David Charters: When going to the Cavern Club one had to make careful preparations to look cool

Jun 3 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

I WAS never a regular “Cave-dweller” myself. That was the name given by the pale compere, with the pout and punning ways, to the boys and girls with dark armpits and cigarette breath, who stepped into the crush of the old fruit cellar.

But I see them now – those beehive-haired, cheap-scented, cross-legged secretaries on swivel stools, who were unleashed from their offices for lunch; the greased rebels and the bar-counter Commies, thrill-seekers and sailors; the two-bit cashiers, who dabbed their fingers on a sponge to faster count the bank-notes; shop stewards, council-flat revolutionaries, that compere Bob Wooler, unpublished poets, barrow boys, art students hanging their lust in front of shop girls, barmaids sounding posh, curates sounding rough, clerks of the law and men of the cloth.

There, they bopped and rocked and squeezed each other with indelicate hands and pop-eyed innocence, as the stone floor trembled to the guitars on the arched stage. Those were the charmed days of the city, remembered in the smell of frying onions, which have slid into our folk mythology, cradled by the vivid glow of an endless sunset called nostalgia.

Of course, the memory doesn’t have 20/20 vision. Some recollections are clouded by the mood of the time or coloured by unfulfilled wishes, the smile of someone untouched in a dream, who has never aged. But there is nothing wrong with that. We call it the romance of history.

On a few occasions, I accompanied a group of friends to the Cavern Club on Mathew Street. But you had to make careful preparations if you wanted to seem cool in those fashion-conscious days, when traditional parents viewed the social changes all around them through sceptical eyes.

So it was that I strolled out of the front-door wearing sensible slacks, a checked sports jacket and a stout pair of brogues. You see, my mother always thought that Donegal tweeds and cavalry twills were my style. Even now, I twitch inwardly at the sight of a country tailor’s tape-measure.

“There’s a young man on his way to a nature ramble. By Jove, Myrtle, he’s forgotten his butterfly net, ” observed one neighbour. “No,” said another. “I think you may be wrong there, Maude. He has the hungry stride of a young man heading for a Bible class.”

However, after advancing a few yards down the road, I hummed a nonchalant melody and doubled-back to the coal-shed, where, under a sheet in the corner, I hid a pair of Winklepickers, jeans and a black leather jacket. In the murk I changed, taking care to keep the coal dust off my clothes. Then, with the cunning of an Apache, I padded back into the daylight, convinced that I looked like a beat-poet. “Hey, man, dig those crazy shoes.”

Here again, we have the romance of history. The truth was that Winklepickers made my feet look painfully long, a weakness accentuated by tight jeans, which stopped a whisker or two above lime-green socks, affording admirers a tantalising glimpse of milky ankle.

Well, a couple of weekends ago, I was reunited with some of the old gang for a 60th birthday party. We laughed until the tears rolled on down our cheeks, recounting tales of how it had been. They were just little stories, our memories offered to a great big world and re-coloured here and there.

My wife, from a younger generation, listened, smiling and shaking her head, while our 12-year-old son gasped in amazement. “My dad did that! Honestly?”

By coincidence, the next day the three of us went back to the Cavern, now in an adjacent cellar, but essentially the same. Older boys at St Anselm’s College, Birkenhead, were presenting Battle of the Bands, or “groups” as we would have called them.

But before telling you about that, I should report a sad incident. Walking to the railway station, I heard a man in a tracksuit scream after being knocked from his bike at traffic lights. He was a portly chap in his 30s with a nasty gash to his head. Although drunk, he was obviously in distress. Not one driver stopped, though a woman pedestrian joined us in helping him to safety. We waited together for the ambulance.

“We were the Good Samaritans,” said our son. “Maybe that’s pitching it a bit high,” I said, “but I’m glad we helped him.”

The boys at the Cavern were wonderful and their teachers’ group was good, too, with their version of Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall. Rock and roll lives on, but it has new melodies carried by younger men. Ghosts bow in the shadows. All life becomes history.

* LISTEN to David Charters on his picture podcast at www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk