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.
Meaty big and bouncy - Desperate hunger in the austerity years
By John Williams
The lure of television is as strong today as was in the first years of its inception. The other day I was walking through my local shopping precinct when I noticed the local down and out, a wretched looking man in his middle years who never speaks to anybody, not even himself.
He was staring through the window of a television hire shop, absorbed by one of the myriad cookery programmes which dangle rich food before the eyes of poor people whose days are filled with visions of exotic dishes while their stomachs remain relatively empty.
In the sixties, as I recall, there was only one television chef and that was Phillip Harben, an ex-seaman who was the spitting image of Sir John Falstaff, Shakespeare's gluttonous anti-hero. Harben was a no nonsense man who assumed his audience had never boiled an egg much less whisked up a Cinnamon and Calvados souffle.
Several years later, we would sit stupefied, watching a harridan called Fanny Craddock basting joints while simultaneously lambasting her monocled and drink sodden partner, Johnny, at every opportunity. The Craddocks were more about comedy than cookery.
Currently the airwaves are stuffed with chefs of both sexes and many house-bound English people are spectres at these televised feasts. Some, like 'Ready Steady Cook' are a mixture of culinary skill with a pinch of music hall, where guests bring an assortment of food items and challenge two chefs to create a tempting dish with the ingredients.
Each guest has a strict budget, something like seven pounds, to provide the ingredients. Since the show is on five days a week the cost of the ingredients alone, without fuel costs, represents more than a single person's weekly job seeker's allowance and almost half of a single pensioner's income.
The meals produced by these preening prima donnas of the kitchen are usually inedible, as the ingredients are so ill matched that Escoffier himeslf would have been pushed to turn out something worthwhile.
I once saw a self important little chef attempt to marry Smoked Haddock with a Mango, Couscous, anchovies and a bunch of spring onions. The result defied description, but the audience applauded it wholeheartedly. Perhaps they had been denied sustenance for a week before the programme and were so hungry that even the evil looking mess so artfully laid out before them appeared somehow appetising.
During the course of a day something like twenty cookery based programmes can be found on British television. However, on evening television these shows are restricted to two or three. I don't understand the logic that inflicts culinary torment on low income groups during daytime and avoids the high income groups at night.
It is obviously cheaper to make a largely useless cookery programme than be accused of showing repeats of old movies.
Of course British food, and attitudes to it, have changed beyond recognition in the past forty years. For one thing foodstuffs are more easily available, because global farming means that there are cheap fruit and vegetables available the year round, except at Christmas and Easter when there is an automatic mark up on prices of all things green. I can only assume that during those holy seasons farmers prefer praying to harvesting.
The importance of food to the British in general, and to the inhbitants of Liverpool in particular, has, until recently, occupied a very special place in the collective psyche. Years ago, before the relentless advance of the games console, children used to read comics. 'The Beano' and 'The Dandy' were the most popular, populating infant minds with such characters as Hungry Horace and Desperate Dan.
The latter was a huge urbanised cowboy whose five o'clock shadow prefigured designer stubble by decades. He resembled an unkempt square-jawed John Wayne and he dined on pies made from whole cows. I can still see the enormous pastry crust which sprouted horns and a tail!
This emphasis on food was universal to British comics in one very singular way. Whenever a villain was vanquished the comic characters, whether by Lord Snooty and his pals or the Bash Street Kids, would invariably celebrate by tucking into a gargantuan meal of either fish and chips, sausage and mash or steak, egg and chips.
The sheer size of each meal, in which the chips or mashed potato were piled so high that they anticipated the EEC food mountains by years, was in inverse proportion to the reality of the scant post war meals we encountered daily.
They were simply wish fulfillment dreaming. A glance at any remaining comics will reveal that our obsession with humble foods as a general reward has disappeared. Modern Bash Street Kids are more likely to celebrate in a burger bar; possibly plumping for the 'healthy' salad option.
It's a strange thing, but my generation were never offended by Desperate Dan's cow pies, even when the slaughter of the cow was rendered so explicit. Modern shaped kids, however, seem to shy away from the carnal knowledge of abattoirs and prefer not to know that what they are eating once had a life.
I first noticed this aversion to the reality of meat in the 70's when a couple of American ladies opened a burger bar, The American Dream, in Bold Street, which was just in the process of losing its status as the premier shopping area of Liverpool.
The burgers made by these ladies were frankly superb and were served with a choice of home-made relishes, which served to enhance the flavour of the meat rather than disguise it.
However, I observed that some of their more squeamish clientelle sometimes baulked at the sight of the prime steak which was kept in full view behind the glass counter and which was ground on demand to make burgers.
Those ladies, although young in years, were, in a sense, relics, because to succeed in getting modern children to eat a meat based product one has to make the product appear to have no earthly connection with the reality of dead animals and the slaughterhouse.
Perhaps that's where McDonalds scores so heavily because the first time I ever tasted a Big Mac I was struck by it's bland almost fibreless texture and the fact that it could have been almost any substance, from Soya Protein to Quorn.
Then again, all this might explain why curry is now Britain's number one meal because let's face it, the beef in a thick Madras sauce is virtually unrecognisable as meat whereas the old Liverpool favourite, Scouse, contained unmistakeable chunks of beef and or lamb as did that classic of old fashioned British cooking, the steak and kidney pie.
Of course, since Margaret Thatcher de-regulated the abbatoirs, unleashing the shambles of BSE, eating beef is a bit like playing Bovine roulette as one mouthful could send a prion bullet straight into one's brain. She was only a grocer's daughter, but she gave the butchers something to beef about.
Incidentally, that tail hanging from Dan's cow pie would now be one of the main sources of Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis. Small wonder Dan was desperate, the poor man was going mad!