THE LIFE OF A SMILING DEPRESSIVE IS A DOGS LIFE,ALTHOUGH THIS LITTLE FELLA SEEMS TO BE ENJOYING IT.
How is your imagination?
Imagine a dimly lit street in the centre of the large city of Liverpool in England. The gas lamplighter was just at the end of his round. With his long hooked pole he was reaching up to pull down the ringed chain to light the last gas light on the corner of Molyneux Road.
It was a freezing cold night and being the middle of winter, as usual the fog was as thick as pea soup. You could just about hear the ships eerie foghorns intermittently blowing on the River Mersey. The lamplighter tucked his pole under his arm, dug his hands deeply into his overcoat pockets for warmth and headed off home into the swirling fog. The gaslights of only a few of the terraced houses in Molyneux Road could be seen dimly through the fanlights above the front doors as most of the occupants were out celebrating in one of Bent's alehouses over on the corner. Yes, it was New Year's eve.
It was well past ten o'clock and at number six Mrs.Laird was struggling to give birth to a baby boy as the revelers across the road were being reluctantly turfed out the boozer singing their bleedin' heads off. Yes, at number six that was yours truly being born in Liverpool on the 31st day of December 1925. Poor Mam! Fancy having to give birth at ten thirty on New Year's eve when everyone else was living it up. I don't remember a great deal about my mother as she died when I was about six, but I seem to remember her as being a slightly built delicate lady and my father always trying to persuade her to go upstairs.
Six Molyneux Road was our address and I suppose you could call it a working class neighbourhood. My father was working class all right, being a labourer with the Liverpool Corporation. A hard man, never missed a days work in thirty five years, promoted eventually to be a ganger maintaining Liverpool's tram lines all over the city. I didn't know much about his early life. As far as I could gather he'd spent fifteen years in the Ninety-Third Highlanders, most of which was spent in India. When he came back to England he got married and settled in Liverpool but unfortunately he was twenty years older than my mother and very set in his ways.
My sister Marion was the first born then came my brother Fred. I was next and then my younger brother Eric. My father wanted to give us real Scottish names like Hamish, and Dougal, but my mother managed to change them at the christening. Although my old man's work was regular he never seemed to have any money and was always screaming poverty. It was always extremely embarrassing for me to go with him to buy anything, especially in the Jewish clothing shops in Kensington. He would haggle for an hour or more over a bleedin' penny for a pair of socks, but I must admit they would never let him go without buying something and it would always be at his price. As I said, he was a hard man.
One of my earliest memories at about the age of five or six was following a brass band down Prescott Street into the centre of Liverpool where suddenly they all stopped playing and disappeared.
I didn't have a clue where I was, so I wandered around for about an hour or more and was finally picked up by a policeman who took me to the nearest police station where they gave me a cup of tea and a cake.
I remember there was the largest pile of toys I'd ever seen on a long table, which I enjoyed playing with for hours until my sister came to pick me up and take me home.
I was always attracted to music and would follow a band for miles, or sit outside a pub listening to the buskers, especially if one was playing a piano accordion. We didn't have any music in our house. I don't think the old man was very musical, although I did see a picture of him once in his Argyle and Sutherland regiment uniform playing the bagpipes. I just love to hear bagpipes being played, preferably under six feet of water.
He was not only a very hard man, he was also a very mean man, I don't know how much he gave my mother for rent and to feed and clothe us, but I'd bet it wasn't more than a quid a week. I was told years later by my mother's sister, Aunt Bertha, that my mother really struggled to feed and clothe us and believe it or not, she died of malnutrition at the age of forty-three. Mmm, that was a new word in those days,"malnutrition", yeah, just another bleedin' word for starvation.
Aunt Bertha also told me my mother was so proud, that when she was visiting them on a Sunday, and was asked to join them for a lovely roast dinner she would refuse saying "Bertha, I've just come away from having a large lunch".If the truth be known, she'd probably not had anything to eat that day, or the day before, having given any food she had to us kids. It's queer, my mother would never admit that she had married a first class bastard of a man who treated us all like the servants he'd been used to in the army in India. I used to just love cleaning and polishing his old smelly boots.
