One of the drawbacks of meeting old friends – I mean really old friends – is that the memories that they engender can be upsetting as well as precious. Ah, yes! I know that time erases many painful recollections. Other things are too bitter to recall.  If I'm honest, my whole childhood is traumatic and psychologically painful. Like the semi-autobiographical memories that Marcel Proust writes about in  À la recherche du temps perdu  (In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past ) his classic account of Paris and the society in which he mixed in the later years of the nineteenth century,  for most people our remembrances are bitter as well as sweet.   For those prone to nostalgia even the thought of past golden days can bring a tear to the eye and a lump to the throat.

     I've been looking forward to seeing my dear childhood friend Hal McDonald for a long time, and now I'm on my way to visit him. Hal lives in the Halton Brook district of Runcorn, a new community twenty miles or so south of Liverpool, a sprawling new town that acts as an overflow for Liverpool’s teeming population. The conurbation is a planner’s dream and a visitor's nightmare. It looks fine on paper. Wide, fast, arterial roads loop around the islands of modern housing. Elegant, filigree pedestrian bridges arch over the expressways like the synapses of some vast cortex and join the separate communities into a semblance of corporate unity.

Runcorn from the air showing the Runcorn-Widnes Bridge across the River Mersey

I drive slowly along the complicated road system, eyes alert for a last-minute road sign that will point me in the right direction for Halton Brook. Except for once, we haven't seen each other for nearly fifty years.

     A year ago, we've made contact after a long break. Hal has spotted me on a TV show and contacted the company for my telephone number. He'd come to my home in South Lancashire. Now he's returned the invitation. My wife Susan-Clare says she doesn't mind me going. Hal says I can stay the night, He's alone for a couple of weeks. His wife Cathy's gone to Ireland for a holiday with some female friends.

As I draw nearer to the area where he lives, my mind goes back over the events of the past. In the spyglass of my memory, Hal and I are snotty-nosed kids again. We stand together in the street, eyes screwed up, scowling into the pale sun, dressed in our unravelled gansie [1] pullovers. We have short pants below our knees and long, crumpled woollen knee-stockings in their usual position - around our ankles. We look like two strange sepia figures from a photographic history book of mid-twentieth century working class Liverpool.

We're raised in the same poor street in the Walton area of Liverpool, situated in the shadow of the Everton Football Club. Hal and I attend the same school, sit side by side at the same desk. Together we drink our government handout milk from half-pint bottles with their cardboard tops - the ones that always  splash your chest when you push down the top. We both eat jam-butties at dinnertime.

Immigrant Welsh Jerry-builders have constructed the terraced houses in the last years of the 19th century. The Welsh brothers who finance and build these rows of battery-hen habitations, wish to be remembered - even immortalised - by these crumbling bathless hovels. Subsequently the streets they build are awarded names, the initial letter of which spells out the first names of these entrepreneurial Taffies. Their names Owen and William Owen Elias are revealed for the judgement of posterity in an infamous acrostic, which spelled the firm's title:

The houses in our street have a bay window to the front and three steep steps that lead to a stout wooden door. Usually the door is painted the same colour as the windowsills and frames. It's either a muddy brown or a dark olive green. The side of the street, which gets the sun, has peeling paintwork. The surfaces on the sunless side are smooth and cool. The women of the street keep these steps scrupulously clean. They scrub them daily on their hands and knees. They rub them with sandstone stolen from the graveyard spoil, or with a special whitening block called donkey stone. They obtain this compacted lime briquette from the ragman. The ragman pushes his barrow down the street every week. His street-cry of 'Aunt Salleeee!' brings the women streaming from the houses. They ply him with rags, and are rewarded with a donkey stone or jug-full of Aunt Sally.[2] He dips his jug into the barrel of slimy liquid and pours it into the proffered empty milk bottle. It's pink and sweet smelling, but it burns your skin.

