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Red Tom

  1. Our hero makes his own way in the big wide world Pt.1

    My first job in 1965 was with Bradshaw &Sons, a builder in Buttermere St., which ran from behind The Pavillion in Lodge Lane, and came out at the top of Upper Parliament St.
    A neighbour/sometime acquaintance of the same age started at the same time.He was placed with Jack Condon ( we never made the obvious puns as they weren't called condoms back then, not by us at any rate). Jack looked a bit like an ageing spiv, a ladies man, but mild mannered, I got Fred Fryer, a permanently furious, ...
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  2. A Practical Man.

    I seem to recall being told that my old man had kept hens in our back yard,this may well be true,other people certainly did, and I'm pretty sure this would have been a common practise in the area around Linden St. and Oliver St. where he grew up in the '20s and '30s.
    I can recall his being an afficianado of budgerigars, he kept them in a table-top aviary in the parlour. However, at some stage, these disappeared to be replaced with several pigeons.The racing of these birds was very popular ...
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  3. A literary thread 21 12 2010

    I was raised in a bookless house,my early reading experiences being via the comics of the 1950's and Radio Fun annuals lying around my grandmother's house, and later, an uncle (still a teenager) in the 'merch' brought home American comic books.
    The Beano, Dandy, Beezer etc were my favourites, I can recall a neighbours (older) son trying to introduce me to the Hotspur and the Eagle, definitely a superior literary experience. However,my old man was a product of the courts and cellars of the ...
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  4. some more scribblings.

    I lived in Tunnel Rd, facing the old coal merchants offices,from birth (1950) and moved out when the bulldozers moved in (1966- there goes the neighbourhood !). We relocated to Lee Park, where my dad's family had migrated from Myrtle Gardens. My auntie May's lot were the first, having settled in Bele Vale Rd c1956 ( many carefree days being spent there pre 1960) and as the rest of the family knew the area,the transition was logical.
    My old man had worked painting the tower blocks some years ...
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  5. Edge Hill Exploits

    I alluded in a previous scribbling to the Dickensian decay of various parts of my old neighbourhood. Indeed it would seem that my wife has a mental image of me barefoot, hoop in hand, scampering behind a Hansom cab crying "spare us a farving Guv?" to the top-hatted occupants. While we are of the same vintage, our childhood environments differed. Her grandparents migrated from surrounding parishes and settled into the village of Speke in 1905, their first child being born in that year, ...
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