I remember not long before my mother died I caught scarlet fever and I must have been very ill as I was in bed for sixteen weeks. After about eight weeks my old man had not even been up to see me, so my aunt Bertha got onto him about it.
She must have given him a right bollocking as he came up to see me a few days later and said,"How are you feeling?" I said "Not too bad" and he said, "Get Jock to buy you some oranges." He always called my brother Fred, Jock. I said, "What do I use for money?" and he slipped a shilling into my hand. I nearly fell out of bed, it must have broken his heart to give me that shilling -just think, that would have been at least three pints of ale - that was the first time he had ever given me any money.
The second time I remember was when Fred and I were playing outside the pub on the corner of Molyneux Rd. Fred suddenly came over to me all excited and said "Hey look what I've found." I said, "What is it?" "I think it's a quid". "Where did you find it?" "Just outside the door of the pub" he said. I shot over to have a look myself and sure enough there was another couple of ten bob notes on the ground. I grabbed them up and went back to Fred and said. "What are we going to do with them?" "We better take them home," he said. What a complete idiot!He should have known better as he was two years older than I was. When my old man saw what we'd found his eyeballs nearly fell out. He just grabbed them off us and said they were a couple of football coupons and stuffed them in his trouser pocket, the lying git.
A couple of days later he came home from work a little earlier than usual and said " I'm taking Jock and you into town".I thought,"Hello,he's going to buy us something". We all walked into town and he marched us into Woolworth's, that's my old man all right, nothing over friggin' sixpence. He bought us both a sixpenny torch, batteries included, but they didn't last long. After a night shining them up and down all the back entries and across the sky the batteries were soon dead. We'd been told you could charge the batteries up by putting them in the oven but we finished up melting them. To think of what my mother could have done with that money Fred and I found and to think she had asked me for the shilling my old man had given me to buy some oranges and I wouldn't give it to her. I was too young to realize she was dying of malnutrition trying to keep us fed.
I well remember the night she died. She had come home feeling poorly the day before. She had been to the pictures and had come out long before the big picture had finished and went straight to bed when she came in. I don't remember if my old man called a doctor when he came home, although I doubt it. That would have cost him about three shillings and sixpence. As the night went by Mum must have got worse and she quietly passed away about three o'clock in the morning. Then my old man sent for a doctor. As I was sleeping in the same bedroom I heard the doctor say, "I'm afraid she's gone, Jim". The old man gave a bit of a moan and said, "What are we going to do now? " I was only about six at the time and didn't take in the consequences of my mother dying. If life had been tough before she died, it was going to get a lot tougher now.
Liverpool during the depression was an arsehole of a place to live, especially in our predicament. My younger brother Eric was only three years old at the time so who was going to look after him. My mother's sister Aunt Bertha said she would take him, so that left my sister Marion, brother Fred, and myself to stay and live with my old man. I suppose my sister Marie did a good job under the circumstances of looking after us. She used to get the necessities of life on tick from the grocer's shop on the corner of Molyneux Road opposite the pub. The owner, a chap named Arthur, would let us have say, a quarter pound of corned beef and put it down in the book as a packet of tea and very occasionally, even chocolate biscuits to be put down as a quarter pound of tea.
I remember one Thursday night my old man was studying the tick book, and he started his high pitched whine, which was usual when he was studying anything that was going to cost him money. I thought for a minute he was going to give birth. He suddenly said "How the fuckin' hell can we have used a pound and a half of tea in a week?" I said "Maybe we are putting too much tea in the pot." I don't know if he ever twigged what we were doing, but from then on he used to make a strong pot of tea in the morning before going to work and that had to last us all day by adding hot water to it. The miserable git would then hide the packet of tea.
