childhood memories. part one/four
THE NEIGHBOURHOOD
On the right hand corner of Desmond Street looking up towards St Benedict,s Church was our local greengrocers. Although the entrance was actually on Heyworth Street, there was a side window in our street. Harry Howarth and May Dreaper owned the shop and did a good trade there. I,m not sure why these proprieters had different names, were they living over the brush or living tally? as some called it in those days.
I used to go shopping her for the vegetables for the pans of scouse that we had in our household. Sometimes we were lucky enough to have meat in with the vegetables, moreoften not as there was not enough money for a trip to the butchers at the bottom of our street and across Breck Road.
May Dreaper would always give me an apple or orange or even a pear if she was in a better mood, when I went into her shop. The fruit always had a bit of bad in it, these we called "fades". The shop always smelt of thyme or sage and there were bunches of these herbs hanging in all corners of the shop, drying out. I would ask for a pennyworth of potherbs and would get a brown paper bag filled with carrots, a few potatoes, a small swede, a parsnip, an oinion and some of the dried herbs that were hanging up. This was all that was needed for our scouse or stew as it is called outside Liverpool.
At the bottom of the street across Breck Road was Unsworth,s our local butcher. Nan, my guardian, almost always insisted that Jim, the older man serve her as he always gave us a bit more or a bit better joint for our money. Ken, the son, never got a look in to serve the older customers who had been going to the shop during the war years and getting good rations.
Then there was our paper shop, Jim Maxwell,s. They lived in New Brighton over the water and travelled over to the shop each morning to open for six o,clock to give the workers their papers and cigarettes. I especially liked Jim because when I was ill and off school, nan would go up to the shop and tell him and he would send me loads of comics, dandy, beano,hotspur,beezer,topper and film fun. O.k. they were all out of date and old stock, but they kept me quiet all day reading and doing the puzzles in them.
Mrs. Mudd ran a cold meat shop at the bottom corner of Desmond Street and Breck Road. We never bought anything in this shop as it was too dear for us, but I did go there for my Auntie Louie who lived at number 40 Desmond Street. Mudds had some lovely Holland,s meat pies and puddings and her salmon paste was out of this world.
Another grocers shop where we didn,t go was Jim McQuaid,s on Breck Road, on the right at the top going into town. I used to go there for Auntie Louie,s weekly shopping order until the shop employed a delivery boy to bring the shopping to the customer,s houses. I used to wait for the order to be made up in the shop and sit on the steps behind the counter, or go into the room beyond and look around for the mop or brush that Stan, the man that took over the shop when Jim died, wanted. The lad who did the deliveries was a boy who used to live in our street next to Auntie Louie,s, Stanley Rickerby, a happy friendly lad. The shop was situated to where Dr. Madison,s surgery was, opposite the petrol station owned by, or sold, Shell oil.
There were two "Uncles" shops in our immediate area. These pawn shops were known as uncles by the people who used them as a way of expressing where the goods were. Perhaps also because they were more in there than their own homes, so they looked on them as family.
Say Uncle Ronnie came home from work and wanted to go out that night to a darts match, he,d want to know where his suit was and nan would say that it was in Uncle Erics, or Eric Milton,s pawn shop because we needed the money to get the tea with. These pawn shops loaned you money on goods for a short period. You could buy the goods back with the money lent plus a small amount of interest. The goods could be re sold if they were not redeemed by the customer within three months. The other "uncle" was Healings at the bottom of the next street, Northcote, and facing onto Breck Road opposite Fishguard Street.
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My Neighbourhood part two
On the top of Breck Road and corner of Heyworth Street was a pub called "the London Stores" sometimes my nan would find herself in there drinking her milk stout, Mackeson, which was supposed to be "good for you"
I heard a story later about a fire in the living quarters of this pub and that the two children of the landlord were rescued in the blaze and were tacken away by the social services.
A bit further away from our street was another watering hole frequented by my gran, "the Kings Arms" A local joke at the time was "Where,s yer gran? " "In the Kings Arms" "Where,s the King,s Arms?" "Around the Queen,s bum" This pub was on the corner of Creswick Street and Breck Road. Along near here were two more shops that I would go to, Beattie,s Dairy where I would shop for nan and Auntie Louie. We were frequent customers here until our credit stopped and then we moved on a bit further along to Waltons where was bought Kellys uncut bread for nan and us. I remember the shopkeeper here being a yellowy complexioned person who, at the time, thought was a foreign looking woman, and the owner of Beatties had a" turn in his eye" ( just like I had in those days) and you wouldn,t know if he was talking to you or looking at the shop doorway. I always had to be asked twice or more what I wanted when I went into his shop.
