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.
Jamjars - vintage boredom in Liverpool
By
John Williams
When I was a little boy, children in Liverpool would derive hours of innocent, albeit monotonous fun spotting car numbers. We would sit on the grass verge, bordering Princess Drive, with a pencil and scrap of paper or a notebook. Some people had more money than sense, and would jot down the licence number of every car that passed by.
Cars in the fifties were still a luxury item, so a good day might yield just a hundred numbers. What we did, or were supposed to do with the data God only knows. I suppose it was just another manifestation of the universal male predilection for compiling useless statistics.
I lived in a road whose house numbers reached five hundred, yet I can only remember one neighbour who owned a car. He lived next door and his pride and joy was an old Austin with wire wheels. Now we kids were as rough and ready as the next bunch but apart from lobbing the odd stone at a door we were not destructive, however that didn't stop Mr. Fairclough from parking his car in his garden.
To this day I don't know how he did it but his privet hedge would miraculously open and he would carefully lay down a wooden ramp before driving his Buster Keaton special into the partly paved garden. Naturally enough it didn't occur to me then, but I had witnessed an event that was to become commonplace the world over, which is the sacrifice of garden to garage.
"They paved paradise and put up a parking lot"
Until the late sixties cars played little part in my life, then I got a job in Ford's at Halewood. I started on the night shift in May 1969. I was given a job which immediately put me in mind of my sailing days on the Empress of England because the charge-hand gave me a wad of cotton waste and told me to clean the oil out of the car shells as they came out of the press shop.
It was such a simple job that I was surprised they hadn't trained monkeys to do it. I used to divert a car off the line, climb inside the shell and swabbed the oil which swished around inside. I lasted four nights and went looking for another job. Looking back on it I suspect that a monkey would have demanded a boredom allowance.
I never did learn how to drive, but now that I have a teenager who needs lifts everywhere and one approaching his teens I will have to bite the bullet. I've just had my photo taken for the licence, one of those from a booth, which reduces everyone to something resembling a flash-shocked, wild-eyed serial killer.
Should I ever get stopped by a policeman, he wouldn't ask me to breathe into a bag, he would be more likely to call for armed back up and try to put me in one!
As for buying a car, I have a bowl full to the brim with car keys sent to me by the Reader's Digest, all assuring me that I have only to open the envelope to win a car. I can't decide between the sporty roadster and the off road rugged rambler. Still, there's plenty of time for that. I have to get a new photo first!