The females of the street have a pride in the appearance of the front steps. This self-respect breeds a spirit of competition. The women make them gleam. The others look down upon a woman who has dirty steps. It's quite usual for some house-fronts to be scrubbed right across the pavement to the gutter. Above each door is a semi-circular fanlight. The inhabitants of the street position cheap china figurines in this small window. Look! Here we see a figure of a whistling boy, there an Alsatian dog. Over here, a pottery boy holds up a bowl in which real disconsolate fish swim. A chipped, moulded, dusty figure of a lad fishes with a bent pin into a bowl. Anaemic goldfish swivel sad eyes at passers-by and swim out their sad circular lives.

Another familiar figurine is of a girl. She wears a voluminous dress, blowing in the wind. Her bare arms outstretched, she holds a straining Collie dog on a lead with one hand, and a wide-brimmed bonnet to her head with other. The ceramic images reflect a lost rural idyll. The street people are the descendants of Irish and Welsh peasants who stream away from the green fields and hill farms to find work in the grimy expanding industrial Port of Liverpool in the mid nineteenth century. Some fanlights boast the well-known Staffordshire dogs placed either side. They gaze at each other in perpetual admiration. There are other variations, but I forget.

As you enter the front door, you can see the stairs straight ahead of you. The narrow lobby or hall leads to a room on the right, (to the left if the house is a mirror image.) It's known as the Parlour. This is a receiving room, a room where you deal with the rent man or the insurance man, or posh visitors. If you are a Catholic, this is the room where you receive the priest when he calls for the coins that you leave on the end of the sideboard for him. The room has an enclosed glass fronted cupboard. The best china is displayed here - never to be used! Sometimes there's a piano. The next door on the right leads to the kitchen. It isn't really a kitchen - it's the place where the family live and spend most of the time. This room has a black cast iron fireplace with a coal fire burning in a large open grate. Mam cleans the grate every week with black Zebo Polish. It makes it gleam. It has an oven, and a large kettle is always on station half on and half off the flames. My little eighteen-month-old brother Frank pulls this kettle of boiling water all over himself and is scalded to death.

High over the fireplace is a wooden mantelpiece. It's always dusty. There's a jug on this shelf where Mam puts the rent money for safety. Another door in the kitchen leads to the back kitchen. This small room is where the meals are cooked on a gas cooker. There's a large stone sink with a single cold water tap. There's no hot water supply. The big kettle in the kitchen is the hot water provider. Attached to the ceiling, in front of the fire, is a slatted clothes maiden. It's lowered from its place above and loaded with damp washing, then raised on squeaky pulleys to drip on the occupants below.

There's a door in the back kitchen that leads down steep stone steps into the cellar. In the cellar is a square brick-built structure with an inverted dome-shaped boiler. It has a small iron door at the front where you put the coal in to heat the water. This is where the family laundry is done. The cellar also contains a dolly-tub and a wooden dolly-peg. The clothes are dunked and twisted by hand with this three-legged wooden prodder, like the action of some primitive washing machine. The cellar also includes a small narrow passage with a circular grid above. Shafts of light strike down through holes in the grid into the blackness, and motes of coal dust sparkle and glitter in the miniature solar spotlights. This is where the coalman drops his bags of coal. In 1939 the council workers come and put some steel pillars in the coalhole as a makeshift air raid shelter. It makes it very difficult to shoulder ones way past the posts to get at the coal, but even more difficult to negotiate the way back as it is impossible to turn around. It is necessary to back up over the lumps of coal in the constricted space in the dark - for there's no light in the cellar. The floors of the houses are clad in linoleum.

Rugs fashioned from cut-up old clothes and blankets lie scattered about. Every door has a draught-sausage, or stuffed ladies stocking to keep out the cold blasts. In the back kitchen, a door leads to the backyard. At the bottom of the whitewashed yard, there's a lavatory with a plank of wood with a round hole. The toilet paper hangs on a loop of string on a rusty nail. It's newspaper torn into squares. In winter, it's very cold in the toilet and you have to put an overcoat on to pay a visit. On the yard wall hangs a galvanised bath. It has formed a white residue of powdery dry soap on its metallic, pitted, inner surface, which scratches you when you have a bath.

