One of the reasons for my poor college attendance was that during my first year in London I kept going back to Liverpool to visit my new girlfriend – indeed I was on Merseyside so often that a lot of people didn’t realise I’d moved to London. Linda and me had met in the summer just before I was due to go to Chelsea. Her best friend from school, Dorothy, had been going out with my best friend from school, Cliff Cocker. The four of us had met for a drink in the Philharmonic pub. During the evening I kept slipping off to use the phone, leading Linda to suspect I was calling my girlfriend, when in fact I was ringing my mother, keeping her updated on whether I was coming home or not. Then after the pub closed at 10.30 we went to the Masque, a late-night coffee bar, reached via a rickety set of stairs, above a record shop called Probe Records in the studenty area of Liverpool. In order to have somewhere to go after the pubs closed you were forced to endure folk music, readings of their work by the third-best Mersey beat poets and milky coffee served in shallow Pyrex cups that ensured it was cold before you could drink it.
In order to entertain my audience of two pretty girls, I brought out my best material. In 1968 at the age of sixteen I’d tried to spend the summer alone in Paris sleeping under the bridges of the Seine. The city was only just recovering from the student riots which had brought down the government so the authorities were extremely edgy. One example of this edginess was that I had managed to get myself arrested, driven to the outskirts of town in a police van and told never to come back. As usual, since my solo holidays always ended in failure, I wandered about aimlessly until a railway station appeared and I took the train back to Liverpool. Over the years I’d worked this slender story into an epic, Homeric narrative of adventure and danger, which I always told girls as soon as I could because it really seemed to impress them. But when I tried to tell it to Linda in the Masque she just laughed at me and said I’d behaved like an idiot. On the other hand she told me she could get the same bus as me home even though I knew it was out of her way and when I asked her if she’d go out with me again she said yes.
Linda had studied English at Bangor University in North Wales for three years before becoming a teacher, and was currently working at a boys’ secondary modern school in Hoylake on the Wirral. She had attended Bangor because after passing her A levels she had gone on holiday, hitch-hiking around Europe with a couple of girlfriends, and told her parents to choose her university for her: anywhere as long as it wasn’t Liverpool. Wanting to keep their only daughter as close as possible Linda’s mum and dad had used a wooden ruler and an old atlas to measure, in inches, the nearest university town to Liverpool and had chosen Bangor in North Wales, not realising that though it might have been near on paper, it was in a whole other country where many spoke a different language, there were two large river estuaries to be skirted and a narrow coastline fringed by mountains to be travelled down, so it took her over six hours to get there on the bus.
It was a relief, though not a surprise, to learn that Linda was interested in left-wing politics – you could not really go out with someone if they weren’t. People would say, ‘I met this girl, she was really good-looking and her dad imported denim of a previously unknown style and quality from the West Coast of the United States, but she couldn’t differentiate between the various factions involved in the liberation struggle in the Western Sahara so I finished with her.’
Only a few months after we met we spent our first New Year’s Eve together, wandering around the bombsites and derelict buildings of Liverpool, carrying a bucket and brush pasting up posters for a showing of a Maoist film, Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, in a room above a pub, and Linda soon joined the Merseyside Branch of the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist–Leninist). Unlike me, whose radicalism had been inherited from my parents like a dukedom, Linda was much more serious and practical in her approach to politics. When she’d been younger, about ten or eleven, she had gone through a phase of religious fanaticism. After making extensive comparisons she decided the Church that was nearest to the word of God, as revealed through the Bible, was the Baptist, conveniently located down the road in the People’s Church of Everton. This was a very strict Protestant group that allowed no make-up, alcohol or pop music and was in every way very austere: they would sing hymns and nature rambles were allowed, though they spent most of their time in prayer.
At the age of fifteen she was taking O level religious education but when she compared the life of Jesus as told in the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, she found that they differed greatly in their accounts, which made her think: If this is the word of God how can there be any contradictions? So she left.
Now she was a Maoist. Lin Piao, who at one point had been Mao Tse-tung’s successor and official best friend, had suddenly fled China after supposedly plotting to depose the Great Leader, but his plane had been shot down. According to reports in Western newspapers the Chinese authorities had been alerted to his defection by his daughter. Linda’s dad asked her, ‘Would you turn your father in?’
‘Yes, if I thought you were an enemy of the revolution,’ she replied.
‘After all, don’t you think, Dad,’ she continued, ‘that it’s better that one man dies if it saves ten thousand?’
‘His own daughter,’ Linda’s father kept repeating in a hurt and wondering tone.
My girlfriend was happy enough to introduce me to her parents early on in our relationship. When I first went to their flat, picking her up on the way to a meeting, I wore my best clothes, my dad’s railway overcoat tied up with string and some huge green flares my mother had made in her trademark style with one leg much shorter than the other, both of which I felt complemented my long, uncombed, greasy black hair and beard. After I’d gone, Linda’s mother burst into tears because she thought her daughter was going out with a forty-year-old tramp. Linda’s dad, Pat, was a very shy man who didn’t say much. In fact the only one he’d open up to was their cat. Sometimes the family would listen at the door as he told their pet about his day or how he planned to move to Guernsey and open a sweet shop.
