Liverpool Revisited Read online

  Liverpool

  Revisited

  Michael White

  Copyright © 2016 by Michael White / EDP. All rights reserved worldwide. No part of this publication may be replicated, redistributed, or given away in any form without the prior written consent of the author/publisher or the terms relayed to you herein.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living, dead or messing about with umbrellas is entirely coincidental.

  The author can be contacted via the links below.

  Website: www.mikewhiteauthor.co.uk

  Email: [email protected]

  Twitter: @mikewhiteauthor

  Amazon Author Page: http://www.amazon.co.uk/-/e/B006Y7JHCK

  By the Same Author

  Paul McCartney’s Coat and Other Stories

  Anyone

  A Challenging Game of Crumble

  Into the Light

  Book One: Lost in Translation

  Into the Light

  Book Two: The Road of the Sun

  Back to The Light

  Book One: The Shadow Lords of Old

  A Bad Case of Sigbins

  Bee’s Knees

  The Adventures of Victoria Neaves and Romney:

  Book One: Victoriana

  Book Two: The Strange Case of the Denwick Beauchamp Fairies

  Book Three: The Vanished Man

  Book Four: The Clockwork Thief of Crickenden Broadwick

  Book Five: Romney’s Day Off (June 2016)

  Book Six: The Abbot Bowthorpe Dependables (July 2016)

  The Complete Adventures of Victoria Neaves & Romney

  Scrapbook

  The Waiting Room

  Overboard!

  Tales of the Supernatural

  Six for Hallowe’en

  Mysterious Tales

  Six of the Best

  The Fae Wynrie

  An Unremarkable Man

  Here Be Dragons!

  Over the Hills and Far Away

  Vallum Aelium

  Barf the Barbarian in

  The Tower of the

  Anas Platyrhynchos

  Montague, Hetty & Boo In

  The Mystery of the

  Hither Charcote Phantom

  Tales from under the lightning tree: Spring

  (The Artisan Cook’s Tale)

  Tales from under the lightning tree: Summer

  (The Minstrel’s Tale)

  COMING SOON:

  Genesis Space Book One:

  Ascent to Heaven: The Church of Man

  Avalon: The Ghost in the Machine

  To

  Golf ball

  Had I known you longer

  This book would have been

  So much bigger…

  Contents

  15th March 1975 – A Mantra

  Bob the balloon, Al Capone and the two Bob Bouncer

  “Nec Aspera Terrent”

  The Strange Case of the Toff’s Policeman

  And the Curious Elm

  Interlude One: On a bench by the Mersey

  The Lipstick Girls

  The History Detectives

  The Last Bomb, Aloise's Café and Death by Cow

  The Order of Pan

  Interlude Two: On a bench by the Mersey

  The Ghost Next Door

  A large sweet tea, please

  A Good Day at the Office

  Three Little Wishes

  Interlude Three: On a bench by the Mersey

  Sunday 15th May 1975 - A Mantra.

  The Liverpool waterfront sparkled like an elusive gem. We were standing on the Wallasey side of the river, marvelling at the beauty of it, gazing and dreaming in the darkness. The entire band were there. That meant that there were three of us. Oh, and Sharon who was my girlfriend at that moment in time, but who would be Dave’s a little later on. Probably sounds confusing but it isn’t really. One thing is however certain. It was a very long time ago.

  We were about to appear in “The battle of the bands”, trumping Bill & Ted by some twenty years or so. It’s a good line of course, but it was actually called a “Grand Group Talent Contest” (Heat three, no less), which is starting to sound more like “Talent Trek” and there we have it – the smoothest link from Bill & Ted to Phoenix nights that you are ever likely to see!

  After that, of course, we would be really, really famous. Bigger than the Beatles, for sure. We didn’t stop and think that we could have made a few quid doing other people’s songs. Oh no. We only played our own stuff, which naturally, unlike the band name - Mantra - was going to change the future of pop music. Or so we thought.

  Uniformly, it was of course, complete shit to anyone else. To us it was mana from heaven and our only real reason for existing at all. What was it John Lennon said? Ah yes – “life is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans”, and so it was with us. Life got in the way. My friends went to university. I didn’t. Things move on, and when you look back it’s impossible not to feel the love and hope for those days, when everything seemed to be ahead if you, and was so clear and simple. Time drifts on. So do you.

  But we didn’t know that then. We were going to be famous. Change the world.

  The competition was to be held in Liverpool. Gulliver’s club, a venue that none of us knew the first thing about. We even had to go on a reccy the week before to find out where it actually was. It turned out to be an okay kind of place. On the night we came joint second.

  Out of three.

  Yeah. That bad. Before we went on we had to pinch the rubber mat from the gents to put under the drum kit as it kept sliding all over the stage. Oh, and I dropped a drumstick halfway through a song. To top it all we got the equipment there in a full size furniture van that nearly got wedged between two cars in the alley behind the club. If it was your Ford that you found missing a wing mirror that night then we’re all collectively very sorry indeed.