There's no bathroom. There's no hot running water. There's no electricity. There's no fridge. The house is illuminated by gas, which casts a yellow light. The fabric gas mantles are very delicate and disintegrate at the slightest touch. The gas lamp emits a quavering wheezing hiss. The people who live in the street who want a real bath have to walk a mile to Queen's Drive Public Baths. Not many people can afford this luxury. You pay four pence, (extra two pence for a towel and soap,) and sit and wait on long brown benches. The people before you slowly disappear into the warm steamy inner sanctum. Gradually you slide up the bench nearer to the door. After sometimes a couple of hours, it's your turn and the big fat woman calls out- ' NEXT!'

In my minds eye I can still see a swirl of bleary-eyed, half-laughing, half-crying working class faces, just before midnight, on New Years Eve many years ago. Local people congregate in a drunken melee in the middle of the thoroughfare, at the junction of Spellow Lane and Walton Road.

It's somewhat touching that the crowds assemble over the spot that was once the site of an underground Ladies and Gents Public Toilet. During the notorious May Blitz of  1941, hundreds of people are killed by a German bomb, which drops straight down the entrance steps to the toilets. Most of them had been drinking and singing in the bright saloon bar of the Royal Oak pub. It proves to be the revellers last dash for shelter. The rescuers retrieve most of the bodies, but fragments of flesh and bone remain and are bulldozed over. Traces of the merrymakers lie forever in the ammonia soaked earth, amongst the fragments of broken urinal stones and toilet bowls. Whether the crowds who escaped extinction are conscious of the significance of the ground, which lies under their dancing feet I'll never know. Maybe they do, but they prefer not to think about it. Perhaps they accept the reality of what has happened. Are they rejoicing that it has happened to somebody else and not to them? Indeed, had the wind been blowing slightly more strongly, or in another direction, it might have been them.

If the German bomb-aimer had taken another draw on his cigarette before he pushed the button, it might be gobbets of their own flesh and slivers of their own bone supporting the dancing feet.

Now, as I drive nearer and nearer to Hal's house, after more than fifty years, the celebrant survivors are there before my eyes again. I can see the brutalised expressions, the slobbery kisses, the exhibitionist cavortings, the maudlin sentimentality. In spite of the war, irrespective of the bombing, they prance again their fretful hour on the darkened stage of those foggy, cavorting streets. They have escaped the virulent diseases that remain unconquered at the time - they have survived to live another year - another war - another year in their drab, forlorn lives. I look back now; it brings a lump to my throat. Most of them have gone now. Their yellowing pictures in some forgotten album. They were decent hardworking people - folk whom fate had dealt a raw deal. They deserved better, but they didn't get it.

I change gear and draw up to observe a red light. A stream of traffic hurtles past. Except for the different colours, the cars look all the same to me. When I'm young, the various makes of cars were recognisably different. The lights change and I accelerate away. I pass through a street of Tudor style buildings. A crazy dog runs to the pavement edge and snaps at my nearside front tyre. I think about the street again. I reach into the glove compartment and get a boiled sweet. I glance at my watch and suck thoughtfully on the mint imperial.

My mind scrolls backward. It's a few years ago. I stand with my American friends Lily Chavez*[3] and Ema. Me and two Americans looking at the house where I was born and raised - the property in which I'd lived my nights and days until I'm twenty-one years of age. The fatherless house where Lily's food-parcels arrived in those far off poverty days long ago. The house we spy is packed with ghosts of my former life. My mother, my childhood, the overnight penny-in-the-oven to bring me luck in the important examination for Grammar School - that I failed! The Boy's Brigade, the smell of 'Brasso'.[4], my little long dead dog Blackie.

I stand with the American visitors in that bright sunshine. Their eyes observe, but don't see. Before me, on her knees my phantom mother scrubs the steps. A tear runs down my cheek. Invisible spirits with grinning smiles debouch from my former existence. Shadowy wraiths with familiar faces perform a dumb-show valse-memoire around me. A feeling like hunger grips my frame and compresses my belly. It's a yearning - a sickly hankering and longing for times gone by. I think of Marcel Proust. Why, like him, am I so controlled by the powerful forces of regression?  Why am I so moved and intrigued by the anonymous faces I see on old newsreels and old photographs? Is it that I'm part of some connective matrix of strong emotion with times gone by? Why do I record the present in such obsessional detail and concern for the useless dead ephemeral of time's detritus? My mother - lurches back from The Red Brick alehouse, a little the worse for drink. I hate her beery kisses, the false bonhomie, and the rank smell of tobacco. Now I reach out for her. Oh! If only I could hold her again! I squirm with a mixture of guilt and regret!