He was not only a hard man and a very mean man; he was also a terrible swearing man. I must have learnt it from him as I have always found it difficult not to swear.When anyone complained to my old man about my swearing, he used to take me into the back kitchen, take off his four inch wide double buckled belt and lay into me. I used to make a lot of noise running round in circles, moving so fast he was working pretty hard to lay one on me. It never stopped me swearing, which in the long term was a good job as being very thin and not too strong, a few of the kids in the neighbourhood used to gang up on me, but I had such a foul mouth, it used to frighten them away in case their mothers heard it and they would be in the cart proper.
A lot of kids around our way must have had scarlet fever the same time as me, as the hospitals were full up, so they came round and fumigated the house. This was unfortunate for me, for even though we were frightened of going into hospital at least I would have got some good tucker down me. Fred came in moaning that the local kids had been told by their mothers not to play with him because I had scarlet fever. Finally after sixteen weeks in a bug-ridden bed I was allowed to get up, and to my surprise I couldn't walk. I just staggered about and it took me a couple of days to come right. No wonder I was weak; I'd been almost eaten alive by the bed bugs so I got my sister Marie to help me to burn them out from between the wire mattress and the wooden frame of the bed with a couple of lit candles. We could hear the bugs sizzling but we never seemed to get rid of them altogether. In bed I got to the stage that I could smell a bed bug two inches from my nose.
I was then about eight years old, my brother or our kid as I called him was ten and my sister Marie about thirteen. I guess I didn't realize our living conditions were gradually deteriorating to the stage that my sister had had enough, so she buggered off and left Fred and me to it. I didn't know it then but I think this was about the first time I started suffering from depression. I would all the time be sobbing inwardly and if anyone shouted at me I would really burst out crying and I couldn't understand why. The old man used to get away to work early and I used to drag myself out of bed and light a newspaper in the fireplace for a bit of warmth. I suffered terribly from the cold. Our kid would fry a round of bread each and add hot water to the pot of tea the old man had made and we would head off to school.
The old man used to give our kid and me a miserable penny each to buy our tucker for the day so we were always pretty hungry. On the way to school which was about a couple of miles away in Brae Street I used to pass a pet shop in Kensington and pinch a couple of dog biscuits or cattle nuts from the bags they had on show outside and munch them on the way. At dinner time I used to shoot off to a butchers shop in Prescott Street and study all the lovely meat in the window and then deciding to spend my penny on a couple of thin sausages or a spice ball which I think was made of animal offal.
My hands and feet would be so cold and painful by the time I got home I would add boiling water to the teapot and wrap my feet around it. Fred would also have bought a couple of sausages or some chips. I would open the gas cooker door and chase away two or three mice that were having a feed of the dripping in the frying pan, and then light up the gas ring. Sometimes we would be lucky to get our sausages cooked before the gas would run out. I guess we got used to eating half-cooked tucker rather than waiting for the old man to come home and get a penny for the gas meter. I'm sure the old git had it worked out that the gas would run out while we were trying to cook a bit of lunch.
Sometimes he used to ask me to meet him on his way home from work. I don't really know why because he used to walk very fast for a man of his age and I had to struggle to keep up with him. We would go into the grocers shop in Kensington and buy some eggs, hen or duck eggs you'd think - not on your Nelly - friggen' snake eggs from Indochina twenty four for a bob and half of them were rotten. The old man would boil a couple of them up and after slicing the top off the egg the smell would nearly knock you over. I'd say, "I can't eat this." He'd say, "There's nothing wrong with it, give it to me" and he'd scoff it all down. He must have had cast iron guts.
Sometimes he'd send me off to the fish shop to buy a large conger eel head for a penny then he'd boil it up for an hour or two in an old cast iron pot and when it was cooked he'd lift it out onto a large plate and get stuck into it. I remember the conger eel's big eyes looking at me as he pulled the lips off and swallowed them down like spaghetti. I couldn't eat the lips, but the white meat in the head wasn't too bad. What I used to hate most was the old man making me drink a tin mug full of the water he'd boiled the head in. "It's good for you" he'd say and he'd swig a mug full down himself. He called it jipper but he couldn't get our kid to drink it.
