At various times in my life, friends have tried to instil into me their passion for driving and all have failed. I actually held a provisional licence for a while, which was exciting, but that was as far as I got, because I just wasn’t interested. Perhaps if I’d passed my test and bought a car I might have stayed longer than two years at St Kevin’s, but because the bus journey was so long and tedious I decided to find a job nearer the centre of town. The one advertised in The Times Educational Supplement looked too good to be true: ‘Assistant Lecturer in Catering French at the Mabel Fletcher Technical College, Liverpool’. Catering French? Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça?’ I asked myself (in a Cork accent). The Principal, Miss Odell, took a shine to me at the interview even though I suspect I was the least qualified and experienced applicant, and to my surprise she offered me the post. And so goodbye Kevin, hello Mabel.
As teaching jobs go my new one was a cracker, and if Bella Fortuna hadn’t eloped with me two years later, I’d happily have served my time there. The Mabel was a technical college with courses in millinery, nursery nursing, shop assisting and, of course, catering, and as you might have guessed, ninety per cent of the students were female and all over sixteen. As there were only two other men on the staff when I arrived, one of whom was gay the other badly crippled and nearing retirement, when it came to ‘Hands up, girls, which male member of staff do we fancy?’ it was a one-horse race. Not that I took advantage of my position, by the way – I was a good Catholic boy, remember – but I did enjoy my mornings with cadet nurses on day release from Walton Hospital, some of whom were the same age as me, and I did thrill to Tania, a saucy sixteen-year-old milliner when she surprised me in the storeroom. (The door clicks shut behind him, he turns: ‘Tania, I really don’t think …’)
My main duties involved teaching menu French to would-be chefs, and although at the time I couldn’t boil an oeuf, at least I could spell one and I soon became a fount of culinary knowledge that was useless except when faced with the menu in a fancy restaurant. Do you know what Potage Robespierre is? Beetroot soup, actually, and although the students could make it, they didn’t know about the bloodthirsty Robespierre who inspired it. Do you know why a chinois, used in the kitchen for sifting, is so called? Because it is shaped like a Chinese conical hat. Do you know where Crème Brûlée gets its name from? A famous chef created the dish for Napoleon to celebrate his defeat of the Austrian Army at Brûlée in 1803. I could go on for hours.
One of the perks of my new job was that I didn’t have to bring cheese sandwiches and an apple to work every day, but instead could saunter along to the Staff Restaurant and tuck into the five-course gourmet lunches cooked and served, free of charge, by the catering students. And there was another perk. As well as teaching English to the nurses and to those on the salesmanship course, and because I was the only male member of staff who could run in a straight line, I was put in charge of the PE department. This involved playing footy with the lads and a spot of netball with the girls, as well as providing me with my own changing room in the PE block where I could lie down after one of those hefty lunches. (The door clicks shut behind her, he turns: ‘Tania, I really don’t think …’)
The actual college itself wasn’t built when I was appointed and for the first eighteen months I was peripatetic, visiting the various sites all over the city. My brown canvas bag came into its own now as I would stay in town after college, and meet up with friends in the pubs and clubs of Liverpool 8.
The El Cabala, a glass-fronted, airy café on Bold Street, was where I sipped my first cappuccino from a see-through Perspex cup and saucer, and learned from the menu about the coffee-coloured habits of the Capucin monks. Although it failed to mention the short black habits of the Espress monks. The most exciting coffee bars, though, were the ones that stayed open late and catered for students, artists and the beatniks who were appearing on the scene, the Masque, the Picasso, the Basement, run by a local painter, Yenkel Feather, and best of all, Streates. This was the time, of course, when pubs closed at ten o’clock and even though there were shebeens and after-hours drinking clubs, most young people were content to sit around late into the night nursing coffee-flavoured drinks and listening to jazz. Here was an audience waiting to be entertained.
Listening to that Dylan Thomas record at university had been an ear opener for me, as had the visit by the poet Vernon Watkins, to read and talk about his friend Thomas, but it was a reading given by Christopher Logue that really fired me up. Looking like he’d come straight from Montmartre, dressed all in black and sinister, he read his political and hard-hitting poems in that crackling theatrical voice of his. Though a little shocked, I was hooked. An EP record called Redbird, Logue reading the poems of Pablo Neruda to the jazz accompaniment of the Tony Kinsey Quintet, would be passed around and wowed over by the young Beats in the city’s coffee bars. As was Allen Ginsberg’s rendition of ‘Howl’.
If you couldn’t be in San Francisco with Ferlinghetti, or in New York with Ginsberg, or on the road with Kerouac, then London was where it all seemed to be happening with the poetry and jazz concerts organised by Jeremy Robson, and featuring Logue and Adrian Mitchell, as well as Laurie Lee and Dannie Abse. Michael Horovitz and Pete Brown were travelling up and down the country with their free-form poetry and jazz collaboration Blues for the Hitch-hiking Dead, and I was stuck in Liverpool where nothing was happening.
At the time I used to envy those writers who lived in such exotic places where the very pavements must have emitted psychic poetic energy. What lyrics I would write if I lived on the Lower East Side. (As a matter of fact, it was quite common for some of our local Beat poets to write about yellow cabs, and walking along 52nd Street, because this was the hip furniture you could bring into your verses to appear cool. A year or two later when I began to set poems in a Liverpool landscape, as did Adrian and to a lesser extent Brian, they seemed unnervingly surreal and non-poetical.) Since those days, of course, young poets have whined to me, ‘Oh, it must have been easy for you to write poetry, living in Liverpool at such an exciting time.’ But a writer struggles to dignify his particular time and place, ‘No easier, mate, than it is for you right now, right here.’
