the least of them the ominous “You just wait ’til your father gets home!”
One time in a fit of childish rage I punched my fist through a pane of glass in the back door and spent the afternoon in terror awaiting the wrath of my dad upon his return from work. I remember him replacing and puttying the glass, but not that I suffered any punishment. Squabbling or bickering among us kids was not tolerated. In hindsight I find it remarkable how my mother succeeded in keeping four energetic boys under such firm control, employing instinctive skills that were at least as potent as the ministrations of any child psychologist or supernanny.
I don’t think that back in those days I was ever really conscious of being poor. The British class system, still clinging to its bigotries and privileges in the postwar years, remained reasonably efficient at isolating each stratum of society, so that comparisons were maintained within one’s class rather than with persons of superior or inferior social position. My mother prided herself on always having us kids look well dressed, clean, and tidy. “Oh, look at the tide mark on that neck!” she’d chide if a face wash had left a line between washed and unwashed skin. The other kids we knew in Woolton were more or less like us, although some were more obviously clothed in hand-me-downs, wiping dripping noses on their sleeves, sporting ridiculous haircuts done by their dads. One of our favorite games was playing “Wet Molly” in the brick-walled alleys behind our house. The Wet Molly was a water-soaked rag. Whoever was “it” had to take the Wet Molly and chase after the other kids until close enough to hit someone with the thrown rag. Whoever was hit would become “it” and take up the chase. Equipment costs for this game were extremely low.
Our house was heated, inadequately, only by a coal fire in a fireplace. In wintertime we huddled around the kitchen hearth and mostly lived within a few feet of its warmth. With neither radio nor television to entertain us, on winter nights we kids would be diverted by gazing at the blue, green, and orange genies dancing among glowing coals. On Christmas Day or the solemn occasion when the parish priest came for his annual visit, a fire would be lit in the front parlor too. For lighting we had gas lamps, and I think there were still gas lamps on the streets, lit each evening by the village lamplighter.
Finally the great day arrived when electricity came into the house, putting an end to the evening lighting of gas lamps and the lack of broadcast entertainment. Uncharacteristically, we were the first family on the block to get a television, conferring upon us an instant popularity among neighbors wanting to watch. Like the rest of the neighborhood, we had no indoor toilet in the house and no hot running water. I remember being terrified of having to go outside in the evening down a dark brick passageway to the ancient outdoor toilet behind the house. For our weekly bath on Saturday night, my parents would heat big kettles of water on the coal fire and pour hot water into a tub in which we’d bathe consecutively, starting with the youngest.
Frugality was bred into our bones. The bus ride to and from school cost a couple of pennies each day, so Ger and I would on occasion walk home in order to save the fare, not for ourselves but to give back to our mum. “Oh, aye,” she’d tease us, “but what about the cost of wearing out your good shoe leather with all that walking?”
“We walked on the grass wherever we could, to save leather,” Ger assured her, and I nodded. Never wasting money and contributing however we were able to the family coffers were unquestioned values to us. Largely because of my mother’s wit, these economies were considered not something shameful that poor people were compelled to do, but rather something terribly clever that smart people did. One time my dad brought home a large, flat wooden crate of glazed pears, a luxury item we’d normally never have in the house. He’d been given it because one corner of the crate had been gnawed by rats, but the remainder was perfectly fine. For the next little while we dined like princes on glazed pears.
My father kept a flock of chickens in a small barn in the backyard, and I was morbidly fascinated by how he could expertly kill a chicken with a quick snap of its neck. Every year he’d have a local farmer drop off several big sacks of parsnips from which he’d make his parsnip wine. We kids would help keep the wine cellar stocked too by harvesting clusters of blue elderberries from vacant land, hauling shopping bags full of them back to the house for our mum’s elderberry wine. We’d secure an enormous and rare treat by occasionally weaseling a couple of pennies from our mum so we could go to the little store around the corner and purchase a bottle of ginger beer.
There was no crushing sense of deprivation in any of this, and we were capable of what passed for extravagance, especially at Christmastime. We’d have the splendid treat of going into the city to see the captivating Christmas scenes on display in the department store windows, to meet Father Christmas and go to a theater to watch in wonderment a pantomime, none finer than Peter Pan with Tinker Bell and Peter flying miraculously above our heads. Somehow excellent presents and stuffed stockings always awaited us on Christmas morning, and Christmas dinner remains vivid with nostalgic affection. It seemed the grandest affair, carried on in the seldom-used front parlor at what was by our standards an elaborately laid table. We had roast turkey and stuffing, mashed potatoes with gravy and brussels sprouts. Always a homemade Christmas cake with marzipan icing and Christmas pudding with brandy and soft sauce. We older boys were permitted a thimbleful of wine. All of this was better than Dickens ever dreamed of.
The inescapable school Christmas pageants were sometimes less successful, and I achieved a personal worst in my early thespian career when I was cast to play the feature role in a re-enactment of Good King Wenceslas. The rest of the class was to sing the carol while another kid, playing the page, and I as king would act out the requisite coming hither and going forth through the rude wind’s loud lament. Preparations were proceeding brilliantly until about a week before the night of the pageant when I developed an enormous boil on the back of my neck. Red and painful pus-filled lumps, boils were not uncommon afflictions, and I remember a number of times suffering from my father’s attempts to “bring the boil to a head” by applying a scorching hot mustard plaster. Unhappily for the pageant, my kingly costume included both a ruff and a crown. The ruff, rubbing against the agonizing boil, caused me to tilt my head forward, which in turn caused the crown to slip off my head. I think I acted out the whole scene with my head facing straight down and one hand clamping the crown to my head, leaving the other arm free to point toward yonder peasant, the miracle of preheated footsteps and all the rest.
Nobody we knew owned a car. A holiday would be a one-day outing by train to Blackpool or the Chester zoo or the seaside at Rhyl in Wales. But these were splendid expeditions, rife with adventure and excitement, like the time when Mrs. Richter came along with us only to have the sea wind lift her dainty little hat off her head and send it skittering along the beach with all of us boys in hot but futile pursuit. As with everywhere else, dangers lurked along the shore. There were deadly riptides and undertows ready to suck us out to sea. One time my father showed us an enormous jellyfish stranded above the tide line. He nudged it quickly with the point of his shoe and we all jumped back as the creature flicked out venomous tentacles. “One sting of those and you’d be paralyzed,” he warned us. The thick grasses growing in the sand dunes were capable of slashing bare legs like rapiers. We viewed with dread a notorious stretch of quicksand where it was said a horse and cart and its unwary driver had all been fatally swallowed up in a matter of minutes. In later years my mother would marvel, “I can’t believe you chose to live on an island that you have to take a ferry to get to,” because, she said, as a child I’d wept uncontrollably and fought against getting aboard the ferry to cross the Mersey River. Fear of water prevented my learning to swim, even with a swimming pool next door, just as fear of heights kept me firmly on the ground while Ger and his pals would clamber recklessly in treetops. One thing I could do in those days was run, run like the wind, run like the great Roger Bannister, whose “Miracle Mile” and subsequent victory over the Australian John Landy in the “Mile of the Century” in 1954, in the far-distant city of Vancouver, swelled our English schoolboy hearts with pride. An old photograph shows myself and Ger, along with ten other comical-looking lads in short pants and fallen socks, proudly posing as the Saint Anthony of Padua track team with our captain holding a large plaque
