Wet Legs

There was rarely, if ever any crowd trouble at Liverpool or Everton matches, for one simple reason. The police turned a blind eye to the law. In those days licensing hours dictated that pubs shut at three pm in the afternoon and not open again until 5.30. The problem was Saturday football usually ended somewhere in between – so the pubs stayed quietly opened, siphoning off the huge crowds enroute to Lime street station. A law was broken but everyone benefited. Then, it may have been the 1980’s, a new and zealous Chief Constable enforced the law. The pubs were forced to stay shut. Thousands and thousands of thirsty people walked en masse the three or so miles to the rail station, and crowd trouble began. You need to know when to turn a blind eye – in the classroom, marriage, dealing with children – or in this case thirsty adults. When it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

With relaxed licensing laws, the ‘lockup’ has lost most of its magic. When I played with an Irish band in Newport, we regularly played at O Reilly’s on a Sunday lunch hour. The pub ‘closed’ at three pm, and the regulars including us stayed on drinking behind locked doors. The Liverpool ‘Lockup was much the same.

I went for a drink with my cousin, Michael McDonald, somewhere in Kirkdale I think. We didn’t get there until Ten pm, which worried me because pubs shut at Ten Thirty. I was introduced to Mike’s thirteen or so friends – then somebody bought a round – 14 pints. Bloody hell, I thought, we’re going to have to drink fast. Ten twenty somebody else in the group bought a reciprocal round…and then the ‘lockup’ began. I was choking down my fourteenth pint sometime around 1.30 in the morning. I had to go to the toilet.

Walls bounced as I clung for purchase, and an immense cloud of steam filled the latrine as I released the contents of an overstrained bladder. Four of Mike’s friends joined me, two on each side. We peed in companionable silence. Then someone asked me where I came from.

‘Liverpool,’ I said, puzzled.

“Yer wha? They turned, still pissing. “What’s happened to yer accent?” They spoke like concerned doctors confronted with pneumonia in Belize.

I had no answer. Just a pair of very wet legs.

The Milky Bar Kid

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     John Lennon's sacrifice: The Philharmonic pub.

The entrance to the Phil

  Doing it in style Mosaics on the floor. More mosaics

And if you get tired of mosaics No not one of King Ludwig's Bavarian castles. The Vines Public House nr. Lime street station. 

 It’s impossible to dissect the magic of the Liverpool pub. I have drunk everywhere from the Cascades to New Orleans, London, Malta, Newcastle, Glasgow and some of the finest pubs in Wales, even New York. But nothing beats the Liverpool pub. I went back recently after a decade or two of absence. We hit the Globe, opposite Liverpool Central Station. It was the Sunday Liverpool had just lost 1.0 to Manchester, which is a bit like saying God had just lost to the Devil. The pub was crammed with flesh, elbows sticking out of windows, bellies rammed against the bar. When someone moved, there was a domino ripple across what was a very small room; a perpetual phenomenon as people made their way to and from the bar, sometimes risking the toilet – everything made well with immense and cheerful courtesy. Chaos and the Butterfly effect, only with beer. Half the Liverpool Kop were there, or it sounded like, people singing, the rest bellowing to make themselves heard. My son asked my how they celebrated when they won. What can I say? It was a blast-back to the past. Within ten minutes a young girl with long black hair, otherwise dressed in red was talking to us having spotted we were strangers there.

 My first experience of a pub was a solitary pint of Double Diamond in the Black Bull, having told my mum I was off to Sunday Mass. It got better. When I and Mike Adams were at Colquitt St. we drank in the Royal Albert in, I think, Seel St. the tables were of dimpled copper and Percy Sledge was for ever on the Juke Box singing 'When a man loves a woman.' 

 When I became a ‘student’ I moved on to the most magical pub in Liverpool. The Philharmonic. It was like walking into a masterpiece and becoming part of it. Even the toilets were special. Pissing was an event John Lennon lamented the fact that he was never able to drink there again after he’d become famous. I lament the fact that it is now too far away for me to slip in there for pint. The beer was good, so was the talk, the company, but it was everything else, the mosaics and the stained glass windows, the plasterwork, the paneling in the different snugs. The only thing wrong with it was the Cocktail bar. Beautiful, but they would insist on serving you in half pint glasses. Further down the road was O’Connor’s Tavern. It reeked of Restoration England, only seedier, and was presided over by a short, cynical bald-headed man who sometimes smiled when he thought of the money pouring over his bar. 