I turn on my car radio and music blasts out. There's a pub. It's the one that Hal told me to look out for, when he gave me the directions. As I swing the wheel and the car enters Hal's estate, I realise that my poor Mum - after working at a sewing machine all week in a dark satanic mill - needed a release, needed a break from the humiliation, the de-feminisation. The daily factory grind that stole her youth! Poor, poor, Mam.

My mother, Annie, did not have a very enjoyable life. She's born into the British industrial working class in 1904. Annie's origins are not exactly an ideal launch pad for a successful and rewarding life! Many overcome the lack of educational opportunity and make something of themselves, but the majority sink back into a mire of hopelessness for lack of stimulation and encouragement. She passes through a period in her early teens when she's receiving  literary input, mainly the poetry of Thomas Hood, Robert Burns and is quite expert on The Ingolsby Legends of the Rev.Thomas Barnham, which is fascinating verse which is little known nowadays) from her educated and inteligent  father, Hugh, it all fades away.  Though extremely witty and very good at rhyming poetry her mind seems to stop developing and become less inquisitive when she is seventeen. Her intellectual horizons shrink back, ossify, and remain so, ever after. She votes labour but has an internalised politico-philosophical position that sees the 'toffs' as inherently superior. She's an expert on the genealogical intricacies of our raddled[5] Royal family. She can still recite a poem eulogising the German Kaiser, that our pre-1914 - 1918 war schoolchildren were forced to learn 'parrot-fashion'.

She learns the poem in her school in Hull in 1912, when the relationship between the British empire and Germany  is one of warmth, and before the horror of the first world war is unleashed. This goodwill is principally engendered by the close family links between the various European monarchies; mainly due to the proliferation of Queen Victoria’s numerous relations and many descendants. In 1914 of course, the warmth between the two nations turns to extreme hatred, and some maintain that it has never returned.

She's capable of remembering every word of this poem in her ninety-third year, except for most of the last verse.

In order to trace the source of the poem, I write to Pam Ayres who has her own radio show on BBC Two. I ask if any of her listeners might be able to provide the name of the poet and the missing words, and help round off what is a beautiful, historically interesting, (if somewhat overly sentimental) ballad. One of her listeners, who owns a compendium of Edwardian poetry finds the piece and sends it to me. Here it is:

The Kaiser’s Questions.

The Kaiser.[6] went to the orphanage, upon a summer's day, And the children braided their flaxen hair and tied it with ribbon gay; They tied it with ribbons pink and blue and each wore her dress of white And the Kaiser said he thought no man could see a lovelier sight. He took his plumed hat off his head, and the children curtsied low; “God bless you children dear,” he said, “and make you in wisdom grow,” Then he called to his side a blue-eyed maid, as fair as a child could be, He said, “Come stand thou here, pretty maid, and answer me questions three “This lily so pure and white and sweet - to what kingdom does it belong?” “To the vegetable kingdom Sire,” - and her voice was like a song. “And this little harp of purest gold?” (He showed her a mimic lyre). She looked up with a smile, and said, “To the mineral kingdom Sire.” “Now tell me, my clever little maid, to what kingdom do I belong?” She thought of lions, and cows, and sheep - the animal sure is wrong. And with a still and solemn air she said - “I think to the kingdom of heaven.” The Kaiser looked up, and then he looked down, and his eyes were full of tears. “The kingdom of heaven dwells,” he said, “in a child of tender years.”

Nowadays, children are encouraged to grasp an overview of a subject matter, rather than concentrate on the isolated components of a genre. Today of course, less emphasis is placed on learning by rote. Powers of recall are not considered of great value, and this makes my mother's achievement all the more incredible!

Not everybody has the same chances in life. Not everybody is blessed (or burdened,) with that grim determination to succeed.

