage 'Nurse of the year', snapped at me,
"Do I look as though I've got any!"
I could only mumble that I had understood that excess milk was sometimes kept for such emergencies and settled down to feed him from a bottle of formula milk.
Apart from one fleeting visit my wife was denied access to her baby for a whole day because there was nobody available to escort her to the ICU, and for the life of me I could not convince her that her son was really alive and thriving in his plastic green house. However, she was eventually allowed to bring him into the ward for a few hours and she told me later that she had held him up to the window in order to show him the stars. I have often reflected on the idea that the sickly child she held up to observe the stars now has as bright a future as any body I know.
The next day he was returned to the incubator where he spent a week being treated for an excessive Bilirubin count which lent him a vivid tangerine complexion. In the three months immediately following our first son's birth we were constantly assured by a seemingly endless stream of old ladies that he was 'a lovely colour'. My God! He was only a Jaffa stamp short of being an orange!
That night I was accompanied by my mate Frank and at the end of the visit I suggested that I give the concert tickets to Frank. My wife, despite her own cares, reminded me that it was only ten minutes from curtains up and that Frank would not only have to give a ticket a way but would also be alone for the show. At her insistence I went with him and was just about to sit down when another friend, John Mac, offered me a glass of wine to wet the baby's head. I must confess that I didn't really feel like drinking and was in fact dreading the concert because Van Morrison is notoriously moody and unpredictable when performing live.
However, in the event Van the Man was in great form as, between sipping bottles of ale and lighting cigarettes, he gave every one of his fans a wonderful evening via a fluid medley of his finest songs. I still can't hear 'Into the mystic' without thinking of women and their mystical journey into motherhood.
I have since entertained the notion that women adore their children quite simply because they are supremely grateful for a cessation of the torture that is birth. It is rather like the 'Stockholm syndrome' wherein the hostage develop an intimate relationship with their captors who, while they might have frightened and even hurt their victims terribly, are eventually seen as kind and loving because at some point they cease to torture and terrify. Just a thought.
The birth of our second son was in my wife's words, 'like shelling peas'. We arrived at the hospital at 7 pm and by three minutes past ten he had popped out to the strident accompaniment of the ITN news theme music. As I gazed on our already ravenously feeding child I heard the news reader announce the release of the Birmingham Six from their false imprisonment and smiled at the thought that at that very moment another innocent had escaped confinement!
Yesterday, the 16th of January 2007, my once jaundiced little boy was accepted by a leading medical school to do his fourth year clinical studies. Soon I will have to address him as Doctor. Life is what happens...
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