Whenever I heard the Liverpool comedian Robb Wilton on the wireless begin his act with ‘The day war broke out …’ I always thought he meant that the war lasted for a day. As I was too young at the time to understand the jokes that followed, I would ponder on this day-war, and because the studio audience would greet his opening catchphrase with hoots of laughter, I assumed that the joke lay in the fact that the war was still going on, and on, and on.
I was two years old when the Second World War began and had been at primary school for two years when it ended, so I think I can speak with some authority about life in war-torn Ruthven Road during Hitler’s offensive. I wasn’t that small child in the sepia photograph, or the one running and skipping in a grainy black-and-white film. My world was as vivid, noisy and multicoloured then as it is for any child growing up today. Grandma McGarry and my aunties were huge fans of Charlie Chaplin and often took me to watch his films at the Palladium Cinema in Seaforth, and I fondly imagined that before the Talkies came in, everybody was silent and walked with a stutter. My own children still refer to my early childhood as the ‘black-and-white days’.
Despite the absence of bananas and the constant threat of being slaughtered, I had a privileged upbringing, not in terms of wealth certainly, but of loving parents and a large pool of close relatives. It was made clear to me from the beginning that I was a very lucky boy. Lucky to have been born into the one true faith, lucky to have been born in Liverpool, to have a roof over my head, food on the table, a beautiful mother, a brave, strong father and a kind sister. And although I wasn’t told how lucky I was to have been born and brought up during the terrible years of the Blitz, it may well have been implied. Ruthven Road, where I lived until my early twenties, is off Bridge Road, the main thoroughfare that runs south from the lift-bridge over the canal to the docks at Seaforth. Three years ago when I was in Liverpool making a radio programme about local railways, I took a cab out to Litherland to revisit the old homestead, pausing perhaps to admire the blue plaque on the front of number 11 Ruthven Road, but the house is no longer there, having been pulled down to make way for Princes Way, a flyover in the ointment.
Talking of ointment, I was standing on Bridge Road remembering Spofforth’s, the barber shop where I had to go every other Saturday morning to sit on the wooden plank laid across the arms of a leather chair and passively smoke. One time the barber, chattering away to the reflection in the mirror of one of the men waiting and making a point with the scissors, snipped the top of my left ear. Out squealed the blood. No harm done, he said, staunching the flow with the cotton wool he kept handy for such occasions. A slick of Germoline ointment and Bob’s your uncle. As I was recoiling at the memory, my hand to my ear, a voice called out from behind, ‘All right, Roger, writing one of yer little poems, are yer?’ A friendly passer-by. ‘It’s all changed since you were a lad, eh?’
Some, but not all. To my right I could still see the lift-bridge that spans the Leeds-to-Liverpool canal and below it, running parallel to Ruthven Road, is Jubilee Road where my paternal grandmother lived. Born Margaret Boland, she married James McGough and bore him seven sons and a daughter. Of Irish stock, they were living in a country that didn’t welcome immigrants and they would have seen those welcome notices in lodging-house windows: ‘No Blacks. No Irish. No dogs’. So perhaps it was no surprise that all the children were given safe old English names. In chronological order: William, Roger, James, John, Francis, Andrew, Edward and Ella. No Seans, Siobhans or Patricks in our street, thank you very much. Living only 200 yards away, we would always be popping over to see Grandma McGough and whatever uncle was on leave: John in the RAF, Frank in the Navy, Andy and Ted in the Army. There was a time early on in my life when I thought that the difference between men and women was that men wore uniforms. As I got older my visits grew less frequent, for she was a tough old bird who’d stand for no nonsense and I think she’d kept her sons in check with a rod of iron, if not a belt of leather.
I never knew my paternal grandfather and he was seldom mentioned. Airbrushed out of the family tree, was James. So completely, in fact, that I can’t recall seeing a photograph of him. Who did he look like? Any resemblance to my father? Perhaps he looked like me. ‘That’s Jimmy on the right with his mates outside the Pig and Whistle. The one with the ponytail and the green glasses.’
At family gatherings the dreaded word ‘drink’ would be mentioned in hushed tones. I gathered, too, that he was one of those men who would spend his wages on beer as soon as he got his hands on them. So every Friday night, Grandma would be one of that band of suffering women waiting outside the dock gates to grab the wage packets off their husbands before they disappeared into one of the bottomless pubs. With crystal-clear blue eyes that seemed to challenge the world, it was evident that Grandma McGough had been hardened by life, and there seemed to be a shell round her, a sort of coldness that kept even her sons at bay.
Looking left down Bridge Road I could still see the railway bridge, beyond which were the River Mersey and the docks at Seaforth. Carry on down the hill, under the bridge, and you’d come to Alder Street on the left. That’s where my other grandmother lived, Grandma McGarry. Born Mary Hughes, she had married a young widower called William McGarry and bore him thirteen children. The ones that survived infancy were William, Hettie, Mary, Joseph, Winifred, Frances, John, George, Magdalen, Kathleen, Eileen and James. My mother, christened Mary Agnes, was called Aggie at home, which she always thought common – ‘Aggie, yer tea’s ready’ – and became Mary on leaving Alder Street.
