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.
Coining it in Liverpool - Life on the edge
By John Williams
A group of eminent archaeologists were recently summoned to Liverpool to try and solve the mystery of the Huyton Stones. For those who have no knowledge of such stones let me point out that they were only recently unearthed when the remains of some recently demolished pre-war council houses were removed to make way for the foundations of a new development of Barrat Homes.
The stones, oblong shaped sandstone blocks about the size of a pillow, created a stir in the dusty world of archeology as they bore hitherto unknown man made marks which some anthropologists argued represented a new language form. As I had a friend in the archeology department of Liverpool University I was allowed access to the sacred stones, which had been temporarily stored in the deep freeze of a butcher in Wavertree.
When I saw the fur coated and legginged scientists poring over sandstone slabs that were scored by deep indentations that crossed at various points like the sand drawings in the Nazca desert, I almost burst out laughing, but, for the sake of my friend, Danielle, AKA Dusty Trowel, the queen of the digs, I kept my feelings to myself.
As I overheard the learned assembly discuss the similarities of the strange markings to early Etruscan and cuniform scripts I wanted to scream that they were making a huge mistake, on a par with Sir Hugh Trevor-Roper's embarrassing endorsement of the phoney diaries of Adolf Hitler, or the debacle of the Piltdown Man. However, for once in my life I was able to keep schtum and avoid the fate of so many messengers who brought bad news.
You see, as soon as I saw the deep cuts and scratches in the lozenge shaped sandstone I was transported back to my 1950's childhood and my involvement in an activity that was, in earlier times, considered to be treasonous and which carried the death penalty.
Of course, I didn't know anything of that as I toiled away, scraping the edge of a halfpenny across the roughened surface of the sandstone step at the kitchen door, in an attempt to remove enough of the copper to make the coin smaller and so pass for a silver shilling, which was the denomination required to enable people to buy enough fuel from the pre-paid gas meter to ensure that roast potatoes were actually roasted and not merely singed.
Such criminal activities, while no longer carrying the death penalty, had their shameful consequences nonetheless. I can still see the sneering look of distaste on one man's face as he emptied the gas meter, and he was just a petty thief! The real gas-meter man was far more diplomatic, and so his face was usually expressionless as he sorted out the coins. His only concession to officialdom was to scrupulously make separate piles of shillings, clipped halfpennies and Pesetas.
The meter man never did give us the clipped coins back and I often wished that the job had been done by a woman who would surely have sympathised, thus ensuring that I had seg free fingers for years!
"Lovely Rita, meter maid..."
I make this one plea. Don't tell the archeologists. Let's keep it our secret!