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.
Money - That's what I want
By John Williams
My wife has an expression for those television shows that encourage competitors to amass fortunes in a matter of minutes. She calls them greedy games. When I was young there was a quiz show for children that could be said to be a visual metaphor for the once deadly sin of greed. I am referring to the programme Crackerjack, which featured a quiz contest called 'Double or drop'.
During the course of this game the children who answered questions successfully won only low value items such as pencil cases or footballs and so you might think greed was largely absent. However, if they answered unsuccessfully they were presented with a cabbage, which had to be held inter alia with the pencil cases etcetera. If they dropped a cabbage or a prize they could be eliminated
So the longer a contestant stayed in the game the more prizes and or cabbages he or she had to clasp to their infant breast. If that wasn't a representation of greed I don't know what was, especially during the immediate post austerity period when I knew poor families who would have prized the cabbages alone.
I would like to say that I have resisted the urge to get something for nothing, or rather, to get something for less than its face value. That, however, is not the case, because for as long as I can remember I have been a fully paid up member of the 'Gimme' tribe.
While I was in Miss Campbell's class a raffle was held where the prize was a plastic dagger with a retractable blade, which, on contact with the target, slid back into the handle, so allowing the owner of said weapon to stab other children without actually harming them, other than psychologically that is.
Perhaps I was a latent assassin, I don't really know, but I do know that the plastic dagger was my first conscious 'must have'. Every penny I had was spent on tickets and long before the draw was made Miss Campbell told me that, given the laws of chance and the fact that almost every other light blue ticket was mine I had a good chance of winning.
I didn't really understand the mathematics of it and so when I won the bright yellow pretend weapon I couldn't shake the idea that Miss Campbell had rigged the draw in my favour, which in retrospect was not only absurd but was also terribly unfair to the fairest teacher I ever knew.
Nonetheless my joy in winning the dagger was tainted by my unfounded belief and I only half heartedly assassinated, one by one, the rest of the class.
It would be some fourteen years later that I won another prize and in fact that evening I won more than one. It was Christmas Eve, in 1964, and I had taken up the offer by a girlfriend to attend a dance at the David Lewis theatre in the South end of the city.
Now for those of you who never attended such an event in that venue I should explain that for a teenager to enter the David Lewis theatre on that particular evening was rather like a modern shaped youngster volunteering to take part in a Derby and Joan dance marathon at the local vicarage.
I say that because on that night my girl and myself appeared to be the only people there whose hair wasn't rinsed blue and also probably the only people not possessed of those proverbial teeth that, like the stars, came out at night.
Winning was too easy and we won almost every spot prize, and I am not referring to my incipient acne. You know the type of spot prize I mean.
The compere, presumably allowing for the hard of hearing, of which there appeared to be legions, would bellow,
"This prize goes to the first person to show me a set of black teeth!"
Whereupon my consort, who somewhat alarmingly seemed to have played this game many times, whipped out a comb and bingo, we'd won a half bottle bottle of scotch!
The older contestants didn't mind at all as we amassed festive treasures. Indeed, many wore fond smiles as we triumphed, even going so far as to overlook my neat trip on a geriatric dancer during a be-bop competition.
I never saw my date again after that night, but I have visions of her in her twenties hanging around old aged pensioners' clubs with her hand hovering near her comb.
The next time I won anything was by dint of outright cheating. I was working in Cammell Lairds when a W.D and H.O Wills promotion team arrived to extol the virtues of Golden Virginia tobacco.
The name of the game was to roll a cigarette of such perfection that it would register a score on a mechanical device that held the cigarette and 'sucked' at it it, thus measuring its flow.
I failed the first time but noted the measurement and so the next one I made, (bear in mind we were only allowed one chance so I was cheating), I adapted my rolling technique so as to allow the machine to draw evenly on the 'rollie'. I won half a pound of tobacco for my devious effort, and I have sometimes wondered what the inside of the puffing billy looked like. One would probably have needed a wire brush to clear the tar filled tubes!
I must have rolled mountains of cigarettes before I next entered a competition and I fear that the iron lung of the shipyard was probably in better shape when it was scrapped than mine is now.
In the eighties I purchased one of the first Camcorders, falling head over heels for Sharp's advertisng campaign which depicted a group of people making movies. Ostensibly I had bought the camera to record the first years of my newly born son, but I suppose that subconsciously I entertained visions of being the next Coppola.
In the end I succeeded only in becoming a control freak who would explode when my family wouldn't conform to my artistic demands.
Worse, I zealously guarded the infernal machine against possible damage to such an extent that my children still revel in replaying a shot taken of me by my wife where I am snarling instructions to her.
Even now, if I am engaged in coming to terms with new technology my boys will echo the line from my starring role in the remake of 'The good, the bad and the downright ugly', by shouting,
"Don't touch that red button!"
My glowing complexion is by then perfectly colour co-ordinated to the button.
I digress. I had bought the camcorder from Dixons and a few days later saw the same device on sale at Laski's priced at two hundred pounds less. It so happened that when I took possession of the camera I was handed a form, issued by Sharp, which, following on from the quiz type questionaire, asked if they could have supplied any more information about the machine than they already had. I filled in the form, adding sarcastically that they might have told me that it was cheaper at Laski's.
Six weeks later I received a parcel containing a portable television, which was the first prize and I have it on good authority, from someone who worked on Sharp's advertising account, that I won the prize not for correctly filling in the quiz/questionaire, but for my Chutzpah!
That was almost twenty years ago. In the intervening years I have played the national Lottery since its inception and the best I've ever done was four numbers once, winning £70, and the ten pound prize about six times. As if that isn't already a poor return for an outlay of approximately £2800 I am stuck with the same damned numbers so I am riding a train that cannot I afford to leave!
I even play when I'm on holiday, because I have nightmares that on the week I haven't played some other person will have picked the same numbers, but not claimed the prize, with the result that the my numbers would be flashing up on the TV screen for months reminding me of my stupidity!
I wonder though what the chances are of such an eventuality, and whether or not I could get a bookmaker to give me decent odds for it?