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.
Somewhere over the rainbow - Just call me strawman
By John Williams
Some day I'll wish upon a star
And wake up where the clouds are far behind me
Where troubles melt like lemon drops
Away above the chimney tops
That's where you'll find me
Somewhere over the rainbow blue birds fly
Birds fly over the rainbow
Why then, oh why can't I?
If happy little bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow
Why oh why can't I?
The longed for day had arrived and we were ready to move to our new house and embrace the leafy suburbs. Not in any active sense you understand, because it was after all November, when the prettiest of trees is liable to be so damp that even the most ardent tree hugger is more inclined to stay at home and catalogue his joss stick collection. It was simply that I had reached an age when the occasional rustle of fallen leaves was infinitely preferable to relentless rhythms of swirling litter.
Liverpool is no more litter strewn than any other major population centre whose citizens are inundated with fast food wrappings while simultaneously denied adequate provision of litter bins, but while most Liverpudlians take advantage of the council's refuse removal schemes which carry away anything from a fridge to cooking stove there is a lazy minority, of dubious lineage, who will dump their garbage anywhere.
Not far from our house a small piece of wasteland had become a magnet for such people and almost overnight it had come to resemble an al fresco entry for the Turner art prize. How else could one describe a scene that at one stage hosted an inflatable woman, an electric foot spa and an orthopaedic bed!
In the final hour before the removal men were due I was in a state of shock as our solicitor had yet to finalise whatever it was he was supposed to finalise. It was my own fault for hiring a solicitor who specialised in house conveyances and so only charged peanuts, which were presumably fed to the monkeys who had waited until the last minute before giving us the all clear. As sage Lancastrians put it,
'You get nowt for nowt'.
Our plan was to follow the removal van while ensconced in the comfort of a taxi, which I smugly considered something of step up from the lady whose old man had callously instructed her to 'follow the van and don't dilly dally on the way'.
Mice have been known to have laid better plans than yours truly and so when the van finally got under way we were faced with the problem of conveying all of the stuff I had forgotten and which had been stashed in an outhouse.
So it was that I set off down the yellow brick road wedged between my wife, two children an unlikely assortment of emulsion, garden tools, a cat and a bucket of frogs, who had, after four years, become an integral part of the Williams' ménage.
When we arrived at our new house the rain was falling steadily and a biting wind nipped at our cheeks. As the removal men set about their business, which appeared to include dropping large hints about tipping, my wife wandered about the house in a state of shock.
You see, my wife, who works very long hours, had grown weary of the seemingly interminable process of viewing potential homes that consumed her every free weekend, and had asked me to go out and find our dream house, alone, and was now surveying for the first time the fruits of my labour. Well she is a trusting person and I like to think I'm not a total idiot. Ahem!
I've always held an affection for old houses with character and the house I had chosen was certainly old, as it was built in 18351, but describing its character is rather less straightforward. Let's just say it had character defects.
When the removal men had gone and the vociferous foreman had pocketed his fifty pounds that I had promised him if he would make the move in one trip as I was so anxious to avoid a return to the house on pain street, we were left to contemplate our surroundings.
The first thing that caught my wife's rapidly welling eyes was that the same wallpaper, circa 1947, was in every room of the house and the hallway too.
I hadn't noticed it when I viewed the house as I was suffering from a severe case of restricted vision, brought about by my desperate search for light at the end of the tunnel, because the previous four years had been spent among short sighted football players, who couldn't spot the difference between goalposts and our children's bedroom window, a female neighbour who offered assertiveness training to Rottweilers and the close proximity of an electrical sub station which cast an electro magnetic field that included our house and our children.
At that time there was a huge health scare about such things and to my fevered imagination it was rather like living next door to a pulsar that was spewing out radiation.
It had all been so abysmally depressing that I would have settled for a wigwam on the outskirts of Wigan. Another cogent reason for buying the new house was that the vendor had been persuaded by my building society surveyor, who baulked at the level of subsidence that gave the staircase a decidely lopsided appearance, to reduce the asking price.
Then the gas fitter arrived to inspect the gas fires. I can still see my wife's face when, on that cold damp autumn day, the gas fitter sucked hard through his teeth before condemning all three gas fires as being unsafe, whereupon he promptly removed them!
I cheerfully suggested that we light a coal fire and my wife abstractedly agreed, as she was staring at the exposed stair carpet grips that the previous owner had kindly left for my boys to impale themselves on. I was too busy indulging in my favourite camping pastime, lighting a fire.
Before too long the licking flames were healing our damp wounds. That is, until the fire was suddenly obscured by plumes of black smoke. I hadn't realised that the chimneys were capped off when the gas flues were installed, probably sometime before the Boer war, and the fumes were billowing back down the chimney!
My wife decided to fall back on the great British standby, a cup of tea, and filled the kettle. Eerily, the sound of running water continued even after she had turned off the tap. The reason for that was soon crystal clear as a torrent of water cascaded down from above the kitchen window.
The overflow valve in the water cistern had joined in the general strike and so our very first phone call was to a plumber! However, my wife is made of tough stuff though and I'm happy to report that she only cried for about five minutes.
That was ten years and a lot of DIY ago. The place is now livable and I've never been happier. That said, my wife still occasionally peruses the property pages of the local rag. I just hope she doesn't force me to go out on my own looking for new place again...
1 On moving in I found about 200 hand made bricks that date from 1835, which was the year that Texas gained its independence from Mexico. If there are any rich Texans out there who would like to build say, a fireplace, with these bricks I am open to offers.