7: Decisions
It’s The Middle 1970s: When Everything Isn’t Always Getting Better (But some things still do)
Late in 1972 I remember being conventionally pleased when I got my offer from Liverpool University to go there the following autumn and start a Sociology degree. Going to university being what I'd long expected to be doing once school was finished with. But as the time drew near I wasn't at all sure.
Because the university idea was instinctively starting to feel like a wrong turn on the path into the housing career I'd wanted since seeing that Shelter poster I mentioned back in Chapter 3. And had now got started with my job at Liverpool City Council. But I'll come back to that after I've left Maghull.
I’ll talk about why and how the Canning and Granby Areas were blighted, and in Canning’s case half destroyed next time, in Chapter 7.
The new town that had been such an effort for the Hughes family to get to and such a great place to grow up in had turned into somewhere, at least for me, that I'd later recognise in the films "Pleasantville" and "The Truman Show." Maghull seemed to me to have started wallowing in its "We've made it and we're all smug about that" celebratory suburban shallowness by the end of the 1960s. Something I'm certain I will have pointed out at home in the long arguments that lasted all the way through my final couple of Maghull years. And which I don't have the will or the energy to write any more than that about.
Instead I stayed out as much as possible, life moved on and I left as soon as I could.
During the moving on I met Diana, my second proper girlfriend. And we got talking about the housing association she worked in, Liverpool Improved Houses. She liked it, a lot, but recommended a different one she thought would suit me better. As they, Liverpool Housing Trust, were more radical, she said, and more about emergency housing for the homeless. So I wrote to them, thinking I might move on to there from my Council job, that was only ever on temporary contracts, instead of going to university at all. But the Housing Trust said no. Very politely and with encouragements to try again some time. So in September 1973 I went to Liverpool University instead, to study sociology.
Which seamless sequence I'm going to interrupt right here to have a think about why? Why Liverpool University and why Sociology? Especially as I now know I'm going to have had two goes at that subject in that same university during my life, and will not much like it either time. Why did I start on it back then, nearly fifty years ago?
Well let's deal with sociology first as it's easy to explain. That's was because I'd failed my English Literature A-level, so needed to apply for something else and thought Sociology might be more up my street. Being, it seemed, about how society was organised and how it might work better. Also my friend Paul had done it for A-level at Wigan and it had sounded better than the Economics I'd done instead. So that was the "what subject" decision, lightly taken. Because "where" mattered more.
And Liverpool University won out on that one over Lancaster, though I did get an offer from there too. But by then I'd been for my interview at the brand new campus and already decided I didn't want to go there as it wasn't really in Lancaster at all. And I'd had enough of suburbs that were long bus rides away from where I really wanted to be.
So I went to Liverpool and not long after Diana and I moved into a flat in Walton together, within walking distance of where I'd come from. So I was back home, at last.
All of which reads back like a glibly taken sequence of life changing decisions. And I do remember it all as lightly done at the time. Even the moving in together, greeted with an "over the brush" fury back in Maghull, just seemed and felt right to us two. So a new life in an upstairs flat at 27 Church Road West it was.
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And here I'm going to interrupt the story again. First with a quote from a favourite writer, you’ll see why. Then an observation resulting from the quote. About that decision to go to university (The story will get going again after the italics, in case you want to go straight there).
Here’s the quote.
“Memory is not a filing system, or even a reconstruction; it is a re-creation. We remember the same things differently at different times not because we are unreliable but because the past is not fixed. Even a simple memory is a cluster of experiences where some things are vivid and some things obscured. As we develop and change so do our memories.” Jeanette Winterson1
The observation is this. That whereas in the story so far I'd been leading a fairytale of a life where everything was always getting better, from now on it won’t necessarily. I've grown up, left home and am now responsible for taking my own decisions, like adults do. And looking forward from here at memories yet to be recounted I can see that some of the decisions made by this younger me are going to look plain wrong. Now I’m older, think differently and see parts of my own past differently. In the light and by the evidence of experience. Meaning there are likely to be some "what if I hadn't done that?" thoughts coming up from now on. Not to change the past, obviously. But maybe to learn from it all, now I see and remember my life differently.
