January 1945 was a month of bad weather and heavy snow – or so the record tells me: I don’t remember, as this was the month of my birth – very premature and under 5lb in weight. I understand I spent my first weeks wrapped in cotton-wool beside the kitchen range.
This would be in Wallasey, a huge dormitory suburb south of Liverpool on the Mersey. Visit it on Google Earth even now and you’ll see square mile after square mile of recto-linear streets lined with semi-detached houses – dwellings for aspirant escapees from Liverpool. My parents, for example. Our house was fronted by a gable-end clad in make-believe half timbering – tudor-style it was optimistically called – and the hall featured panelling in oak-veneer. You get the idea. I’m certain there are those who have some kind of affection for Wallasey: I am not one of them. It was a pretentious un-place, an aggregation of some half-dozen villages, wedged into the angle between the Mersey and the Irish Sea, and given spurious identity by the burgeoning need for dormitory housing during the brief, final period of Liverpool’s prosperity before the country turned its back on the Atlantic approaches and faced Europe.
So what do I recall with any affection of my early years? Not the town itself, for sure. It had nothing – no centre, no identity, no life.
The river, then? Yes, certainly. We could – and did – cross it regularly by ferry, and in those days the ferry might, at high tide, have to wait patiently for a gap in the in and outbound ocean traffic. Turbid, muddy and perilous, the Mersey was an endless source of fascination. We learned to identify the major shipping lines (Holt, Blue Funnel, CPR, Cunard) and to admire the skill of the tiny tugs that butted and towed the larger vessels through the crowded waters. In adolescence, an uneasy member of the quasi-military organisation called the Sea Scouts, I sailed a couple of times overnight with the Liverpool Pilot boats (you can see one now, in the Maritime Museum) and marvelled at the unceasing, perilous business that swam on the slick, black waters. The Mersey at night and in the dawn, a place of shifting lights swimming on black water, an element that left you uncertain of what was still and stable or what moved.
The sea, of course, licking hungrily at the concrete sea-wall and spreading its wide horizon out towards the sunset. The black, hungry sands, and the sand dunes. Places we wandered in childhood, in the years before danger was invented.
The tacky funfair and amusement arcades of New Brighton – still, then, a thriving resort for those without the transport to escape the muddy confines of the estuarial waters. Bathing beside sewage outfalls, the working classes of Merseyside thought they were having a good time. So did we, when we wandered that far. Our meagre resources put the major attractions of the two funfairs – one huge and outdoor, the other tiny and constrained implausibly under a roof – beyond reach. But we could wander, and look, and part with a few old pennies inserted optimistically in arcade machines.
Oh, and Bidston marsh – now long gone and concreted over under the M55, the footpath over the marshes to Bidston Hill was the nearest we ever got to open country. Left to its own devices, the northern Wirral peninsula would have been a maze of tidal salt-marsh out of which a cluster of red and yellow sandstone islands would have protruded – and Bidston’s hill was perhaps the most prominent. We would cross the last vestiges of primal marsh, green-mantled and (as I recall) dead, and climb up to where the old windmill, tattered skeletal sails still in place, though tethered, and the domed observatory looked out over the estuary. I wish I could recall a sense of history under the watchful eye of the observatory: it was, after all, the place which as much as any other enabled eighteenth century science to unravel the mysteries of Longitude. But no. For us, it was just a place of fun and some adventure. Far enough away from home to be different: not too far for us to be able to wander back – muddy kneed and probably bickering – in time for tea.
