A few words from Paradise

Sep 29 2007 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

The writer son of an unemployed philosopher from the Mersey waterfront tells David Charters how he found what everyone is looking for

IN THE high, scented woods of Paradise, a man who calls himself Kipper writes about Liverpool, which is fair enough because many Liverpudlians have written about Paradise – usually locating it somewhere between Woolton and Allerton, along the Hunts Cross bus route.

But this chap really does live in Paradise – Paradise, California, which, in the measure of beauty, is perhaps only a whisker away from the other one above us.

Even so, his lyrical, writer’s mind still roams back to younger days on the Mersey, when the swish of a teacher’s cane was even more frightening than the screech of a German bomb falling from the sky.

Actually, he didn’t come from Liverpool at all, but Seacombe, that row of terraced streets and factories around the ferry terminal on the other side of the water in the old borough of Wallasey.

Peter Sale, as he is really called, became familiar with the Irish tone because he was the only boy in his class with an English name. So his book, Tom Kipper’s Schooldays, has the secondary title, Memories of an Irish Childhood in Liverpool.

This, of course, is not strictly true, but his Lon- don publisher obviously thought that Liverpool had more commercial appeal than Seacombe, partic- ularly as the city prepares to be next year’s European Capital of Culture.

The adopted name Kipper came from his Uncle Bart Finnegan, who, bizarrely, liked kippers (smoked herrings) and marmalade for breakfast, his favourite meal of the day. There’s no doubt either that Kipper is an appealing name to have on a book cover.

This book covers the familiar territory of tough times made tolerable by community spirit. In this case the community, which in style and speech still rubs the auld clod, offers alleg- iance to Our Lady and St Joseph’s Church, Seacombe, and the parish school, popularly known as “the Academy of Hard Knocks”. Despite that, it provided an excellent basic education.

We have Tom’s father, a genius of indolence and the easiest imaginable convert to the Marxian maxim that you should not work for a capitalist, therefore you should not work at all; the saintly women, who hold together the whole cart of tumbling spuds; Hail Marys, schoolyard scraps, roguery, paternoster beads; the drinks, the winks, the songs and the borrowings; the teachers good and bad; explorations and the Blitz, which reduced Tom’s terraced house to “charcoal and spaghetti”.

Peter’s book stands out because it is charmingly written – in a style a little reminiscent of James Joyce in The Dubliners or Brendan Behan in his columns/short stories for Irish papers. You can hear the language as you read the passages. Here he is after the bombing of the library.

“Father Nicholas O’Toole five months out of Ballyporeen Seminary, thrown headlong into England by his stuffy superiors, stumbled into the brick mountain on sturdy Irish legs. ‘What the divil,’ sez he, ‘is going on here’.”

“A woman,” said Jimmy Malone, “a librarian is buried beneath the mound.”

“The young priest, muscled from hurley, jumped leprechaun-like into the bricks . . . Fog spectre-style, rolled down the Mersey, enveloping immense merchant vessels and the bleak wharves, wreathing the Liver Building and the half-built Gothic cathedral, sneaking, rolling stealthily over the village and up Priory Lane at its own humorous pace, smiling.”

What of Peter Sale himself, for he leaves the impression that in the cloak of Kipper there is plenty of room for romance and fancy. He admits that some names and places have been changed for the book.

“I can hear all the words that my mother used to utter in the kitchen,” he says.

Peter, now 79, was brought up in a terraced house in Seacombe, the son of Joseph Prendergast Sale, an unemployed Marxian philosopher with a posh accent, and his wife Mary Cosgrove from Connemara. “He was completely different from all the dads the other kids had,” Peter says.

“He had a magnificent library of books by Charles Dickens. After the bomb dropped and destroyed our house, there was just one corner of the bedroom still standing. It was that corner with the book-case and I went up there with one of the kids and brought them to the bigger house we had moved into.”

The book finishes with Tom leaving the Academy of Hard Knocks.

“It was a pretty tough school, but it was absolutely wonderful. It gave me an education up to the age of 14 that was as good as you get,” the character recalls.

By January, 1941, just before the Blitz on Merseyside, Peter had taken up a position as an office boy in Liverpool.

That’s a long way from his timber and brick, single-storey house now in Paradise, to the east of San Francisco in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

“There are more trees here than you could possibly imagine and everything is as green as could be,” he says.

“But I think about Seacombe and I think about Wallasey and I think about getting across to Liverpool and I get terrible nostalgia.”

* TOM KIPPER’S Schooldays, by Peter Sale, is published by Headline at £6.99.

davidcharters@dailypost.co.uk