  At that moment in time however, that was all in the future. We had a final night’s worth of practice, and then it was full steam ahead for fame and fortune. Yet what a summer that was! A year before finishing school, the sun was bright and the days long. Endless, even. It seemed as if anywhere you went that summer the sound of guitars wouldn’t be far away, floating on the breeze, floating out of someone’s bedroom window as they practiced their chords or a song, or maybe a band practising in their mum’s front room, the doors and windows padded with mattresses and cushions in a vain attempt to keep the sound in. Poor bloody neighbours!

  We would practice our harmonies sat in a huge playing field, far away from any interruptions or distractions. Yet ven there in the middle of nowhere there was still the sound of guitars that would come floating from somewhere. Somebody practising in their bedroom perhaps. Not important where it came from, really. It was never far away.

  We were all seventeen. We had the future ahead of us. This would of course all start with us winning the competition over in Liverpool. Our heads full of music, fame and fortune. We were young, optimistic and dare I say it, a little on the naïve side…

  In terms of real life experiences, we were of course total novices. In truth, we knew absolutely nothing at all.

  Now that’s just a story like any other. Nothing remarkable about it but you see, when you look at Liverpool there are so many tales, even if you are not part of them, there is history everywhere and it’s not just the Beatles, it’s the people and the places. Like four teenagers stood in the dark daring to dream unaware that in the end it is very, very true that the love you take is equal to the love you make.

  Of course, all Scousers love a ta
le, and the thing with tales is they grow with time. They breathe out. Expand a little. When I was eighteen I had a row with my then boss of a Co-op grocery store and in a fit of temper shouted at him and kicked a case of tinned peas in anger. The manager was a right old stickler and gave me hell for months after. Some twenty (or so) years later I bumped into someone who had worked with me at the same shop and had witnessed the row.

  “Do you remember that row you had with the boss?” she smiled. I nodded in agreement. “Fancy you chasing him around the shop with the butcher’s knife.” She smiled dreamily, “God knows what would have happened if you had caught him.”

  And she was serious!

  So. Stories grow. We all know this. The stories in this book are a little like that. They have grown too, but grown in my head. Filled in the corners, coloured in the borders. Some are sad, most less so. I like to think most are optimistic and full of hope.

  Just like Liverpool itself.

  Bob the Balloon, Al Capone and

  The Two Bob Bouncer.

  When I first started work on the docks one of the very first things that the foreman said to me was that as I was new, all of the other Dockers who I worked with would listen quite carefully to every word I said and that they would then choose a name for me from something that I had said, perhaps how I behaved or even perhaps something I wore. To give you an example, the foreman, whose real name was Bob was called, “the balloon”. Bob the balloon is how everyone referred to him. They called him that because he had a habit of saying, “Don’t let me down lads, or the bosses will blow me up”! To be honest in that first week I heard him say it a fair few times so fair do’s. Bob the balloon it was.

  The second bloke had given his favourite saying away before I ever learnt his name. On my first day he had popped his head around the corner of the shed we were in and asked, “Where’s the gang, Bob?” All the dockers called him Al Capone of course, which even I managed to work out why he was called that straight away. Anyway, I was a stubborn bugger back then and so I thought to myself, “Well okay. I’m not going to make it easy for them. I’ll just keep schtum for a couple of weeks and only respond with a “yes” or a “no” whenever it was needed. Apart from that I’d give away nothing. I’ll try and act completely normal and not wear anything outlandish.” So that’s what I did. I just thought that it would be funnier if they had to work at it than if I gave myself away by saying or doing something daft that they would immediately pick up on. After all, once I was stuck with a name then that was that. There was no changing it. I thought that if that was the case then I was going to make them work for it.

  You could see that some of the older Dockers had sussed out what I was up to, and just left me to it. They had probably seen this many times before. A few of the other blokes tried to get me talking but I wasn’t having any of it. I had set myself a couple of weeks and then after that see what happened. Looking back this was quite some years ago now, but the way I remember it, it only took them until the start of the second week to give me a name. To this day some people on the dock only know me as “The quiet man”. That was some forty odd years ago now, and so “The quiet man” it was.

  How can I describe the docks to you when I first started? You were looking at just over seven miles of industry, cargoes from all over the world bound for every corner of the country, and every single bit of it was man handled by thousands of the hardest working, funniest men I have ever had the privilege of meeting in my entire life. Don’t get me wrong but it was almost like being on a completely different planet. It wasn’t just the exotic cargoes that used to pass through every day, because a lot of them weren’t very exotic at all. In fact some of them were downright nasty. Chemicals and what have you. Stuff that you most definitely don’t want to be trailing home. Of course, there were an awful lot of things that you were made up with if they did by some strange chance happen to follow you out through the dock gates and past the security guys and ended up in your house! Believe you and me, an awful lot of it did. That would be the “take home” as we called it. The biggest culprit of the “take home” was the docker called “The Drunken Overcoat” as he used to stagger out of the gates laden down with his “take home” every night. Rumour had it that on one occasion he had smuggled out an entire dinner service, including a huge soup tureen, all under his overcoat!