I was still living at home and envying those free spirits around me with flats in town, so when Jane Cook, a lecturer in the art department at college, offered me the use of a room above the garage at the back of her house in Sefton Park I was over the moon … I mean garage. There were wooden stairs on the outside of the building leading up to a space that was dark and unheated, but it was dry and it was mine, and I pretended that it would become a second home. It never did, of course, because one mattress on the floor does not a fully furnished bijou apartment make, but I fondly remember that Siberian winter, like the time I offered Pete Brown a bed for the night. He and Mike Horovitz had been reading in town, after which we’d all got roaring drunk, ending up with Pete, hairy-black and bearlike in his tartan lumberjacket, looking every inch the ‘Back Cricklewoodsman’, skating on the icy pavements and sliding down the wooden stairs as I tried to get him into the room. Luckily we were too drunk to die of hypothermia, and I like to think that he drew heavily from the experience when writing lyrics for ‘Cream’ in the years that followed.
The point of the bolthole, though, as you may have guessed, was not to offer shelter to itinerant drunken poets, but a place to which I could lure suspecting females. To be painfully honest, I had more success providing for passed-out poets than I did with the females, although I did notch up one notable victory. I refer to ‘Comeclose and Sleepnow’, a poem whose style echoes Wilfred Owen and e e cummings. The true inspiration, of course, was the girl, but I can’t recall her name. One of the lines, ‘Shoes with broken high ideals’, is a clumsy play on words, but I was so thrilled with it at the time that I never had the heart to change it. Brian Patten published the poem in Underdog, his little magazine, and it would appear at the beginning of my section in The Mersey Sound. So, as Lennon and McCartney would have it, ‘Thank you, girl.’
I heard my first Beatles record while walking down the corridor at the Mabel, when it was being played on a gramophone in the Student Common Room. Later in the week, when I heard ‘Love Me Do’ being played on the wireless, it was exciting in a way that few people would understand today. Pop songs were American (yes, I know we had Dickie Valentine, Dennis Lotus and Tommy Steele, but really?) and here was a record by four lads from the town where I lived. What was going on?
The Philharmonic Hotel, lying midway between the two cathedrals on Hope Street, became my favourite pub once I had gravitated towards the centre of town. With its crystal chandeliers, copper panels and ornate wooden mahogany friezes carved by craftsmen who had worked on the Cunard liners, it remains a magnificent example of Edwardian flamboyance. Most evenings, after a pleasant day with the nurses and would-be chefs at college, I would meet up there with a group of teachers and artists, plumbers and sparks including my new pal John Gorman, and John Hewson, known as ‘Hewo’, the pub jester, who was to become the Scaffold’s stage and road manager. And it was at the Kardomah Café in Clayton Street where we used to gather on Saturday afternoons to chat up the girls and plan our big night out. The reason most of the girls were there was not to be chatted up by the likes of us, but by the likes of Faron and the Flamingos, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, the Undertakers, the Whatevers. Ringo was a regular and even before leaving Rory to join that other group, he looked a million dollars in his suede overcoat and leather jacket. Yes, you could say we were jealous, just a teeny bit.
It was in the Kardomah one Saturday afternoon in 1963 that we heard about rehearsals that were about to start at the Playhouse Theatre for John Osborne’s new play Luther, and there were job opportunities for young men who could sing Gregorian chant. So Gorman and Hewo, myself and another teacher, Mike Collins, who, having been educated by the Christian Brothers had the Latin and were afraid of nothing, downed our coffee and nipped round the corner to offer our professional services. I think the director, Bernard Hepton, would have been well within his rights to have opted to hear a few bars of Gregorian chant before taking us on, but he didn’t, and perhaps was to regret it in the weeks that followed.
Our main task during the performance was to slip on stage during the blackout between scenes and move furniture around. Dressed as monks, we would carry on a heavy refectory table and a couple of benches while singing ‘Veni Creator Spiritus’ in County Cork accents, and when the lights came up be sitting silently at table pretending to eat polystyrene bread while proper actors acted. Luther was played by a young actor with dark, brooding good looks called Inigo Jackson, and other cast members included Barry Jackson, Noel Davis and a comely but snooty young actress who kept a pet hamster in her dressing room. The Assistant Stage Manager, who had the unenviable task of trying to keep us in order backstage, was Jean Boht, who went on to fame as a television actress and more besides. I enjoyed the whole experience, which was a universe away from my day job at the Mabel Fletcher, but sadly, darling, as a group we could perhaps be accused, darling, of not taking the whole theatre thing seriously enough, darling. And we got into big trouble because of it.
I am not referring to the occasion when John whispered into the ear of the snooty young actress as she was about to go on stage, ‘Your hamster’s just died.’ But to the strange business of the fan letters. After a successful opening night and once the show was up and running, letters would arrive at the theatre from fans in the audience, which would be posted on a noticeboard outside the Green Room.
‘What a stunning production … Bernard Hepton fully deserves …’
‘Inigo Jackson is star quality …’
‘Noel Davis again thrilled us with …’
One afternoon before the Saturday matinée Gorman brought along sheets of headed notepaper purloined from various furniture removal firms, and the four of us composed paeans of praise to ourselves, signed them as if by the owner of the firm and pinned them to the noticeboard.
‘The acting was very good and so was the direction, but for me the play really came to life during the blackouts …’
‘… the table humping was pure poetry …’
‘Forget Inigo Jackson, for me the star was the monk who carried off one of the benches single-handedly … etc.
On the Monday evening we were told to report to the Theatre Manager, Mr Willard Stoker, on the third floor who, having reminded us that the Playhouse, founded in 1866 was the oldest repertory theatre in the country, tore into us for our lack of respect and our philistine attitude to long-established theatrical traditions, and if it weren’t for the fact that Gregorian chanters were hard to come by, we’d be out on our ears. Good-day, darlings.