The Early Years: Growing Up In Britain During The 80s and 90s (Part 1)

It’s fair to say I didn’t have the easiest start in life, and goodness knows where I would have ended up had it not been for one couple looking to adopt their third child. This was how I came to be rescued from Liverpool’s woefully inadequate care system at the tender age of three. The names of my two would-be saviours were Pamela and Gerry Franks.

I was born on the 30th January 1977, the year of Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee. At that time, James Callaghan was Prime Minister, Jimmy Carter was the US president and Elvis Presley was still just about alive; he would die in August of that year. My mother, a single parent living in poverty, no doubt looked after me to the best of her ability. But she was not well. She had a mental illness, in all likelihood caused by her father Oskar. Maybe she was schizophrenic or bipolar? In any case, the strain of looking after me own her own proved to be beyond her capabilities, and eventually she gave me up for adoption.

I was placed in Strawberry Field Children’s Home which was just off Beaconsfield Road and situated a couple of hundred yards from Saint Francis Xavier’s College, the school where I would be studying for my GCSE and A-Level exams 13 years later. Strawberry Field was run by the Salvation Army. In its heyday, there was a large manor house set some ways back from the road and accessible by famous red painted iron gates. As a boy, John Lennon, the kid who would grow up to be one of the Beatles, would use Strawberry Field’s extensive grounds as his own personal playground as you do when you’re that young age, and climb up into trees with other kids. The house where Lennon lived was called Mendips and was at 251 Menlove Avenue; a short walk from Beaconsfield Road. Lennon’s aunt Mimi apparently once scolded John about trespassing onto private property, to which he is said to have retorted, “They can’t hang you for it”.  This is why in the lyrics of that famous song ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, you will hear the line ‘Nothing to get hung up about’. This is a reference to that conversation. When I ended up at Strawberry Field around 1979, the house had already been demolished and three smaller housing units built.

The entrance to Strawberry Field as seen from Beaconsfield Road

I have no recollection of my life at Strawberry Field, or of Captain David Botting (he was titled Captain as the hierarchy of the Salvation Army is based on military rank) the care home manager. My adoptive parents told me much later that I had made a cameo appearance on some TV program about Strawberry Field with my face hidden behind a large teddy bear because the program makers were not allowed to show the children’s faces on national television; this was due to reasons of confidentiality.

I don’t remember my parents-to-be coming to visit me at the home but they made several visits with Mark and Nicola in tow, the children they had already adopted, to take me out for short stays with them as part of the adoption process, and to see if I would be a right match for them. They told me many years later that when they dropped me back at Strawberry Field after I had spent some time with them, I would scream and cry my eyes out. Apparently one member of staff remarked to my parents that I had chosen them as my family and that I now belonged to them, or words to that effect.

The adoption order finally went through early on in 1980 and sometime in that spring, Pam and Gerry came to collect me from Strawberry Field for what would prove to be the last time, and to take me to my new home. My sister Nicola tells me that she and Mark had been preparing my room at the front of the house by arranging all my toys ready on the shelf. No sooner was I inside than I dashed upstairs with excitement to explore my new surroundings and play with my toys. Nicola said I was a snotty-nosed child in those early days, meaning that my nose ran a lot and I seemed prone to bad colds. I would also have ‘accidents’ at times, either peeing myself, wetting the bed or at one time, an episode of faecal incontinence whilst asleep in bed, which had made mum angry with me (this episode happened one evening after she had sent me to bed early for tearing the veneer edging strip off a coffee table). Thinking back to that time, I think my mum had taken it personally as an act of rebellion against my punishment. Nothing could have been further from the truth. In all likelihood, it was emotional distress.

My earliest memories with the Franks (showing me, Nicola, Mark, dad and Mrs Cubells)

I quickly discovered that in the Franks household, it was mum and not dad, generally speaking, who gave the discipline. Mum was a short woman but she was still a force to be reckoned with. Dad was not what I’d consider the dominant head of the household, and when he and mum argued as often they did, he was usually the one to back down, not least because he just didn’t want the aggro, as he often put it. If mum ever snapped at us then we were on our own as dad would side with mum, taking the path of least resistance. Don’t get me wrong; mum was a lovely person most of the time, but she could lose her temper very easily, and if she happened to be in a bad mood, she was petulant and quick to find fault with something or other. She was a product of the post war baby boom generation and the style of parenting she was brought up with would have been authoritarian. In her day, children were not allowed to answer back or be cheeky to their parents as the grownups always knew best. When I remember just how much of a harridan my grandmother Rose was, it’s easy to imagine just how terrified into submission my mum must have been as a child. Mum continued this style of parenting with us to a degree, but I need to stress that most of the time, she was lovely and pleasant. She was always nice with her patients and they thought the world of her. Mum worked very hard. Not only did she have her nursing job to keep her busy, but she also managed to find time to keep the house tidy and presentable for visitors. With three rowdy kids and the pets, her work must have been never ending. There is something else that mum kept hidden from us: her disability.