Where else? The church, of course: St Hilary’s, perched high on another of those sandstone bluffs and looking out over the Irish Sea to North Wales. From the great West door of the church (a huge and rather vulgar display of Victorian gothic, whose stones were – as I then supposed all stone structures to be – blackened by a few generations of soot) one could gaze out across the bay towards Anglesey, and see, perhaps, on a clear day the distant blue line of Snowdonia’s mountains; or, if the westering sun chose to appear from beneath the clouds, an often spectacular and moving sunset over the water. Twice every Sunday, for a few adolescent years, my brother and I would be despatched up the hill to don cassock and surplice and sing in the choir. Hair Brylcreamed, slick and black, we would stand behind the carved oak of the choir stalls and sing like – like what? Angels is the usual cliché. Well, we sang well. Music and its making were an important part of childhood, and we were a well-taught choir. When we sat down, however, we were not angels. Hidden from all view except that of the men-choristers, behind and above us, we would go about the normal pursuits of small boys while the liturgy rolled meaninglessly over our heads. And occasionally a tenor or bass would lean over from behind us and flick un unsuspecting ear – so that we should be reminded of the respect due to that impotent old Maiden Aunt, the C of E. For a brief while, after confirmation, I was persuaded that a deep spiritual calling was mine: what else could explain the suffusing and dizzying glow that accompanied my consumption of the Host? Then it dawned on me that perhaps I was feeling the effects of sweet and alcoholic Cyprus wine on an empty stomach. I have not been much prey to illusions since then.
Ah, the war. It is not possible to think back to childhood without acknowledging the omnipresence of that conflict, so recently terminated. Bombs, chiefly, of course. Though the sky was clear for us, the post-war children, it was still full of ghostly visitors. Incendiaries, like the one which had crashed through our roof and landed, mercifully inert, in the cockloft, or the one which burned its terrible magnesium white-fire out in the back garden, still fell in scorching sticks through the dark skies of my parents’ memory. Land-mines floated softly, prettily, lethally down on silken parachutes – until their flash and dull percussion flattened the pair of semis over the road, or the line of arcaded shops on the main street, or simply blew out our lounge windows. And in a battered biscuit tin under the kitchen sink (a chipped porcelain trough) was kept a clattering handful of relics: metal fragments, twisted into gargoyles by extreme heat; the still-recognisable tail-fin of an incendiary; fragments of silken parachute cord that slipped easily through the fingers. We would tip the contents of this tin of death out on the back step, and sort through its mythical contents. Children, wondering. And listening and storing away all the small stories of the terrible years of the war.
One night in August 1951, as a wide-eyed and wondering six-year-old, I was, with my brother and sister, wrapped up warmly in overcoat and – at an hour when ordinarily I should have been asleep in bed – taken on the river. One of the elderly Wallasey ferries, took us out onto the Mersey to watch a display. Many, many other boats were on the water – tugs, pilot cutters, coasters, all dressed in their finery and lit stem to stern. And then the moment. Dashing in line, riding high on their own bow-waves, a line of MTBs sped past us threatening to fly. They roared into the evening towards the Bar – the lightship seven miles out to sea that marked the entrance to the navigable channel into Liverpool. And almost before we had watched them vanish (or so it seemed to me in the heightened and alienated state of mind of a small boy who should have been in bed) they were back – roaring and powering their way through the Mersey’s tide-ripped narrows. I ought also to remember the fireworks along the river, pluming from barges moored along a two mile stretch of dark water – and I do, just. But it was the flying MTBs which then, and even now, stirred me.
This was the regional, provincial arm of the Festival of Britain; of which I recall one other curious and – in its way – poignant detail. A visit to a coal mine. Or so it was represented to me. We travelled in a huge cage down into the dark and saw – not much, really. A rough-hewn roadway underground. That is all I recall. But it was not, of course, a coal mine. Canning Place it was – or so I believe. For years after the war, hoardings hid the bombed out ruins just behind the docks, ruins you could just glimpse from the top deck of the rumbling trams. And it was – I think – those ruins which were pressed into service as a mock-up coal mine for the Festival. Why a mine, and in Liverpool, I have no idea. I imagine that, lacking the resources for immediate regeneration of all the vast destruction of the Blitz, it seemed good to someone, to put the ruins to educational use.
So, then, the river, the sea, the war. The furnishings of childhood memory.