 Once, jaded by the opulence and fired by working class zeal, I persuaded Geoff Fimister and others in our group to go to a real working class pub. ‘Where?’ they asked, tolerant, amused, but not yet convinced. ‘The Slaughter House, somewhere off Dale St.’ I said. ‘I hear it’s really good.’ ‘It’d have to be good with a name like that,’ said Geoff. So we went. It was obvious something was wrong as soon as the door slammed behind us. Too late to escape. A room full of skin-heads, their heads swiveling, focusing on us, on our long hair, and me with my gold rimmed John Lennon glasses. Someone grabbed me by the collar and accused me of looking at him; someone else called me the Milky Bar Kid. It could have been worse. I think we stayed for a pint, out of pride and then made our escape. Once again my judgment had been brought into question. So I guess not everything in Liverpool is good. Just most of it.

Buses are for talking on

The beautiful Atlantean bus
The old pierhead bus terminus
The magical Ribble bus
Regimented penguins walked on these ferries. We would hang from that chrome rail shooting at outlaws.

The Liverpool bus was a wondrous thing. It came in red or green. So simple. The red buses were run by Ribble and came from faraway places such as Blackpool, Ormskirk, Much Hoole, Little Hoole or Preston. I loved the colour, especially on misty days, but the people on them spoke different, and looked different. The men wore tweed and the women wore strange hats, which to a small boy was off-putting.

The Corporation buses on the other hand were green and the people on them spoke like I did, which was all to the good. These Atlantean buses are still remembered with fondness – especially by my brother in law in Australia; but I preferred their precursor. These were also green. You don’t mess about with colour.

The driver was encased in the front and the entrance/exit was at the back of the bus and guarded by a conductor, who stood there all day, when he was not going up and down the bus collecting fares or talking to old ladies.

The beauty of the entry point was that it had no doors. Just a single chrome pole and you could leap on the bus as it was taking off and hang on with your head sticking out into the traffic. What fun we had.

The real beauty of the Liverpool bus was the people on them, talking to their friends, talking to strangers, talking to themselves, talking. I warned Bernadette the very first time she went on a Liverpool bus. Don’t make eye contact unless you want to tell a stranger your life story. She thought I was mad until she was halfway through giving an account of her schooldays to curious old man.

On more than one occasion I’ve heard how a student or stranger to the city, looking for an unfamiliar address has asked the conductor or driver for the nearest bus stop to it, and have found themselves driven to the very front door, the bus and its passengers having gone on a magical mystery tour to get there. It helped if you were young, female, and attractive.

And finally you reached the Pier Head, a place once exciting and vibrant but which is now little more than an antiseptic theme park. Then the buses piled up in their bays right on the water front, like gigantic green pigeons jostling for space.
If you were early, you’d see the Wallesey ferry come in and be treated to another sight, now sadly gone: a ferry its three decks crammed with office workers in pinstripes, some in bowler hats, all carrying umbrellas, earnestly perambulating in a clockwise direction, and stopping only when the ship hit the landing stage with a judder. Seagulls, giant green pigeons and regimental penguins, Liverpool had them all.

“I’ve lost me ticket. I’ve lost it. I’ve lost me ticket!” the boy, about sixteen years old and wearing a pale green jacket, jumped up from his seat, brushing down his bottom, his face torn in anguish. “I hope I haven’t sat on it – It'll have swallowed up.” It was the first time I’d ever seen or heard somebody overtly gay and gloriously funny. I’d heard about it but only in whispers.

In the early sixties if you wore deodorant you were ‘gay’. Somebody in theatre once came to St. Bonaventures. He wanted ‘volunteers’ for a production of Carmen he was putting on in the Philharmonic Hall. We were dragooned into it and did our stuff as soldiers on the stage in the school hall. Rehearsals didn’t go well. The man wore deodorant and talcum and we cringed when he touched us. I never made my debut on the stage, at least not then.

Whispers: the pub in Liverpool where the Beatles’ ‘Sexy Sadie’ worked; we’d heard about him before ever the song was written. Whispers: lesbians – never heard of them until the word came out that Dusty Springfield was one, and that broke a small boy’s heart. Whispers: Mick Jagger was changing his sex.

