Narrow Dog to Wigan Pier Read online

  Monica and Jim and Jess and I walked down from the Albert Dock past the Echo Arena and the Revenue Building to the lock where I had manhandled the PM2 into the city. Apartment developments, some new houses, empty sites, and on our right the light and space of the Mersey. The tide was out – a soft wind and the heavy smell of yellow mud.

  It was a long walk and Jim was getting tired. Monica keeps saying he is getting old, but how can my Jim be old? How can my puppy be old, that chased me round the garden and rolled over on his back and chewed my fingers and went to sleep on my chest? Perhaps that was how my mother felt about me – that would explain why in my sixties I was still her Carol Ann.

  We’ll let them off the lead. Let them stretch their little legs. It’s cruel to have them on the lead all the time. Here, this is the place – now we are back on the pontoons – there is no way they can get on to the streets from here. We’ll let them go and they can race each other to the boat. They are very clever creatures with memories like steel traps. They will know the boat and jump into it and wait for us. Little loves.

  The two whippets knew a game was on and shivered as I let them slip. Their claws scratched the boardwalk as they accelerated, Jess ahead and Jim after her. They slowed as they came to the narrowboats and leapt aboard the first green boat they met, right into the boat, scaring the poor boaters, who threw themselves on their Persian cats, which were staring death in the face.

  Those guys were lovely, I said, letting us off without a caution. I don’t think they knew what Jess can do to a squirrel. We should not have let them slip, taken that chance. The fool dogs didn’t know their own boat.

  They would have known the Phyllis May, said Monica. Her voice broke.

  When you think of heaven do you think of snowy peaks? Too cold, too far away. Sand and surf? No, this is not a package holiday. Valleys perhaps – and what do you see there? Buttercups and lady’s smocks and grass and streams which are very clear with lots of fish and jewelled with marsh marigolds.

  But a rural heaven would not be enough for a chap who has spent too long in Hong Kong and caught the breeze in Carcassonne and loitered in London and tarried in Taipei and pissed about in Paris. I would get impatient with the bluebirds.

  To design my own paradise I would start underfoot – just like the people who are remaking Liverpool. Round the docks and the Liverpool One area are granite, marble, brick, cobbles, flags – surfaces always changing and guiding you – now smooth, now rough – this way a bit – here, over here. The ground changes key every ten yards, and you are engaged, refreshed, delighted.

  Then a street. The name is always a problem – Excellent Avenue – Perfection Parade – Beautiful Boulevard – Celestial Crescent – how boring – why not just Paradise Street? That’s better – let’s all know what is going on.

  You need a variety of levels – walkways up interesting steps where you can sit and drink beer from cans and watch the people passing and chat with Jim Francis and Doctor Ian and the others.

  There would be a lawn, but not too big, and many restaurants, including a Thai restaurant that makes that green curry with coconut. And a French one that does mussels and muscadet, and a pub round the corner that does Timothy Taylor’s Landlord’s Bitter.

  Many shops, with marine polos, and T-shirts with really interesting slogans like I’M THE BIGGEST BITCH ON THE BEACH and SALE NOW ON and SORRY I’M TAKEN and trainers and shorts so everyone can look like a fourteen-year-old junkie.

  There would be street stalls, but not many, and the fruit stall would sell sweet grapes and cherries. There would be light and space and colour.

  Just over the road from Salthouse Dock is one of the world’s biggest retail developments, just completed on forty acres around Paradise Street. It has everything I have mentioned, except Jim Francis and Doctor Ian.

  * * *

  Fifty years ago I was an executive with Lever Brothers, and I would travel to Port Sunlight to argue with chemists and engineers. Just an ordinary executive, but in the Adelphi I was a prince.

  The Adelphi Hotel, Liverpool, was built in 1826 and refurbished in 1912 to coincide with the launch of the Titanic. She is titanic indeed, taking up the whole of a Liverpool block. From her elevation in the centre of the city her pillared and majestic proportions look towards the Mersey, back a hundred years before it all went to hell.