I would get my sweets from another shop along here and sometimes go a bit nearer home to a sweetshop known locally as "the tin hat" as it had a soldier,s tin hat nailed on to the fascade outside the shop. The shopkeeper had put it in pride of place outside his shop as a badge of honour that he had fought for his country...and survived. I would of course get some sweets at Jim Maxwell,s shop too, but he didn,t like going to the side counter to serve us kids and would leave us till all his customers were gone before serving us. He was not a well man was Jim. Sometimes you would go into his shop and he,d have his head in his hands and look really ill. He even confided in me once, a mere child of ten, that he felt awful and would I ring his wife up and tell her. I felt sorry for him sometimes.
Another of my favourite shops was on Heyworth Street on the sweep going towards my school, Jackie Balls. We boys used to say, "Are you coming to Jackie Balls for some of his mint balls."
There was a cinema at the top of our street over the main road and the corner of Rupert Lane (named I suppose after Prince Rupert who was reputed to have stayed there while trying to oust roundhead soldiers who had taken control of Liverpool Castle in the civil war) called "the Everton Palace." My Uncle Ronnie who lived in my nan,s with us, went there and to another one further along Everton Road and down Lytton Street, called "the Lytton." There was yet another cinema a bit more distance away towards town and over West Derby Road, called "the Royal Hippodrome." So really we were well off for something to do if we had the money to go and see a film. The one I always went to on a Saturday morning was back on Breck Road on the right going towards Townsend Lane. It was called "the Royal" and us kids made a hell of a racket in there watching Hopalong Cassidy or Tex Ritter or Roy Rogers, chasing all those Indians right across the prairie. Little did we know in those days that we were the bad guys chasing the people from their own land.
One of my favourite shops in the area was along Everton Road, the local pet shop run by Mrs. Lyons (joke there somewhere) she had a huge cage hung up outside the shop with a big green parrot called Laura inside. The parrot used to shout her name very clearly and whistle after the passengers getting on and off at the bus stop nearby.
At the bottom of our street around to the left was a huge three storey building that we called "packies" I,ve no idea why. It was a rag merchants that had floor to ceiling clothes and bits of cloth tied in huge bundles, baled and stowed. There was always a funny smell coming from there and the building attracted mice, rats and cockroaches, but it didn,t stop us kids playing around there at all.
The favourite walk by some of us kids in those days was to the local toy shops to peer into the windows at the array of wonderous items we,d dream about getting in our Christmas stockings. The nearer toy shop was "Addisons" near to where Breck Road meets Breckfield Road. This was a double fronted shop that stocked larger toys like doll,s prams and bicycles of all sizes. There was many a snotty nose pressed up against the glass peering into the wonderland of kids dreams.
If we were feeling more adventureous one day, we would go abit further afield and go down Breck Road a bit more and cross over to the other side near to where the Holy Trinity Church was. We had to transverse two main roads to get here and we were not even supposed to go out of our street. Woe betide us if someone told our parents. I,d get a good smacked bum for a start and maybe have to stay in with a face on for a few hours. It only lasted a few hours because once nan,s temper died down she was o.k. Anyway this other toyshop was well worth the punishment for us kids to gasp at the multitude of toys in that shop approprietly called "toyland" with toys in the windows of the double fronted shop, hung up on the ceiling and on the walls inside, oh it was a dreamland of bliss and contentment just to gaze; Well worth a shouting at and a slap around the chops to any kid.
Once there was a gang of us playing around the streets doing nothing in particular. We were walking along Jasmine Street which backed onto our street, when someone suggested that we push a taxi that was parked there so that the alarm would go off. I remember being one of the hands on culprits and the alarm did go off so we all ran down Jasmine Street towards the entry that leads to our street. The taxi driver starts running after us and seemed to have homed in on me. While the other kids disperse to their own houses I keep on running. I was so scared that he was going to hit me and I ran right across Breck Road, the main road I was forbidden to cross. If there had been traffic coming I would have been killed. I ran up an entry in Glenvale Street that I realised I couldn,t get out of, so I gave up running and the taxi driver grabbed hold of me and shouted at me and accused me of scratching his vehicle. I just lay there crying and denying all. If I,d have taken him back to my nan she would have made mince meat out of him, but I decided out of the goodness of my heart, to let him off....this time. I still don,t like taxi drivers to this day. I think they are milking the times, sitting in warm vehicles all day getting a fat bum.
