Ok so I didn't pass my two chances at the eleven plus. I was such a mediocre pupil at Heyworth Street School and I can truly say that my school life there was happy and trouble free. I was going to miss the school and half of the kids I grew up with from all round the area, but I wasn,t to know this yet untill well after the six weeks holidays that were looming up. Finishing junior school was a milestone in my life, already the first ten years of my life was over. What would become of me, would I be working, get married, live like the rest of the neighbours in our street? Us kids would discuss these topics as we sat around on the big removal like van parked on the oller at the bottom of our street.
I remember my gran telling me stories of the war years from her point of view. About how that our school was used as an air raid shelter and how they,d had to run all that way up Heyworth Street to get to it. I remember thinking at the time that by the time they got there, there would be planes overhead watching you. In fact one of the stories repeated by a woman who lived in our area was that she was caught in Everton Road during an air raid and that a bomber followed her along the street and verred away from her back to the dockland area. I heard Dora Caseupton tell that story many times in her reminices of her life in later years. My gran used to tell me that my dad had climbed up onto the roof of our school to dislodge an incendiary bomb that had fallen on a full shelter of people. But whether that was a true story or one just to make me proud of my dad or reinforce her love for him, I,ll never know now.
The school holidays were spent in the best ways possible, playing in the entries and ollers and empty houses around our area. I remember several houses that were like gold mines to us kids. One was on the main road, Breck Road and had been stripped of copper wire and doors and fire places. We rooted around some of the junk that had been left and abandoned of life and we found trinkets and pens and documents of all descriptions including photographs of the relatives of those that had lived there. It seemed to me at the time why had these people left legacies of their lives to be pinched and pilfered like this. It seemed like those war films I,d seen on the flix of those people being hounded out of their homes and taken into concentration camps. But Liverpool was a far cry from life like that, why had these possessions been left? Upstairs the bedrooms had been stripped of floorboards and us kids walked across the beams from one wall to another and had great fun playing in that particular house. Then there was the house in Whitefield Road that had been abandoned and in the cellar there was all kinds of army gear all over the place, phones, dials, speakers and petrol cans. We thought that there may have been a shop upstairs where they sold these items or that the owner was a secret spy and had been taken in by the mi5 and this was why the house was empty. Then there was a house in Queens Road a large three story dwelling where we found a stack of "dirty books " but we didn,t know how to make a profit with these items so we just looked through them and went "ooooh" and "yak" and such meanial noises.
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Well as I said before I failed the Liverpool Education Committee,s eleven plus and the one from Huyton where I was when the social services got us together as a family for a short time. But I did go to a senior school that I felt comfortable in with some of my mates from Heyworth Street, and we started out together on the road to adulthood.
The school was a sandy bricked affair built about 40s or early 50s. The pupils were sectioned off into competative houses, Scott, Livingstone, Drake and Hudson. I knew about the first three explorers or adventurists, but Hudson?! didn,t know him then or now for that matter. Scott was red, Livingstone yellow, Drake blue and Hudson green. The brainy lads always seemed to end up in Scott while the dimwits were all in Hudson. I selected the Livingstone house and was the house captain throughout my four years in Prince Rupert Secondary Modern School for Boys with two gates, one facing Mill Road where the famous hospital was situated at the end of the road and where twenty years later I was to work and enjoy ten happy years of service under the guise of civil servant. The other gated entrance was in Margaret Street, once well known for its baths where many an Everton son had used to get a good bath in as there we,re not many households with a bathroom in our township.
In the Livingstone House were John Bennett who had become my cousin when my Uncle Albert married his sister Kitty. The whole family had flaming red hair and John was no exception. He was a crackin, lad and always game for a laugh as was Paul Breen and his mischievious grin, Raymond Culshaw who lived next to our old school in Heyworth Street, Tommy Evans a qieter, football crazy Liverpool enthusiast and his mate Billy Milner, Raymond McMahon another flaming redhead who later was to be my neighbour in St Georges Heights about five years later. Bringing up the last member of Livingstone House was a tall lad with ruddy cheeks, and his name was Robert Armstrong.
I,ll have to leave the story here this time as there are four ambulancemen and a cines boxer dog called neddy knocking on the fanlight window.
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