As a young girl, Pamela had been diagnosed with a form of childhood arthritis. This was possibly an excessive autoimmune reaction to a virus or bacterial infection although the exact cause of this disease is not known. But whatever the cause was, mum refused to let her arthritic pain impact on her day to day life, nor stop her from pursuing a nursing career, which is something she had wanted to do from childhood. She would sometimes arrive home in the afternoon from work looking worn out and not in the best of moods. But she didn’t complain despite being a little grouchy. And yet, she must have experienced a lot of pain when working, as her job was often physically demanding.

Pam & Gerry Franks on their Wedding Day in 1966

There have been rare moments during our childhood where mum would lose her temper and smack us hard. I’m pretty sure she regretted it afterwards as no sooner had she done it than her anger left her. Most of the time, it was just the occasional slap which didn’t do us any harm. There was only one time I remember her hitting me a little too hard and giving me a bruise below my eye. I had wet the bed that morning which had not put her in the very best of moods. A day or two later, my mum took me to see her friend, Mrs Cubells. Mrs Cubells, having seen the bruise on my face, asked me how I had gotten it. I was old enough to know that if I told her the truth, it would not show mum in a good light. Instead, I said that I had fallen while playing and that seemed to satisfy her curiosity. Mum, who was present at the time didn’t say anything, but she must have been aware that I had covered for her. In any event, that was the first and last time I ever remember mum hitting me that hard.

Scarcely a few months after becoming the latest addition to the Franks’ household, around May or June, my parents took us all away to Florida. I must confess that my memories of this trip have almost faded to nothingness. And yet, I still have vague fleeting recollections of going to a water park, seeing alligators in a zoo, and even getting up close and personal with Disney characters like Alice in Wonderland at Walt Disney World. Mum and dad have told me on numerous occasions that I nearly drowned in the outside pool of our hotel. We were all in the pool as a family. I was wearing my armbands and splashing about. All of a sudden, feeling confident in myself and deciding I no longer needed my flotation aids, I suddenly decided to remove my armbands so I could be like the grown-ups. Immediately, I realised that swimming was a lot harder than it looked and I got into difficulty. Fortunately my family were close by, and I was quickly rescued. It would be a long time before those arm bands came off my arms again.

The holiday to America marked my first ever trip abroad. I only wish I had been older so I could have remembered more details about it. It must have been magical going to Disney World and meeting all the characters from the cartoons. I made a friend over there called Michael McDonald, a young boy of about my age with curly blond hair. He was the son of a school friend of my dad’s, Brendan McDonald. Brendan came from a large Irish family in Liverpool. He had married a woman called Helena and the two of them had emigrated to Canada some years previously. I would see Michael again when he visited Liverpool in the summer of 1986 with his parents at the age of 9, and one further time around the age of 15 when Brendan and Helena invited me up to Canada to see them.

As a family we were to go on many holidays, although I think the trip to Florida was the first and the last time we would ever travel abroad as a complete family. I didn’t mind that at all. I enjoyed myself just as much during our camping trips to North Wales. My parents had friends down in Devon so we also made a few trips there too. Dad had a large station wagon for the whole family, and I would clamber into the boot; this being before the time when mandatory car seats for children were introduced.  I also remember our first family holiday to Blackpool. The first time we went there, I must have been 5 or 6. I loved that place, tacky or not. Donkey rides were very popular in those days, and my parents treated me to a ride on one down on the beach. Later, we spent the night in one of those sea front hotels that lined the Golden Mile. I had taken a book with me; one of those Ladybird books for kids that had very realistic illustrations. The book was ‘The Three Billy-goats Gruff’ and the picture of the troll lurking under the bridge was very scary looking. What I found most terrifying of all, was his long and bulbous nose and watery eyes. At some point during the night, I dreamt that I was confronted by the troll under the bridge. I woke up crying with fear and sweating profusely. Luckily, my parents were sleeping in the same room and were able to reassure me that it was only a nightmare.