A "for example" right here in this chapter would be my 1973 decision to go to university. Which I now see as a mistake, and not the time of valuable experience and buoyant self-confidence I've been telling myself about ever since. When the truth as time and I now see it is that I didn’t value or enjoy the subject, its studying or being at the university at all. And was on the point of leaving it all the time I was there. But didn't leave, despite the so called self-confidence. And so for the rest of this chapter I will be glad I'm in Liverpool, but write with this new remembering of how hard I was having to labour through a mistake of a time at university. Rather than get on with the housing life I now see mattered to me more. And it matters to me that in the writing of this I’ve recognised that and will be ready for other mistakes still to come. One of them being that decades later I’ll have another go at sociology in the same university, before finally realising why I should never have gone there, either of those times, in the first place. That’s for later though, much later.
On the other hand no. So I’ll say this now while I’m thinking of it.
And it’s about scanners and divers, a question I’d ask people in later years, when I was helping them think about what sort of work they might love. “Are you a scanner or a diver?” I’d ask. “Someone who likes to see the big picture of a situation or someone who goes straight for the detail?” We can all do both, I’d explain, for a short while and if we absolutely have to. “But our natures will move towards one or the other before long.””
I for one am a straightforward and instinctive scanner. Which is why I could never cope with the diving in and staying there for years of deep academic study, either of the times I tried it. I don’t have the patience or the nature and, as I’ve learned in the writing of this, was wasting my time even trying. Especially that second time round when I already knew most of the elements of this stuff about myself, but hadn’t yet read or learned from that wonderful quote about re-created memories. Now I have I know I simply can’t do academic studying and could never ever have made myself want to.
I might say more when this story reaches my more recent university mistake but this explains it enough for now.
So let’s get back to the 1970s. Which might be turning into a more up and down, light and dark, interesting sort of a story. Now everything isn’t always getting better. Let’s see.
And like with Chapter 5 I’m going to try and sum up several years in these few highlights: Pat’s Flat; O’Connor’s Pub; Songwriting; Falkner Square; and Living On My Own.
Pat’s Flat
Me and Pat, my first girlfriend, had stayed friends. And by the time I was starting at the University Pat had moved to a flat in Liverpool, near the University, and said I could use it if I liked, while she was out at work each day. Which was great, kind of her and probably why I stayed and completed the degree. As I’d do most of my work there and just go in for lectures and tutorials. Meaning I didn’t much engage with University life, but then I didn’t much want to.
The flat was in Falkner Street, only across a couple of roads from where I’d mostly need to go. We’d later learn that early in the 1960s the flat had been owned by Brian Epstein and he’d loaned it to John and Cynthia Lennon when they’d first got married. We didn’t know that at the time and I have no Beatles-related memories of there. The music I most associate with then being “Close To The Edge” by Yes and Supertramp’s “Crime of the Century.” Second hand from Probe on Clarence Street. Hippyish music bordering on Prog (and both still wonderful when I’ll occasionally play them all these years later).
So the days passed pleasantly enough. And being in Falkner Street meant I was close to Canning Street, which is going lead me directly to Falkner Square and my future a few anecdotes from now. But before then let’s go to the pub.
O’Connor’s Pub
Back in school when I’d had what passed for a careers interview, with a priest called Father Erskine, my bewildering answer to his asking where I’d like to work had been “Liverpool 8.” By which I meant up the hill out of town where the Everyman Theatre, the Philharmonic Hall and O’Connor’s pub were. Because that’s where the poets and musicians were. And I knew this because of the cover of a Liverpool Scene LP.
That’s leading Liverpool poet and artist Adrian Henri sat at the front. And they’re all standing outside O’Connor’s Pub. So that’s where we’d all go, school friends and girlfriends every Saturday night. Upstairs at O’Connor’s, like we were poets and musicians too.
Songwriting
Though I knew I wanted to work in housing, and still did all the way through university when I’d go back and work at the council during all of the holidays, I also still wanted to make it as a songwriter, as I’d told that priest back at school. And as well as a guitar and big dreams I had an Akai reel-to-reel now. To begin producing demo tapes of the songs I’d go out and play at local folk clubs.