Part three/four death and play
The back room was wallpapered and painted, and a new gas mantle was bought for the fitting. It was the first time in seven years that I had seen this room properly and wondered why it was being done all of a sudden. I was told that we were moving in there for a little while out of the parlour that had been the only living space for tens of years for nan.
A day or so later grandad,s body was brought home from the hospital where he had died a few days before. McDougals the funeral directors on Breck Road had brought himin a plain blacked out windowed van. The neighbours were on the steps peeping out and muttering about the colour of the coffin or the fact that nan could afford to have had grandad insured at all. There was shuffling and talking low in the parlour and next thing the house was quiet again and I was left sitting in the chair with a piece of toast that had burned while it was being made on the open range of the back room.
This room had been so dark and miserable since I,d been brought here those seven years ago. The window in here was so thick with ground in dirt that it looked like it had never been cleaned since well before the war which had ended eighteen years before. The old smelly curtains and nets just fell away having them taken down and went right in the bin in the wall out in the small yard where a hundredweight of coal lay sprawled on the concrete. We only ever passed through this room on our way to go to the toilet in the yard or to go to bed, feeling our way in the pitch black of night or with a dripping penny candle to light our way up the cold bare staircase and into one of the equally cold bare bedrooms. How strange this room was now with a bit of light coming in through the still dirt ingrained window.
There was comings and goings in the front room over the next few days in this cold, snow filled January week. The neighbours had been and gone to show their respects to grandad. Mrs. Mac next door could be heard blubbering away and quickly muttering her sorrows. Mrs. Thompson giving my gran her support in volunteering to cut the sandwiches and butter the bread. and Mrs. Boyn promising to lend nan a table cloth that once adorned the funeral tea of some relative or other back in the last street she came from. Then my Uncle Bob asked me did I want to go in and see grandad, I nodded and we went into the parlour to see the coffin laying under the closed curtained window with the lid standing erect at the bottom against the wall. I noticed immediately that the room had been wallpapered and that the room felt cold as there hadn,t been a fire lit in there for a week. I look at grandad who looked so clean, the cleanest I,d ever seen him, and shaved too. His face looked like he had make up on I thought. I asked Uncle Bob why he was like that. (I felt awkward and just said that for something to say) He told me that it,s the way we go when we die. I then made a remark about they had spelt grandad,s name wrong on the coffin lid in gold letters too, and left to go and read my Bronco Lane annual that I,d got off somebody for Christmas.
I was to witness another death in the family in number 21 two doors away. It was Ganny, my grandma,s mam. I remember going up the stairs in their house to see her in her bedroom. The bed seemed huge to me in that little front room, and all I could see of Ganny was her small white haired head on the pillow. She lived here alone since great grandad had died of a brain haemorrhage during the war years. Ganny was lying flat in the bed and nan was putting vaseline on her lips to keep them moist. I knew that she was dying as young as I was at the time of the tender age of six.
Grandma was used to death. I remember one morning while I was in the parlour asleep with Uncle Ronnie, Mr Thompson from three doors up banged on the door a few times. Nan got up from her bed upstairs and opened the front door. I heard Mr Thompson telling nan that his wife had "gone in the night" and would nan go and "lay her out" Lter I found out that his wife had died during the night and would like nan to wash and prepare the corpse for the funeral men who would be coming later that day to take it away.
There was often or not a large removal type van parked on the waste ground at the bottom of our street adjacent which was Northcote Street. It could have been an Eddie Stobbard hauliers truck. Margaret Guy and her friend Josie Williams, myself and one or two others found this truck a good place to sit on the front engine part and chat. We would sit on the bonnet for hours being shielded from the rain as there was an overhang above the cab. This was a firm favourite of ours to sit and play guessing games and talk about what we wanted to be when we grew up. A few years later I would get my first kiss from Josie during a game of true, dare, kiss, command.