  I would wander her halls and swim in her marble pool. The Sefton Suite with its wonderful chandelier is a replica of the smoking room in the Titanic. I was startled by the Masonic meeting room as big as a Congregational chapel that held the corner looking out over Lewis’s store. Masonic devices in the plaster of the breakfast room under the ceiling puzzled me as I addressed my kipper. Behind the main ground-floor concourse, room after room, some well lit from high windows, some internal and dark with coloured pillars six feet thick like an Egyptian tomb.

  But most of all I enjoyed my marble bath with the gold-coloured taps, and the hot water pouring and gurgling. I am a big chap but I could stretch out and float. I never found another bath where I could stretch out and float, and I have tried quite a few.

  Thirty-five years later Monica and I went to Liverpool to a concert and were surprised that we could not find the Adelphi in a book of hotels but we managed to ring and book a room with a spa bath. It didn’t cost very much. The room was dismal and the spa bath was plastic with holes in the side and didn’t work. The hotel was still titanic, but

  Over the mirrors meant14

  To glass the opulent

  The sea-worm crawls – grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

  Jewels in joy designed

  To ravish the sensuous mind

  Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

  Dim moon-eyed fishes near

  Gaze at the gilded gear

  And query ‘What does this vaingloriousness down here?’

  We had made friends with a Liverpool antiques dealer. What happened to the marble baths in the rooms?

  Torn out – they skipped the lot.

  * * *

  It was after the six o’clock news when we heard an aero engine. It clattered and popped and ran to a stop. My father and Uncle Jerry hurried out into the dark and the rain and after a while came back with a man wearing a big coat. He looked pale and he didn’t want to talk to us kids. Dad and Jerry took him into the morning room and there was a lot of muttering. Tea was brought in.

  After an hour or so the man left and we heard the engine start up again. Dad and Jerry went out and watched the plane take off. Through our tall windows we just saw its shape because it had no lights.

  Dad and Jerry came back in. Hush-hush, said my dad, looking very pleased.

  My father was at Melksham in Wiltshire teaching mechanics how to service instruments on war planes. He was a warrant officer now, with badges on his uniform, and he lived like a country gentleman. In fact we all lived like a country gentleman, including his pal Jerry, who was another warrant officer, his wife and their two boys.

  Fearful of the bombs in Pembroke Dock and my mother’s exhaustion in the besieged town my father and Jerry had rented a house called Westfields, just outside Trowbridge, Wiltshire. Westfields was up a drive a hundred yards long with horse chestnuts blazing with candles or rich with conkers. It had tennis courts, a paddock, stables, a woodpile eight feet high, chickens that laid warm eggs, an orchard, a loft full of apples spread out on the floor not touching each other, a roof where you could walk about, and thirty rooms. There were bathrooms and lavatories.

  The sun would shine through the arch of golden chain. At breakfast there was marmalade – I don’t think marmalade had reached Pembroke Dock. Vera Lynn would sing ‘Yours’15 and ‘There’ll be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover’.16 In the newspaper there was a pretty lady called Jane17 who took off her clothes for her dachshund Fritz, and put them back on for her boyfriend called Georgie Porgie. This did not strike me as strange at the time. In my comics were Big Eggo and Corky the Cat
,18 both fully committed to making Hitler look even more ridiculous than he was. I thought the Red Army was Red Indians. At weekends my father would organize schemes like picking the apples or the peaches or gassing the rats in the compost heap and us kids would hunt caterpillars and beetles and tadpoles. After dinner on Sunday Dad would wrestle with me on the floor.

  At school I was with the red team and wore the sash with pride. We leaned over the fence in the playground and waved to the trains and the engine-drivers and the people on the train waved back. I still dream about the waving back and I always wave to little children from the boat even when they don’t care. I made a friend called Roger because I told him he had forgotten his gas mask and he told me back I had forgotten mine and we laughed. Some of the gas masks had Mickey Mouse noses but mine was black and went flubba dubba dubba when you breathed out. A bomb fell in our field and made a big hole, but it didn’t frighten me because it didn’t whistle and when it went Bang we were still alive.

  One morning a letter came with my mother’s call-up papers to join the British army. My father said this must be Hitler’s last desperate move.

