The British Legion Club band suddenly stops and the dancers return slowly to their seats. The sound of conversation wells up from the area around the bar. I look sideways at Hal; he's chewing his lower lip in contemplation.

'I don't know whether you recall the excitement in the street when the men came to build the air-raid shelters?'

'They arrive with horses and carts carrying bricks and building materials. After the workmen have knocked-off for the day, us kids get amongst the bricks and sand and build our own little houses. I remember this particularly well, because I try to carry a heap of bricks. I'm being very busy and industrious. A brick falls on my toe, and I'm in agony. The other kids are laughing their heads off. I can still think back to the pain from that toe. Afterwards I can't understand why the toe- nail is going another colour.'

I mention the The Red Brick pub at the bottom of our street, has now been painted blue and wonder if the locals now call it The Blue Brick instead? but I am interupted as woman on another table waves to Hal. 'How's Cathy?' she shouts. 'Fine,' Hal calls back to her, 'I'll tell her you were asking after her!'

Hal sniffs and turns his face away from her. 'Friend of Cath's, I don't like her myself. Too fond of the ale and a good time. I've heard she's at it with another guy.'

'I know I'm always talking about time,' frowns Hal, 'but time seems expandable when you're a kid.'

He smiles and takes up the story once more.

'You know my thoughts on 'time' don't you Hal?' I answer, 'For me 'Time' does not exist - only changing objects (including human objects like us) exist and the changes we humans observe in objects (for example the changing position of the earth around the sun) we 'measure' with an abstraction we call 'Time.' Therefore just you and I and the objects which surround us in the environment that we call 'the world' actually exist.

Hal frowns quizzically, takes a another drink and continues...

'The toe-nail goes blue for a year and then black for a year, and the process of falling off takes another year - or so it seems. In reality, the whole process probably only takes two to three weeks!'

He looks down at his foot as if to recall the pain of his damaged toenail.'

'When the shelters are built, we feel safe. When the air-raid sirens go off after that, we head for the shelter. Mam and Dad gather all the family together and it doesn't matter what you're wearing at the time. The priority is - get in the shelter quick! Of course, there's a blackout. You can't see your hand in front of you - unless it's a full moon

One night we all rush out in a panic - we're all fleeing - the whole street's fleeing for the protection of the shelters. I run full tilt into the lamp post that stands outside Betty Hengler's house. I run full smack into it - full in the face.' Hal rubs his forehead ruefully. 'I am picked up, carried into the shelter, and put in a bunk. D'yuh remember those smelly bunks? There's me, Betty Hengler and our Georgie gets put in the bunk.

The grown ups in the shelter start singing. Someone has a mouth organ or a squeezebox. It's a great singsong. If anyone's brought some beer, they all got the ale down. Mr Hengler, who's a docker (like my Dad) , is very good. Maybe it's for a selfish reason - I don't know, but he never forgets to bring a bucket. The bucket's put outside around the side of the shelter. Anyone, who wants a pee, gives a polite little cough and a nod to someone who's by the entranceway - to indicate that they won't be a minute.

Out they go to use the bucket. The flash of exploding bombs intermittently illuminates the darkness. Silver rivers of tracer-bullets flow upward into the sky. It's just like Guy Fawkes' night!

Us kids can hear the grown-ups peeing into the bucket. D'yuh know the sound when liquid is poured into a bucket - there's a hollowing sound and it's almost musical? As it fills up, the tone changes. We enjoy the sound of the pee going in the bucket - and d'yuh know, it gets that way, we look forward to it. They try to cover up the noise of it by whistling or singing - but we can always hear it. I always feel like telling them: 'You're wasting your time - we know you've been peeing in the bucket!'

If there's any drink going, then maybe one or two of the women would go, but most of them stay with the children all night. They don't seem to have to go.

Waking up in an air-raid shelter is a great novelty. You get dressed and walk out of the door straight into the street. When you go back in the house, you often find the water is off. Something's been hit and you've got to go down to the bottom of the street. You've got to go to the standpipe and wait in a big long queue to fill a kettle with water. You take it home so Mam can make a cup of tea.