I must also point out that it was at this age that I had a crush on a lad at school as I didn,t remember him being around much. I may have first saw him at the school play centre one night. His name escapes me at this time, Eddie I think. I decided to follow him home one night after we had been to the play centre for our nightly two hour session. Steven Guy from our street was with me and we hid in entries on the way in case he saw us. He was a clean fresh faced lad with a natural tanned skin and rosie red cheeks. His hair was brushed back and Brylcreamed. Perhaps he was so clean and fresh, unlike me who was grubby and skin troubled, that I wanted to emulate him. There was no follow up to this episode of school kid crushes.
I remember that at first I never stayed for school dinners, I always went home at twelve o,clock to have a jam buttie or whatever was going at the time. Lter on I did start staying for the meals on wheels, as we called them because the food containers always came in a van from somewhere. I loved the school dinners. To me there was always a lot of it, and "seconds" sometimes too. I,d never been fed so well in my life. My favourite was cheese pie, and pudding, any suet pudding with hot custard and the skin off the custard too. I usually asked and got this schoolkid delicacy and never left any food on my plate, ever.
photos to go with my storyi
Photos of my area include; The London Stores pub; the right hand aspect of Desmond St. from Heyworth Street, Jim Maxwell,s second shop in; Desmond St looking down from St Benedicts Church; A street party to celebrate either the coronation of hm the queen, or ve day, not sure.
Life and times at 25 Desmond Street
:tear:
Getting ready for school each morning I would wash in the brown sink in the back kitchen from the single brass cold tap. There was never a sink plug in this basin ever in all my days there. The back kitchen consisted of a sink and a wooden wash stand. Cobwebs covered the whole of the small window as well as all the corners of the room. The spiders that lived in them were of the round bodied type the size of a contact lens and long spindly legs and of a grey colour. Talking of colour, this room was devoid of it, just cement grey. The cold grey floor was concrete and had no covering on it ever while I was there, or after I,d left. There was never any money for fancy things or luxury items beyond the portals of 25.
The out side toilet almost always had a burst pipe during the winter months and the landlord had to be contacted to send a jobber to come and reweld the lead pipes. Sometimes we would leave a candle burning out there to help stop the pipes freezing but that stopped one year when our toilet door was taken for the bonfire, thereafter we had to do our "business" in the open air and in full view of Molly and Frank whose bedroom window looked into our yard and some of the back windows of our street neighbours from Jasmine Street. I didn,t mind as in those days I didn,t have very much to hide! When the pipes burst water would be coming out for days until the landlord,s men came round to fix the leak or leaks. We had to stifle the flow as best we could with an old item of clothing with string wrapped around. Then we would have to take a bucket of water to flush the toilet if needed.
One day I remember I was crying with terrible pains in my stomach and I couldn,t go to the toilet at all. Nan took me down the yard and sat with me holding my hand until eventually I did go. It took ages and it was very painful but nan was good and looked after me like that.
The room that was called the kitchen was always in darkness for some reason. Although there was a gas fitting in the ceiling, the mantle remained broken and was never replaced and lit. There were two clothes lines across the full width of the room full of clothes always. It was used as a giant wardrobe. The coalman making his delivery to the yard through the house always managed to catch the line on his way through but it was never brought down. There were huge bundles of clothes on the floor in this room which always remained dark and dingy and the windows with ages of grime encrusted on all four panes of glass. There were periods when this room did have some items of furniture but non specifically that I can recall.
There were two floor to ceiling cupboards on either side of the big black fire range. On the hob was a single gas jet (how safe was that?) where most of the cooking and teamaking was done. The fire was lit sometimes at weekends, money permitting, so that some form of Sunday dinner could be cooked. Behind the door going from the hall to the kitchen was a high shelf under the stairs where things were put out of my reach. I got at them one way or another over the years; Chinese fire crackers brought home from the uncles going away to sea, letters, photos, tools etc. were all got at by me and sifted through as I was a right snooper. Over the years I saw some really interesting and at the time, frightening, letters pertaining to my father and mother and the reason why I was living in this Dickensian hellhole which was to be my home through all my schooldays and two years after when I was deemed a man.