There was an obnoxious and prurient undergrowth of homophobia feeding on the insecurities of adolescence and designed to entrench the status quo. It took courage then to accept what you were, courage, too for others to accept that they should. Homosexuals were never shown as attractive; films showed then as in some way ‘creepy’, and the whispers soon came out that Dusty bathed her face in onion juice to preserve her skin. I mean, tell me anything better designed than that to quash a boy’s desire!

And despite all the whispers I never saw it coming.

It took place of course on a Liverpool bus.

I was coming home from an evening drinking. A middle-aged man sat next to me and in the way of things we soon began talking. He worked on a farm, and I was the young Trotsky in full inflammatory mode and skin-full of beer. We talked of workers and peasants, and by the time we reached Walton Church his hand was on my knee. We talked of Krondstadt, the Permanent Revolution, and by Warbreck Moor his hand was on my thigh. I was oblivious, convinced he was hanging on my every word. He would have been hanging on something else pretty soon except for the fact that the next stop was mine. The following morning, in replay mode I winced at what I never saw then. But boys grow up and learn that deodorant is good and that gays are both funny and generous and wise.

In many cases.

Shelagh Williams

Last night I had a dream of Harry and Felicity Dowling. They were sitting on the pavement alongside a small bookstall, both dressed in brightly coloured clothes. Felicity was not the first great love of my life, but I went out with her briefly, largely because I felt it was about time I had a girl friend. It started badly. We agreed to meet outside the Cavern in Matthew Street, but she didn’t turn up. As she said later, she hadn’t thought I’d been particularly serious. The second time was more successful, but coming home on the bus, I noticed her face looked slightly yellow beneath the fluorescent lighting and I lost enthusiasm.

Harry Dowling was a working class Marxist who also enrolled at the Liverpool Institute for Further Education. Within a few months, he’d discovered the delights of romantic poetry, psychedelic shirts, and Felicity Corcoran. And shortly after that they married. I haven’t seen them since - except in that dream. Nor have I seen Shelagh Williams since then.

She taught me what it was to be in love. She could have sat under a ten-gig watt fluorescent strip, a face with the tonal quality of butter, and I would still have loved her. Fortunately she never put me to the test.

Shelagh had a lean, intelligent face with a wry smile and dark shoulder length hair. Her mother was a teacher, her father head librarian in Bootle Library and I realized I was scaling dizzy heights. Even her name, Shelagh, was spelt different to the Sheilas I had known.

Our first date would have to be special. She was educated, more cultured than I, intensely bohemian. I settled on Ballet - The Nutcracker suite, and read a book on what it was about. To my relief she settled on the pub.

It’s hard to recapture now the excitement in first holding her hand. I tingled in ways I’d never tingled before, but we’ve all been there, so enough about emotion and strange sensations. I just enjoyed being with her, even when she cut her hair short and took to wearing a grey pinstripe suit. My last abiding memory of Shelagh was at a party. She wore a black dress. Sergeant Pepper was playing, and we got gloriously drunk.

We split up when I was at University and I was heartbroken. I hope my own children never experience this, though the odds are they will…and then get over it.

Jesse James and King Zog of Albania

The Liverpool Institute of Further Education was a pale blue Victorian building on Duke Street almost opposite the Anglican Cathedral. The building itself seems to have gone, which is a shame because a large part of myself has gone with it. The Anglican Cathedral remains, which is something.

The Institute was an exam factory for anarchists and free spirits. Mrs Clough was one of them, a sixty year old student who’d just given up smoking because she wanted to live longer. Then there were Balbur and Daljeet Kanijar, two Indian brothers who were hopelessly in love with Lily, a diminutive pre Raphaelite blonde. It was a place where the unexpected happened, and sometimes sex. Toni was her name, an intense nervy looking girl in a blue corduroy dress. She had an interesting way of breaking the ice, unbuttoning the front of her dress and taking out a breast. ‘You can feel it if you want.’ Then there were those who were less sexy.

Mark Serralier was less sexy, a porky looking boy with black hair and a high pitched lisp. He claimed to be descended from Jessie James and King Zog of Albania. Worse, he believed it, which made him irresistible. My abiding memory of Mark is of him sidling up to us in Liverpool Central Library. The main reading room is a huge acoustic reservoir, a vast book-lined dome where a dropped pencil reverberated like a World War I cannon.