After the war's over, the air-raid shelters are abandoned and just stand unused in the street. They soon lose their aura of importance and protectability. We kids use them as play areas. When it's getting late and we want a pee, we know there's a danger our Mam will keep us in if we go into the house - well sometimes we nip into the shelter and have a pee there. Because of this, the shelters become stinky places.

After the ALL CLEAR, if it's been a daylight raid, we go looking for shrapnel, which is very exciting. Sometimes you pick up a piece of shrapnel at the top of Claudia Street and Leta Street after they get hit. You go rummaging around. You find a bit of shrapnel - Ah! There's a piece! - you say, and you pick it up, and then drop it quickly because it's still red hot, though it's a long time after it's fallen. Then there's all those notices, y'know - 'Careless talk costs lives!' 'Save waste paper!' 'Save scrap metal!' We take tin cans and old newspapers to school for the war effort

Both our Walter and our Bob are called up for the navy. They get draughted into the Royal Navy. We hear Walter is in a ship that bombards Sicily, and our Bob is a stoker or something on board an aircraft carrier that fighting against the Japs in the Pacific.

Walter meets Al Jolson while he's in New York. Bob's ship is hit badly, and there's lots of bodies lying around. People don't recognise shell shock in those days. Nowadays you get counselling for that sort of thing. In those days, you just have to get on with it. With Bob, those things are buried deep inside him. But as you and I know they come to the surface some time later and affect him deeply - but I wont go on about that now.'

There's a sudden deafening boom. A mistake with the amplification system's volume control unleashes a cacophony of jangling noise. An exaggerated tapping of the microphone follows, as the old man tests the equipment. We're interrupted by the strident voice of the bingo caller, 'Eyes down ladies and gentlemen for a full house!' Although we've purchased bingo cards earlier and we strike off our numbers diligently, our luck is out.

'The time comes for us to leave Gwladys Street School and go to Priory Road School, or to give its proper name - Stanley Park Secondary Modern. It's then I begin to feel aware of myself. It's a mixed school. I start to look at myself in the mirror and I don't like what I see. When I look at the other kids I know, such as Roy Lello, I see a kid who's quite handsome. Jud Evans is quite a good-looking boy too. He's regular features and nice dark hair. I look at them, I look in the mirror, and what do I see? Oh! I don't know what I look like! Something under par anyway. I have irregular teeth, squinty kind of eyes, hair all over the place. Scruffy as hell. Dozy as hell. Thick as hell. The more I see the more I try to hide. Then we have to go to Priory Road.

Soon after we start there, we have to sit some exams, to see were we fitted into the scheme of things. There again, I wasn't very pleased with myself - I did very poorly. I'm put into some kind of class where nowadays they put kids they call 'divvies'. So I'm in the divvies class when I began to notice girls. The girls never took any notice of me of course. Sometimes the girls used to flit around certain of the boys - and one of the boys they used to flit around is Ronnie Smith from Winslow Street. He's taller than I am. He has sort of aquiline features, he's wide eyed, and he's intelligent looking. He's a good head of hair and all the rest of it. I don't like him. I should have liked him I suppose because everybody else did.'

'I don't like him,' I interjected, 'I thought he's a snide!'

'I started to come on a bit as the years went by', continues Hal, 'I'm noticing girls more. Becoming aware. I'm aware of Betty Hengler for instance. Betty took a shine to me. I thought then that she's a fatty, but if someone takes notice of you like Betty used to take notice of me - I'm quite grateful for it. In the petty squabbles that used to take place in the street, Betty used to protect me. She have a fierce temper and with all this weight behind her. My God! There's no one who could get the better of her. Everybody is frightened of Betty Hengler. Everybody! As you know Jud, when we called at her daughter's house in Eton Street not long ago, I told you Betty Hengler's dead and you were genuinely shocked.'

'I was shocked,' I mutter as I absent-mindedly pick at a beer-mat with my thumbnail, 'I just cant get used to the idea of our contemporaries dying and leaving us, it seems somehow a bit mean of them to slip away and leave us to carry on alone.'