The parlour and bedrooms of our house
Then there was the front room, the main room in the house. This room was lounge, kitchen and bedroom all in one. We ate on a square, two leaved pull out table while sitting on the arm of one of the armchairs. The seats of these chairs were always full of old "Echo" and "Daily Mirror,s" so high as sometimes unable to sit down upon.
The walls were wallpapered in this one room in the house and the pattern changed periodically, maybe three or four times in seventeen years. The fireplace grate was a modern one probably financed by one of nan,s sons after coming home from sea and spending out a bit on their old ma. There was nearly always a cosy fire when it was needed or when finances allowed. The winters were the best with the snow outside a foot deep and the temperatures below freezing, the fire would be halfway up the chimney with a fireguard usually around drying the clothes that had been washed in the wash house at the top of Heyworth Street. The other furniture in this room was a bed settee and a sideboard we called the dresser. Uncle Ronnie and I slept in the make shift bed in later life but early on I mainly slept upstairs with nan in the back bedroom or on the parlour floor by the fire with coats over us. This was probably before the bed settee arrived. I also remember Uncle Bob sleeping on the floor in the front room at one time, he had come back from a long voyage at sea and this was the only room available. The front windows were cleaned by the local window cleaner up and down but he stopped doing them when he never got paid.
The window sills were never painted outside but the front door was. Uncle Ronnie put a hardboard panel over the door once and a full sized triangle done in half beading and painted in maroon. The Yorkshire stone pavement outside the front door was sandstoned periodically to keep it clean.
Up the stairs in our house were two bedrooms, one front and one back entered by a small square about two foot all round we called the landing. Now the stairs had a fascination for me for it had a huge (to me as a child) shelf halfway up and across the whole width. It was dark with loads of things on but I was never able to get onto it and rummage around as it was too dangerous, I might have fallen down the stairs in my attempts to do so. But, now and again I was able, with a stick, to bring some things to the front of the shelf to inspect,but in the end nothing very exciting was ever found. The bedrooms never had wallpaper on them and there were watermarks high up and onto the ceilings from long ago holes on the roof where the water had been coming in but I never experienced any while I was there. I used to pick off flakes of distemper when I used to sleep up there and make patterns on the pinky bare walls revealling the blue distemper from an age before.
In the front bedroom were two beds on bare floorboards, and, across the fireplace which was now rusty but must have once been black and had only ever been lit once I remember when I was taken ill, lay a pencilled or charcoal picture of a long dead relative of ours, so I learned later. My nan told me that he was supposed to have been the first policeman in the Liverpool force to have been been given permission to sport a full face of hair, ie beard and mustache, and you should have seen the fullness of it all. The picture was about three foot high and two foot six across showing this policeman in full uniform. The frame and glass were dirty and the back card coming adrift. There was also a gas mantle fitted to the wall by the window with a finger length fracture in the arm where gas must have escaped ferociously and rendered the shillings (5p) of gas to a mere sixpence worth each time. I often wondered later if this was one of the reasons why we never slept in that room so often. It was by providence that no one was gassed in that room. The mantle was so near to the window probably letting the obnoxious stuff pass out into the street before doing any harm to an occupier sleeping in there. I used to play in this room quite a lot between the ages of five to twelve on the bare boards with a sheet canopy above me playing cowboys and Indians and suchlike.
The back bedroom was where nan and I slept in a huge double bed with a large headboard. I,d remember Lonnie Donnigan singing the song starting "does your chewing gum lose it,s flavour on the bedpost over night?" when I used to go up to bed by the light of a candle as there was no light fitting in the back room at all. The mantlepiece used to be full of candle grease eventually dripping down over the sides and ends like an ice cave,s stalagmites and tites. I use to get a knife and prise it off when it looked like a scene from another planet.
There was a big mound of clothes and papers in this room covered over by a big dirty sheet, just like the ones in the back room downstairs. I found a gas mask, a trilby hat and a photograph of Randolph Turpin amongst other things under this cloth mountain. A dressing table was the only other item of furniture in this room. A small shelf high in one of the alcoves on either side of the chimney breast where I once hid my pet mouse which was discovered and thrown out, was all that was in that cold back room. We took a bucket up each night to save us the discomfort of getting up and going down into the back yard toilet, this was used very frequently by nan and I. I used to wet this bed and grandma almost every night at this time. Then, later on when it was the bed settee in the parlour and Uncle Ronnie who got it, a little less frequent, much to the Ronnie,s delight.