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.
Smoking is truly a mug's game - Why I want to sue Humphrey Bogart
By
John Williams
Some years ago I consulted a delightful lady called Marilyn Ure with a view to quitting my smoking habit. She succeeded in helping me to pack it in for three years, which was in line with her prediction regarding how long I might last before once more succumbing to the weed.
Apart from being a miracle worker Marilyn was a psychotherapist and the first person to raise the idea of people having role models who help us adopt the awful habit. Her observations led me to review all of the people who had somehow influenced me to become a smoker. The list of role models included the screen idols of the forties and fifties, my peers and of course my own parents.
Marilyn offered me a very simple proposition which highlighted our parent's role as match makers, making them partially responsible for our introduction and subsequent marriage to Mademoiselle Nicotina. She argued that in the eyes of a child's their parents can do no wrong, and so all the warnings about the dangers of smoking are lost on many people whose parents smoke because the debate is eventually reduced to a simple statement,
If my parents smoke then it can't be wrong."
If anybody thinks that this presents an inflated idea of the influence that parents exercise I would point to the children of the mass murderer and hideous child abuser Fred West, who, despite his bestial behaviour toward his own flesh and blood, inspired so much love in one of them that she tried to kill herself because she felt she had let him down by informing the police of his abusive behaviour. That was an example of parental power writ large.
The fact remains that my parents must have had role models too. There were their peers, who are highly influential in shaping our behaviour, and also a cluster of film actors and actresses such as Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davies and Joan Crawford who were all high profile smokers as well as being the brightest stars in the alternative constellation of Cancer. In the end I am to blame for my smoking habit, but even the harshest critic would have to concede that I had a little help from my friends.
I can recall the first time Mademoiselle Nicotina ever kissed my lips. I was about ten and in the house alone because my parents were at a friend's house a few doors away and I was watching our newly purchased television. On impulse I opened a bottle of my father's rum, one of several he had bought back with him from a voyage and I sipped gingerly at the amber spirit. I found it so harsh it would be years before I attempted to drink it again.
My father also bought cartons of cigarettes back with him, mainly Phillip Morris, Chesterfield and Lucky Strike and so I sat there, a glass of rum in one hand and a Lucky Strike in the other. I didn't finish either of them but the seeds of my self image as a smoker had germinated.
Of course, when I did start smoking seriously, about three years after my infantile flirtation with 'Luckies', cigarettes proved rather more difficult to obtain than they had when I was posing as an adult in my living room. Indeed, until I joined the Merchant Navy my demand for cigarettes always outstripped the supply. Sharing with one's mates was the norm, and one's standing with them determined at which bedraggled stage of the single cigarette you got it.
Some days whole cigarettes were out of the question and I can vividly remember my pal Joey showing me how to hold a 'dog-end' inside my cupped hands and sucking hard at the gap between my thumbs in order to extract the last wisp of smoke from what was little more than an ember. My addiction had transformed me into a human bong.
By the time I was fourteen my hunger for cigarettes had usurped food on my list of priorities. Every day on the way to school I would call in at Dolly's newsagents in Lodge Lane and pay my tuppence for a 'loosey', which is what we called a single cigarette. I would then have a few quick drags before stubbing it out, saving the remains for after school.
Dolly must have been delighted with us schoolkids because there was a decent profit to be made from selling cigarettes at that price as a packet of ten cost about a shilling, or twelve pence. Moreover, it was possible to purchase a loose match to light the bloody thing!
One of my best friends, Frankie Bennett, a non smoker, once offered me a packet of Woodbines, which even then were referred to as 'coffin nails'. We were sitting in Capaldi's cafe, at the corner of Eaton Road, sipping hot orange squash. I protested that I had no money but he just said,
" It's alright, I'll mug you."
Now before anybody imagines a violent robbery followed soon after that remark, let me explain that in England, prior to 1974, the word mugging, to denote violent robbery, did not exist.
The term, as we now know it, was imported from America when on national television a senior London policeman described the murder of a gay as 'a mugging gone wrong'*. Before long almost everyone was using it to mean common assault involving theft. Truth wasn't the only casualty of that policeman's casual abuse of language, an old and much loved Liverpool expression was buried too.
You see, in pre 70's Liverpool to treat someone to a meal, a drink or a cinema trip was to 'mug' them. The idea, originally prompted by someone giving a friend a mug of beer gratis was eventually extended to all acts of generosity. Oddly enough, it was the idea of hitting someone with an empty mug and then stealing his money that led to the American usage for violent robbery sometime in the 19th century.
There is a famous Liverpool song called 'Maggie May' in which the eponymous prostitute 'rolls' a drunken sailor and then pawns the proceeds. The verb 'roll' indicates that this type of crime was usually non-violent and opportunistic, simply taking advantage of the drunken sailor's inertia.
Sadly, few Liverpudlians remember the old usage of the verb 'mug', or if they do they don't use it, which just goes to show how easily language and memory can be erased by powerful mediums like television and newspapers. The truth is that in 1976 an endearing aspect of Liverpool's linguistic heritage was well and truly mugged, and I don't mean it was given a treat!