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.
Hold that Dragon - My days as a squire
By
John Williams
My love affair with tales of chivalry was inspired by the film 'Ivanhoe', starring Robert Taylor as the exemplar of knightly virtue, and Elizabeth Taylor as the beautiful Rebecca, daughter of Isaac the Jew of York. Joan Fontaine was enchanting as the Saxon rose, but even as a child I couldn't understand why Mr. Taylor preferred her pale frailty to the charms of the exotic and stunning Ms. Taylor. Perhaps the Catholic knight couldn't afford to get involved with a high profile divorcee.
I was always a sucker for a male in chain mail and I adored Ivanhoe, whether in his big screen incarnation or in the television series where he was portaryed by the well scrubbed and shiny faced Roger Moore. In fact, the only way my mother could get me to eat mashed carrot and turnip was to tell me that Ivanhoe ate them by the basinful. So when my youngest child begged me for a trip to Camelot theme park, which is housed near the quaintly named Charnock Richard, I was already half way there.
We loaded up our horseless cart and before long we had arrived at car park number seven. My lucky number I thought, until I we joined the gaggle of camp followers heading for the park proper. It was miles away! By the time we got there my spurs were killing me. Worse was to come when we eventually got to the entrance and found queues stretching from the turnstiles, all the way back to the dark ages.
After about thirty minutes of painfully slow plodding we finally gained access to the interior of Arthur's redoubt where I fancied I heard a voice shouting,
"Let the queues commence!"
However I dismissed it as a figment of my imagination. I wish!
The rest of the day was spent performing the Camelot shuffle and I could only think that it was a good thing that the day was overcast and cool or else there would have been so many serfs that the boys would never have got a ride. Personally I couldn't have cared less as some of the rides looked positively terrifying,
and since discretion is the better part of valour I found myself sitting on the dampish grass for most of the day watching the wheels go round.
The one ride I did fancy was the Dragon Flyer, a sort of medieval roller coaster but without any of those awful loops which leave one screaming while hanging upside down. It was for parents like me really. As my wife and the lads headed for the queue, which was about thirty minutes long, I headed for the chip shop.
The queue for the chips didn't look that long, but it was an age before I managed to get a polystyrene tray of chips and a pot of ye olde currye sauce. I can only assume that the dragon's breath which heated the chip fryer had been extinguished, possibly by an ill aimed squirt of Coke.
By the time I caught up with my family they were only three Dragon rides from the front of the queue. I was just about to leap the wall and join them when my wife pointed to a notice which declared that queue jumping was cause for instant banishment from the park. Part of the definition of queue jumping was that of reserving someone's place and so I was left holding my victuals while my nearest and dearest whizzed around me aboard the Flyer. Verily, I was pissed off!
I was partially consoled by the jousting tournament which was quite thrilling albeit a little puzzling. You see, I had always assumed that Camelot was somewhere in Cornwall, but judging by the accents of everyone concerned, from the very funny Jester to the Pre-Raphaelite Guineverre, the round table must have been located near ancient Wigan.
The jousts were a round table version of WWF wrestling and traditional pantomime. It evoked memories of the times I went to the old stadium and bore witness to the ineffable villainy of Jackie Pye and his son Dominic, two of the original bad boys of wrestling, as Lancelot was cheered to the rafters at every mention of his name and the jester/warm up man even persuaded everybody to generate a medieval Mexican wave whenever he uttered the words' Lancelot and Sir Percival'.
The villains of the piece were a somewhat grubby looking Black Knight and his sidekick Sir Gawain, both of whom played dirty and frequently smote poor Lancelot from behind until the latter abandoned chivalry and roundly attacked the swine with everything but ye olde kitchen sinke and thus restored order to the Arthurian universe.
As much as I adored Ivanhoe et al I think I'll take my lads to Blackpool next time I feel like watching white knuckle riders. Okay, so perhaps it lacks some of the cachet of Avalon, but then again, it generally lacks Camelot's interminable queues.