The old man would sit reading his newspaper and it would get darker and darker. I'd say "When are you going to light the gas dad" and he'd say "Shortly" and then get his magnifying glass out so he could read a bit longer. Eventually, when we couldn't see each other, he would get up and carefully light the gas mantle. I say carefully, because if he accidentally touched and broke it, like he did one dark night, he would go friggin' bonkers and we would have to clear lower deck. Later he would put on his jacket with his quart bottle in his pocket and walk smartly over to the pub. He certainly liked his beer and he often used to say to me that he would die if he didn't get his pint every day. I often wished that I could have thought of a way to make him miss his pint, but I must say I never saw him the worse for it and he always walked straight as a die. I did hear one time my aunt Bertha telling some one that he would be buying drinks for his friends in the pub, while his wife and kids were suffering from malnutrition, but I'd doubt if this was the only case in Liverpool.
Fred and I would be playing games in the kitchen but always listening for the rattle of the pub door closing and then looking out the window to see if he was coming back. He would always bring his quart bottle of beer back with him and pour himself a glass before settling down to finish reading his paper. He used to always tear off a piece of paper to cover his glass. I don't know why, maybe after fifteen years in India he had a problem with flies. I used to wait for him to go out to the back yard toilet for a leak, then I'd take a good swig out of his glass and top it up from the bottle and carefully replace the piece of paper on the glass. When he came back in he'd look at his beer on the table, give a bit of a whine, light his pipe and go back to reading his paper. I was never really sure if he twigged that I was pinching his beer but if he did then he never let on. He'd just say "Its nine thirty, get up to bed". I used to like the odd times when he would ask me to go to the fish and chip shop to get him three pennyworth of spare ribs and chips for on the way back I would carefully open it up and pinch a rib and a couple of chips, very enjoyable. I knew he wouldn't offer me some anyway.
He used to pay my aunt Bertha five shillings a week for looking after Eric and every Friday night he would go down to Doddridge St where they lived and take her up to Harry Best's pub on the corner of Hall Lane for a glass of beer. My aunt told me once he would wait till the very last minute to give her the measly five bob.
I must have been about eight or nine when my second lot of teeth were well through and my first lot hadn't dropped out so the school dental nurse gave me a note to get them taken out. I remember going by myself down to the infirmary in Islington and sitting in the waiting room wondering what they were going to do. After what seemed a long wait they took me into a small room and sat me up on the dentist's chair and the nurse said, "We're going to have to give you gas." They shoved this horrible smelling rubber mask over my face and said, "Breathe deeply". I thought I was going to die, it was ghastly. I took a couple of deep breaths and the next thing I remember they were shaking me pretty vigorously. I think they had given me too much gas and couldn't wake me up. I was finally led over to a sink which I thought I was supposed to fill up with blood. They seemed to have a problem stopping the bleeding and eventually stuffed my mouth with cotton wool and sent me off. Unfortunately on the way home I met someone I knew, and was terribly embarrassed trying to explain with a mouth full of cotton wool where I'd been.
I'd only been saying a few days before to our kid that I wondered where our sister Marie had got to when suddenly one Sunday afternoon she appeared on our doorstep and guess what! With presents, a new overcoat each for Fred and me. She had a boy friend with her, and they asked us if we would like to go down to Newsham Park and they would hire a boat for a row on the lake. We put our new overcoats on and off we went. She told us as we walked to the park that she had been involved in a car accident. Some idiot driver had opened his car door and she had ploughed into it fracturing her ankle. She had taken the chap to court and the Judge had awarded her twelve pounds plus expenses. Newsham Park was a lovely park. A brass band was playing in the rotunda and as Marie's boy friend Eddie rowed us around the islands and under the bridges, Fred and I were eating ice cream cornets Marie had bought us and we thought we were real toffs.
