Paul McCartney's Coat Page 19
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By The Same Author
Paul McCartney’s Coat and Other Stories
Tours of Note
The Fae Wynrie
Vallum Aelium
The Greatest Virus of Them All
Here Be Dragons
The Road from Ballylaneen to Skellig Michael
Overboard!
(Autumn 2012)
To Jack Rowlands
“Golf Ball”
Had I known you longer,
This book would have
Been so much bigger.
“A dream you dream alone
is only a dream.
A dream you dream
together is reality.”
(John Lennon)
Contents
5. Foreword
7. 15th March 1975 – A Mantra
8. Bob the balloon, Al Capone and the two Bob Bouncer
13. “Nec Aspera Terrent”
19. The Strange Case of the Toff’s Policeman
And the Curious Elm
Interlude One: On a bench by the Mersey
38. The Lipstick Girls
41. The History Detectives
69. The Last Bomb, Aloise's Café and Death by Cow
75. The Order of Pan
Interlude Two: On a bench by the Mersey
81. The Ghost Next Door
94. A large sweet tea, please
104. A Good Day at the Office
113. A Place in the clouds (“Drawing in the strings”)
Interlude Three: On a bench by the Mersey
157. Notes
Foreword
Why Liverpool?
First, it is a unique place. That curious mix of Irish, English, and Welsh; the sense of humour. Only in Liverpool would you find a poet on every corner, a sage in every bar, and more comedians per square mile than anywhere else. Liverpool is a curious and heady stew of anger, laughter and sentimentality; tragedy, even. All human life is there, some of it downright ugly, but a lot of it is simply wonderful.
When I sat down to write a new collection of short stories I had lots of ideas, but I felt that I wanted something to unite them all. A common theme, if you like. I thought about weaving a single emotion through them. Perhaps injustice, anger, whatever you want to think of. That however would put too much pressure on the stories that I wanted to write. Could even be restrictive. So, I thought, how about uniting them by setting them all in one geographical place? Once I had decided on that, there was only ever going to be one place that I could use. Once I had Liverpool the stories came thick and fast, because the Scouse mind-set is adaptable, and the stories seemed to fit in around it. It is quite simple, really. Scousers are not English or even British. They are Scousers, and they pity anyone who is not.
So here are the stories, wrapped around Liverpool in pretty much the same way that the river Mersey wraps around Liverpool itself, intertwining with its people and places, the mist rolling off that wonderful, beautiful river, and if you were to let your mind wander and imagine that the river is a song then that song would be a shanty, sad and melancholic, yet lifting as well. It would make you laugh, it would make you cry. It may even make you think, but for sure it would most definitely break your heart.
Welcome to Liverpool, the gateway to absolutely everywhere else.
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 particular moment of time, but who would be Dave’s a little later on. No matter. 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. 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.
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. We would practice our harmonies sat in the middle of a huge playing field, far away from any interruptions or distractions. Yet still the sound of guitars 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, cocky and thought we knew it all.
Actually, we knew absolutely nothing at all.
You see, when you look at Liverpool there are so many tales, and the longer you look the taller they get. Sometimes they get very tall indeed, and the gates, as they say... well, they were about to open...
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, see? 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?” That was Al Capone of course, which even I managed to work out 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 nothing at all. 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.
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 hundreds of 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.” and so, “The quiet man” it was.
How can I describe the docks to you when I first started there if you had never been there at this time? 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 did want to follow you out of work, and 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.
That was all ahead of me, though. 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 surprised to find that on different days you would be working on all kinds of different 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. 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”. You’d probably refer to them as a glass back these days, but it means the same thing. 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 a day 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.
“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” (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 memory 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.
When we finished that night I found myself running for the bus with The Two Bob Bouncer just behind me. Best to explain that the buses way back then were not the same as they are now. The old buses had a conductor to collect the fares, and the back of the bus was wide open. A quite wide step led either up the stairs to the top deck, or through to the lower one. The conductor would let the driver (who was cossetted away in a little cabin at the front of the bus) know when to stop by ringing a buzzer or bell once, and ring it twice to tell the driver to pull off.
As the two of us ran for the bus that day however I could see that it was absolutely chocker. I leaped on to the back of the bus just as the conductor rang the bell twice to tell the driver to move off. The Two Bob Bouncer was right behind me but the conductor held out his hand to stop him getting on as the bus began to move.
“Full up, mate.” he said, as the bouncer stopped in the road. “No room. Not even for one more. Get the one behind.” Bob the Bouncer just looked at him, now keeping pace with the bus as it tried to move off into the traffic along the dock road.
“Is that right?” he said. “Not even one?”
“That’s right.” gulped the conductor noticing for the first time the Two Bob Bouncer’s size. “Not one.”
The Two Bob Bouncer reached on to the bus and lifted the conductor off his feet and placed him effortlessly on the road. “You have now.” he said gently as the bus gathered speed. Just in time for The Two Bob Bouncer to jump on to the bus in his place. I swear I could feel the platform tilt as he got on. “You have now.” repeated The Two Bob Bouncer as the bus pulled away, the conductor now running after it, trying to catch up with the slowly accelerating bus and failing completely.
There was a roar of laughter throughout the carriages as it moved away, the conductor in hot, but useless pursuit. The loudest cheers, of course, came from those who had yet to pay their fares. Especially “The Baldy Rabbit” sat down the front who never seemed to have his fare.
“Hang on! Come back!” we could hear the conductor yelling but soon we were too far away and he just came to a halt in the road, shaking a fist at us as he came to a sudden breathless stop. Then we were gone. The Two Bob Bouncer just grinned at me and we took it in turns to operate the bell as the bus continued on its route, people getting on and off as it went about its way, the driver seemingly completely oblivious to the fact that the bus no longer actually had a conductor on board at all. It was at this point that I decided to get it straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.
“So why do they call you the Two Bob Bouncer then?” I asked, but he just grinned at me and said nothing. There was an awkward silence, but it didn’t last long as shortly after that it was my stop and off I went. Half an hour later as I was supping a quick pint before returning home the conductor passed us, obviously intent on walking to the depot. He got a round of applause as he went past. I seem to recollect that “Beams On Toast” and “Golf Ball” were there that night, and we all stood laughing as the conductor continued on his way. Probably too proud to jump another bus. Beams On Toast, by the way was a right character. Used to operate the cranes. During his first few weeks on the docks he was lifting a cargo of steel girders with the crane with the wind caught the metal, causing it to smash into the canteen that was full of Dockers at the time. It was bloody lucky that the beams only caused minor damage, and the Dockers who were in there having their breakfast were bloody lucky not to be killed. Anyway, beams on toast it was from then onwards. Golf Ball used to work on the ships and he had a talent for falling down any hole that came his way. Not clumsy, as such. He just seemed to have trouble going around them. One thing about Golf Ball though was his singing. Get a few pints down him and the pub would come to a halt as he sang. His voice would lift us, soaring out into the night, and many a man there would join in too, perhaps a tear at the corner of their eyes. These were hard men. They had to be. But when Golf Ball sang, some of them used to cry like babies. That was a long, long time ago and I can still hear him singing. I think in my heart I would rather be dead than lose that memory.