She's living here with us up until she dies in 1997 aged 96 years old. She has her own room, so she has her privacy. We have a nurse who comes in every morning and bathes her, which is a great help. She's no trouble to care for and she's very good with Cameron who is just a small baby. She sits in her room, rocking his chair for hours on end. Twenty years ago she developed a hiatus hernia, so she has not eaten solid food for all that time. She survives on those special vitamin-packed drinks, which ironically may have been responsible for her great age, as normally she would probably have not received all the nutriments and protein from her usual diet.

She's certainly a child of her time, and I suppose it's easy to criticise her failings. Now I'm older I understand. I loved her dearly. Oh! If only one could turn back the clock!


I stop at a red light. Then I experience another flash back. I'm there again with my American visitors. They stand there uncomprehendingly looking at the frontage of the house in that mean street. They're somewhat disconsolate. They shift from foot to foot. We pose for photographs. 'What are we expected to say?' One of them sighs. 'We can hardly say - It's an interesting slum!'

Flecks of rain spot the windscreen. I switch on the wipers. The pale sun has disappeared. Dark clouds scud across a sullen sky. I think about Susan-Clare and my three small sons. I crest a hill a see the River Mersey spread out below me. A vast winding ribbon of pewter. Hal moved out to this town fourteen years ago. I think about the vast expanse of time that flows backwards to the street and Hal.

I start to think about my father. My father John Owen Evans is born on 15 Sep 1906 in Liverpool. He dies on Monday 4 January 1971 in South London. He's cremated on Thursday 7 January 1971 in London.

Dad is brought up in very poor circumstances. His mother Georgina Evans (nee Bourne) is a hotel maid, and his father, (also called John Evans,) is occupied in the tanning trade. The family lives in Rockingham Street, (now demolished) which was located off Stanley Road in a poor area of Liverpool. He's the eldest of six children. He has a brother George, as well as four sisters - Ginny, Aggie, Minnie and May. The last named May - or Edna May to give her correct name is illegitimate. When the father of the family - John senior returns from soldiering in the First World War, he discovers the child, and throws out his wife Georgina. She flees to Blackpool and goes back to her hotel work, leaving the unfortunate ex-soldier with six children, one of which isn't his own child. Of course he can't cope with the children and hold down his job as a warehouseman at the same time, and the children are taken into care and sent to the Leyfield Convent in Honeysgreen Lane, West Derby.

In 1920, my father John and his younger brother George get into trouble over swinging on a shop-blind in Stanley road, and the young boys are hauled up before the Stipendary Magistrate. John, being fourteen and the older of the pair is given the opportunity of either going to Borstal or joining the army. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he chooses the latter, and soon after he signs on as a drummer-boy in The Royal Welch Fusiliers whose regimental HQ is at Wrexham in North Wales. A short time later he finds himself on board a ship to India, where he is to remain for twelve years serving in Karachi, Bombay, and the Khyber Pass area.

After appearing before the magistrates my father's brother, George elects to go down the mine in 1921 at the age of thirteen. He then finds a job in a Blackpool garage. He's seventeen by that time. On his return to Liverpool, he lives with Aunt Sal in the Barlow's Lane area, [off Bradewell Street]. Subsequently he joins the same regiment as my father - The Royal Welch Fusiliers, and goes out to India where they meet up. My father and George return to Liverpool from India in 1933.

My Dad's now a civilian again and unemployed. My mother works as a machinist in the Dunlop Rubber Company sewing the uppers for canvass footwear. They live together for six years but after parting, they are to remain married all their lives, for my mother refuses to give him the divorce he so badly wants.

The tragic death of my brother Frank at the age of two years is a major contributory factor in the break-up of my parent's marriage. The unfortunate, inquisitive Frankie pulls a kettle of boiling water over his chest from its permanent position on the hob. He's been left unsupervised in the small kitchen, which doubles as a living room. My parents haven't provided a barrier to avoid such an accident. It's an accident waiting to happen. They're both guilty of gross neglect by any standard of judgement. A fireguard could have been obtained very cheaply. There are plenty of cheap second-hand ones available on practically every street corner. If things are so bad that they can't even afford a used guard, then the kettle should have been removed from its position near the glowing coals. Alternatively, one or other of the partners should have watched the child like a hawk.