'We start organising ourselves, d'yuh remember? coughs Hal.

'We joined the Lifeboys. There were you, our Billie, Georgie, Roy Lello, Brian Blackler, Alan Unwin, Alan Lee and me. Unfortunately, the Carrols couldn't join because they were Catholics. We sort of looked down on them a bit because they were Catholics. They have these strange beliefs and if you went to St Francis de Sales church with them, you see these horrible statues and pictures of a man with a beard with all his chest opened so his heart's exposed. It's all very frightening and the whole atmosphere is spooky. It's a bit like you think about vampires nowadays. It's all mystic. The other strange thing is that all Catholics have different sorts of eyes to us. Catholics have Catholic eyes!

We were taught a bit of discipline in the Lifeboys. The taught us to march and keep ourselves tidy and clean. We practised signalling with flags - semaphore they called it, and we have cute little uniforms with a blue jersey and a sailor hat.

A couple of years later we progressed up to the Boys Brigade. The 15th Liverpool Boys Brigade, Walton, Liverpool 1947. . It's a quasi-military organisation. You swore allegiance to the king etc. The idea is that you discipline your body with exercise and cleanliness and have a good moral outlook. Hal is 3rd from the left 2nd row from the back, his brother Billy is next but one to him on the right. Jud is 2nd row from the front dead centre.

Hal continued... They taught you Christianity with church parades and bible classes, all to help you to grow into an upright citizen. Upon reflection, it didn't do us any harm and undoubtedly did us a lot of good. It did teach us a lot of things that became useful later in life. Speaking for myself though, I came to reject the Christian attitude eventually, although I understood some of the rules were there to help us to get along. The military aspect of it - the marching, the drilling, the discipline, the physical exercise, the holidays, and the comradeship - it all helped to mould our characters - what else did we have? Not much - we only have the street.

As we grew, we formed into gangs. We started having raiding parties against the Neston Street gang. I'm always fearful of the Neston Street bucks. We heard stories that if they caught you; they ripped your balls off. I'm always attached to these appendages, always have been, I even am now. So you have to make sure if you were going on a raid to Neston Street, you always got behind Ray Trafford. He's about the biggest on our side.

From the safety of Raymond Trafford's back, you could shout all the obscenities you wanted at them, but whenever you did, you would think, I hope to God they never see me when I'm on my own without Raymond Trafford!' *[1]

The organist and drummer have begun to increase the tempo. Middle aged couples prance around the small dance-floor or sway uneasily from leg to leg. There's a hum of conversation and much clinking of glasses coming from the busy bar area.

'Another pint Jud? Go one, you're not driving!' I sit and look down on the dance floor as Hal threads his way through the tables and slowly mounts the steps that lead away to the service area that fringes the dance area.

My eyes do a slow pan of the figures that sit at the surrounding tables. Soundless elderly couples sit staring at the now empty dance-floor. A few are seated in parties of three or more. Dotted around, are tables with two female occupants. Most are deep in conversation, their eyes roaming restlessly. Widows looking for a replacement mate? Perhaps it's simply boredom with the topic of discussion?

Some glance in my direction. I don't flatter myself. An unattached male stranger in a place with a predominantly regular membership inevitably attracts attention. When their glances are not reciprocated, their swivelling eyes fix on other reference points. Do I really care for the ghosts that inhabit the Deleted Items Folder I call my childhood? Maybe they are only symbols of a simple and serene remembrance? Perhaps I only use the lives of my street contemporaries to exemplify my idyllic reconstruction of a lonely childhood? Would I really like to be transported back to those mean streets? Would I really want to meet them again? Perhaps they're better left as wraith-like doorkeepers - guardians at the portals whereby my past is retrieved. I know I can never recapture those experiences of the forties and fifties. Gentle forgetfulness will lean more heavily on the delete button as the years go by.

Sometimes I wonder if I actually experienced the reality of the world of the street at all. Perhaps I constructed an interpretation of events and time? Possibly, a re- construction of the past is the only true form of consciousness that anybody undergoes.