“Have you seen my new umbrella?” he whispered.
A thousand faces looked up.
We shook our heads, but said nothing.
“It opens out with a touch of a button.” (We’d never heard of such a thing!)
The devil spoke to me then. “Show us,” I said.
He looked round as one who hoped he wouldn’t be seen, then pressed down his thumb.
Metallic spokes exploded. It was like the crack of a hundred bull-hide whips, and he stood there, in the middle of the reading room beneath an open umbrella, waiting for rain or for the ground to swallow him up.

The place was an exam factory, the teachers cynical and dedicated at a time when you could be both. Notes were dictated, a two-year course compressed into one and we valued the teachers who spoke clearly, gave good notes and told it as it was. We’re not here to educate you lot; just learn the damn notes. As a teaching method, it can’t be faulted, except by progressives who find beauty in complexity.
The Institute was also a place of laughter and excitement. One window opened out onto sky and the gothic grandeur of a great cathedral. Below us was the hum of a Liverpool in ferment, and just a little down the hill was small seedy café where you learnt to make tea last an hour.

I learnt’ Sixteenth and Seventeenth century history from Mr. Radcliffe. He may be dead now, but then he resembled a prince of the church, a Cardinal Wolsey in a grey suit. He was fleshy, sardonic, good humored and cynical. Later I learnt English Economic History 1750 to 1920 from Bob Waring a man with the face of a battered cherub. He later became a Labour MP and grew less cherubic, though no doubt rich. For English I had Ms Fahey, a Catholic with a merry smile and a very sharp tongue.

Finally there was a tall thin man in a grey pinstripe suit. He was bald, and I think his name was Basil. He made the workings of the British Constitution even more mysterious, his notes a patchwork of random thoughts, biographical asides and finely tuned boredom. His real passion was Moral Rearmament a Christian cult that spearheaded the importance of the individual. I would have settled for decent notes.
He was more interested in making converts, focusing on those lads he thought had ‘leadership’ qualities. So I was spared. Tony McMullen however was not and went to his Hope St. Flat on a number of occasions to meet Mrs Basil (I wish I could remember his damn surname) for pamphlets and tea.

Portals have become cliché in speculative fiction, and we struggle to find new names to refresh a useful device. The Liverpool Institute of Further Education was no Star-gate but it was a magical portal - and thoroughly human. It whirled me from the kitchen to University and introduced me to the first great love of my life.

The Young Revolutionary

The young revolutionary...and erm...is that a horn sticking out from my head?


The first political book I bought was a biography of Lenin by David Shub. I showed it with some pride to John Ward, an active Young Socialist and electrician, who asked to borrow it. The following week I asked what he thought of it. ‘I threw it in the bin’ he said. ‘It was thoroughly rightwing.’

It would be neat conceit now if I was to use this anecdote as an early insight into a closed, totalitarian world, but as an earnest ‘class warrior’ and afraid of being labeled petit bourgeois, I swallowed the hurt. A true Leninist had to be disciplined.

My self-image, the man I aspired to be was ‘Strelnikov’ the Bolshevik zealot in ‘Dr. Zhivago,’ striding the streets of a revolutionary Liverpool, in greatcoat and boots. The reality I disguised from myself for as long as I could was the petit bourgeois spirit that had shaped me from birth. Grandfather Parry worked in the Docks but he was a man of aspiration. His father had owned a small business, his sister a ‘Ballroom Dancing School. Grandfather Keyton had died a Sergeant in the Boer war, his widow bringing up my father single handedly, and he in turn had risen from deck-hand to Chief Officer in the Merchant Navy. A Catholic education gave it the final gloss.

I read the book, Dr Zhivago and I remember crying (in private) when Zhivago lost Lara. I cry quite easily - Jude the Obscure did it for me some years later. My daughter’s quite embarrassed by it. I’m old enough not to be.

But then - the late sixties - it was a different matter. Bolsheviks were calculating and cold. I was Strelnikov lacking only the scar. We discussed Zhivago when the film came out and I remember the general sneer that the story in itself was trivial, ‘petit bourgeois’ - the masses were portrayed unsympathetically - the revolution revealed as an unnecessary inconvenience to the love life of a bourgeois doctor - and so it went on. I loved the poetry but said nothing.

