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.
Liverpool pig tales - a whimsical view of modernity
By John Williams
We have all heard of the days when children were happy to spend days out digging on a beach, roaming a forest or simply partaking in a country walk, whilst in possession of nothing more than some dry bread and a bottle of water.
Just recently my son completed a sponsored walk, sustained only by a freshly baked baguette and a bottle of Evian water. Now, when I was a kid the cost of his water alone would have kept a family for a week! What's worse, and you can call me old fashioned if you like, but until recently I thought a baguette was a small piece of luggage. Which reminds me that I can still remember when women used to aspire to owning a good strong shopping bag.
Of course that was in the days when shopping was done on a daily basis and all of the ingredients for a family meal could be carried by one person, invariably the woman of the house. Nowadays people drive to supermarkets for their weekly 'shop' and regularly cart off enough food to have ended the siege of Leningrad in one visit.
Only now are we coming to recognise that our environment is being destroyed by the ballooning growth of plastic bags, and yet it isn't so long ago that plastic bags were such a novelty that people cherished them until they fell apart. Even though I'm a man I was, in the early seventies, prepared to withstand the taunts of my fellow ship builders in order to maintain a firm grip on my Biba bag. When it eventually got snagged and consequently ruined on an ill placed hanger at Laura Ashley's I was inconsolable.
However, it wasn't too long before the supermarkets were handing them out as if there was no tomorrow, which is an appropriate expression because for the trees, birds and fish trapped and wrapped inside them there will be no tommorrow.
Talking about trees and fish brings to mind the current British obsession with garden centres, where the sale of flora and fauna is quite literally a growth industry. When I was growing up in Huyton there was a man called Frankie Robinson who was famed for his Dahlias, and rightly so, as his garden was the only splash of colour that I can remember in what appeared to be a vast desert of rye grass and privet. Yet if I were to go to a garden centre today and be lucky enough to find a parking space I would find the world and his wife engaged in purchasing plants by the barrow load.
I am forced to ask why this love of the soil is only now surfacing. You see I used to think that the majority of householders just couldn't be bothered to utilise the acreage that the council had bestowed on them. I had thought that the notion of tilling the soil had been insidiously bred out of industrial man, Homo Clocconicus, until it occurred to me that original man was a nomad, surviving by hunting and gathering who would have had about as much use for a hanging basket as he would for a digital watch.
There is a mass of archaeological evidence for the existence of flint axes, but I've yet to read of the discovery a flint trowel or a bone rake, much less a hide covered vacuum cleaner for collecting leaves.
I am curious as to what the next big craze will be. We have had D.I.Y and gardening, activities which are largely alien to human nature. So what is next? Sheep shearing on the patio? Milking parlours next to the conservatory?
While I applaud many of the improvements in our life styles I cannot help but regret the passing of older values. I will never forget the family who lived quite close to us in Huyton. They were of French descent, whose ancestors were asylum seekers who had escaped the French revolution, and were nicknamed 'The cookies', possibly because they were registered with the department of social security as the Bourbons.
Anyway, they lived in a house in which every door had been chopped up and burned during the course of a particularly harsh winter. The windows were curtained with back issues of the Liverpool Echo and the floors were thick with the droppings of their Pot Bellied pigs which had been donated by relatives who were then rulers of Vietnam.
As you can readily imagine the Bourbons came in for a lot of criticism, especially as we as a nation were beginning to tumble to the antics of a certain Greek Prince who had also arrived as a destitute but was suddenly living it large in London. Some people, especially those residing in nearby posh Prescot, called the Bourbons many scurrilous names, but the one label they were never stuck with was that of being snobs, because they always had a friendly smile for us poor bastards.