  Nobody laughed at the next letter – Daddy has been posted to Whitehall, to the Air Ministry. He has to go to London and we have to go back to Pembroke Dock.

  They looking back, all the eastern side beheld

  Of paradise, so late their happy seat.19

  CHAPTER THREE

  LIVERPOOL AND THE RUFFORD BRANCH

  The Kingdom of the Mad1

  Fierce bees coming over the fields

  Mr Morse hit Mr David on the chin – Come here he said and drew a knife – We do not mention the python – Captain Johnny with his sloops and corvettes – Blood on the leaves and blood at the root – Where was his guardian angel? – That chap can play the clarinet – The very earth was alive and flowing – You can fly with gulls and eagles – Magic texts – My God you are English! – Under the control of an alien presence – A slimy little bastard everyone knew as Slug – I was born on a boat! – In comes Adolf with the hypodermic – I balanced on the edge of clouds

  EVERYONE WHO IS brought up in Pembroke Dock loves it always. It is not too big, it has hills and views, and it is near wondrous beaches. But like anywhere else, it is best if the right people are there with you.

  When my father came home from Whitehall he was an officer and had more badges but I didn’t care about that because he never came for long and the first thing he did was hug and kiss my mother a lot and I felt funny and sad because they didn’t notice me though I was hanging on to his legs and then when he left it broke my heart. Most of my friends had no father too.

  One day my mother came home with two young men in RAF uniform. They talked and drank tea and ate biscuits. The young men went away quite soon. All the time you knew that they wanted their girls or their wives and Mum wanted Dad and people you met down Pennar Gut were not as good.

  My school was called the Coronation School. My father had gone there and all my uncles. It smelt of boiled cabbage and there were dirty drawings on the lavatory walls. Nobody bullied me but at night I would pray that Mr Morse and Mr David would not teach us, as they frightened me so much. Mr Morse was hairy white and very aggressive. He caned the other boys a lot but not me because I was quiet and my mother had visited the school when I arrived and she was beautiful. Mr David was bald and not quite as bad. After some months I found I was getting used to Mr Morse and Mr David. In fact Mr David gave me a penny once for knowing that ‘harbinger’ meant ‘herald’.

  Just as I was getting used to Mr Morse and Mr David, Mr Morse hit Mr David on the chin and broke his jaw and we did not see Mr Morse after that.

  Miss Davies was nice. We had slates to write on with slate pencils. Some of the slates had squares on them already to help you but the slate pencils scratched. Miss Davies showed us charts with the shapes of aeroplanes on them in colour so we could tell if it was a Junkers or a Messerschmitt or something else, but by the time the charts came the planes had stopped coming.

  I knew that Stalingrad was important and felt that we were bound to win now.

  We had two books in 4 Albany Street, Pembroke Dock – one was The Fifth Round by Sapper. That was great, about Bulldog Drummond. The other book was about Trinity House, which is responsible for lighthouses and light vessels. It was really old and full of blotchy black and white pictures. I read it right through. I cannot remember if it included the South Goodwin Light Vessel, which shadowed us across the Channel, but I bet it was there.

  I was in the St Patrick’s choir and went to two services and Sunday school – the Sunday school where Dad passed Mum his notes. I loved the music and the words from the Bible and once a year we had a special outing. The minister was the Reverend J. Iorwerth Thomas. He was handsome and very nice – the nearest thing I had to a father.

  American soldiers in the streets – Got any gum chum?

  We were not begging – it was a sort of greeting. What is a little boy supposed to say to an American soldier – ask him if it rains a lot in the Bronx?

  The American soldiers understood what society required of them and put their hands in their pockets and chucked us some gum. The gum was little pink rectangles flavoured with cinnamon. There were no sweets in the war and this was rare stuff indeed. You can find gum like it in British shops nowadays if you are lucky and I always buy some because when I chew it I am on Milton Terrace and there is Milford Haven below me and the GI in the jeep and his smile and God Bless America.

  At the end of our street Italian men – each evening a hundred of them walking down the lane. They must have been prisoners of war coming back from work. Each evening they walked by and we would shout Hello and they would say Buona sera, buona sera, and they would help us repeat it until we could say it too.