With the child covered in a blanket, my desperate and frantic father runs the mile and a half to Walton Hospital. There's no time to try to find a telephone box, and there are no taxis to be hailed. It's to no avail - when my panting father arrives at the hospital his baby is dead in his arms. The Death Certificate reads:

                             'Death from pneumonia following scalding to the chest.'

The date of this dreadful catastrophe is 16 September 1936. The whole episode is appalling, with mutual blame and recrimination. In early 1939, my Dad rejoins the army. The marriage is over. Having no father is like living in the middle of a void. There's a painful vacuum. It's no use pretending otherwise. I try to brave it out. I claim to my little friends that I don't need a Dad – but I damn well do!

At the outbreak of World War II in September of 1939, when I'm four years old, I'm evacuated to the countryside of Worcestershire, which is a beautiful rural area in the centre of England. Clutching my gas mask, I'm taken by train with my school-children friends to the small market town of Tenbury Wells, where I'm lodged for six years. My mother has to remain in Liverpool to work. I don't see her for four years.

I'm very lonely with my foster parents Charlie and Louisa Horton. Charlie's the head gardener at Burford Gardens, which is owned by Lord Whitbread of the brewing family. I miss my Mam dreadfully and don't understand why I've been sent away from her. When I feel sad I go and sit by the Roman Weir*[7] which is on the River Teme behind Burford Church.

I return to Liverpool when the war ends to a broken home. My parents have separated, and my mother brings me up alone. This is a great economic struggle for her.

My Dad goes off and lives in Oxford with another woman. I don't see him and am not reconciled with him for over twenty years. My Dad died years ago, but I miss him still. He's out of reach. Death has moved him away again – just out of range – just when I got used to touching him again.

I live with my Mum in Eton Street and Hal lives over the road with his Mum and Dad and seven siblings. It's just after the end of World War Two. Things are very cold, grey, dreary and tough in Britain. Food is scarce and clothing is almost impossible to buy.

Money is extremely short, especially for people like my hard-working mother, who's bringing up a child on her own. When you're a kid, you accept things just as they are. When you get older and travel around a bit you examine your childhood environment critically. You see it for what it really is. In our case – Hal and I agree – It's a slum!

Hal’s Dad is a Liverpool docker. Early in the morning, you can see him walking down the street. He has a curved pipe clenched between his jaws. On his head, he wears shiny flat cap. It's flat because he carries bales of cotton on his head. Over his shoulder hangs an old army bag. It contains his carrying out. *[8] His docker’s hook hangs from his belt. It looks sinister like the pirate captain's in Peter Pan.

Hal’s mother stands in the doorway in her flowery pinnie, watching her husband disappear into the early morning fog. For a moment, he stands at the bottom of the street on the corner by the Red Brick pub (real name; The King Alfred). He doffs his cap and waves it at the distant figure. Then he's gone. A small stout woman with pale blue eyes, Mrs. Mac's figure is bent with the burdens of raising a large family. In her youth, she has a fine voice.

She appears in a singing role as an amateur on the local music hall – the Rotunda Theatre  in Scotland road. There are singsongs in the Macs' front parlour. They gather at Christmas, on birthdays, on sad days, on happy days, at funerals, at weddings. When the Macs' have a party in their front parlour there's a lot to drink. Hal’s Mum stands by the piano and sings a medley of those moving, meaningful songs of the Great War and the twenties and early thirties. Her voice at this time is a shrill vibrato, but she hits the right notes and displays an assurance that indicates more than a passing familiarity with the lyrics.

There's Roses of Picardy and The Sunshine of Your Smile, and especially My mother’s Eyes.

She sings in a beautifully controlled contralto voice-

Everybody in those immediate post-war days has his song  or her song. Some people recited a poem, others played a tune with two spoons clicked against their knees. The words impart some meaning into their flickering, ephemeral lives.

                          'Give us YOUR song!' Those long dead voices shout.

Now time has stilled the voices, never to sing again.