At the time of my adoption, our family were living at number 30 Green Lane: a four bedroom semi-detached property located in a well-to-do area in South Liverpool’s leafy suburbs. At the front of the house was a garage and at the back, overlooking the garden, there was a patio of pink and yellow paving slabs and a swing which both Nicky and I loved to play on. Later on, we would also get a yellow, plastic outdoor paddling pool moulded into the shape of a giant turtle, which would be filled up with the garden hose.

Other than the five of us, we also had a couple of cats called Tig (or Tiggy) and Mum Cat, and finally a white poodle called Penny, not to mention a goldfish tank. Mum Cat was a stray that my parents had found one day before they had moved to Liverpool. She had given birth to a litter of kittens and my parents had kept one of them plus the mother. Penny the poodle was quite an old dog by then, and I can’t have been there for very long before she passed away as I barely remember her. She was eventually replaced by a black mongrel (what was more affectionately known as a Heinz 57) called Sammy who had previously belonged to an ex-policewoman.

Pam and Gerry ran a hardware business in Speke called Abisgolds. They had inherited the name from the previous owner. My mum was also qualified as a district nurse and so, whilst she may have helped out at the shop from time to time, her main work was visiting her patients at their homes.

Until the time I was able to attend school, mum took me to a nursery just up the road in a private house, and left me there until she could collect me. During the school holidays, Mark and Nicola would look after me in the mornings until my mum came home from work in the afternoon. When Mark and Nicola couldn’t babysit me, my mum took me with her on her visits but kept me in the car as I was not allowed in to the patients’ houses. You probably couldn’t do that today without someone raising hell, but back then, people were less conscious of stranger danger or the risks of leaving children in cars. Even today the law still doesn’t stipulate the age when children are old enough to be trusted in a car on their own but leaves that judgement to the parents. I was old and sensible enough to be trusted to wait patiently for her to come back without getting up to too much mischief. Oh, I’ll readily admit, there were a few occasions when I tried releasing the handbrake off the car, but I never succeeded.  I knew you had to press the handbrake release button, but although I tried my hardest, I couldn’t make it budge as my young mind didn’t understand that you had to pull the actual handbrake lever up at the same time. If I had succeeded, nothing bad would have likely happened as the roads where she parked were flat and level. That hadn’t always been the case. Once, she had parked her car on Rose Lane just at the bottom of Mossley Hill while she went to the sweet shop. Mark and Nicola were inside the car. Perhaps mum hadn’t applied the handbrake properly or maybe Mark had been a bit of a scamp and had managed to release it? Whatever the case may be, the car ended up rolling forward and bumping into the one in front of it. I can only imagine the look of horror on my mum’s face when she came back out of the shop.

Number 30 Green Lane, looking very different to when we lived there

Back then, my mum had a Mini. In fact, when she replaced her car she would always get another Mini. She really liked those cars as they were economical on mileage and she didn’t need to travel far. One of the Minis she had was brown, another white with rear panels instead of windows and a third one blue. Sometimes when she was on call and had left me in her car, I would climb into the back and sit there among the dressing packs, bandages, paper towels and syringes. Mum came to pick me up from school once when she had just changed her car. I was looking anxiously for her, and then I spotted her familiar face waving to me from her brand new Mini and breathed a big sigh of relief.

My mum Pamela was a non practising Methodist who came from the town of Biddulph in the Potteries area. When the question arose as to how to raise the kids, Pam and Gerry came to an agreement that they should be brought up in the Catholic faith, and so in September 1980 after I had been with the Franks for half a year, I started attending Our Lady’s Bishop Eton Primary School where my sister was, and its associated local parish church run by the Redemptorists: a Catholic order known for their missionary work. My brother Mark was just starting or had not long started at his secondary school, Saint Francis Xavier College, or SFX for short. SFX boys’ school used to be in Liverpool city centre and run by the Jesuits. There is a photo of me, Nicola and Mark that was taken outside in our back garden on the day I started school for the first time. The look on my face was a picture. I was scowling.

