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.
Don't be plant pot all yer life
By
John Williams
Liverpudlians, when commenting about another's perceived lack of intellect, tend to address that person with such quaint terms as 'You divvy' or 'you plant pot'. Usually, these terms of endearments are accepted with equanimity. However, a person not conversant with local idiom might simply call someone an idiot and risk being chastised for a breech of etiquette.
I suppose that the term 'plant pot' indicates an empty vessel, awaiting someone else's seed pearls of wisdom. For much of my early life I was most certainly a plant pot, a receptacle for germinating the ideas of the great and the good. I must have become pot bound because one day my brittle exterior cracked wide open and I was eventually forced to fit the pieces back together. I don't know exactly how it happened, probably a result of my lack of potting skills, but my re-constructed shards seemed to reject the old cultivars and allowed in only wild varieties, a state of affairs I am entirely happy with.
It's difficult to say when the stresses and strains brought about my collapse, but I suppose the cracks where really starting to appear when I was uprooted from Liverpool and transplanted to its satellite town of Skelmersdale. You see, there are people, emigres for instance, who remind me of Aspidistras, which are also known as 'iron plants', because they survive harsh and unfamiliar environments. I was more cotton plant than iron.
In the immediate period following my marriage, a ceremony that had been conducted by a priest who was so grudging with his blessing that it felt more like a delayed curse, I began work at a factory in Earlestown. The factory made biscuit rolling machinery. For weeks I watched fascinated as skilled engravers carved the outlines of biscuits into heavy brass cylinders that resembled gold plated carpets and which would eventually imprint hundreds of biscuits a minute with the intricate design of Jammy Dodgers or Custard Creams.
However, the wages I was being paid barely kept my wife and myself in bread much less biscuits and before long I was responding to an advert which promised work and housing in Skelmersdale. To a twenty year old resident of a city where neither commodity was much in evidence Skelmersdale sounded like Paradise. Had I known that the town's name was bestowed on it by Vikings and meant, 'Valley of the wind and rain', I might have had second thoughts, but I doubt it.
It was the promise of a home of our own that sold me because at that time we were tenants of a Polish landlord whose appearance was so grey and forbidding that when I recall his home, off Oakfield Road, it is as if I am watching a black and white film.
Everything thing about him was grey. His hair, his socks and even his tie which snaked over his huge stomach that strained against the waistband of his marquee of a suit. By contrast his young daughter, whom I never once saw garbed in anything other than the Polish national dress, was a pale blonde. When he wasn't intimidating his oppressed looking family he would sit at a table eating Polish sausage and drinking bottled Vichy water. He had also rigged the gas meter so that a shilling would be used up heating a pan of potatoes. I don't know what he was before the war but I feel fairly safe in ruling out the role of Ambassador for Poland.
In January 1966 I got the job in Skelmersdale. I was employed by an engineering firm that had taken advantage of the government grants and moved up from Wiltshire. I also took up the offer of a once privately owned semi-detached in the old part of town because the promised housing was still in the building stage as the estates mushroomed in the valley of the wind and rain. I was quietly happy. In spite of my growing sense of isolation from Liverpool and my friends I liked the older house which was in a cul-de-sac just off the high street.
My happiness was short lived because my mother in law let it be known that the house 'gave her the willies', presumably because it backed onto a field. I couldn't help but reflect that she had lived all her married life on the second floor of a block of council flats yet somehow felt that one house wasn't enough for her daughter.
Within weeks we were taking up residence in a house on the new Windrows estate. Looking back it's hard to escape the feeling that the architects had never known a family life because there were no fireplaces to create a focal point, with the consequence that we spent many an evening staring at a storage heater.
One work-mate went to the trouble of building a mock fireplace and, in keeping with the modern age, had decided to accomplish his task with the aid of a device that transformed an ordinary power drill into a dove-tailing machine. I can still remember the day he set about creating Skelmersdale's equivalent of an Adam fireplace.
