I Came Out Sideways Read online

  Title Page

  I CAME OUT SIDEWAYS

  From Liverpool to Another Place

  by

  George Porter

  Publisher Information

  First published in 2014 by

  Chaplin Books

  1 Eliza Place

  Gosport PO12 4UN

  www.chaplinbooks.co.uk

  Digital edition converted and distributed in 2014 by

  Andrews UK Limited

  www.andrewsuk.com

  Copyright © George Porter

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder for which application should be addressed in the first instance to the publishers. No liability shall be attached to the author, the copyright holder or the publishers for loss or damage of any nature suffered as a result of the reliance on the reproduction of any of the contents of this publication or any errors or omissions in the contents.

  Quote

  There is a time in every childhood when a door opens and the future is revealed

  Graham Greene

  The Power and the Glory

  Chapter 1

  The Fault Line

  I came out sideways. Neither head nor bottom first, but sideways.

  This unusual and distressing exit from the warmth, comfort and security of the womb was conducted by the composer himself - The Fuhrer. There must be a grain of truth about my admission to the world, for my sideways entry seemed to permeate my being and give me a distorted understanding of everything that surrounded me.

  Not that I recall any of Hitler’s atrocious melodies played on the day of my birth, though in my early childhood, I could see the evidence of them. In my fresh and unsullied eyes, the blasted skeletons of buildings and the wastelands of demolition that went with them were not scenes of devastation, ruin and shambles, but were playgrounds as common and as exciting as any country garden would have been to a child of a noble. I didn’t know that I was deprived. I didn’t know I was sickly. Pneumonia was something I ‘got’. Coats doubled as blankets, and newspaper doubled as toilet paper. A jam butty was ambrosia, and scouse was cuisine of the most superior kind. Tripe was the pits. Nothing to me was more sumptuously satisfying than a large viscous splodge of Fussell’s condensed milk spread on a wedge of fresh bread. I was, in the eyes of my childhood contemporaries, normal. And it was, until the age of about eleven, a pleasant existence.

  In reality we were neither poor nor deprived in the conventional sense. We lived on the cusp; a fault-line between material wellbeing on one side and grating poverty on the other, and, undoubtedly because of my father’s proclivity for backing losing horses, we had a foot in both camps. For some of our neighbours, Waterloo was just a step away from the terrors of the Liverpool slums and the wastelands of the blitzkrieg, but for most of us, including me, it was a very agreeable place to live.

  It is set on a bank of the River Mersey about three miles from the famous Gladstone dock. Before a marina was built in the 1970s for the few locals who owned yachts, it had an endless beach of fine sand and dunes, stretching as far as you could see past Formby Point and on to the northern Mecca of Blackpool Tower, a jagged black speck in the far distance. Across the river once stood a less celebrated, but even taller, tower at 577 feet, that of New Brighton, and if the eye travelled further the lower slopes of the mountains of North Wales became evident. Great ocean liners and merchant ships from around the globe sauntered up and down the River Mersey, displaying their shipping lines by the coloured stripes and stars on their funnels. Old sea dogs would sit up against the beach wall with their binoculars continuously trained out to sea, muttering to each other in a nasal Liverpool patois about which was what ship and who had sailed on her and where she had come from and where she was going and what she carried and, and, and ...

  On Sundays in the summer, families from the shattered remnants of Scotland Road and Bootle day-tripped the four stops to Waterloo by rail on the Liverpool-to-Southport line and walked en masse past the Victorian and Edwardian parade of shops in South Road to the shore, bellicose and bawdy, displaying their rough but sometimes gentle self-effacing humour which is the worldwide trademark perpetually boasted of by the Scouser to the Scouser. They’d stop at the Golden Goose and Mr de Roose’s corner shop to buy ice-cream, candy floss, buckets-and-spades, and little plastic windmills on sticks, taking a day off from the harsh hand dealt them by a war they had been told they had won. Then it was off down the slope onto the beach or into the sand dunes for games of hide-and-seek or more adult activities. Sometimes an enormous box kite could be seen flying high in the sky, dwarfing the smaller diamond-shaped ones pulled along by whooping small boys. Trenches were dug in the damp sand alongside the concrete dragons’ teeth tank-traps intended to hamper the German tanks which never arrived, and into those trenches jumped dirty-faced imaginary soldiers in their ragged underpants, some with pop guns, most with plastic pistols.