I conclude that this evening in the British Legion Club, this meeting with Harold, has some deeper purpose. Is it part of a cathartic process? Is this reunion another part of my gradual coming to terms with the legacy of a lonely childhood? Is it a way of trying to understand what my early loneliness did to me, and how it affected my relations with other people in later life? Some people I know spend their lives avoiding introspection.

Am I having a REVELATION here in the Halton Brook British Legion Club or is it simply the effects of the beer? I look around again at the reassuring scenes of cheerful normality. Suddenly the realisation comes of what it's all about.

It's about my incipient life-long isolation! At last, I'm mature enough to face up to the stark fact, that in spite of all my large family, regardless of my many friends, I'm a very lonely man - I always have been and always will be.

Slightly surprised with the clarity and candour of this self-divulgement, I pick up my glass and drain it to the last dregs.

Those Eton Street days are so far away now. Memory is so illusive. Hal's fantastic recall is helping me to pin it all down - to give it more shape, more resonance. I feel a kind of emptiness in my chest and realised it's a form of yearning. It's something, which I've heard described as gut-wrenching. It's an indefinable yearning for things gone by. I can see my poor mother's face, the brown trusting eyes of my dear little dog Blackie. 'Oh God!' I intone, 'Get a bloody grip of yourself!'

I'm thankful for Hal's speedy return. 'You were quick.' I smile.

'I'm a regular here Jud, and I always make a point of tipping the barmen.' Hal winks. We sit and drink our beer silently as the band plays the last waltz and the staff hurry around clearing the empty glasses from the tables. 'It might be cold on the way back?' I query by raising my voice at the end of the sentence.

'No problem', murmurs Hal. 'By the way, talkin' about the cold, d'yuh remember those winter-warmers we used to make? We get an old tin can, pierce it with lots of holes to let the air through, put two holes in the rim and fix a wire through as a handle. When it's finished, we put some paper and wood and bits of coal in it, light it and whirl it round and round until it glows. The trouble is, when you swing it upwards sometimes the tin kinks and the wire that holds it slips a little and all the hot coals come showering down the back of your neck! It makes you dance, I can tell you!

I turn towards Hal and smile. 'I burnt a big hole in my coat once,' I say, 'my Mam went mad over it.'

'D'yuh remember how Stanley Park is so very important to us,' Hal asks, we play there a lot. If it's quiet you can hear the birds twittering and you know you're away from the sooty street. There's a lake with rowing boats. We congregate on the bridge and scrabble our way up onto the parapet to look over at the boats below. You can spit down on the people in the boats. There's no chance they can catch you, for you can be miles away by the time they've rowed to the shore, disembarked and given chase. I went back to the bridge after I had grown up and I could see the ridges in the sandstone blocks of the bridge have been worn away by the countless toes of children's shoes over the years.'

We walk on in silence.

'Strangely enough, my Mam and Dad first meet on Stanley Park bridge,' I muse out loud. 'If my dad had hired a rowing boat instead, I probably wouldn't be here now!'

We pass a one storied building with closed green shutters. There's a whitewashed terrace with no porch. Red and pink geraniums run wild. Here is a small garden is a sloping plinth of black and white diamond tiles. Nothing stands on it. A battered cardboard box and a broken-down gas stove are sunk in the grass.

'We go to the park with a bottle or a jam-jar or whatever.' Hal says softly. 'We catch our jack-sharps[2] and take them home. The poor things don't live long. It isn't long before their little bodies float motionless on the top of the smelly water. Sometimes, whilst paddling, we stand and stare at the little ripples. Sometimes you lose your balance and you go over. It isn't very deep as you know, but it frightens you. You go home soaking wet expecting sympathy. All you get is a clout over the ear from your Mam. You have all your clothes dragged off and you get put to bed. I don't think you get washed really. You just get dried with an old towel. I think if the same thing happened these days you'd get taken to hospital and get all kinds of jabs. No one bothers in those days.'

'Time gentleman please!' screams the loudspeakers. 'Can we have your glasses please!' We hear the murmuring of 'G'night love!' Sounds of chairs scraping and tables being dragged.