By this time I was devouring the works of Trotsky, rehearsing his arguments, wishing that I too might one day be a great and inflammatory orator. And then I met Peter Taaffe and realised that someone had beaten me to it. Peter was a key figure in ‘The Militant’, a Trotskyite organisation that was infiltrating the Labour Party. He was a powerful and persuasive speaker with a habit of ending a provocative sentence with ‘…you know!’

The ‘you know!’ was delivered in the imperative, and the effect - in my case at least - was for my head to nod…of course I knew!

I began this post with the observation that it in many respects it was a closed and totalitarian world I had entered - and as hard as any cult to break out from - not because of any overt or sinister pressure on the part of those around me, more the guilt and habit of mind I had created for myself.

The Militant was, I know, monitored, almost certainly penetrated by our Security services; it had its share of scoundrels along with men and women of immense moral stature and strength of will.

I discovered eventually that I was no Strelnikov and that I cried too much to be a true revolutionary. I’d resented the Church telling me what to do, and now I realised I resented - really resented John Ward, telling me what books I could and could not read. Basically I hate being told what to do. No Leninist then. But I’m grateful for what ‘Militant’ gave me - belief in myself - an intuitive Marxist sense that life is largely governed by class, and an acceptance of my petit bourgeois heritage.

A knife in his chest

Unlike Sheila Pound, I can’t quite remember how we met, or how we became friends. It just happened. Because of your middle name (St. John) you were frequently called ‘The Saint’ after the series on TV at the time, and I seem to remember the Simon Templar motif on your bag. I also remember the theme tune - DA -DARA - DA - DOM - DOM - DA. (Bloody hell, I’d forgotten that. The early books were a little darker and more gritty than the sanitised TV version. I re read one of them recently - They evoke post war Britain perfectly)

In my first year I was unfortunate enough to be persuaded by my parents to wear the College Uniform, a green jacket with braiding around the collar and cuffs a pocket badge depicting bees and a hive - and the word ‘Industrial’ springs to mind. (This uniform must have hurt deeply for you to remember it so well) I felt a right pillock and would have fitted in well at St. Trinians. You on the other hand wore a polo neck shirt with a brown corduroy jacket and brown suede shoes. I’m not to sure about the trousers but feel sure you wore some.

Some of the people I remember:

A blonde girl with Olympic calves and child bearing hips, spoke with a lisp, and believe it or not had no eyelids - like a fish.

Jennifer Gee. Dark hair, pretty, a bit posh with a turned up nose. She was the first girl to kiss me one Christmas at College. My legs went to jelly unlike another part of my anatomy.

Justina Atoyabe African, traditionally dressed and wore open toed sandals, even in winter. The mean-minded subjected her to vile abuse and she would retaliate by throwing kitchen knives at them.

Sheila Connolly - sat next to Justina and was a trainee nun (must be another word for that)

John Passey - Although not in our group and in his final year, deserves a mention. He was the person everyone liked and wanted to be seen with. Although John had a crowd of followers he still found time to acknowledge me and frequently gave me a lift home when a seat was available in his yellow Reliant three-wheeler. John sadly died of bowel cancer a good number of years ago, and although I felt he was destined for great things, he lived and died in Widnes. Even so I still envy his charisma and remember him with great affection.

The Fletcher Maffia. The Tonge brothers and their followers were the hard boys of the college, George in particular. I was in the changing rooms with Tony Alexander, or Alex as we called him, and one or two others from our year, when George came in and took out a 10 inch Sabatiere knife. He was larking about and then lunged with it into Alex’s chest. George’s expression didn’t change as he removed the knife from Alex, just watched the blood pouring down from his chest. Alex was taken to hospital for treatment and was told that the knife had just missed a main artery, that he was lucky to be alive. Ronny Tonge was as crazy as his brother. When his girlfriend, Tina, finished with him, he took a knife and slashed both of his wrist.

Well Mike, I could rime on for hours about our memories - the Chinese business lunches for 2/-6d with Sheila and Jennifer - the trip to New Brighton instead of attending lectures and getting caught and scrubbing copper pans for three days afterwards. Mike, it seems like yesterday. Thank you, Mike for giving me the opportunity to re-live and value those very happy years.

Which is what this blog is all about. Thanks Mike, I really enjoyed reading this We’ll share a drink soon.