  Who would have believed that in half a century these tank-traps would be replaced by the poignant statues deposited at random by Anthony Gormley, all gazing out to sea towards another place? Little girls scraped hopscotch frames in the very sand where one day the metal feet of those figures would be planted.

  The girls spent their time jumping from one square to another, or doing handstands with their dresses firmly secured in the legs of their knickers. Other children undertook the laborious task of trying to dig through to Australia, and some even risked disease or getting stuck in the mud by paddling in the Mersey. I was warned about getting a disease, but never got one, although I did get stuck once when the tide was out. A tall man, up to his knees in the mud, pulled me out - yowling - with a plop. The shore was heaven on earth for a day for people worn down but not out, existing in the darkness cloaking the half-truth of England’s green and pleasant land, known of but never seen by most of those children whose fathers had fought for it. Many of those fathers never came home and many who did, returned to a devastated wasteland of mangled masonry and craters where houses once stood. Bootle had only 15 percent of its houses left undamaged after the war, and that is how we finished up living in Waterloo.

  The room into which I was shoehorned by Dr Novak, who oversaw my cumbersome arrival and attended to later sicknesses with gentle concern, was the bedroom of a decaying Victorian flat above a builder’s office. I can still recall an image of the doctor warming the business end of his stethoscope against his arm before applying it to my wheezing chest. We all shared one bedroom, my older brother and my parents, and when my cot became too small for me, a second single bed was acquired and strapped on top of another to form a rickety and precarious nest for my brother on the upper level, with a roomy little house for me below. In fact the structure was roomier than the rest of the floor-space available to us all. The windows rattled, the rain ran down the walls inside, and the oilcloth lifted off the floor whenever a gust of wind blew in. Slates were missing from the roof and bowls and pots were strategically placed to catch the downpours from the ceiling. On a cold, wet and windy day I would awaken not to the clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk clatter of the shunting goods trains in the sidings opposite our home, but to rattling windows and the slushy hypnotic swish of the waves of the River Mersey gliding onto the beach some two hundred yards away, accompanied by the squawks of seagulls bickering over scraps.

  Next to the bedroom was a slightly larger room which we called the kitchen. This caused confusion in my mind as I grew up, for similar - although m
ore luxurious - rooms in the more conventional houses of the children I later became acquainted with were known as ‘living’ or ‘sitting’ rooms. Our cooking was done in the ‘back kitchen’, which did make some sense, for indeed it was situated at the back. This kitchen was shared with my maternal grandmother, Martha, a cross between Old Mother Riley and Queen Mary, who occupied the greater part of two floors of the precarious rotting structure of number four, Church Road. In one corner of the ‘back kitchen’ was a big old Edwardian coal-fired range which was her divine right and was only used for the cooking of tripe, and in the other corner an ancient gas cooker on which my scouse, porridge, and eggs were cooked by my mother.

  My grandmother, the only grandparent I knew, was - and is still - an enigma to me. I have only a few vivid memories of any communication I had with her. One was when she told my friend Albert that he couldn’t come into our house with a dirty face - he ran away crying. Another was scaring me witless by telling me, as she dragged me into the butcher’s shop on South Road for her weekly portion of tripe, that the butcher would chop off my fingers and make them into sausages. This terrifying threat was given even greater credence by the butcher himself, who aided Martha in the subterfuge by frowning at me through his bushy eyebrows while honing his big knife.