Together we walk slowly out of the club and into the cold night air. Hal sets up a brisk pace. 'It won't take us long like this.' he pants. Quickly we retrace our steps in the orange coloured light of the sodium lamps that lines our homeward path.

' D'yuh recall how we used to stand outside the 'Colly'.[3] and the 'Queen's' [4] asking people to take us in?' continues my companion, 'I got accused of bunking in to the Queens once,' pants Hal. His breath came out in clouds in the chilly air. 'One of us pays to get in legitimately, then sneaks down to open the safety doors to let us all in. I've picked up an old ticket off the floor, so when the man with the torch comes up and challenges me, he isn't able to prove I haven't bought it legally.

"I'll get you - you little bastard!" He grunts.' Hal laughs aloud at the memory.

Those days, during the performance, they send some one around with a big flit gun and in this flit gun is a mixture of paraffin and DDT. This particular time he's walking down the slightly sloping aisle flitting his gun to the left and then to the right. It's supposed to kill any bugs that might be floating in the air or lice and fleas crawling about on the patrons' bodies I think. There's a lot of tuberculosis and polio going around in those days. When he gets up to me, he looks at me and I just look back at him casually. Suddenly he gives me a quick burst of the flit gun right in my face!'

We come to a row of brightly-lit shops and stand for a moment looking in at the magazines in a newsagent's window. Hal stops talking.

It all comes back to me. I can smell again the aroma of oranges in the local fleapit The Coliseum at the Saturday Children's Matinees. Every week we kids watch third-rate American films that extol the Americans and denigrate the slitty-eyed, buck-toothed Japanese. Incredibly, the Japanese troops all appear to be myopic, for they all wore steel-rimmed spectacles. I recall some of the weekly serials. There's Don Winslow of the US Navy and Hopalong Cassidy.

Do you want to see a free Don Winslow or a Hopalong Cassidy film again, or just a bit of it to remind you of what they were like after all these years?  

The wonders of modern technology allow you to do so here:

	http://www.archive.org/details/don_winslow_of_the_navy_ep1
	http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wn5HcBLqIOc&feature=related

One of the weekly shows is a fourth-rate movie from the late twenties or early thirties called Queen of the Jungle. The scratched and flickering film stock tells the tale of a little girl trapped alone in a balloon. It drifts to Africa were she's received as a goddess by the bulging-eyed black primitives who made her their queen. This is long before the days of the outlawing of racial discrimination and racial stereotyping- so there's much use of words like Bongo, bongo, Massah, and Bwana. We kids enjoyed it though, and screamed our heads off with cries of: 'Look behind you! 'Look behind you! LOOK BEHIND YOU! '

Such a grand name- 'Coliseum', for such a decrepit pile! It's now The Everton Supporters Club and is used for playing Bingo.

We stare at a book behind the steamy glass of the window. The Spice Girls. Hal sniggers and points.

'The British stars of the time we liked the most,' he says, 'were Nat Jackley, Ben Rigley and Will Hay. After you'd paid you seven pence, you hand in your ticket to a girl who stands just inside the entrance door. She tears your ticket in half and threads one half onto a needle and cotton. The other half she gives to you. Obviously, it's for checking purposes, to stop the staff fiddling. On Saturday afternoon matinees the hero in the weekly serial triumphs over the baddies. The kids stamp their feet and the roar in the picture house is deafening. They throw orange peel at you. You see it flashing through the light of the projector beam. Thinking back now. The pictures play a very important part in our childhood.'

The trees are seething with amber shadows. Hal strides ahead and I follow down a leafy walk planted with a tall double row of dense trees whose interlocking foliage form a green, dark tunnel of blackness. The air is cold and sharp. We drift along together between a twin phalanx of shiny-black stanchions. The path conducts us onward to an open space with a broken-down van and an abandoned super-market trolley. With its front wheels removed, the van kneels in obeisance like a forsaken camel.

D'yuh remember Nitty Carruthers?' Hal winks suddenly.

I smile. I'm amazed at the memories this man has stored away in his head.

'Yes, of course.' I reply, dancing slightly to my left, deftly avoiding some dog-shit, 'she's the one that's always kept back by the Nit Nurse.'