  I am getting ahead of myself though. So there I was, new to the docks and once I had the nickname of “The Quiet Man” I admitted defeat and I began to open up a bit, and soon I was accepted as just another one of the lads and that was that. I was hardly surprised to find that on different days you would be working on all kinds of various cargo, and depending on what it was or the size of it, you were mixing with lots of Dockers on and off. It soon became obvious that everyone had a tale to tell about someone else on the dock. Who was up to what, and so on. The names went on and on. You found yourself forgetting their real name and using their nickname instead. In fact, quite often you would be working with someone for years and never actually know what their real name was. You would just refer to them as their nickname. Like “The London Fog”, which was the name for the docker who always seemed to vanish when there was any heavy lifting to be done. You’d probably refer to them as a “glass back” these days, but it means the same thing in the end. London fog never lifts, you see?

  One of the Dockers I worked with all of the time was called, “The Ghost”, because he was always moaning, and me other big mate at the time hated the bloody place. He was always saying he wanted a change so he was called, “Doctor Jekyll”. We were put into a gang which was usually about ten of us, though the number of people in it tended to change from time to time. I can remember “The Plazzy Surgeon” (he was a good grafter), “The Reluctant Plumber” (wouldn’t do a tap), “The Lazy Lawyer” (he always used to struggle with cases), “The Two Bob Bouncer”, “Van Gogh” (when asked for anything he would always say, “I’ve got one ‘ere”) and “The Olympic Torch”, who never went out, allegedly.

  On most days the ten of us used to have our lunch together, and what with times being hard and what have you we tended to find that whatever we had on our butties that day was what was going to be on them all week. So we devised a system called, “The Divvy Up”. What all of us would do is to put all of our sandwiches still wrapped up on the table in the shed, or wherever we happened to be, and then we would all take turns to pick one out that wasn’t our own. That way we would all have a bit of variety throughout the week. Sometimes you would end up with jam or even marmalade, though sometimes it worked out okay and you had something that was nicer. It was a good system and it worked pretty well.

  We were sat there one day chewing over our sarnies and discussing the policeman on the Gladstone gate called “One a Day” as he used to, as you would expect, catch one docker a day trying to leave the docks with his “take home”. “The good shepherd” had been caught with a whole frozen lamb under his coat the week before, and his explanation that he was simply keeping the lamb warm didn’t count for much at all, but it did explain where his name came from.

  “He’s lucky he didn’t bloody end up with pneumonia” said the Lazy Lawyer, to which Van Gogh just nodded.

  “Should have cut it up first” mused the Olympic Torch and there were several nods of agreement. We carried on with our food and some of us had a smoke when the vicar put his head around the door.

  “Hey men!” he shouted, “The Piano”” (called as such as everyone plays on him) “has some nights going if anyone’s interested?” Most of the lads shook their heads. It had been a long week and we were all pretty knackered. Everyone except the Two Bob Bouncer who just strode along ahead of us the same as usual. He didn’t seem to be tired at all. Mind you, I did notice that even he didn’t take up the offer of doing a night shift. “The Jelly” would probably snatch their hand off, though. After all, he was always saying it would only take one night and he would be set.

  One by one we headed back to work.
I was walking with The Reluctant Plumber, who true to his name seemed to be lagging behind me just a bit. “Why do they call him the Two Bob Bouncer?” I asked, realising that I either couldn’t work it out or hadn’t been told.

  “Dunno.” said the Reluctant Plumber, and turned to the Plazzy Surgeon who also shook his head.

  “No idea.” he said. I just smiled and left it at that. It probably had something to do with his size, I remembered thinking. Two Bob was in fact, enormous. Perhaps time is playing tricks with me but in my head when I think about him I have him as at least six and a half foot tall, and probably just as wide as well. What I do remember for certain, is his hands. They were like bloody shovels. Enormous. Each finger was about twice the size of mine, and I’m not a small bloke by any stretch of the imagination. Suffice to say that the Two Bob Bouncer was very popular on any gang he worked on purely for how strong he was. Sometimes it seemed as if he could manhandle a crate out of the hold on his own. A big man. A very big man.

  He had been there years, as well. Longer than most could remember. The Ghost told me that he was sure he would be coming up for retirement this year. He certainly didn’t look old enough to retire by the look of him, but generally he was that big that it was difficult to take him all in at once anyway. So I assumed because he looked like a bouncer then that was where his name came from. But it’s not like me to let anything go, and over the next few days I asked a few of the older guys on the dock if they knew the origins of Bob’s name.

  None of them did.

  It was quite funny really, seeing them searching their memories for any recollection of exactly where the name, “The Two Bob Bouncer” came from. Especially when I was told that his real name was Martin, though I for one had never heard him called that. There were a few outlandish theories pushed backwards and forwards, but nothing that made any real sense. Most of them concluded that it was indeed, as I thought, merely something to do with Martin’s size, and simply that he would definitely make a very good bouncer. Not that, as far as any of us were aware he had ever done any work as a bouncer. In fact he was quite the opposite. A gentle soul. Rarely had anything bad to say about anyone, even when they deserved it, and he pretty much kept himself to himself.