You could not be brought up on Merseyside without an intense awareness - and experience - of the possibilities of water. I was a Sea Scout - the 10th Wallasey, an admiralty-recognised unit in those days, which meant that we could and would be called upon to support the Royal Navy in the event of need - so close did the war in those days still lurk over our shoulders! We never questioned the absurdity of the fiction but donned our little sailor uniforms weekly, and entertained a serving RN officer annually on our formal inspection.
And yet, we did experience the water, and learned many of its ways. I still have, somewhere, a Class B waters navigating certificate which declares that I can safely be trusted with a small boat on inland waterways. The Wallasey docks were our training ground; specifically Canada Creek where timber boats unloaded, where the Liverpool Victoria Rowing Club propelled its needle sharp boats (eights, fours, double and single sculls) in practice - and where we paddled our home-made sailing and rowing dinghies and canoes. I learned to row in a minute PRAM dinghy which would spin on sixpence and certainly capsize of you stood in it. I tacked back and forth over the industrially polluted waters (rumour said that if you swallowed any you needed a stomach pump) in a blunt-prowed Cadet dinghy - a handy little boat that could be relied on to dodge the occasional passing coaster or tug quite nimbly.
The tarry saltiness of the drab and dingy docks was our familiar element. And the docks brought other joys. I recall cycling down to the big dock where bulk carriers unloaded iron ore for smelting at Shotton, on the Dee. The sound of the goods trains leaving that dock, loaded up and trying to get traction for their short run down the Wirral was the music of sleepless nights for me - the slow, pulsing exhalation of steam from the underpowered locomotives as they set out, followed by the staccato over-run of their engines as their wheels lost traction and spun. It could take half an hour for them laboriously to ease their loads out of earshot. So the dock was familiar enough, by ear at any rate. But to cycle in at its front gate, in uniform, with an appointment to see the dockmaster, Captain Sanders, was an experience of a different order. We clambered up clanging iron stairs to a kind of land-bound bridge where the good Captain would be overseeing the huge cranes, sliding back and forth on their massive rails, as they unloaded ore. And while he watched, he taught us - to tie knots! I can still whip a bowline around my waist faster than it takes to tell: sailor skills, even when archaic to the point of self-parody, are to be proud of.
Wherever we went - on a choir outing to Southport (yes, I was a choirboy, too), on a scout camp on Windermere or the Isle of Man or Marlowe on the Thames - we sought out boats and ... messed about in them, I guess. Not the worst way to spend time when you are a boy.
We learned to swim, too, at the Guinea Gap Baths, taught, like all our generation, by one or other of two brothers. Dick and Tony, long-suffering and effective denizens of the pool, must between them have coached the whole Borough. I was a late pupil of Tony: not until I was twelve did I master breast-stroke.
Guinea Gap was a state of the art pool when it was constructed, some time in the 1920’s - it was all of 25M long, and surrounded closely by narrow changing cubicles from which one emerged almost straight into the chlorine-rich water. On three sides, I think, ornate cast-iron pillars supported a balustraded balcony, where spectators crowded for school swimming galas. Over it all, a glazed roof gave the whole the appearance of some exotic conservatory - and a deafening echo!
And the baths sat, of course, on the banks of the Mersey. Back to that river. A busy - but now half deserted waterway. At high tide a ferry boat might have to cruise up, or down stream for many hundreds of yards to find a gap in the procession of sea-bound freighters and liners, before diving busily across to the Pier Head in Liverpool. And on New Year’s Eve the concerto of massed ships’ sirens woke the night with its many-toned welcome to the year.