  They lived in a circle of Nissen huts down the lane. One day I walked into the camp. An Italian asked me into one of the huts.

  Come here, he said, and drew a knife.

  Then he took a patch of leather, about three inches square, and fastened it to the table with a steel pin. He took his knife and cut a notch in the side of the patch and pulled the patch round as he cut it and it began to turn into a leather bootlace. I watched astonished and he finished the lace and then he gave it to me.

  Miss Thrale, did you see his shoes?

  His shoes, Dr Morelle?2

  Gentlemen don’t wear brogues with rubber soles.

  I must say he looked a bit like the murderer in the case of the Shepherd’s Bush Python.

  Miss Thrale, we do not mention the Python.

  Post-war radio – dear dead days3 beyond recall. It came in by wire from the little Rediffusion hut on the hill, swooping over our terrace houses and into my grandfather’s dark kitchen, into our little speaker, delivering a clear signal – the signal that had brought news from the war.

  Children’s Hour – Toytown with Larry the Lamb, played by Uncle Mac, with Dennis the villainous dachshund, and Mr Growser – Somebody ought to be ashamed of himself. Breakfast with Braden – Me, I’m going back to bed. Valentine Dyall and his Appointment with Fear. I was frightened to listen to it myself so my friends would tell me the stories in school the next day. And Dick Barton, radio’s first serial. I never found out what happened when that woman turned round and picked up the knife from the table, because they cut it out of the omnibus edition.

  But that wasn’t as bad as when I was listening to a natural history programme –

  The frog advances on its prey, getting nearer and nearer, and then just as the fly is beginning to feel his presence, faster than the eye can follow –

  And then faster than the eye can follow Rediffusion pulled the plug on the frog and switched over to a programme in Welsh. I guess the chap who cheated the poor frog of his dinner is long dead, but if you are not, sir, here is a seven-year-old boy telling you that you are an idiot.

  No programme more comfortable than Monday Night at Eight, because it was on every week for ages and had l
ots of good things and best of all Ernest Dudley’s detective Dr Morelle and his Miss Thrale. They always got their man and there was a little twist that sorted everything out and Miss Thrale had a lovely voice and a lovely name and I imagined her as beautiful and sexy though I could not have known what sexy meant.

  Despite my rich diet of radio, and reading many of the books in the town library, I nearly didn’t get into Pembroke Dock Grammar School because I never learned my tables. They had dropped down the crack between Trowbridge and Pembroke Dock and I do not know them to this day. But I did get in as a Grade Two pass or something and then we moved to Cardiff and the family was back together.

  My parents quarrelled a lot in Cardiff and it wasn’t the same for me with my dad. I had found it hard when he kept leaving me – it was like having bits of your inside torn out and they didn’t grow back.

  * * *

  Six narrowboats sailed out of Salthouse Dock, across Albert Dock, and into Canning Dock, and across the front of the Liver Building. A new canal with bridges and tunnels had been built along the waterfront, and we passed in royal procession through the sculpted concrete channel. Two young British Waterways chaps would shepherd us through the locks out of the north of the city, where we would head inland.

  In Canning Dock there was the South Goodwin Light Vessel. We had passed it in the Channel on the Phyllis May seven years ago. It had taken an hour and a half to reach and an hour and a half to get away from. I thought it would never go. It was like a bad memory, an old enemy waiting for me to die. It had followed me to Paris and waited for me on the Seine and now here it was again – grown bigger – waxed fat on the new mistakes I had made, the new things I wanted to forget.

  We passed the statue of Captain Johnny Walker, the winner of four DSOs. In the Second World War we had to have supplies from the USA to survive and Hitler and Admiral Doenitz with their U-Boats had their hands on our throat.

  Churchill said everything depended on the Battle of the Atlantic, and of all the battles in the Second World War this was the one that made him most fearful. But we had Captain Johnny with his sloops and corvettes that were hunter-killers as well as escorts and we had the Sunderlands in Pembroke Dock and we had the civilian merchant seamen who never stopped sailing to the USA and back, though their losses were terrible.