How Did All This Happen?. John Bishop

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ seemed to be the way with everybody when I was a child – I didn’t know anybody whose parents hadn’t done the same thing. I remember being at school when I was 13 years of age and my mate, Mark, telling me that his dad was having his 60th birthday party. I fell off my chair laughing at the image of his father being the age of what I considered a granddad. My dad was young enough for me to play in the same Sunday league side as him when I was 16, although I was under strict instructions to call him Ernie. Apparently shouting, ‘Dad, pass!’ was not considered cool in the Sunday league circles of the early eighties.

      Having young parents had a massive impact on the way I saw the world, and perhaps was the driving force behind me wanting to have children myself very shortly after I got married. Or, to be fair, that may well be the result of me being a better shot than I anticipated.

      When I entered the world, my dad was 24 and my mum was 23. They had four children, all born in the month of November. All my life I thought the fact that we were born in November was a coincidence; it wasn’t until I was married myself and I became aware of the rhythms of marriage that I realised the month of November comes nine months after Valentine’s Day. If you’re married, you’ll know what I mean; if you’re not, you will do one day.

      The first eight months of my life were spent living a few doors away from the hospital on Mill Road in a house that my dad had bought from a man in a pub for £50. You could do that sort of thing in the 1960s. The house was about a mile from the city centre and proved to be perfectly placed, as it allowed my parents the opportunity to walk to the hospital to see my sister Carol, in between looking after the rest of us.

      As Carol’s coeliac disease meant she couldn’t digest gluten, throughout our childhood my mum was constantly baking separate things for her. This meant our house very often had that warm smell of baking – although if you have ever eaten gluten-free food you will know the smell is a lot better than the taste. Nice-smelling cardboard is still cardboard.

      I don’t have any memory of that first house, and it is no longer there. Someone came from the council and declared it unfit for human habitation, along with many others, as the city council progressed with the slum-clearing project which changed much of the centre of Liverpool in the 1960s. The declaration was upsetting for my dad, as he had just decorated, although I am sure the rats and lack of adequate sanitation had more to do with the council’s decision than his ability to hang wallpaper.

      As a result of the clearing of the slum areas, various Scouse colonies sprang up as families were moved out to places such as Skelmersdale, Kirkby, Speke and Runcorn. Getting out of Liverpool was not something my mum and dad would ever have considered; it was all they had both ever known, and Carol was still being treated in the hospital. The council offered various alternatives and, like most decisions in parenthood, my mum and dad did what they thought was best for us.

      They chose to move to Winsford, out in Cheshire, the option that was the furthest from the centre of Liverpool – if not in miles, then certainly in character. Winsford had been an old market town, but now had emerging council estates that needed to be populated by people ready to work in the factories of the local, rapidly developing industrial estate.

      My dad went for an interview in a cable company called ICL and received a letter saying he had a job at the weekly wage of £21.60. This was a staggering amount at the time, when he was getting £9 a week on the building sites he had moved on to after too many falls into the Mersey had convinced him that tugs were not the future. So, without further ado, we moved. When the removal van arrived, such was the exodus from Liverpool that it was already half-full with furniture from another family, the Roberts, who actually moved into the same block as us in Severn Walk on the Crook Lane estate.

      When my dad received his first week’s wages, he was paid £12.60.

      Yes, thanks to a typing error, my mum and dad had made the decision to move all the way out to Winsford: a simple clerical mistake was responsible for where I was to spend my formative years. However, I have to say I am glad the lady who typed it (it was 1967 – men didn’t type letters, as they were busy doing man-things like fixing washing machines or carrying heavy stuff) made the mistake, because I cannot think of a better place to have grown up.

      If you were a child in the 1960s and somebody showed you the council estate where I lived, you could not have imagined a finer location in the world. Rows of terraced houses that were built out of white brick reflected the sun and made everything seem bright. We lived at 9, Severn Walk, which I always thought was a great address as it had two numbers in it, until I realised the road was actually named after a river. We spent the first ten years of my life at this address. Coming from a slum area within Liverpool, it was an exciting place to be, and my mum even today comments about the joy of discovering such modern things as central heating, a hatch from the kitchen into the living room and, the biggest thing of all, an inside toilet downstairs. Opulence beyond belief to live in a house where someone could be on the toilet upstairs and someone on the toilet downstairs, at the same time, and nobody had to put their coat on to go outside.

      When I started to write this book I wanted to go back to the estate and have a look, so, six months ago, I went for a walk there. It was night-time, and I sat on the wall and remembered all the times we had had on the estate, both good and bad, and I will always be grateful for the childhood I had there.

      I have to say that the town planners of our estate did a brilliant job in setting out the rows of houses in such a way that you were never more than ten steps away from grass. Every house had a back yard and a front garden, and then beyond that there would be grass. I know that ‘grass’ is a very incomplete description, but that is basically what it was. You either had enough grass to host a football match, an area big enough for a bonfire on Guy Fawkes or any other night you felt like building a fire, or you just had enough grass for your dog to have a dump on when you let it out.

      As a child, I don’t recall the concept of poop-scooping existing, and I can’t imagine anything more at odds with the world that I lived in than the image of a grown adult picking up dog shit. Dog ownership involved feeding the animal and giving it somewhere to sleep. Beyond that, nobody expected anything else. Nobody took their dog for a walk – you simply opened the door and let it out. The dog would then do whatever dogs do when left to their own devices, and it would come home when it was ready. The only dogs that had leads when I was a child worked for the police or helped blind people cross the road.

      I am not suggesting that we were bad dog owners; in fact, I think the dogs were having a brilliant time, although you only have to slide into dog shit once as a child playing football before you think someone, somewhere should do something. I recall being asked to do a school project about improving the community and I suggested that dog dirt was a real problem. The teacher agreed and asked me what I would suggest to improve the matter. After some thought, I came up with the idea of the dog nappy. The teacher tried to seem impressed and not laugh, but sadly the idea never caught on – as there was no Dragons’ Den in the seventies where my eight-year-old self could have pitched the idea, it became no more than a few pages in my school book. And, instead, picking it up using a plastic shopping bag has become the norm. However, I challenge anyone who has to pick up dog shit first thing in the morning not to think the nappy idea has some legs.

      Most of what I remember of my childhood happened outdoors. All we ever did was go out and play, and mums would stand on their steps shouting for us when our tea was ready. I should explain to people not from the North, or who may be too wealthy to understand what I mean by the word ‘tea’, that I am referring to the evening meal, which you call dinner, which is what we call the meal in the middle of the day, which you call lunch. It is important we clear this up, as I would not want you to think I am using ‘tea’ in the cricket sense, and that after a few hours’ play we retired for a beverage and a slice of cake. Instead, the call for tea was an important signal to let you know the main meal of the day was ready. The shout was not something to be ignored, СКАЧАТЬ