  I recollect her making me stand on a chair in her room next door to ours, which was usually off limits, and conduct while she sang We’re Soldiers of the Queen, My Boys. At Church Rod, she had a large room to herself where she would lie in silent stately repose on an ancient threadbare chaise longue. She would boil her soot-blackened kettle on a moving iron griddle over the mean little fire she assembled for herself every day. Her lighting was supplied by ancient gas lamps on hinges attached to the wall - in 1890 they would have been very contemporary. She always had coal, but she retained it under lock and key in a shed in the back yard. We often seemed to run out of coal, although Martha’s copper scuttle was always full. We made do with a battered old galvanised bucket. She had a piano which was also locked and never, ever, played. I was led to believe that it was a repository for bundles of large white five-pound notes. She was a miser, although the fear of dying in the Liverpool workhouse where she was thought to have been resident at one time, was most likely entrenched in her psyche.

  One day a big policeman came to our house to see Martha. It emerged that she had lost her purse somewhere on South Road and it had been handed in at the police station. It contained some of these five-pound notes, and the policeman was interested in how such a large amount of money had found its way into the purse of a very old lady living in what could quite rightly be described as reduced circumstances. He left after a short time, bewildered.

  The answer to the locked and unplayed piano could lie in the auspicious circumstances of the death of Martha’s husband, a Scottish marine engineer. Several confusing myths grew up around him, one being that he had been torpedoed; another was that he’d been a chief engineer on board the Mauretania, sister liner of the Lusitania, where a hatch had fallen on him and he’d lost an eye. A much more audacious anecdote was that he had tested the water on board the ship, but it had been poisoned by the Turks and he had died as a consequence and been buried in Alexandria. This was the source of the wads of five-pound notes believed to be secreted in the piano. He had had a glass eye and a red beard. These are two indisputable facts, because my brother knew where the glass eye was kept. There was also a spare, and there were occasions when a clandestine game of marbles was played. I inherited the red beard and also the stout proportions.

  Up two further flights of stairs was my grandmother’s bedroom - a place I never recall visiting until after she had died. It later became our bedroom and to me it was always imbued with an aroma of peppermints, as if she sometimes dawdled around the room in my fearful mind’s eye, shuffling across the floor in the middle of the night. This additional room for me and my brother enabled my parents to have a measure of peace and privacy, and for us to have more space for serious combat. Next to her bedroom was a treasure house. Contained in this gloomy Dickensian chamber, which we called ‘the attic’, with its broken and cracked fanlight, paper curling off dripping walls, ancient plaster dropping in lumps and the pervading smell of damp distemper and rotting wood, was where my grandfather’s collection of possessions transported home from his voyages was stored. Who would believe that so many treasures were stowed away in such a place? There were several exquisitely carved and beautifully embellished wooden spears, pristine as the day they had been carved. Leaning up against the wall were two enormous turtle shells polished to such a sheen that I could see my face reflected in them, and a box containing assorted wooden carvings and ornaments. Some native drums were enclosed in this tomb, never to beat out the pulsating rhythms intended, or to be at the heart of a tribal ritual.

  Fact, however - as we know - can sometimes be even more enthralling than fiction, and the authenticity of the myths which grew up around him is much more fascinating than the half-truths I came to know. A ship he sailed on as the second engineer, HMHS Lanfranc, was indeed torpedoed in the Channel, conveying British and German wounded from Normandy, and now sits almost intact on the seabed. My grandfather wasn’t on board, however, because he had died a year earlier on this same ship transporting the wounded to Alexandria from the Dardanelles. He wasn’t buried in Alexandria; he was buried at sea off Alexandria with full military honours, although a merchant seaman, because he had indeed tested the drinking water and was said to have died of dysentery and there is evidence that the water supply at the time had been tainted by the Turks. It was reported in the Australian press, although not in the British press - Churchill had seen to that.