My dad Gerard was born in Liverpool in 1935 and was raised as a Catholic by his mother Constance. Gerry attended St. Charles Catholic School in Aigburth. At the age of 15, he left school to join the Royal Air Force and was stationed in Hong Kong and Germany for a while, finally leaving the RAF around 1962 or 1963. He was then head hunted by the government and invited to work at GCHQ which he accepted.  He was based at an outpost in Stoke-on-Trent, and then later, down at the main GCHQ site in Cheltenham. It was while he was in Stoke-on-Trent that he met Pamela. They were eventually married in 1966 before moving to Cheltenham. Dad spent around 8 years at GCHQ. Later on, they moved back up north, first to Stoke and then to the village of Lowton within the Metropolitan Borough of Wigan and just two miles from Leigh. Dad ran a computer company in Lowton. It was during this period that they adopted Mark and Nicola. They finally moved up to Liverpool in the 70s. When I first met my dad to be in 1980, he had a thick bushy beard which he kept trimmed every day with an electric shaver.

Dad would make us all, willing or not, go to church on Sunday mornings or Saturday evenings. Mark and Nicola would pretend to be asleep in the hope dad would leave them there, but the ruse did not work. Being such a young age, I had no understanding as to what this ritual was all about. I would bring my toy cars and run them up and down the tops of the pews until I got too noisy and then dad would motion for me to be quiet. I’m not sure whether dad truly believed in the faith or whether he just saw it as his duty to raise his kids. But outside of going to mass, we weren’t a religious household by any stretch of the imagination. We weren’t made to say prayers before going to bed. Neither did we have to say grace at the dinner table. One Catholic tradition was always observed however; mum always cooked fish on Good Friday instead of meat.

When my brother and sister were later administered the rite of confirmation in their early teens, dad, perhaps thinking that they were probably old enough, let them decide whether or not to continue going to mass. Both Mark and Nicola chose to stop going. Many years later as a young teenager going through adolescence, I too would be confirmed, although I was to continue going to church with dad for reasons I will get into later. Dad would eventually get disillusioned with the church and stop his regular attendance, but I had already left home by then.

My nana Constance was very devout and said her prayers every day. Speaking of nana, my dad would take me, Mark and Nicola down to see her after mass. It was common in those days to devote Sundays to visiting ones grandparents or for carrying out other chores such as washing the car and tending to the garden. These things were as traditional as Sunday roast. There was no Sunday trading back then as all the shops were closed. If you suddenly found that you had run out of batteries or needed to go to the grocers for some bread and it was a Sunday, then it was just tough luck. But because there was absolutely nothing to do on a Sunday, it made it the perfect choice of day for seeing the extended family.

Our school year photo taken at Bishop Eton

Nana lived on Birchtree Road in Aigburth; a street of small terraced houses. She would later move to social housing on Pitville Grove, a quiet estate near Mossley Hill. When dad took us all to see her after church on Sunday morning, my mum did not come with us. I did not question why at the time but just assumed that mum was busy preparing the Sunday roast dinner. When I was old enough to understand, I realised that Constance and Pam did not like each other for some reason. Whether it was because of a personality clash or because Constance was disappointed that Gerry had not married another Catholic, I do not know. Nana was a widow and lived alone. She had never remarried since her husband Leo had passed away. How she had coped on her own all those years, I shall never know. She was a frail lady, even back in those days, and didn’t seem to eat much. When we came to see her, she would usually offer us a Rich Tea or Plain Digestive biscuit and a drink of orange barley water. She would give us some spending money when it was time to leave. It wasn’t much, but being a lady of very modest means, it was no more than what she probably could afford.

Gerry’s dad, Leo Franks, had died while Gerry was still a boy. Leo had worked at the Post Office in Hatton Garden in the city centre. During the war, he had also worked as fire warden. Liverpool had been heavily bombed by the Luftwaffe due to it being a strategic shipping port and the city had taken a lot of damage. Even today there is evidence of the Blitzkrieg. St. Luke’s Church at the top of Bold Street is the obvious example. The building still stands today, although it is nothing more than an empty shell. Both my dad and his father had witnessed some awful horrors during the war. Once, Leo had gone into a side entry with a friend. There had been a sudden blast and then Leo had seen a disembodied head roll past him. On another occasion, Gerry was visiting his godparents whom he referred to as Aunty Peg and Uncle Joe. They lived around the area of Greenbank Park. Dad had passed a building that had been recently bombed and was now just a pile of rubble.  He saw what he took to be an arm sticking out of the rubble and pointed it out to his mum. She noticed what her son had been looking at and horrified, moved to shield him from the grisly sight.

