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Liverpool, England, 1940.
A great city port,built on trade with the New World. Gateway to America and the Empire.
Over ten miles of docks, running north to south along the River Mersey, It’s waterfront justly famous for its magnificent buildings and some of it’s boulevards rivaling Paris for their architecture and scope.

Now in the autumn of that year, at bay and at war. In the early summer months German aircraft had flown at some leisure up and down the riverfront, photographing the docks and goods yards. One of my
uncles sat on top of one of the great storage sheds and opened fire at them with a machine gun set in a barrel of sand to absorb the kick back. The German pilot waved at him as he flew off with a grin and an unharmed aircraft. They used their pictures to good intent later on in that fateful year.

I was conceived sometime in early 1940. A piece of poor timing by my parents if you ask me.

Maybe they got carried away with the ‘Phoney War’ and thought that it would all end soon and they could
safely bring a little lad into the world.

War II had began the previous September and from our teams point of view, things were not going well.

Poland had fallen in rapid fashion and in the mist and snow of that winter, the Germans were massing in the Ardennes for their planned spring offensive into France and Belgium, whilst the great French army
massed in the wrong place well to the south of them. You would have thought those Allied Generals would have taken greater care in protecting the future of the generation being born.

Still , love will out, my Mam and Dad had met only a short few months before. He was 35 and she 29.

It was not a case of very youthful love, they had already travelled someway along the road of life.

Their eyes met across a crowded room in a Public house called the Boundary in Liverpool. Mother always said she noticed this handsome man, leaning on the bar and looking a bit like John Wayne, and the
race was on. He asked her out to the pictures and on their first date, as the lights dimmed, he took off his dashing trilby hat, which he had been wearing at their first meeting. She was shocked to see he was bald.Never mind though, he had such lovely white teeth to make up for it. Ten minutes into the main feature
she observed him slipping them out onto his bottom lip. So, he was bald and had no teeth. She fell in love anyway.

Hitler tried to kill me, on 27th October 1940 to be precise, in the early hours he sent waves of his Dorniers and Heinkel bombers against Liverpool, in a doomed attempt to get me at birth. My Mother told of ceilings shaking and walls showering down paint and dust as the Anti-Christ made his effort to stifle my life at the
outset. He tried again in 1942 and this time got very close to success. A mine, floated down on a parachute smashed into the row of houses we were living in, in a little street called Fern Grove in Liverpool 8. It blew the roof off the house, killed 40 odd people in the street and made us homeless for more than a year,
wandering around relatives across Merseyside, seeking shelter and support. We survived the mine by being under the stairwell, Dad said my face was black with soot from the chimney , the spitting image of Al Jolsen. So the Fuhrer failed, was eventually defeated and my adventures commenced.

1945 and ALL THAT.

The year 1945 stands out vividly in my early recall, at Easter I started primary school at Tiber Street, two streets away from our house . That first day I met a small, dark lad called Ron Birchall who would figure large in my life ahead, we remained friends till his death over 55 years later. Certain milestones stand out as key moments in the cauldron that those times created in my mind. Mr Churchill (Ordered troops against the strikers in Liverpool in 1911 and fired on them, planned the disaster that was the Dardenelles, said Dad), speaking to the nation in May, telling us, all grouped around the radio, that the war in Europe was over and that Germany had surrendered. Dad said Churchill was a great war leader in 1940 and without doubt had saved the nation that summer but he was still a rotten Tory and no friend of the working man. As the radio broadcast finished uproar broke out people danced in and out of the house, the street was full of people rejoicing and singing. A jeep came around the corner with some American soldiers in it, they were dragged out and thrown up in the air then caught and smothered in kisses by the girls. It’s over shouted Dad, he had been too old in 1939 to fight but all his brothers were overseas, doing their bit, Steve Abrams in the 8th army, Joseph in the 1st and John in the Royal Marine Commandos. Dad threw me up into the air, your safe son, they wanted to turn you into a bar of soap and me into a lampshade, now we have licked them. A bar of soap ?, from that day to this I can never look at a German without wondering about their washing habits.

That evening bonfires were lit all over the area and straw dummies of Hitler burnt in the spring night air. It was rumoured that across the road, on the other side of the lane, a Mrs Dean, on shouting down to her husband in the cellar that he could now come out, the war was over, was met by her Grandad shouting back
‘I always knew the Kaiser would give up eventually’. The festivities went on into late in the night, our house filled up with a mixture of soldiers and civilians, I sat under the table in the kitchen and watched the legs and feet of the dancers above and around me. It was a magical evening. I watched the girls kissing the soldiers and sailors and vowed that when I grew up the forces would be for me and the girls had better be ready. We stayed up all night, gradually being pushed further back up the staircase by the extra crowd pushing their way into the house. My bed was eventually occupied in the early hours, I was not alone, it contained several other people from different parts of the world, some of them giggled and wriggled and sang the small hours away, well they deserved it and anyway, one of them had given me a bar of chocolate.

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