A personal reflection on a Wirralian life

Jun 2 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

IT’S an old curmudgeon of a town, really; not the place to be if you don’t like the smell of human breath, blowing into your nose from a mouth that’s soaked in beer or whisky or memories, as eager to complain as the day is long.

Maybe that’s how I’ll always think of it. I still see two heads together, friends sitting on plastic-puffed stool at a wooden bar in a pub, where they kept a pork-pie under a Perspex dome to impress strangers.

Dogs snoozed on the patched carpet with one eye eternally open, while the stained fingers of their masters rolled cigarettes in dented, screw-lidded, green tins.

Into the rolling afternoons, their masters spoke, exchanging smoked philosophy, while their breath grew thicker and their nods ever-closer and more sympathetic, until their blood-shot eyes were almost rubbing each other in passionate understanding.

Yes, they were masters of their kind, Michelangelos of gloom, and if you listened to them from a discreet distance, you could understand why they felt that way.

“You’re so right there, pal. And, you know what, he saw it comin’, sittin’ there is his big office, but he never done nothing about it. So that was it, lad, we were all on the bloody scrapheap.”

The loss of jobs in the Birkenhead shipyards, docks and allied factories in the late 1970s was a private matter made public by its immense scale.

And as a reporter from the posh part of town, I was privileged to be allowed into the homes of people whose conditions, values, prejudices and hopes, I would not otherwise have been able to appreciate.

If your heart has a warm beat, this town, with his grand mansions overlooking squat streets, will always make you feel for the underdog.

By listening, you learned. People who talked too much remained ignorant. And there were a lot of them.

When I was little, with pale knees peeping from short, grey pants, I remember seeing men with missing limbs on Grange Road.

What a lovely road it was then.

There were those Welsh-green Austin A35 vans parked outside the various produce shops. Men in smart tunics called their customers “sir” and “madam” and pretended, with a cunning wink, to have put aside a special slice of fish or a pork chop for each one of them. “I kept this one for you. Mrs...”

Occasionally, but not often, one of the old soldiers would be seen begging on the pavement.

Old hands would be placed on young shoulders and you would be ushered away without a word. Ssshh.

In the big department store, there was a model of a little, blond boy on crutches holding out a begging box, in which you were invited to place a penny to help him and other “cripples”.

He stood in a corner of the store’s cafe, where the generally well-to-do wives of business and professional men gathered around tables to gossip over coffees served in cups and saucers, under which they hid a “kitty” (tip) for the waitress.

Overhead, fans whirred and wheezed, circulating the fug and reminding me of films I had seen of French North Africa.

Up the hill, on the Oxton ridge, near the bombed ruins of a pub called the Caernarfon Castle (which would be rebuilt in the mid-1950s), ran the Flatt Lanes, which skirted a pill-box, in which a woman had been strangled to death with her own stocking some years earlier.

“Her own STOCKING!” people said with terrific emphasis.

For some reason this seemed to give the murder a special flavour.

I was too young to know what she had been doing in the pill-box.

Apparently, however, she had not been sheltering from an unexpected shower.

The words “no better than she ought to have been” were regularly applied to her character, accompanied by Presbyterian shakes of the head and loud sighs.

To me it seemed that she must have been a most appealing person, to have been described like that.

The area was mostly Celtic with the chapel-Welsh, the professional Scottish and the more carefree Irish much in evidence.

It was said that some of the clergy were not above “poaching souls”, whatever that might mean.

At all times of day, visitors to houses would be asked whether they wanted tea, coffee of “something stronger”.

The coffee, of course, was blended with chicory. “Chico” was a brand name, which hinted, subtly, at its content.

As you advanced down the Flatt Lanes from the pill-box, before the area was lost under houses, there was a network of ponds fed by an open-sewer, rather gloriously called the River Fender.

Children fished in these ponds, though I can’t recall anything being caught.

But there was a report of uncertain origin about a drowning in the biggest pond, the victim being variously described as a child, a cat or a dog.

The general consensus being that the loss of a dog should be mourned rather more than that of a cat or child.

Children tend to be indifferent to the passing world, as they plan their own futures.

But soon after joining the Birkenhead News as a cub reporter, I became an obituarist – sent to knock on the front-doors of widows, asking them if they would let me, a callow teenager, write a tribute to their dear, dead husbands for the paper.

Most were happy to invite me in. The experiences of those days helped me to ask the right questions later in my career.

It was in the parlours of kind strangers that I saw the photographs of brothers, sweethearts, husbands and fathers framed on the mantel-pieces – the men who had gone to war and returned and those who had not.

I had seen some of them in their long coats on Remembrance Sundays. I would never forget them. Poppies sold on pavements.

The old soldier I remember most was Mr Blakeman, who ran the local dairy and general store.

He was such a kind fellow with his little moustache.

People whispered that in the Great War, he had been badly wounded and the empty arm on his brown tunic was always neatly pinned, so that it didn’t hang loose.

At Christmas, he laid cotton wool in his window, decorated with lights, animals and a big snowman. It was so beautiful, beautiful enough to draw tears, even now.

And then the 1960s began to swing.

Along the promenades at Parkgate, West Kirby and Hoylake, long-haired girls in miniskirts licked ice cream cornets provocatively and sat on the bonnets of sports cars or on the back of mod-scooters, while guitar tunes throbbed from transistor radios.

Even vicars grew their hair, but on the country lanes you could still hear the clip-clop and the snorts of horses, leaving their steaming deposits to remind us that we were surrounded by farmland. Cool beer and long hair heralded a new spirit. The world of the young had begun.

But in the towns the old world of Welsh-dressers, Bibles and newly-pressed Sunday suits was being brushed into history.

Sometimes when walking my old dog, Sebastian, on Bidston Hill, I would think of these things. I still do, but now I walk with my wife and son.

Indeed, I was lucky to have been born in Wirral, to have walked the banks of the Dee and the Mersey and to have watched the ceaseless flow of both rivers from the rising heathlands.

The sun rises and the sun sets over Wirral.

So we can see the coming and going of each day. But I can promise you this. That old curmudgeon of a town, smelling of beer, whisky, pies and salt, is always there, rubbing your soul.