Every few weeks on a Sunday afternoon, we would travel down to Stoke-on-Trent to see Pamela’s parents, Rose and Harold Bradburn whom I knew as gran and grandad. Sometimes, they would come to visit us in Liverpool. My grandparents lived on Nevin Avenue, a very quiet cul-de-sac with bungalows. Gran and grandad’s bungalow was the second one on the right as you turned into the road from Colwyn Drive. There was a small garden at the front and a large one at the back which went back a fair way.  At the side of the bungalow was the driveway. It led up to a garage at the back.

Me at gran and grandad's bungalow with Sammy the dog just to my right

Rose was a slim built yet stern woman whose default expression seemed to be a frown and whose withering gaze could have turned Medusa herself to stone. She didn’t seem to smile that often although she had a perfect set of teeth. It took me a while to realise that she wore dentures and would take them out at night, leaving them to soak in a glass of water. Rose would usually wear dark trousers and a white woolly jumper. She would have the best seat in the lounge, closest to the window where she could observe anyone entering or leaving the driveway. Although there was a front entrance, gran and grandad never used it, and the front porch was used to house potted plants. Instead, visitors came in via the back door which was further down the side of the bungalow and led into the kitchen via a small pantry. Gran would have her legs resting on a pouffe; the sole adult to enjoy that privilege.

My grandad Harold by contrast to Rose, was more friendly and approachable although he wasn’t the type to stand for any nonsense. He was a large heavyset man, although still physically fit and strong, and a carpenter by trade, although close to retirement by the time I knew him. He still had all of his carpentry tools in his garage and would regularly make toys for us; a fort for Mark, a play house and a rabbit run for Nicola and much later on, a pair of stilts and space ship for me that I had designed myself and given him the blueprints for. Both my grandparents smoked. Gran smoked cigarettes and grandad, a pipe which he would light from his seat at the other end of the lounge to Rose. When we went to see them in Knypersley, I would pinch a few of grandad’s pipe cleaners to make little men with. Grandad caught me once or twice but although he told me off, it was never in a serious way and he had a hint of a smile when he did so. I honestly think my cheeky grin and innocent blue eyes helped me get away with murder. I was on the whole well behaved, but I did have occasional moments of mischief and like all children, liked to test the boundaries.

Towards the end of our visit, grandad would give us a packet of fun size Mars Bars, Milky Ways or Marathons (later to become Snickers) to share between us. We’d usually end up with about 7 chocolate bars each, and I would eat mine usually in one go. Grandad would also give us a couple of bottles of milk to take back home. I loved what I called Grandad’s milk. To me, it had a nicer, creamier taste than the milk back home that was delivered every morning by the milkman.  The milk that my grandparents had was pasteurised. I didn’t know that at the time. All I knew was that it came in a special shaped bottle and had a had a hard top, rather than the soft tops on our milk bottles.

One of grandad’s interests was making wine. The kitchen would have several large glass containers containing liquids of various colours, which, I found out much later, were called carboys or demijohns. At the top of the demijohns there were rubber bungs or stoppers with bendy tubing coming out in an ‘S’ shape. These were called airlock bubblers and you could see bubbles breaking through every so often. When I was on my own with the demijohns, I used to secretly put my lips to the end of the tube and suck out the escaping gas which gave me a heady rush. Though I didn’t realise it at the time, I was sucking in carbon dioxide from the fermentation process. When we had our Sunday roast, grandad served wine with the meal. Although I was too young to be drinking wine, my parents actually let me try a little sip. It was like rocket fuel and very pungent, but I would always taste a little of it. Grandad seemed to make Rosehip and Elderberry wine a lot of the time. Once he even made coffee wine but that didn’t seem to go down well.

Outside the bungalow in 2012 after grandad had passed away in hospital

When he was not fermenting wine, smoking his pipes in front of the television or discussing politics with my dad in conversations that could sometimes get heated, Grandad liked to play bowls down at the Biddulph Bowling Club. If he happened to be playing on the day we came up, our family would drive down to the club to watch him whilst having a few drinks in the bar area. I would usually go off with Nicola to see some horses that were in a nearby paddock and feed them sugar cubes. Nicola loved horses.