On the way home Marie asked us if we would like to see the flat she had just rented down by the Casino ice rink so we set off to have a look. It was just a tiny kitchen and one small bedroom and me being such a thoughtless twit said I didn't think much of it. She got very upset as she thought she had done very well and I suppose she had, considering she was only fifteen and had buggered off with only the clothes she stood up in. I guess my idea of a flat wasn't two tiny rooms in a great big old house. Marie was a very hard worker and she soon saved enough money to start her own little business. She would set up a stall at the different markets in and around Liverpool and sell imitation jewellry, She reckoned it was quite a profitable little business.
Sometimes Fred and I would pick up our younger brother Eric from my aunt Bertha's and we would all go down town to have a look at the shops. I Remember one time Eric accidentally walked into a lamp post and started screaming his bleedin' head off. We tried to console him as he was causing a lot of attention from people passing by. He wouldn't stop crying so we started to walk away from him when an old lady stopped and asked us what was the matter and when we told her she opened her purse and gave Eric a penny.
He immediately stopped yelling and we shot off to the fish shop for a pennyworth of chips and mushy peas. As we were golloping them down my brain started ticking over as it usually did on any ways of making money, so I thought we could make a habit of this" as that was an easy penny Eric made, even if he did have a big lump on his head. We tried it a few times, getting Eric to start yelling, even if we had to give him a couple of thumps to get him started, but we soon found out there were not very many kind old ladies
I distinctly remember one Saturday afternoon asking the old man for a penny to go to the pictures but he said he couldn't afford it. It was pouring with rain as I was staring out the dirty windows through the old lace curtains into the empty street. I thought he's bound to give in if I sit here long enough looking miserable but no such luck. The old bugger just sat reading his paper, ignoring me. I'd heard you could get into the "Lytton" picture house somewhere in town for a couple of empty jam jars. We didn't have any so I jumped up on the backyard wall and walked along looking into other people's back yards until I finally found a couple. I took them home to wash them out and shot off to find the Lytton. I had a vague idea where Lytton Street was and after asking a couple of people for directions finally I found it.
There were hundreds of dirty jam jars on the floor by the cashier's desk so I put mine down, got a ticket and was ushered in. I sat down absolutely saturated after my long walk. The Lytton used to show at the kids Saturday matinee, the two big films they had shown during the week, even if they were unsuitable for children, so it was great value for two jam jars.
I think my father only ever went to the pictures once in his life. It was when Fred and I took him to the Kensington picture house one Saturday afternoon. The picture had started and it was pretty dark when we were shown to our seats but unfortunately they were in the centre between the two aisles and some of the people didn't bother to get up. In the darkness the old man must have stepped on some of their corns or bunions on their feet. What a bleedin' commotion there was, I could hear the old man effing and blinding something awful. I felt embarrassed and was quite relieved when they all settled down. I even remember the name of the film, It was "The Thirty Nine Steps." On the way home I said " What did you think of the film dad." He said "Pure rubbish." Not a very feeling person, in fact I'd say, dead from the bollocks up.
Never having any money to buy something you wanted was a problem but I soon learnt that swapping was the answer. I suppose it started with swapping comics and in no time I'd worked up to getting something I'd wanted for a long time, a pair of roller skates. I just about lived on them and soon became the second best roller skater in the neighbourhood. I remember well I was about ten, and I was showing off my skating skills to a couple of young girls standing outside a sweet shop in Farnsworth St. They were eating sweets and I think pretending not to notice me. I was doing a high speed fancy about face when suddenly one of the bleedin' wheels came off, boy, did I go for a shit, I think I did a double somersault and landed straight on my poxy head in the gutter. I could hear the two girls laughing as I staggered away still seeing stars and looking for my skate wheel. At least I learnt one thing, lesson number one, don't show off in front of other people.
