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.
No more heroes - The lost weekend
By John Williams
When I was growing up my world view was greatly influenced by what I observed at the cinema. I inhabited a world largely populated by gunslingers, epic heroes and snarling mobsters. The few films I ever saw that depicted English life left me with a sense that almost all working men wore flat caps, spoke with a Cockney or Cornish accent and had, apparently, attended servility school where they graduated with honours in subjects such as forelock tugging, fawning and looking generally idiotic.
Sometime in the early sixties that viewpoint was abruptly shattered when I visited the Scala cinema in Lime Street to see a film based on Alan Sillitoe's novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. The credits had barely finished rolling when I was presented with the sight of Albert Finney working at a lathe and glaring balefully at his surroundings.
His thoughts were given voice, via his gravelly Nottingham accent, and I heard him 'say',
"Don't let the bastards grind you down!"
I remember sitting bolt upright, thrilled and electrified by the sense of shock that Finney's character, Arthur Seaton, had generated in my hitherto passive soul.
In one snarled sentence Finney had obliterated the memory of years spent watching actors, such as Bernard Miles, depicting working class men as a cross between the village idiot and Uriah Heep. Suddenly I was aware that there were men and women who weren't awed by authority and who refused to accept the status quo.
My personal sense of self esteem had been given a massive boost by Sillitoe's hero and I felt within me the stirring of voice long stifled by various forms of authority.
How sad then that within three years of seeing Finney's galvanising performance, which had elevated working men to an almost heroic stature, the popular image of British men was universally accepted to be best represented by the antics of James Bond, the creation of Ian Fleming, an out and out snob.
The exploits of Arthur Seaton, which included such ordinary activities as river fishing, were totally eclipsed by a character so far removed from every day reality that he might as well have earned his living raking soil on the Moon.
Hollywood's obsession with westerns, depicting a period that lasted barely two decades but which nonetheless represented a massive percentage of its film output, was aped by the British and for a time we were swamped by films and television series devoted to the activities of spies who by and large spoke with the impeccable accents of the upper classes.
One notable exception was Michael Cain's portrayal of the working class spook, Harry Palmer, in The Ipcress File. Even he had middle class pretensions though because he used to cook gourmet meals in a kitchen equipped with copper pans.
That said, Palmer's freedom and independence from both his own class and that of his handlers represented an ideal for me, a sort of kingdom of the personal space. Sadly, I have never been able to afford copper pans.
In retrospect it was inevitable that the days of genuine representations of working class existence, such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and its television counterpart, Cathy Come Home, would give way to the ludicrous world of the soap, wherein virtually every working class character is an entrepreneur, because too much reality is bad for ratings, unless it is specifically called Reality television!
Where Arthur Seaton fished peacefully on a local canal, James Bond, in the second Bond epic, From Russia with Love, set lakes on fire with barrels of high octane fuel and whereas Seaton introduced us to the sordid world of back street abortion the priapic Bond slept with half the world's women without ever once impregnating one of them.
Seaton tried, ineffectually, to rescue an old drunk from the clutches of the police while Bond wasted whole armies of villains with a merry quip on his lips so perhaps it is understandable that we seek to identify with winners as long as it's not Michael Winner, who, vide such films as Death Wish, gave us another stereotype, the wronged citizen/psychopath with a licence to kill.
Perhaps my adulation of Finney's character went too far because I too ended up playing a major role in that little known Liverpool based film, Twelve bore romance
To the Earl of Locksley, that other Nottingham based hero, I say Come back all is forgiven!