When we weren’t visiting our grandparents down in Stoke, mum and dad would often pass the afternoon at Liverpool Cricket Club. They played squash in the courts on the ground floor while we used the pavilion building as our personal play area and fiefdom. As you walked into the building from the outer car park and faced the stairs going up, there was a games room, cloakroom and seating area through the doorway to the left, with a snooker table and a smaller pool table where we had a few games. Up the stairs led to the main bar area where you could order drinks and sit by the window watching the cricket taking place outside or just sit in the corner chatting. If you walked around the bar and carried on, you would get to a big hall. When there were events for children, they would take place in here. Outside the pavilion there was a terraced seating area for the spectators. At the base of the building was a dark passageway, littered with rubbish and debris which went underneath the building, directly under the pavillion’s outdoor seating area and which ran the full length of the building. We used to explore down there, wondering what lay at the other end. It turns out there was just another exit to the other side of the building.

One of my earliest vivid memories following our holiday to Florida was my sister Nicola, or Nicky, who must have been around 8 years old at the time, waking me up with excitement in her eyes to say that Father Christmas had visited our house. I think this was Christmas 1980. It would have been an especially happy moment for me because this was the first Christmas I had spent in a proper family. In the run up to Christmas, my sister Nicky had played a practical joke on me. Perhaps I was being a bit petulant and cheeky at the time? Anyway, Nicky suddenly announced that she was going to call the North Pole and tell Father Christmas not to deliver any presents to me because I had been naughty. We were both there in the hallway when she picked up the telephone (one of those old fashioned rotary dial types) and pretended to dial a number.  As she began to speak to her imaginary interlocutor and tell him that I should not have any presents this year, I became upset and had a screaming tantrum so she quickly thought better than to torture me and said to Santa or whoever it was that I deserved to have presents after all.

After Nicola had roused me from my sleep, I rushed downstairs closely followed by my sister. Full of excitement and anticipation, we tore open the presents that had been left for us with gleeful excitement. One of my presents was a little plastic mouth organ moulded into a pair of giant plastic lips, while Father Christmas had given Nicola a large Sindy house that was in the hallway. With all propriety forgotten, I skipped around with the large fake lips in my mouth, and even ran back upstairs all the while tooting my mouth organ, probably to see how I looked in the bathroom mirror. Finally I heard my dad's voice shouting with exasperation, "For goodness sake, wrap up! It’s 4am in the morning," or similar words, and that put an end to the excitement.

Grandad cuts a birthday cake but whose birthday is it?

Funnily enough, that mouth organ is the only present that I can remember.  I had plenty of toys though. We were spoilt when it came to Christmas presents.  I also remember playing with Weebles but I didn’t know if they were actually mine or my brother Mark’s. Weebles, if you are not familiar with the name, were a toy made by Hasbro that first came out in the 1970s and featured egg shaped people. The novelty was that you could push or tap them and they would just wobble on their base. It’s amazing how simple ideas can turn out to be so popular with kids.  I know we had a Weeble plane and submarine. I would play with the latter in the bath along with a bottle of Matey Bubble Bath.

Another toy I loved playing with was the Big Yellow Teapot made by Bluebird Toys. There were a few Fisher Price toys as well like the Chatter Telephone and the Music Box Record Player. I’m not sure exactly when I was given these toys but I do remember having hours of fun with them.

Mark was 8 years older than me and so by that time, he would have been more interested in boys’ stuff like football and videogames. Around that time, Mark had an Atari 2600 which was one of the first home games consoles to arrive on the market. I don’t know when he was given it. It might have been the Christmas of 1980 when I was given a mouth organ, or at some other time. I just can’t honestly arrange all these memories in chronological order. Mark had a Superman game which I thought was the bee’s knees at the time, though the graphics quality in those days would have looked pretty basic. The example that springs to my mind is the game Pong which comprises of a round ball that bounces from one side of the screen to the other and you have to block it with a paddle that you can move up and down.

A few doors up the road from our house lived our neighbours, the Boardmans. They had a daughter called Lucy. I think she was a school friend of Nicola’s and she was maybe 9 or 10 years old when I met her. I didn’t know anything about her at all, but I knew she was sick. When my family came round to visit, I would be taken to Lucy’s bedroom to say hello and chat. She would be propped up in her bed, looking weak and tired but with a warm smile on her face. She even gave me a toy car once. It was one of those ones with a pull-back mechanism inside so that when you placed it on the floor, moved it back a few inches while pressing down, it would shoot forward. Lucy was a kind girl but every time I saw her, she would be propped up in her bed. I didn’t know why she was so ill but it turns out that she had oral cancer. It was discovered during a routine examination at the Rose Lane Dental Practice which was the one that our family went to. I remember my parents telling me she had passed away and I felt really sad as she was too young to die. The Boardmans gave our family a photo of Lucy in a stand up photo frame which we kept ever since to remember her by.

