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.
Candy man - My sweet youth
By John Williams
Sweet things were scarce when I was a boy and so kids would resort to mixing weird concoctions with anything that was available. One of my favourites was to take equal parts of sugar and cocoa and mix them together in a brown paper bag that sometimes bore the faint whiff of apples.
I would then moisten my finger and dip it into the mix before transferring said digit to my Burnt Sienna tinted lips. The mixture had a bitter sweet taste as the cocoa was not designed to take the place of Cadbury's chocolate.
Sugar, in the fifties, was at a premium due to rationing and so sometimes I had to use condensed milk as a sugar substitute. In those days nobody I knew had a refigerator and so foodstuff was kept in the larder.
Warm weather ensured that even on the marble shelves the condensed milk would dissolve so that the upper few inches would be runny while the remainder crystalised into ultra sweet clusters with the consequence that the resulting cocoa/milk mix, had it been around today, would have been called Treacle Lite.
The problem with our larder was that it was part of a house that had been built on what had once been farmer's fields and so the larder was arguably the world wide headquarters of Ants incorporated. During those long hot summers of the fifties our larder was the scene of ant conventions, mass ant weddings and anti-saccharine demonstrations.
When, years later, I came across the notion avante garde shopkeepers selling of chocolate covered ants I couldn't help thinking that we kids were way ahead of the trend.
In those far off days most households enjoyed home-made pies and cakes and on Sunday afternoons window ledges throughout the country were the source of tantalizing aromas as wholesome confections cooled down prior to Sunday tea.
My mother used to bake huge rectangular fruit cakes in a baking tin that was in fact a roasting dish. She was self deprecating about her efforts and even nicknamed her cake 'rock-a-ma-jock'.
In truth it was a delicious but for some unknown reason never looked like a traditional domed cake; au contraire, my mother's cake had a pronounced concave shape and was so big that it looked a geographical model of the Qattara depression.
My mother was never big on aesthetics. As long as it was edible and tasted great that was all that mattered. Nonetheless, there was at least one occasion when I wished she hadn't been so cavalier a cook.
I remember once when I was about seven and we discovered too late that we had forgotten to order bread from the roundsman and as it was Sunday there was as little chance of finding a grocery shop open as there was of finding a church shut.
My mother decided to bake some bread herself. Perhaps there is some Jewish ancestry in my family because she used only flour and water without the addition of yeast so that we ended up with unleavened bricks that crumbled at the touch of a knife. That was the end of her threat to the giants of the bread producing industry.
If my mother had a consistent culinary fault it was her gravy. Now don't get me wrong it was delicious because she always used the essences from the meat to make it, but it was, well...viscous. No. It was thick. So thick that one could hold the gravy boat in the pouring position and then read the Sunday People from cover to cover before the roast potatoes were even vaguely covered.
One thing I will always remember about my mother's table was that she was years ahead of her time vis a vis the current demand for whole foods. Especially in summer when she would serve up a plate of boiled ham and salad, which always consisted of a whole tomato, a whole lettuce leaf and a whole raddish. I don't think the plates were that big because I never saw a whole cucumber!
Just thinking about sweet things has made me peckish, but, since I was only recently diagnosed type two diabetes the sugar and cocoa mix is out of the question, as is cake, as is....oh Hell, it'll have to be wholemeal bread and sugar free jam, again!
October 15th 2004