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.
Life in the Liverpool Alamo - Pay the piper
By
John Williams
I suppose everyone has had to employ a plumber at some time or other but it seems to me that in the past twenty years I have had more call for their services than ever. I mean, in the fifties and sixties appliances that need a plumber's attention were thin on the ground.
As I understood it then, a shower was a bunch of ne'er do wells, while a dishwasher was usually a woman with reddened hands. Some of you may remember the television ad for Fairy washing up liquid, which depicted an angelic young girl, not a boy you notice, admiring her mother's beautiful hands to the strain a lyric that went,
"Hands that do dishes feel as soft as your face with mild green fairy liquid"
Of course, wearing rubber gloves helped too but in those pre-Marigold days only bin men wore those.
In the past thirty years plumbers have seen an explosion of central heating and appliances that have kept them in constant demand. Unfortunately, not all of those tradesmen are up to the job. Some of them are simply cowboys and would be better off exchanging their pipe wrenches for branding irons. I recommend they all use the Bar-X brand as any letter with a curve in it would be beyond them.
Don't get me wrong, I've been well served by highly skilled and professional tradesmen, but as with life so with plumbers, one only remembers the chaps who leave you with an unreasonably large bill and a botched installation which, as long as it exists, serves as a memento of their visit.
One such rider of the purple sage was a local plumber, a young man with an Italian name and, I suspect, French plumbing qualifications. To be fair, it wasn't entirely his fault as he was working in a house that was built in 1835, the year Texas gained its independence, and so the plumbimg system was outmoded before Thomas Crapper had even been potty trained.
That said, he managed to drop a hammer into the toilet pan and shatter it. Obviously a new pan was required, and I had to pay for it as I knew instinctively that had I charged him he would have done a runner, thus leaving us with a mess and a vacancy for a plumber.
Every time I went up to see how he was getting on he had broken something else or a nut had sheared. He claimed to have served his apprenticeship with Liverpool City Council but I can only think that he had been seconded to Vandals R Us.
His depredations meant that my wife, who, like most women, is weirdly fastidious, refused to use the upstairs toilet until another plumber righted it. I couldn't understand her attitude because, let's face it, she married a drip, at least where judging plumbers was concerned. Women are strange creatures in that they manage to clean a baby's mess without puking, but let them see a near infinitesimal pee stain on the bathroom floor and they go absolutely I.C.B.M.
I was glad to see the back of Super Mario because after two days of his mishaps/vandalism I had grown terrified that he would puncture the central heating pipes so lovingly and excellently installed by a real plumber.
I have, unfortunately, bumped into the bathroom bodger several times since and he always avoids eye contact, or perhaps he's hopelessly short sighted, which would explain a few things. The last time I saw him he was sitting in a parked car in Sainsbury's and the only reason I noticed him was that on my approach he slid down into the seat with smoothness of an electric window being wound down, or a cobra disappearing into its basket.
Lately we have made several changes to our home, including the installation of a shower that takes advantage of a combination boiler system, for me a somewhat radical and vaguely unwelcome departure from an upturned bucket but for my spouse's sake I'll try anything new fangled idea.
Now, I have rarely been able to ask for estimates from different tradesmen as I always feel guilty when I have to disregard the unwanted tenders. So it was that when I met our latest plumber, a young man called, would you believe, Mike Williams. I simply accepted his estimate and boy am I glad I did!
From the outset his approach was different as he wore a suit and tie while surveying the bathroom. With his short hair, steel rimmed glasses and determined expression he looked more like a C.I.A operative than a plumber, but with a more reliable intelligence than the boys from Langley.
He is a rather taciturn, at times dour young man, preferring to work rather than talk, and how he worked. Quietly insistent he persuaded us to install chrome pipe work, which not only complemented the shower-head etc, but satisfied his need to create an aesthetic appeal in his work.
As, at intervals, I delivered him fruit tea, which exotic and most un-plumber-like item he had brought with him, I saw our shower taking place as if watching a photo lapse on a plumber's training video.
First he tiled the walls with a studied concentration worthy of a NASA engineer installing a heat shield on a Shuttle spacecraft. Then he fitted the gleaming pipe-work with such precision that he could well have been renovating the great organ in the Anglican Cathedral.
However, while my sights were set on the gleaming edifice in the corner of our bathroom Mike, down to earth as ever was busy ensuring that our bathroom was tidier than when he left it. Not only had he brushed the carpet, after first removing his tool-boxes, so numerous that they would have served as an insurmountable barricade at Rourke's Drift, but he cut the carpet so that it fitted around the shower base.
Gerard Manley Hopkins once likened the efforts of a ploughman, who has turned over clay soil so that it gleams where the farrow's blade has compressed it, to life's endless struggle, by asserting that only constant spiritual and physical effort enables us to bring out the bloom in our lives,
"...sheer plod makes plough down sillion shine..."
I'm a bath man myself, but as I lie soaking in my own effluvia, a method of bathing that drives the Japanese wild with disgust, I cannot help but glance admiringly at the shining result of Mike's hardworking and honest endeavour.
It shouldn't surprise us to know that he is this year departing for the Everest base camp in aid of the Heart Foundation. Well done lad, you've redeemed a whole raft of plumbers.