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.
Hold your hand out you naughty boy - Spare the rod save a child
By
John Williams
My very first foray into my education lasted all of four hours, because by dinner time of the first day I had persuaded my mother that Colwell Road primary school was not for me. Not that there was anything wrong with the place, it was just that I didn't fancy school at any price.
My mother acquiesced, and for the remainder of the day I once more resided in the land of innocence, where the only use for chalk was to draw wickets on walls or mark out hopscotch squares and where bamboo canes were solely employed to support runner beans.
However, my return to Eden was brutally brief for by the next morning my mother had arranged for me to attend St. Dominic's. I say brutally because the first sight that greeted me as I timidly made my way to the classroom was of Mr Stephenson, the burly headmaster, haranguing a pig-tailed and bespectacled little girl.
She had been discovered chewing gum and had further compounded her crime by denying that she even had any of the offending substance on her person. Her pathetic attempt to hide the gum under her tongue served only to infuriate her balding interrogator and he was preparing to cane her, but first he had to persuade the little girl to hold her hand steady and so allow him to readily apply the thick cane.
As her apprehensive hand dipped from the desired horizontal plane he rapped her knuckles from underneath with a swift upward arc of the cane and then, as her open hand recoiled from the unexpected pain, he lashed her open palm. I couldn't feel her pain but I lived her terror.
Apart from one regrettable incident when I was punished for decapitating six captured cabbage white butterflies and storing them in a matchbox I avoided the cane through all of my primary school years and it seems to me now that Mr Stephenson's terror tactic had more effect on me than it ever did on his young victim, who, later that day, in the playground, was to be seen nonchalantly chewing gum while gaily twirling the end of a long skipping rope.
I suppose that the whole incident partly ensured that I became what psychologists term a reward seeker and punishment avoider. In short, I was eager to please. So when I passed the eleven plus my teachers and family were mightily pleased. However, I couldn't please all of the people all of the time and certainly not some of my sneering peers who immediately labeled me a 'college pudding'. It is perhaps ironic that those few children who bandied the insulting phrase were probably ignorant of the fact that there actually was a confection called College Pudding.
Given my studious avoidance of punishment you can imagine my horror on discovering that at my Grammar School, St. John De La Salle, corporal punishment was de rigeur. Don't get me wrong, because I do firmly believe in just chastisement. So if a teenage scholar asks his female teacher for a 'blow job', apparently a popular request nowadays, then I don't think a stinging retort would be amiss. The problem for me was that the brothers of the De La Salle order were either unable or unwilling to make the distinction between just and unjust responses.
They lashed out for almost any offence regardless of culpability. A traffic delayed bus or inappropriately coloured gym shoes was justification enough for a beating. Perhaps it was not entirely their fault because their elder brothers, the Jesuits, had, by creating a slippery argument known as casuistry, forever blurred the line between just and unjust war. The fact is that there was so much punishment at the school that at times it resembled a casualty clearing station.
I didn't survive for very long and exiled myself to the gentler environs of St Bernard's secondary Modern. I left at there the age of fifteen, mercifully free of strap marks and wholly unencumbered by qualifications.
It would be another twelve years before I ever again entered an educational establishment.
I had experienced a severe nervous breakdown and was curious as to why it had happened. I knew that my lack of self esteem was in large measure due to my flunking out of grammar school and so I decided to attempt to repair that aspect of my life as a starting point in my quest.
In 1973 I was working in Cammell Lairds shipyard and so was earning good money, although on reflection perhaps earning is too strong a word. Anyway, I approached a college of further education in Childwall, which as far as I could discern was largely populated by young police cadets.
The interview was memorable for the degree of suspicion that the principal harboured regarding me. He seemed to imply that I was perhaps 'after' the grant, a notion I found preposterous as I would have been taking a large cut in income in order to pursue my limited ambition of obtaining 'O' levels. So it was no great surprise when I received a letter informing me that my application had been denied.
What was surprising was that he had somehow obtained a medical opinion that stated I was unlikely to withstand the stress of academic life. Now, if there is one thing I have learned over the years it is that one person's stress is another person's adrenalin rush. I eventually obtained an honours degree without so much as a wobble and truth to tell I revelled in the exam system. However, I also discovered that if there is anything calculated to place me under severe stress it is any circumstance wherein my personal morality is compromised. If I am asked to support or perform an action that undermines my own sense of integrity I don't just wobble; I crash faster than Windows '95.
Of course, my self discovery was made many years after the principal at Childwall had lobbed a spanner in the works. Initially, I was terribly downcast as I informed my teacher girl friend of the outcome but she told me to ignore the the setback and try again at another college, where apparently the ethos was rather more adult orientated.
I did so and encountered a difference in attitude toward me that was as breathtaking as it was refreshing. I was initially interviewed by the principal, who after engaging me in adult conversation about politics and literature told me that I should take the entry test. He also ventured that in my case it would be a formality. I flew home.
I was desperate to obtain, among other qualifications, a maths 'O' level, but the problem was that I had almost no grasp of the subject thanks in part to the leather fetish of Mr Hodson at De La Salle who handed out punishment with a vigour that would have made Judge Jeffries blanch. So the night before the test my girlfriend frantically taught me the principle of converting fractions into decimals. Not exactly Einstein!
The next day I was was presented with some simple maths problems and asked to write an essay on any historical subject of my own choosing. I sat around after the exam drinking coffee and quietly perspiring. I needn't have worried because a man burst into the room waving a test paper and asking for me by name.
He was a lecturer and his uninhibited enthusiasm for my writing was so thrilling to me that it wiped out in an instant all of my disappointments, not only the one which had occurred after encountering the icy environs of Childwall College but also those feelings of frustration I had nurtured ever since I failed to live up to my primary teachers' expectations after which I had saddled myself with self loathing.
The teacher had been a builder before he entered academia and so it could be said that he went from mortar boards to mortar board and in between obtained a complete grasp of the importance of sound foundations toward the construction of a person's confidence.
The following two years were among some of the finest of my life as various teachers nurtured my craving for knowledge and self esteem. Given their interventions it now seems almost a foregone conclusion that I would eventually obtain six 'O' levels and three 'A' levels and so gain entry to Liverpool University.
Oddly enough my most prized certificate was the one which recorded my lowest grade, a 'C' in 'O' level maths, which I owe in the main to a harrassed elderly man, who in his lessons had to cope with varying levels of ability ranging from people who had narrowly failed the exam earlier to the likes of me whose understanding of maths was only slightly better than that of Biffo the Bear. I should add that I also cribbed a lot from the class beauty cum mathematics wizard, Margot.
I was twenty seven when I began my 'O' levels, and as such a happy member of the Woodstock generation wherein self realisation, by any means possible, was fiercely encouraged, so you can imagine my dismay when acquaintances of mine began to mutter the dread phrase, 'College pudding'. I only mention this because the other day my high achieving youngest child sorrowfully informed his mother that he was being labeled a 'swot'.
Plus ca Change, Plus C'est La Meme Chose...