'Yes,' replies my old friend with a throaty chuckle, 'she fascinates us in school with her continual scratching. Her hands slip under her desk and you'd hear her elastic twanging - God knows what she's doing. She always got a cold. You sit and watch fascinated as a drop forms on her nose - caught in a shaft of sunlight through the school window - it's more brilliant than any diamond you've ever seen. The drop descends by degrees. As you watch you see it getting longer and longer. The longer it gets the tenser you become. Then with a sudden sniff, it goes back to whence it came. Soon the performance begins all over again.'

We round a corner and our nostrils are assailed by a pungent vegetable smell. Discarded rows of dead grass lie where the mowing-machine has formatted them on an open green.

Hal spits reflectively into the gutter.

'I once went into Mathew's Newsagents in later years.' He says. 'I see Nitty there and she has grown into a rather beautiful woman. She's in tears for as always, her life is blighted. She's on the verge of a nervous breakdown and said she's thinking of killing herself. She has man-trouble. She's already in the shop before I arrived - crying to Mr Matthew's. When she see me - I don't know how old I am then - twenty-one or twenty-two I suppose, she appealed to me for help. What is she going to do? She couldn't stand much more. She's thinking of putting her head in the gas oven and committing suicide. I stayed with her for quite a bit outside the shop. It made me late for work. I couldn't do anything anyway. What could I do? I knew it's hopeless to try. When I eventually got to work, I'm late. I worked at Napier's on the East Lancashire Road. They used to close the gates after a certain time in those days. I lost a day's work. I don't know if you wanted to hear about Nitty Carruthers, but this is the last time I ever see her.

It's when I'm at Stanley Park Secondary Modern - I suppose it's the onset of puberty, I become much more aware of girls. I'm not really worthy to have much to do with girls, because in my own mind I'm a scruff. Big teeth, tatty head, there's nothing I can do with my hair. I put loads of water on it and plaster it down, but it's still wild. It's as if I have a kind of a point on my head! It doesn't matter what I try, if I attempt to comb my hair like Ronnie Smith's with waves and all that, it just springs back the way it is before. It just falls down all the time. So, it doesn't matter what I do, I still think of myself as short, ugly and thick. As I say, I'm not really worthy to talk to them and they really don't want to talk to me. I want to talk to them though. I can't really get near to them. So what I do is to walk near to them and brush up against them - not in a rude way - I mean maybe my shoulder brushes against their's. I get a little charge from doing this. It's my awakening. I remain full of self-doubt - full of unworthiness. I consider girls to be angels. They are creatures just like us - but they are not like us. Each day my awareness grows and each day my unworthiness increases.

For some boys it's so natural to approach girls and start to talk to them, but if I have to speak to one of these creatures my face goes red and I go hot and even get pins and needles in my head. If the girls look at me and notice my discomfiture! My God! This makes me worse!'

You are obviously enjoying recalling all your ghosts.' I observe, 'your face has become sad, but I can tell that it is an enjoyable, sweet sadness.'

'Yup,' says Hal,' Mam is getting older now. Mam has Georgie and me late on in her childbearing life. When she's tired and she goes down the cellar after a shovel full of coal, I go through agonies worrying about her. I promise myself that when I grow up, she will never go down the coal cellar again. No woman should have to do this. There's no light. We don't have electricity in the house. The only light down there is from a few pinpricks of light that filter down from the ill-fitting coal-grid above.

I always think back to this - my wife will tell you. There's no woman ever labours for me. I put women on a pedestal and make sure they don't suffer bringing up their families. I've made sure that I've taken more than the greater weight of bringing up my children.

Hal and I walk on bathed in the yellow light of the street lamps. The night's grown a little colder, but the midges are still active in the wooded areas.

I've had a good night. My nostalgia-hunger's been assuaged. I'm thinking about how this time with Hal has helped both of us see and understand a little more about who we are and where we have come from. It's refreshing and important to clarify the significant connections that underpin our individual short lives. It's good to re-examine the connections between us and other people - between private moments and shared experiences. Hal and I share similar feelings about people, places, music, and even objects. It's sometimes difficult to make sense of these concealed undercurrents, this hidden matrix. The invisible warp and weft, that transforms us, binds us, and changes the very world we live in.