  Prior to World War I, the Lanfranc sailed regularly a thousand miles up the Amazon to Manaus through jungle and rainforest. Hence the turtle shells which originated from the region. These were the shells of the largest freshwater turtle in the world, and the ‘spears’ were not spears at all, but ceremonial paddles, examples of which I later saw in the British Museum.

  My paternal grandfather, Joseph, is buried in the ancient Norman church of St Helen, Sefton, which dates from 1111, the inside walls of which display plaques commemorating some of my uncles who were killed in the trenches to be remembered alongside crusader knights on the same walls. He had left my father’s multifarious brothers and sisters - ten, I was told, but am not sure - not for another woman, but for another pint of Guinness. I was told he was an Irish immigrant, and also an Orangeman replete with all the prejudices inherent in the extreme version of this phenomenon: it was said that the only flowers he would grow were orange lilies. He cycled into the Leeds and Liverpool Canal one night on his way home from the tannery where he worked. The story has it that he had a bottle of Guinness in each of his overcoat pockets when both he and his bicycle were recovered from the canal. My father was only five years old when this occurred. Joseph’s wife, Elizabeth, died some short time later and is buried with my grandfather. I was told she died of a broken heart, but I think it was more likely that she died from the stress and strain of an unending quest to feed so many mouths with so little support. Thereafter, it was my father’s born-blind sister Alice - the oldest of them - who reputedly became the head of the family.

  My mother fretted constantly, cried often, had ‘nerves’ and consumed large quantities of Beecham’s Pills, along with anti-depressant tablets supplied in bulk by the caring Dr Novak. Money was her constant concern, not because my father didn’t work but because he gambled most of his wages on horses. The horses with which he was financially acquainted were either ‘bloody crabs’, ‘beaten by a bloody nostril’, or sometimes a nose hair. He literally gambled it all away, what little there was. One incident which comes to mind is the shame and humiliation I suffered when I was made to carry, on a borrowed handcart, my mother’s only prized possession - a large sewing machine - to a secondhand shop called Rosie’s which boasted a huge supply of debris deposited by neighb
ours for a few coppers so they could supplement a dwindling supply of coal from the railway sidings opposite with cheap briquettes of compressed coal-dust. I believe Rosie had a financial interest in the production of this combustible shite, so that many of the coppers she doled out to the financially strapped clientele of her little empire of rags travelled full circle into the greasy bulging pockets of her tattered Royal Navy greatcoat replete with the corroded insignia of a naval officer. My mother had a wedding ring, but her engagement ring had gone on a similar journey to a pawnbroker’s window prior to my birth and never been retrieved.

  The grief of tears.

  The twisted anguish in a piece of cloth

  Which stems the flow of rivers of woe

  Showing all to plain

  The ache of living

  My mother had a friend called Doris Leatherbarrow whose facial arrangement was assembled as if it had been carved out of the same material as her surname and who delivered omens displayed in tea-leaves, which seemed to do nothing except intensify my mother’s manifold anxieties. I can still see Doris Leatherbarrow now when my mind is idling in neutral. She had a Roman nose, non-existent eyebrows, sunken cheeks coated with scarlet blusher, pink hair and an unnerving and malevolent piercing cackle which seemed to occur whenever there was a hiatus in the conversation. When she shook her head, as she often did when viciously slating her husband, a cloud of Woolworth’s scented face powder would be discharged. Her pink hair was tightly curled into her head, displaying rivers of white skin winding paths through her skull in the aftermath of her removed metal hair grips. She wore a bottle-green gabardine coat, never removed, buttoned up to the neck, regardless of the temperature. When she pursed her painted lips they would crack and morph into a cat’s business end. Her voice had the hard edge to it of one who cared not for the niceties of polite refined conversation, although when she drank her tea she did so with the exaggerated demeanour of a dowager taking tiffin, holding her cup between her scarlet-tipped forefinger and thumb, with her little finger poking out horizontally to the saucer balanced dexterously in her left hand.