A few doors down, going the opposite way to the Boardmans, lived the Browns; Jim Brown and his wife Felicity, plus their two sons, Martin and Joe. Jim Brown was the deputy head at SFX College where Mark was currently studying for his O-Level exams, and taught Classics. Felicity was a French teacher in another school. My dad was good friends with Jim, and I soon became good friends with Joe as we were both the same age. That friendship was one that would endure right throughout our academic life until the moment we started university. Being friends with Joe was no picnic. He could be very obstinate and stubborn. And if you picked an argument with him, then it’s fair to say he usually won, as he never backed down. To be fair, Joe was the more intelligent among us and more times than not, he would be right. But that was not always the case. The only time we ever came to blows was very early on. I had gone over to the Browns to play with Joe. While we were both watching a Marvel Comics animation called Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends that was airing on the television at the time, we got into a heated argument that came to blows. I ended up hitting Joe in the face, catching his nose and making it bleed. No doubt alerted by the commotion, Jim came in and quickly broke up the fight. I steeled myself for a good ticking off, but instead Jim scolded Joe for being inconsiderate to his guest, and then took me back to my house. I was pretty relieved not to be in trouble at the time, although I knew that I had gotten away with more than I should have done.

During our time at Bishop Eton, Joe and I concocted a game that we would play together in the yard at break times. It was called the ‘Cheese Game’. We just ran around the yard pretending that everything was made of cheese. Sometimes, there was often no rhyme or reason to small children’s imaginations.

Not very far away from us, on Menlove Gardens North, lived the Cubells. Mrs Cubells was my teacher in the reception class at Bishop Eton. She was married to a crazy Spanish guy who I knew as Jimmy. Now I must say that I did like Jimmy. He was such a character and was always cracking me up with his humour and jokes. Our family would go and visit the Cubells regularly and Jimmy would make a big fuss of me. Jimmy was a heavy smoker and there was always a smell of cigarette smoke in the house.  I was left to my own devices a lot of the time, and so I would sit in the front lounge and play videos. The Cubells had a library of blank video cassettes on which they had recorded stuff from the television such as Spitting Image and Only Fools and Horses.  The Cockney humour of Del Boy and Rodney went completely over my head but I found Spitting Image hilarious. It didn’t matter that I didn’t understand the political satire. The grotesqueness of the puppets themselves was hugely entertaining. My favourite character was Roy Hattersley who sprayed saliva everywhere when he spoke but I liked the Margaret Thatcher caricature as well. Mr and Mrs Cubells had two children: Simon and Anna. Anna was actually in my class at Bishop Eton, although we weren’t close friends. Both children were very intelligent and both could speak Spanish fluently, as could both parents.  Mr and Mrs Cubells were the only friends of my parents who would one day end up getting a divorce. Apparently, Jimmy had a hidden side which none of us knew about. He could be very possessive. And Mrs Cubells, who was quite a strong character, eventually snapped.

Mrs Cubells’s sister was Helena. Helena is the lady I mentioned earlier who married the Liverpool Irishman man called Brendan McDonald and moved to Orlando in Canada. Brendan was one of the McDonalds who went to school with my dad. There were quite a few of them: Isabel, Pam, Christine, Brian, Brendan, Patrick, Gerry and Frank. That is how they all knew each other. My dad used to regularly go drinking down at the Fiveways on Friday evenings with Frank. Mark and Nicola stayed at home with mum and watched The Gentle Touch on TV while mum treated them to Yorkie bars. Friday evenings then became known as Yorkie Night. I was already in bed by that time and so missed out.

On the 30th May 1982, Pope John Paul II came to Liverpool, designated one of the nine cities in the UK that was to form the visit. The papal visit was significant because it was the first time that a reigning pope had ever set foot in the United Kingdom. It was uncertain whether the visit would even go ahead. At that time, the Falklands War was still taking place and the pope had tried to persuade Margaret Thatcher to stop hostilities and reach a compromise with the Argentineans. But Thatcher, not one for compromising had steadfastly refused. In the end, thanks to the diplomatic intervention of Archbishop Derek Warlock, the visit did go ahead after all. This day sticks in my mind because I have a vivid image in my head of seas of people lining the streets of the 8 mile pre-planned route in their thousands as they waited for the pope’s motorcade to pass by. My family had come out to watch this procession as it made its way from Speke Airport to the city centre. It was a warm sunny day and the atmosphere was electric. When the Popemobile finally passed by, the people were cheering and waving their white and gold bicolour Vatican flags. My dad hoisted me up onto his shoulders so I could see above the crowd and receive a papal blessing from His Holiness.