The only time Pat became voluble was when showing visitors the hot-water boiler and central heating system, which was located in a cupboard in the kitchen of their flat. He had an interest in the central heating because he was a pipe-fitter welder. Everyone got a look at the boiler including Linda’s schoolmates, and of course me, though Linda’s dad didn’t really expect me to be interested, seeing as he thought I lived in a cardboard box. All in all we both felt things had gone quite well.
On the other hand I managed to keep Linda from meeting Molly my mother for as long as possible, but one winter’s afternoon my luck finally ran out.
If I was back from college in London, I would be waiting when Linda got off the train from Hoylake at Liverpool Central Station. That day we decided to walk through the entrance to Lewis’s department store, which led directly off the station concourse. There was a Luis Buñuel film that year which had been a surprise hit in the cinema called The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. In the sense that you could definitely say it was about anything, the movie concerned a group of upper-middle-class people attempting – despite continual interruptions – to dine together. In one scene one of them enters a secret cubicle as if they are visiting the lavatory but instead they shamefully and hurriedly eat a meal. That was the way food and dining were regarded in Liverpool in the early 1970s, as an ignominious and unseemly practice. One of the few places where eating was celebrated was the Food Hall of Lewis’s. We liked to walk through the marble-lined hall between the chiller cabinets full of pies, cakes and sliced meats.
That day in a corner by the biscuit counter I suddenly became aware of a crowd of shoppers clustered around somebody who, though they couldn’t be seen, could easily be located by their screaming, sobbing and crying out in great distress.
‘My God!’ Linda said. ‘It sounds like there’s a woman over there who’s having some kind of breakdown.’ She appeared to be planning to slow down, possibly to offer help, but I had already recognised the sound of the screaming, sobbing and crying out in great distress from its usual place in the living room of our house.
I said to Linda, ‘That’s my mother, just keep walking.’ Unfortunately my girlfriend, not having met Molly before, was appalled at my callousness and insisted we go over to offer assistance. Pushing through the press of people, we came upon my mother at the centre of a circle of disturbed and horrified onlookers, her eyes raw with weeping, her clothes in disarray from where she had been tearing at them and her red hair sticking straight up in the air.
‘They’ve robbed me, Lexi!’ she shouted, not at all surprised to see me amongst the crowd. ‘They’ve stolen from me and they won’t do anything about it!’
When she’d calmed down a little Molly explained between anguished sobs that a shop assistant had short-changed her by ten shillings, and that was why she was making such a scene. She screamed at the woman until a manager appeared and offered my mother a £5 gift voucher by way of apology. When we got home the missing banknote was found in Molly’s purse.
Linda insisted on getting the bus back to our house with my mother. As the three of us walked from the stop on Oakfield Road towards our house a car suddenly swerved across from the opposite lane into oncoming traffic and its male driver yelled at Molly, ‘Fuck you, you old bat!’
With equal fury my mother screamed at the departing vehicle, ‘No, fuck you, you fucking fuck!’
What shocked Linda was not just the verbal assault, but the way in which my mother afterwards instantly reverted to her previous calm demeanour.
Linda asked my mother, ‘Molly, why was that driver swearing and trying to kill you?’
Molly professed to have no idea, except, as she said, ‘You’ll find, Linda, that owning a car makes people act like capitalists and all capitalists think nothing of driving at fifty miles an hour on the pavement shouting swear words.’ This wasn’t the explanation.
When a child, especially an only child, leaves home it can be extremely traumatic and parents react in a variety of ways; some become obsessed with grandchildren, others take to the bottle and a few become lollipop ladies. The School Crossing Patrol was an organisation of old people rather like the Second World War Home Guard or the Volkssturm. They were not armed with First World War .303 Lee-Enfields or Panzerfausts, instead their weapon was a round orange, red and white sign mounted on a four-foot long pole which read, ‘Stop Children Crossing’. With this pole they were supposed to shepherd children across the road from their school gates or help them traverse busy junctions in safety. Molly’s post was a busy corner at the intersection of nearby Breck Road and Oakfield Road. Dressed in a police cap with a glossy peak, a silver Liver bird badge at its centre, the strap drawn tight under her chin, and a shiny white plastic mac, she was supposed solely to help local schoolchildren get over the road, but she saw it more as an opportunity to conduct her own private war on motorists, a war as ferocious in its way as that being waged by the Vietcong against the forces of US imperialism. She was, at the same time as being a lollipop lady, secretary of the Merseyside Medical Aid for Vietnam Committee and perhaps some of the stories of armed struggle she had heard had seeped into her consciousness. A lot of Communists, like my mother, never approved of automobiles – couldn’t see the point of a car unless it was dark green, armoured and had a big red star painted on the front.
Like the unhappy American Marines ‘in country’, the drivers of Anfield never knew when or where Molly was going to strike next. It was an accepted convention that a lollipop lady pretty much stuck to the corner that they had been assigned, but my mother had given herself a more roving brief so that a motorist might be in their car half a mile away from the junction with no schoolchildren in sight when Molly would leap out waving her lollipop at their windscreen, forcing them to scream to a halt. A minority chose to swerve around her swearing, but this was only a temporary victory since Molly knew that unless they wanted to take a long detour the drivers had to come back the next day and then she’d be waiting for them.