There are eight McDonald children. Elsie is the eldest girl. She's my favourite. To me she has a look of a film star called Jeannette McDonald. Elsie has big blue eyes and coiffured, Marcel-waved hair. *[9] She eventually marries a dark, handsome sailor called Matt. They get a house is Nesfield Street off Sleeper’s Hill. Bob who's the second eldest and the tallest of the family follows her. Later Bob will kill himself. He's driven mad by the vivid memories of the wartime carnage he has witnessed as a sailor on an Aircraft Carrier with the Pacific Fleet. Poor Bob puts his head in the gas-oven and commits suicide to escape from the mental torment. The memory of seeing his mates torn to pieces by bullets from the Japanese planes had become too much to bear any longer. Hal finds his brother's body in the back kitchen. He'd attached a rubber pipe to the cooker and shoved it down his throat. Hal has to break the news to his Mam. Understandably, Mrs. Mac never gets over the tragedy.

Then comes Walter, who's a sprightly, confident man with tight, clingy wavy hair that looks as if it has been Marcel-waved like his sister's. He's straight as a ramrod both in character and physique. There's another girl whose name is Agnes. She's very fair and slim. I can see her now with her Mrs Miniver.[10] hairstyle and dressed in frocks with padded ‘forties-style' shoulders.

Jenny, the youngest girl is very pretty with huge brown eyes and shoulder- length hair. She's endowed with the loveliest, laziest winning smile that you ever did see. Billie is very small as a lad and hated being called 'Titch' at school. Billie is a couple of years older than Hal and me, but he includes us in his gang of ragamuffins. When he joins the army, he suddenly shoots up in height. He also shoots up the promotion ladder very rapidly becoming a sergeant after only three years. It's a terrible tragedy when Billie dies of a kidney complaint in his early thirties. He leaves a young wife and children.

Then there's Hal. George is the youngest. Always a quiet withdrawn lad, he remains a bachelor all his life. He's the one who remains in 67 Eton Street when all the other birds have flown the nest and his Mum and Dad have passed away. Even today, he hasn't moved far away. He lives in a flat in nearby Langham Street.

Hal, Billie and me join The Lifeboys[11] together at the local County Road Methodist Church. Looking back now, it proves a lifelong influence on our behaviour and outlook. I still remember the feel of the rough wool of the dark blue gansey and the coarse feel of the blancoed lanyard that hangs around our necks. The badge on our breasts is a brass life belt and we wear dark blue sailor hats with Lifeboys in gold on the hatband. We meet twice a week. On Tuesdays it's gym night. We run around in circles and jump over the buck[12] and somersault onto the mats. The leader is an amiable, stout woman called Miss Edna Brooke. She dresses in square-shouldered jackets and calf-length, dark, heavy skirts with flat, wide brogue shoes. She has a round, kind, and pleasantly chubby face with dark whiskers on her chin. She's authoritative, but genial. Her assistant is a shy, slight, mouse of a girl – possibly her lover. Why couldn’t we see it then?

Later, at the age of twelve, we move up to the Boy’s Brigade. The discipline is much stricter. The leader is Captain Jones. He has one eye. His other eye is a glass one that never moves. He tells us that a Japanese soldier stuck a knife in his other eye because Captain Jones spilled some soup on his uniform. Captain Jones leaves all the hands-on work to his lieutenants, Lt. Farragher, Lt. Naylor, Lt. Brindle and six-foot-six Lt. Henry Thurston who lives in our street. Henry Thurston's house is on the same side as Hal's, the sunny side.

Oh! Yes, there's second-in-command Captain Oliphant as well. We attend a sports night and a drill night. The discipline is quite tough, and any boy who messes around too much is kicked out. We have a Church Parade on Sunday mornings. We march around the area with a band of bugles and drums. Everyone is envious of the bass drummer with his leopard-skin tabard.

In the afternoon, we attend Bible Class, (I was rather sweet on the teacher - a Miss Birch) and in the evening, we're expected to attend the church service.

We have many other little friends in Eton Street. I'll deliberately mention them, for I've a feeling that if I don't, they'll be irrevocably lost in the deep black maw of history and never heard of again.

There's Raymond Trafford, Alan Unwin, Tommy and Roy Lello, The Cliff brothers, Albert and John Carrol, Alan and John Lee, Nicky Cusack, Jimmy Knowles, Norman Chambers, John McDonald. The girls in our age group are - Betty Hengler, Gwladys and Muriel Boardman, Ann Fletcher, Vicky Burt, Josie Cusack.