The original souvenir booklet of the 1982 papal visit to Liverpool

In December of that same year, I went to see E.T. at our local cinema down on Allerton Road. I think this might well have been my first experience of cinema, at least in this country. It made a big impression on me at the time. It’s possible that the main plot of the story which was all about a stranded alien from space befriending a boy called Elliott who then helps him to make contact with his fellow aliens so they can return back to earth and rescue him, resonated with my own situation a little bit. Only with me, I was not going back to my place of origin but making a new home with a new family. I have never been able to watch that film since without crying my eyes out during the scene where E.T. dies and then a moment later, comes back to life after becoming aware of the presence of his family whom he senses are nearby. For Christmas that year, I had an E.T. toy in my sack of presents. It had an extendable neck and I think it actually walked if you put batteries into it. It also had a chest that glowed red.

About a month after that Christmas, I turned 6 and my parents organised a party for me at home, inviting my class mates over for the day. Mum and dad had hired an entertainer who came round to screen some cartoons on a two-reel movie projector. I remember tucking into a load of foam shrimps my mum had bought to prepare treat bags with, and then getting a touch of diarrhoea afterwards while the party was in full swing. Whether that was due to eating too many sweets, I don’t know. Fortunately we had a toilet under the stairs as well as the main one upstairs so I was able to go discreetly without anyone knowing.

Within walking distance of our house on Green Lane was Liverpool’s Calderstones Park. It was a fairly large park and I’ll never forget the tall grand entrance gates bordered on either side by giant twin Atlantes sculpted into the stone gateposts. This was our local park where we could run around as kids and play around in. It was here that I learnt how to ride my bike without stabilisers.  It was quite a large park and had a manor house within its grounds. But the biggest attraction by far was a collection of six megaliths, or Calder Stones from which the park got its name, and which were said to be even older than Stonehenge.  Back in the day, I had no knowledge of the historical significance of Calderstones Park. For me it was just a wide expanse of 126 acres of parkland to explore. One day, it was to serve a very practical purpose for my dad.

The entrance to Caldersone's Park

In the summer of 1983, our family bought a couple of rabbits, both males, from the local pet shop for Nicola’s 11th birthday in July: one black rabbit and one white. In those days, you could actually go into a pet shop and buy a puppy or kitten perfectly legally. The pet shop owner had sold my parents two male rabbits, or so we thought.  Once the summer holidays had ended and before school one morning, my sister had gone into the garage where we kept the rabbit hutch, to check up on her pets. Grandad had made some kind of rabbit run connected to the hutch so the rabbits could have some freedom to explore their surroundings. My sister saw some small black furry things scuttling about and ran out screaming as she thought they were rats. When dad went to see to check out this rat infestation, he quickly realised that one of the rabbits must have in fact been a female, as she had just given birth to a litter of baby kittens.  I’m not sure how many there were, but there must have at least been a dozen. Dad went back to the pet shop and managed to get the shop owner to take the baby rabbits off him. That was the end of that business, or so we thought. Not long afterwards, our two rabbits became amorous again and produced a second litter.  This time, Dad realising that he probably couldn’t palm this second lot of rabbits off to the pet shop, made a few phone calls to friends to see if anyone would be willing to take them from us. The take up was poor and so we were left with the pressing problem of what to do with our furry friends. My dad eventually took them to Calderstones Park and released them into the wild along with the parents so they had a sporting chance of survival. In total, there must have been over 20 rabbits.

While all this was happening, mum and dad’s hardware shop in Speke, Abisgolds, was not doing at all well financially. The B & Q store there was taking a lot of business away and eventually the bank decided to foreclose on the mortgage and repossess our house.  Our family were left with no other option than to leave the area. And so, in the autumn of that year, our family moved to a more modest 3-bedroom house in Wavertree, not far from SFX College’s lower school site on Queens Drive; the school where my brother Mark was at the time. And so began the next chapter in my life.

END OF PART 1