I think of the way Hal and I once threw bottles into the water off the Isle of Man boat with messages inside. It was strange how fate led me to Walney Island in Barrow in Furness.

'Do you remember when we were thirteen and we go on that trip to the Isle of Man from Liverpool with the Boys' Brigade?' I ask Hal. 'It's to a summer camp. Halfway across the Irish Sea I throw a bottle overboard with a childish message inside. The bottle IS washed up on Walney Island and a Barrow in Furness youngster who gets in touch with me after finding the message which he picked up. I do a schoolboy's plan drawing of Walney similar to a kid imagining Treasure Island. The hand of fate is to play its part with that floating bottle nearly forty years later.

In 1985, after buying and running a hotel in Turkey then returning to Britain without a job, a friend of mine in the village called Jane Livesey is looking through the job advertisements in a national newspaper. She sees that someone is needed as a sales manager on Walney Island.

Noting the Walney Island address, her mind goes back to what I had told her about the bottle episode, she slips the advert under my door. I promptly apply for the job and get the position.

I work there for three years and a half years - at the West Shore Park Mobile Home development. The homes don't look at all like they are mobile - the wheels underneath are merely for negotiating them into position on the concrete base. To anyone unfamilar with such things they appear to be middle-sized rather luxurious bungalows. Eventually I am made general manager, supervising 300-plus homes on the 11-acre site.

The strange thing is that it's the mention of Walney Island that attracts me. Amazingly, Earnse Bay Beach where West Shore Park is located , was the very place where the young lad found my bottle containing its fateful message. I can't remember the lad's name after all this time, but I would dearly like to know if he remembers the incident all those years ago. If he can be traced, we could have a nice reunion.

Not long before I leave the park I give a friendly wink at a beautiful woman who is a resident on the park as I'm walking around the estate with a prospective customer. The lady that I wink at later becomes my third wife.

Hindsight's a great retrospective tidier and organiser of the forking paths that punctuate our crazy journey along the byways of our transient human existence. If only we can make sense of the sidetracks and doubling-back - the sudden veering off. If only we knew what the underworld of our hidden lives revealed - what strange causal factors are at play - what tangential touchings there are - the origins of the secretive chains?

Why do we meet this particular person at this particular time? Are we the toys of the gods, as the Ancient Greeks believed? Do some omnipotent beings look down from partings in the clouds above and play with us like toys on strings? Perhaps, as Omar Khayyam suggests in his great Rubiat, God plays Chinese chequers on some vast infinite board with us for pawns?

If only we can expose the concealed framework and wiring of our brief moments in time. Life would be complete - be fully rationalised. Perhaps we could understand its mystery.

I look at the clouds of suicidal moths whirring round the orange sodium-lamps I consider their brief unconscious lives. I glance at Hal's confident, energetic striding figure.

It's only when one looks backward and sees how quickly the last fifty years have fled, one realises the brevity of life and the nearness of death.

I feel good about Hal and our lifelong friendship. In the far distance, I hear the familiar sound of a ship's foghorn coming from all scousers' beloved River Mersey. It evokes warm memories of the dear friends of my childhood.

Susan-Clare and our three young sons will be snug in bed by now. I would not change my Liverpool past - even if I could. I still love my city and Liverpool folk. My mind is at peace. All is well.

© Jud (George) Evans 1999.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Raymond Trafford. Became a policeman. [2] Jack Sharps. Small freshwater fish.

[3] The Colly. The Coliseum picture house. Now the Everton Supporters Club

[4] Queen's Cinema, Walton Road, Liverpool 4. Opened 1913. Closed 1959. Became a Co-op Supermarket. Queen's Bingo Club from 1973. Queen's Social Club, from 1974 with Star turns like Tom O'Connor & Les Dennis. Closed about 1975. Demolished 1982 Was a Car Park and then McDonalds built a restaurant on the site.

    Next Ron Molyneux with his photographs and reminiscences of Eton Street