A friend of mine who lives in Liverpool sees a photograph of our street in the Liverpool Echo some time ago, and cuts it out and sends it to me. It is obviously shot from the window of the entertainment suite of the Everton Football Club, where the manager, Joe Kelly, used to have his office in the old days.

I remember that Nicky Cusack[13] once threw the pillow from his sister, Josie's, doll's pram up towards that window about 30 feet above - it lodged on Kelly's window-sill and remained there for twenty-three years!

I look at the photograph. In the old days, there are hardly any cars to be seen in the street, (other than when there is a football match!) I see that the lampposts are new. The newspaper photograph could have been taken fifty years ago! Our street is very much like the street in the longest running British TV soap, Coronation Street. Maybe that is why I'm so much of a fan and never miss an episode.

Like Coronation Street, the street is blessed with many characters. Ninny Timewell is a bandy-legged, unmarried harridan, who's always chasing us if we play ball near her house. J - - -  is a burly docker. He's habitually drunk. On some days, he slides in and out of the bay windows as he navigates his way up the street on his way home from work. He grins one of his stupid lob-sided smirks at us kids. We whistle and laugh at his shambling figure. He tries to chase us and falls drunkenly to the ground. We dance around him holding hands. We sing the old children's nursery rhyme.

   'Ring a ring of roses, A pocket full of posies, Atishoo! Atishoo! We all fall down.'

With that we all drop down and sit with him. The miscreant falls back and lies snoring within the circle of laughing children.

We know that yet another cargo of ship's spirits has been broached. For the last few hours, he has been propping up the bar in some dock road pub. His long-suffering wife, waits for him on the steps and clouts him round the ear as he staggers into the house. We feel sorry for his daughter.  She's mortified to witness her Dad's ignominy. It would have been funny if we had not known that he had boozed away all the housekeeping. Soon after, my mother hears a knock on the door. His desperately  thin wife is on the step. I hear my Mam commiserate with her. 'Can I borrow a cup of sugar, luv?’ Says the woman quietly.

Josie Whitty is the local femme fatale. She's a huge-breasted frowsy, blonde-haired woman with a heart of gold.  There are a hundred houses in the street and we knew everyone in them.

We play the usual street games familiar to most urban children of the time. Two of the most popular ones are 'Al-lal-ee–oh,' which is a chasing game and 'Film Stars'. The rules of Film Stars are as follows. The child who's ‘In’ would throw a rubber ball at the wall opposite and shout the initials of a well-known film star’s name. For example E. F. The child who correctly guesses Errol Flynn has to catch the ball after it hits the ground and bounces once, then shout out the initials of another. Of course, there's Hide & Seek and plenty of skipping and bouncing-ball games. Cricket and football are played in the street. Coats are used for goal posts, and chalk marks suffice for wickets.

Many are the sunlit afternoons and echoing twilights that we bat and kick away our transient childhood.

Notes:

[1] Gansie. Liverpool slang for a Guernsey pullover

[2]Aunt Sally. An early form of liquid soap

[3] Lily Chavez. Fifty years later I manage to trace her through a Texan radio station. Later, in 1997 she comes to our home in the North of England to visit us.

[4] Brasso. A liquid brass cleaner.

[5] Raddled. From the noun: Raddle - a red mineral for rouging the cheeks. It is found in the Lancaster area. The red coloured powder was also used for colouring the front steps of houses red.

[6] Kaiser Wilhelm.

[7] Roman Weir. I have never checked as to the weir's Roman origin. When I spoke to the then owner, Mr. John Treasure in 1993, he said he believed that the weir was of seventeenth century vintage. I would like my ashes scattered there after my death.

[8] 'Carrying out'. Packed lunch.

[9] An American system of perming hair using an intricate system of hot curling tongs. The effect was of a severely contoured wave which looked very artificial - almost like a wig

[10] Mrs. Miniver. Exemplary British middle class housewife of a wartime film played by Greer Garson

[11] Lifeboys. A church based youth organisation for boys aged 7 to 11.

[12] The buck. An artificial horse with two handholds for physical exercises. [13] Nicky Cusack. Died of alcoholism aged 43.