I wanted to tell you about the canal a hundred yards away from where I grew up and I began with my walking along the bridle path, but I typed in ‘bridal path’, which I thought was the correct spelling when I was a boy. Where brides went walking, I had assumed. Where they were led by their husbands in the olden days, still clasping a bouquet, perhaps, a pink satin halter round the neck. Silly me. But strolling along that bridle path, with not a sprinkling of confetti in sight, was what I did a lot of. If you headed away from Liverpool in the direction of Leeds and kept on going it was like being in the countryside. And that’s what I did one afternoon in late summer with George, a mate from school.
Except for the occasional cyclist or someone taking their dog for a walk, it was always quiet, and we walked and talked, ate our butties and drank our pop. We kept an eye out for water rats and tried to put a name to all the birds we spotted: (‘Jimmy’, ‘Alan’, ‘Margaret’, ‘Francesca’). We’d walked for miles and it was early evening when we turned to retrace our steps home, and we’d just rounded a bend in the canal when suddenly, towering in front of us like a stink-bomb factory blocking out the sun, was our friendless neighbourhood psychopath, Puggy Lewis.
Even though we outnumbered him by two to one, or a hundred per cent, it wasn’t enough, and besides, he was hopeless at maths. We could turn tail, of course, and leg it back down the towpath, but that would have been cowardly. Sensible, but cowardly. (Towpath! Yes that’s better than bridle path.) So there he was, barring our way, piggy eyes dull and unblinking in a big, fat suet pudding. ‘Hello Piggy,’ I said brightly, then regretted it immediately. ‘I mean Puggy.’ Luckily for my nose he had disappeared behind some bushes to re-emerge with a heavy sack. Instinctively, George and I knew that it wasn’t filled with presents for the poor children of the neighbourhood. Whatever it was filled with, it filled us with dread.
‘You’re just in time’, grunted Puggy, ‘to witness the great disappearing act.’
A bird swooped low across the surface of the water and disappeared into the trees beyond, and I wished I could follow it.
‘Did you see that chaffinch?’ I said in the vain hope that a conversation about bird classification might follow during which Puggy would forget why he’d come to the canal.
‘Shut it,’ he said and swung at me with the sack. It caught me on the shoulder and had it not been for my superb balancing skills and magical powers I would have toppled into the slimy blackness.
‘Not a word to anybody about this, d’ye hear?’ We nodded. ‘Now stand well back while I give this lot the heave ho.’ We did just that as Puggy swung the weighted sack round his head a few times before letting it go. It swung in an arc over the setting sun before hitting the water like a smack in the face. There were a few outraged bubbles followed by silence.
We watched the ripples unravel for a moment until George broke the spell: ‘What’s in it?’
‘Mind yer own business, and don’t forget what I told yiz. Breathe a word about it to anyone and you’re dead.’ As if to underline the threat, he grabbed George’s nose between thumb and forefinger and squeezed until the poor lad’s eyes watered.
Using my superb balancing skills and magical powers, I backed away. ‘We won’t tell anyone,’ I promised, ‘especially not the NSPCC or the RSPCA, or the CID.’
Confused by the acronymous jumble of letters, Puggy frowned. ‘Just don’t.’ And wiping his moist fingers down the front of my shirt he swaggered off down the towpath. George and I watched him disappear before dawdling home. On the way we saw a ‘Swimming prohibited’ sign floating face down in the water and wondered what the fish made of it.
The canal bank was also where my dad used to take me for walks on a Sunday afternoon. He had big docker’s hands and being tiny I would cling to one of his fingers as he relived his days in the Merchant Navy before the war. Storms at sea and men drowning. He talked of faraway places, the delights of Rio de Janeiro and of the spell that Auckland had cast on him. (I was later to learn that he’d filled in the immigration forms and booked our passage to New Zealand, but Mum had cried off at the last minute.) I think he often regretted not settling out there and of course it gave me food for thought. How different would my life have been? Would I still have written poetry? I assume so. Would I have had a number one in the charts? I don’t think so. Would I be writing an autobiography? I doubt it. Would I have been happier? Ah, who can say? If Dad’s stories filled me with a sense of adventure and a restless desire to grow up and see the world, Mother’s stories, usually at bedtime, were designed to make me feel peaceful and secure, and sleepy.
One of my biggest regrets in life is that my own books weren’t around when I was a child. I would have identified with the characters in the stories, laughed at all the jokes, and as for the poems, they would have been so much fun to recite, and easy to learn by heart. But as we all know, things don’t always work out the way we would have planned. Because I write for children, visit schools and perform in theatres to huge crowds of the little blighters, you would imagine that I would be an enthusiastic and gifted reader of bedtime stories to my own children. People often tell me how lucky and grateful my kids must feel to have me for a dad.
‘How I envy the McGough children. Night after night of magical word-juggling at the hands of a consummate craftsman!’ Well, er, not quite. More often than not my wife would be shouting upstairs, ‘Now go to sleep, otherwise your father will come up and read some of his poems.’
You could hear them groaning, ‘Oh no, not the consummate craftsman …’ Then silence. I don’t know why, but I always found it hard work reading even the stories that I’d loved as a child, Grimm’s fairy tales, Aesop’s fables and the rest. I would get bored very quickly and embellish, do silly accents and leave out great chunks. My daughter Isabel would always insist on my going back, although none of the boys seemed to mind, or notice. My eyes on the big, smiling Thomas the Tank-Engine clock. ‘Gosh, is that the quality time? Must fly. Goodnight, God bless.’ Kiss, kiss. Exit.
I am back on the canal bank, but it is late in the evening and the moon is reflected in the inky black water. I am not with a mate this time but with a girl, and if it weren’t for the end of the chapter looming up, I would furnish you with gratuitous and explicit detail of our encounter. However, there is only enough room left for me to say thank you to Maureen. Thank you, Maureen.