If there was a certain anaglyptic chill in the back-to-back up by the canal it was fireworks down by the docks, and the living room downstairs is where it all happened. Grandma McGarry was deaf, had cataracts and was crippled by arthritis, but she was the benevolent planet round which all the related stars revolved. Her secret was seeing the absurdity in everything and using her deafness to comic effect:
AUNTY EILEEN Ooh, that Hilda Johnson, yer tell her something and it runs like water off a duck’s back.
GRANDMA Runs like duck’s water off her back?
ALL (Voices raised) No, like water off a duck’s back.
GRANDMA That’s what I said.
The living room was large and dominated by a kitchen table that always sported a white tablecloth, numerous cups and saucers, at least one teapot, sugar bowls, a bottle of sterilised milk and a deck of playing cards. Off the living room were a small kitchen, a pantry and a room in which the coal was stored. Sounds strange now, but at the time it seemed like a great idea. Need more coal? Out into the yard on a cold winter’s night, or cross the lino and grab a shovel full? I know which I’d have chosen.
It also housed Uncle Jim’s war souvenirs, which included a 303 rifle. Uncle Jim, who had joined the Royal Marines at seventeen and seen action at Dunkirk, was the youngest of the family, with gas-flame blue eyes and dark curly hair, his gypsy looks and charm had the women of the family fluttering around him: ‘Lash me, but I’m tired,’ he’d yawn, cueing his sisters to put the kettle on, plump up his cushions and push his armchair nearer to the fire.
As my first school was a hundred yards up the road and the church wasn’t much further, plus the fact that the McGarrys were at the heart of our social life, Alder Street is where I spent a great deal of time. Uncles Bill, John and George were married and living away, so it was the aunties who ruled the roost. Gossip, gossip. Cluck, cluck. Kathleen and Eileen, the pretty ones who taught me how to jive and jitterbug at thirteen. Gossip, gossip. Cluck, cluck. Magdalen, known as Marge, who had been disfigured by a dental operation in childhood, which left her with a twisted jaw, was everybody’s favourite aunt and a babysitter extraordinaire. On a Friday evening, once Mum and Dad had left for the cinema, the playing cards would come out and by ten o’clock Brenda and I, falling asleep over pontoon, would be red-eyed and begging to be taken to bed.
‘Ah, just one more game of snap,’ she’d plead, magicking two toffees from behind our ears.
I would love to regale you with tales of musical evenings. Those nights spent around the piano in the parlour singing the songs of auld Ireland with Uncle Billy on the accordion, Aunty Winny on the fiddle, me mam on the penny whistle and Grandma herself beating it out on the bodhrán. But alas, I cannot tell a lie. When people played the piano or sang, it would be a friend of the family, Arthur Kennedy, Joe McDonnell or Father Hughes himself:
GRANDMA Will you have a smidgen of whisky, Father?
FATHER HUGHES No thanks, I’m forswearing it for Lent.
GRANDMA You’re swearing for Lent?
ALL (voices raised) No, Father’s forswearing the drink for Lent.
GRANDMA That’s what I said.
My father enjoyed sitting down at the piano at home and going through his short repertoire of airs but he played for himself, never socially, for he was a shy man and it’s from him I inherited that fear of the jolly compère pointing and saying: ‘Your turn now, give us all a song. Quiet everybody.’
And where was Grandfather McGarry when all the shenanigans were taking place in the parlour, when the carpet was rolled up and everyone joined in for a spot of lino dancing? Sadly, he’d gone before I could talk to him. Not dead, but his mind had gone. Delayed shell-shock they all said, the result of the horrors he’d gone through in the Great War, and I didn’t know any better. Senile dementia? Possibly, but his symptoms seemed nearer to some sort of extreme psychosis. He’d worked all his life at the Bryant and May factory and had a framed scroll to prove it, but by the time I knew him he was a spent match, choking on fish bones and walking round the yard with a broom handle at his shoulder. He didn’t seem to know who I was. He would talk to me but he made no sense, it was as if he was talking to someone else. Someone who lived in a different age. He shambled around the neighbourhood mumbling to himself and, as far as I’m aware, nobody laughed or pointed at him because they remembered him as a good bloke. At this time, too, just after the war, a new younger generation of shell-shocked ex-servicemen were taking to the streets.
The first seventeen years of my life were spent within a half mile radius of 11 Ruthven Road, in an unlovely, unfashionable part of north Liverpool. Word was to reach us later of the drumbeat of Toxteth and the scally, Scouseheart of Dingle, the coolness of Woolton and the smugness of the Wirral, and I would be drawn inevitably to the heart of the city, but, for those early years, this was my geography:
North:
Jubilee road. Near the canal by the lift-bridge
in Litherland, a frying-pan’s throw away
from the Richmond Sausage factory,
grandma McGough, having raised seven sons
and a daughter lived alone. No jubilation.
All done and dusted. Frost on the aspidistra.
Helsinki.
South:
Alder Street. In a roomy back-to-back
in a cul-de-sac near Seaforth docks,
grandma McGarry, having borne thirteen
was deaf to the noise of grandchildren,
giddy aunts and messmates. ‘Put the kettle on.’
‘It suits you.’ ‘Who’s for a game of cards?’
Naples.
For those early years this was my geography.
My north, my south, I sailed between the two.
Since then I’ve travelled the world and found
that everything I learned, I already knew.