Fred and I used to go down to Newsham Park to fish for jacksharps in the model boating lake, and I used to envy the boys with their model yachts. Luckily after a while I was able to talk one of the boys into swapping his model yacht for my precious pair of roller skates. I couldn't get down to the lake quick enough to have a sail of this beautiful fifteen-inch yacht, and either in my haste, or I didn't know, I pushed the yacht out without loosening the sail. The friggin' thing sailed slowly out to the centre of the lake and stayed there. I waited and waited but it never moved, a man told me to go home and get a long piece of string that would reach across the lake so we could drag it in. I ran all the way home thinking where am I going to get a piece of string that long as the lake would have been at least two hundred yards wide. I explained it to the old man but I got little sympathy or money to buy string from him. It was getting dark as I ran all the way back to the park hoping the keeper hadn't locked the gates, but he had, so I climbed over and my heart sank when I saw my yacht had gone. I walked home slowly crying inwardly to myself. Lesson number two, I suppose there was a lesson for me somewhere in this but I'm not sure what it was, maybe it was, learn a little about what you're doing before you do it.
As would be expected with a father like ours, none of our relations ever came to visit us. Even the kids in our street were frightened to knock on our door to ask me to swap a comic. The old man had a sister, Aunt Katie who lived in Utting Avenue East, then a very posh neighbourhood in Liverpool. I remember Marie, before she buggered off, taking me out there one day on a tram car. It was a joy to ride on one of these twenty five ton monsters nicknamed "Green Goddesses." Once we got out into the country it seemed to glide along the shrub-sided grass tracks. No one was home when we got there, so Marie decided that we should wait for a while and after about an hour our Aunt Katie arrived.
I don't think she was too over thrilled to see two ragamuffins sitting on her doorstep and quickly invited us in before any of the neighbours saw us. She must be very rich I thought. I'd never seen such a lovely home, and the furniture was beautiful, everything was spotless. I was afraid to sit on the chairs when she asked us to, and Marie knocked my grubby fingers off the beautifully patterned tablecloth. Aunt Katie made us a lovely pot of tea and brought out the largest plate of home made cakes I'd ever seen. I gollopped two of them down in as many minutes and was ready to grab the third when Marie gave me a very nasty look which said, that's enough. I could have scoffed the lot.
I think the reason Marie went to see aunt Katie was to see if she could help us one way or another, her being dad's sister, but she gave us the impression that our old man was the black sheep of her family and didn't want anything to do with him. We sat there for a while after having another cup of tea and not saying very much, until aunt Katie got up, found her purse, opened it, and gave us a penny each. Normally when we visited relations, the giving of a coin was an invitation to leave, so we said goodbye and left. On the tram speeding back through Liverpool, Marie said, "I don't think we'll get much help from Auntie Katie" and she was right. We never heard of her again.
I was brought up on American films.I used to love going to all the picture houses in Liverpool, as soon as I got my hands on a penny or tuppence, which was mostly by running errands for the old dears in our street. I specially remember one at number fourteen, almost every day asking me to run messages for her. She'd say "Duggie." I hated being called Duggie. Then she would ask me to get this or that down at the shops and promised to give me a halfpenny when I got back. I knew the routine. When I'd get back she'd open her purse and say, "I haven't got any change I'll give it to you tomorrow." The mingy old bitch. She knew what I was learning fast, that tomorrow never comes. She must owe me quids.
Unfortunately, except for Saturday matinees, a kid could only get into the pictures if he was accompanied by an adult so I used to stand outside a picture house, sometimes in the freezing cold or rain, saying to anyone who I thought was going in, "Take us in mister, take us in." Usually some kind soul would take me in.
In those days the films ran continuously from ten o'clock in the morning till ten or eleven o'clock at night, so the chances were that you got in half way through a film. That didn't bother me overmuch as I would sometimes spent up to six hours in there and I would see the films over twice. At least it was warm and comfortable and gave my clothes time to dry out. One night I remember standing outside the Hippodrome in West Derby Road in the pissing rain asking to be taken in when a rough looking chap I asked said."O K give us your money, I'll take you in".
My Favorite things about Angelfire.