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.
In an English country garden - Jimmy Rodgers eat your heart out
By John Williams
It's that time of year when promises sown during the wild month of March are being met. It wasn't until late in life that I found the necessary space to explore the pleasure of gardening, and for many years I pursued my floral fancy ardently, until that is I discovered the world of computers, which supplanted my older love.
I began to neglect my garden, offering only a perfunctory glance in its direction and simply going through the motions of a relationship.
My garden, which had once dazzled me with its gorgeous finery, grew sullen and withdrew into itself, as if donning widow's weeds. Just as it appeared that my love of the soil would be buried beneath an avalanche of technology based flirtations my affair with the web began to cool somewhat and so I now find that my old affections have green shoots once more.
I don't know where my desire to grow plants came from because as a child the only gardening I ever saw my father undertake was to cut the rampant privet hedge that surrounded our council house. The air would be moist with the scent of clipped leaves mingled with the sweet smelling florescence of yellowy white privet flowers. To this day I love the heady honey perfume of the humble privet.
My grandfather lived in Hillside Road, which was almost the last road before Liverpool gave way to Prescot, an ancient market town. There was a cherry tree in the back garden, which every year produced two green cherries that clung to a lower branch like the testicles of a camouflaged and singularly undendowed giant.
My father and his father in law used to stare up at the pitiful bounty and mutter about fertilizer, but that was as far as their horticultural impulse went, apart from the year my father clambered up the tree to pluck the fruit from the loins of the giant, only to find them bitter beyond belief.
My grandfather's neighbour, a bus driver by the name of Sullivan was much more enterprising because he had what appeared to be a veritable plantation devoted to rhubarb production. However, in the early fifties sugar was still rationed, and so whenever Mr Sullivan handed my grandmother an armful of the pink stems my lips would pucker as the sour juice of anticipation flooded in to shrivel my palate.
Mr Sullivan had a daughter called Angela, whom I admired from afar and whose sweet features more than made up for the mouth-puckering rhubarb.
That was my last contact with domestic food production for almost ten years as none of my subsequent homes had gardens, because they were all terraced with barren yards.
In any case my stepfather was so tired from hefting sides of beef, over twice his own body weight, that any notion of gardening was absurd. It was as much as he could do to watch Sunday morning repeats of Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men that so fascinated my baby brother.
While my stepfather's spine was crumbling my brother was absorbing much more than images of flowerpots and weeds. On those days when I had finished an early shift on the buses I would often find myself slumped in front of the television watching the antics of Bill and Ben. At the end of every programme the lady narrator would ask which flowerpot had performed whatever mischievous act the show had displayed that day. I invariably guessed wrongly, while my four year old sibling would always get it right.
One day, frusrated by my inability to give the right answer I bemusedly asked him how he always knew. Looking at me with something akin to pity in his eyes he replied,
"It's easy...one day it's Bill and the next day it's Ben."
Shortly after that I married and within a year had my own garden. I would like to say that I immediately transformed the overgrown garden into a demi Eden but the truth is that the only use we had for it was to hang sheets to dry on the bushes.
Actually the house was only a temporary dwelling as we had been told that we could live there while the newly built council estate of the Windrows in Skelmersedale was completed and so I didn't really have much incentive to sow a crop.
However, while I was there someone tried to reap a rather unusual harvest. One day when I came home from work I found the house empty as my wife was attending an ante natal clinic. Just as I was in the kitchen putting on the kettle I was startled when a man stepped out of the adjoining bathroom.
Shocked, I asked him what the hell he was doing but I calmed down when he told me he was the refuse collector man and that he'd been looking for the bin. I never thought anything about it and several months later found myself playing in the same pub team as the intrusive bin man who was quite an accomplished player.
It wasn't until I read in the local paper that he'd been convicted of stealing over three hundrd items of women's underwear from washing lines that I realised why he'd been in the bathroom!
When we eventually moved to our new house I was surprised to see the newly deposited soil had been levelled ready for planting and already sported an ornamental cherry tree courtesy of the council. That was the only good thing about it because after the first rain storm the garden resembled a miniature boating lake as the topsoil had been laid over a mixture of rubble and clay.
With hindsight it would have been more appropriate for the council to have planted a Willow. That way the tree would have looked more in keeping with its surroundings and I would have had a handy source of Aspirin to alleviate the headache of wondering whether or not I would arrive home one day to find my baby son had drowned in the damn garden!
After my divorce I lived for many years in a small terraced house that had a yard dominated by a brick and concrete air raid shelter which wasn't demolished until the early seventies. I used it to store my rust ridden tools and a scooter that I had bought in order to make my daily journey to my job in Bidston rather easier than the usual bus and train.
When my present spouse moved in she was a little dismayed to find that there was such a marked diffference between the yard and the garden of her country home in Dorset.
I felt I had to make some sort of effort to recreate her paradise but only succeeded in making her giggle at some of my antics. Not that she was disparaging but it is hard not to laugh when you find someone digging up daffodil bulbs planted in an old ammunition box, in order to see if they were they were the right way up!
I ended up with a couple of barrels and that were home to a few sooty roses but then I reached the limits of my expertise.
My Sadim touch, that's Midas backwards, eventually withered on the vine and with incredible luck I eventually found myself in possession of a large rear garden and a medium sized front garden.
That was ten years ago, when I had assumed that my wife would want the usual suburban meat and two veg, that is, a lawn and border, but she expressed a wish for flowers and nothing else. So it is that I am typing here with my keyboard on an extended lead, and sitting in a comfy chair because my back is aching from weeding. Trust me to resurrect such a demanding passion at my age!
I think I will do some pruning, editing, and call the gardening off for a day. The web has its share of weeds but none quite like the people who pass by and ask of my painstakingly worked out drift planting, admittedly at the behest of my better half,
"Do you just scatter your seeds at random?"
I just think, 'Those were the days my friend...'