And to cut straight to the end of a very long and hopeful story I never did mange to have any kind of parallel carer in songwriting. But I loved, enjoyed and still value the fact that I wrote so many songs. They were how I wrote then, before I would write things like you’re reading now. If I hadn’t written the songs, I’m saying, I wouldn’t be writing this.
So good job songs, well done. They were also how I’d go on to express myself through some difficult times. As you’ll no doubt hear in future episodes.
Falkner Square
Falkner Square, at the top end of Canning Street, was where Liverpool Housing Trust’s office was. The housing association Diana had recommended to me, before they’d knocked me back and I’d gone to university instead.
Now we were living together Diana was still recommending them as a possible employer for afterwards. Which is how come one day in the autumn term of 1975, the final year of my degree now started, I’ve walked along Canning Street to go into LHT and offer to work for them until that “afterwards” as a volunteer. They’ll say yes, I’ll start work during that Christmas break, then regular days each week up to my finals. And then for the following twenty years, more happily than not.
And get a strong indicator this might be the place for me on that first autumn day as I turn the corner from Canning Street. “Born To Run” by Bruce Springsteen, him again, has come out, all the LHT windows are wide open, and his music is blasting out across the Square. Tramps like us, indeed. I feel like I’m definitely home now.
And yes Fr. Erskine from back at school, it’s a job, in Liverpool 8.
Living On My Own
The summer of 1976 was long, hot, brooding and memorable. Television presenters would broadcast from the bottom of parched reservoirs, standing in the ruins of drowned villages. And I finished my time at Liverpool University by not bothering to pick up my degree certificate and going to London where my friend Paul now lived with Una, his girlfriend from Bootle who he’s now married to or soon will be. Paul’s just started writing music reviews for the NME and for one of them we both go to the 100 Club in Oxford Street to see the Sex Pistols at a gig lots of music types will later claim to have been at. The one where Sid Vicious starts deliberate fights in the audience. Well we were and I hated it, and the band, and warned Paul against basing his journalism career on that shower. Wisely he ignored me.
Back in Liverpool I turned up at Falkner Square, LHT started paying me and soon afterwards I moved into a flat on my own. A lot to say in one sentence and I think I’ll leave the housing stuff ‘til the next chapter. While I say a bit here about the flat and Diana.
Which is that I’m not going to say much about Diana at all. Our relationship would be long, happy at times, tempestuous at others, and would end badly. But it ended half of my lifetime ago now and I no longer feel badly about it. What would be the point? Diana’s still around, is still the mother of our precious child Clare, and I wish her only well, even though it’s many years now since we last spoke. But I’ll be speaking no ill of her in here. So’s you know.
Late summer 1976, then, was the first time we parted. When I moved into a tiny flat in Greenbank Drive, in a building that’s now a refugee hostel, backs onto Sarah’s allotment and is within half a mile of where we live. So moving into there was definitely what’s now called a sliding doors moment. When I might have been moving into an entirely different life. Living on my own, working somewhere I loved, that was filling up with other young left-wing activists, one of whom might have been the one. So there’s a path not taken there. Not taken because by the end of the year Diana and I were back together in the flat in Walton.
And I do have a memory of her not being as enthusiastic about that as I was. But like Jeanette Winterson says this could well be a memory I’m re-creating, here in the present day, to suit the part of this story where we will finally split up twelve years later. But anyhow, by early 1977 we’re back in Walton again, ready for the next chapter.
And before ending, a word about the photographs2
Jeanette Winterson from her 2014 Introduction to “Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit”
Other than photographs of places, some from the internet others from my own archived blog posts, I have no photographs of this time other than that one from my student ID card. Such as there were have been left behind, somewhere along the way.
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The student ID photo! Mine is long gone, but I expect I looked about 12 and rather prim. Loved this installment. I have similar feelings about my Uni years. I don't regret them in some ways (what's the point, it all brought me here), but I was a fish out of water. I had all my liberatory fun as a sixth-former with my nose in Beckett and Eliot and Heaney and Bob Marley and Talking Heads on the common room turntable. By comparison, Uni always felt very constraining. I think it often doesn't live up to expectations, and what comes before/after is a lot more interesting. Look forward to the next chapter.