Closely observed by about six of us he set up the device and put his precious timber into the clamp. A screeching minute later he realised that although the dove-tails he had created were perfect they were in fact the wrong way round. He started on the opposing upright but the result was the same. By then perspiring, and acutely aware of the scrutiny of his audience, he tried to level up the other upright but again the joints were facing the wrong way.
Before long both uprights were considerably shorter than he had planned because he had been forced to saw off the ends of the deformed timbers and start again, and again, and again, until, after many aborted attempts, the uprights were about the height of a two year old child. He finally abandoned his butchery when a wag observed that if he stopped at that point he would still have the makings of a five a side goalmouth for midgets.
The skills of the men I encountered in the engineering works varied. Some were craftsmen who had been employed to build the first British made car washes, while others, less skilled, welded anchors. The anchors represented a design revolution and were the brainchild of the partners, messrs George and Hardy. The maritime masterpieces were so revolutionary that they were exhibited on the foremost English science programme Tomorrow's World. The problem for Messrs George and Hardy was that they had workers who for the most part were firmly entrenched in yesterday's working practices, which meant doing as little as possible.
The foreman was a mild mannered fifty year old from the wilds of Wilstshire who had been persuaded to abandon his life as a milk farmer in favour of engineering. The poor bastard, he would have been better off running with the bulls at Pamploma. He used to mooch about the works wearing a brown overall coat which reached his ankles and which was tied around the waist with a rope. No doubt it was the height of chic on the farm but on the Gillibrands industrial estate it wasn't so much a fashion statement as sartorial suicide.
His method of increasing production was to hover near a group of workers who were indulging in a smoke or a chat and hum through his nose until someone noticed him, before promptly ignoring him. A local wit, Bill Rhoden, one of the few bright spots in my sojourn in the town, started a rumour that the foreman, Jimmy, had in his nose a surgically implanted miniature mouth organ. After that the putative boss couldn't wouldn't have got people to look at him even if he'd hummed the complete aria from The Magic Flute
Bill Rhoden, who looked like a particularly rugged looking John Lennon was possessed of a sense of humour which was so acute that even though he was a local I considered him an honorary Scouser. One day he burst into the dining area brandishing a copy of the Daily Mirror and, stabbing his finger at a photo of Jean Paul Belmondo, a French film actor who looked as if his features had been created from a mixture of Playdough and loose papier mache, exclaimed,
"John, we've cracked it, ugly men are in!"
His remark was strangely prescient because for the following two decades we skinny ugly types were in fashion for probably the first time since cave men discovered bacon sandwiches.
At home however life was nowhere near as funny. Because we lived so far from our families and friends we had a smaller social circle than Ben Gunn. Things picked up briefly when I joined a pub football team and sometimes attended functions at the Railway arms. It wasn't all gloom you understand. For instance, one of our neighbours, whom we hardly ever saw as he was probably fully engaged in staring at his storage heater, inadvertantly provided us with a comic episode which had me chuckling long after I'd returned home to Liverpool.
The new estate had a show house, complete with carpets and curtains, until they mysteriously disappeared one evening. One minute the house looked as if it was an entry for Home and Gardens magazine, the next moment it looked like every other house on the estate.
Anyway, this neighbour of ours was looking out of his window one morning when he saw a policeman heading up the path. Before you could say Wilton our neighour fled out of the back door. The same thing occurred the very next day. On the third day policeman had wised up and brought with him a back up who went to the back door. When our neighbour made his morning dash he was horrified to find his escape route blocked and immediately blurted out that the stolen carpets and curtains were upstairs. You can imagine the policeman's surprise as he had only called to inform our neighbour that his wife was in hospital and had been for three days!
After eighteen months of secretly mourning for my home town we garnered enough cash to start a mortgage application and said goodbye to Skelmersdale. Getting the mortgage was a tale in itself, but that's for another time.