Now: 29th October, 2023
When I was born Winston Churchill was the Conservative Prime Minister, the new Queen was probably still being called "The New Queen" and the post-war rationing of meat wouldn't end until the July of that year, 1954. But of course I wasn't aware of any of this having just been born.
But now, almost seventy years later as I begin this writing I’m all too well aware. That the Conservatives are in power again, as they have been for more of my life than would have been ideal, the old and respected even by me Queen has recently died, and food banks have become a necessary evil all over a country that could be said to be almost as bedraggled as the one where a world war and its follow-up austerity were only just ending.
In my opinion.
Which is the last time I'll use that excuse of a phrase in this whole memoir, because there'll be opinions all over it, probably more of them than facts. And why not? It's my memoir and I well realise that even where a chapter's subtitled something like this one, the version of the 1950s I'm remembering and writing down is one pieced together from things I've been told, official records of the time, other people's writings, photographs and films together with my own few and unreliable memories. All rolled up together into roughly what I believe and remember as having happened. Ok? So here's the story.
Or should I say "some story?" Because although I'm calling this a memoir it’s not going to be an exhaustively, irritating, day by day life story. More of a summary, really. So I can reflect on what I thought, found and liked, loved and didn’t along the way. Intending a good deal of the book, once the story’s got going, to be about now. What a lifetime’s thoughts, opinions, reflections, intentions and maybe even wisdom have all added up to, as I reach what's still apparently the average expected lifespan for a human male. Three score years and ten. Seventy in other words. An age I’m expecting and hoping to live a good number of years beyond of course, but you never know. So seventy seems to be not just an auspicious age but also a sensible one for me to get this thinking and writing done. While there's still health, strength and spark in me, in reliable abundance.
Because there might not have been by now. From when I was fourteen a song I first heard then, "Old Friends" by Simon and Garfunkel, had me expecting that by now I'd be mostly and miserably huddled in a big coat on a park bench somewhere, humming:
“How terribly strange to be seventy”1
Which it's turned out I only rarely do. Due to said health, strength and spark's occasional dimming by a tendency to depression. Though not so often these days, now I’ve spent a couple of years clearing stuff out of my life I’d decided I was either done with or not taking to. All that clearing and stopping meaning I'm starting this in good humour and great optimism, on a late October day in 2023, just as the clocks go back here in Britain.
So let’s get the story properly going, back in mid-1950s Liverpool, where a new baby has arrived.
Then: 1954
Walton
I was born to parents Roseanne and Joseph Hughes, Rose and Joe, at Walton Hospital in Liverpool on January 20th 1954. By their accounts, I have no other, it was a cold day in a cold winter. And they brought me home, their first child, to a first floor flat in Diana Street, also in Walton. I'm told I was a happy child and the photograph below, from not long after then, beamingly supports this claim. I'm being held there by my Auntie Ellen and my mum Rose is crouching between me and her own mum, my nan Elizabeth Gerrard. We're outside my nan's house, at Marsh Avenue in Orrell Park Bootle, where we'll also go and live for a few months later on in the 1950s.
From these just born days my memories are few and don't include that photograph being taken, happy though I clearly was about it. But a sound and sight memory that has stayed from then is of being held by my mum in one arm, while I'm looking down on a pot she's stirring with the other as a tune is playing on what was then called the wireless. A tune I now know was the theme of The Archers, then in its own very early BBC days. A warm kitchen memory I’l still often think of all these years later, every time my wife Sarah opens BBC Sounds on her iPhone and says "It's Ambridge time!"
My other baby memories are less clear but no less precious. There's one of drifting in and out of sleep during what I’d later be told was my only ever trip on the Liverpool Overhead Railway. My dad said they'd taken me on it soon after hearing it was going to be be shut down. The there's another of trams. Where I'm in my pram being pushed down Spellow Lane to the shops on Walton and County Roads, and there are two trams rattling along in opposite directions at the crossroads ahead of us.
And on what could easily have been the same day there's a memory of my mum's she'd often talk about. Where we get to the shops, she's bought some daffodils and leaves me outside in the pram while she goes into another shop. It’s what always happened with babies then. Only to come out and find I've just eaten all the flowers. She panics and takes me straight round to the doctor's (free as I’ve arrived soon after the NHS) but is assured I'll come to no harm. And of course I don’t, though I've never eaten a daffodil since.
For the next big incident in my small world of a few streets, local shops and Stanley Park, we've moved to a different shared house on the opposite side of Diana Street, away from the park end where the first house was. I'm standing up in this memory, and leaning on the inside of the front window to see what's causing the thunderous noise I can hear coming in from the pavement. The noise of course, if you know your Liverpool geography, being from the thousands of feet of passing football fans on their way into Goodison Park, Everton's ground at the now near end of our street. Where sometimes they’d crowd in 70,000 fans in those days, before health and safety had been invented and when the team had just returned to the First Division.
The ground's in more of my memories of round there from then on, as I was clearly getting outside more now I could walk. Playing in the street or being taken to the shops. And I remember always looking out for evidence of the Everton players, kicking balls around over a high wall or looking out of the windows high up in the stands. Because I imagined they all lived and practised inside there.
But while I’m talking about Everton this is probably the place to mention that as early as I could comprehend what he was on about, my dad let me know that we didn't support them, physically close as they were, but a different team from far away on the other side of the park called Liverpool. And so it was and has always been, for me. Not so for Colin though, my eighteen months younger brother, born at this time. Who later and deliberately rebelled into becoming the Everton supporter he has remained.
Here's Colin and I from before he was an Everton supporter being held for the now traditional just-born photograph outside my nan's. That's our dad holding me there, while baby Colin appears to have fallen asleep.
From around the same time, and I think it's the same duffel coat, is the only photograph I have from Diana Street. Me on my tricycle being looked after by someone I always think is a girl from the second shared house there. Which we would be leaving soon after this photo was taken, to go and live at my nan's for a short while as we waited for the new house we were going to get, a whole house of our own, to be ready.
Bootle
From living at my nan's I have just two memories. One of her shouting "Mind me mantle!" The mantle being the gas powered and apparently fragile "big light" in her living room. So threatened by me kicking a ball or balloon around under it I’d be repeatedly sent out to “Go and play in the back entry!”
At quieter times, and often, I remember playing with her wireless set which she called "The Rediffusion.” A speaker high up in the corner controlled, to my wonderment, from a brown Bakelite switch box I could easily reach. Which let me switch between its two stations that I'd later learn were labelled on the box as "Home" and "Light." The future BBC Radios 4 and 2, and the beginnings of a devotion to the BBC, the radio and to music that's never left me. From the time the music I most remember listening out for is not Elvis, Little Richard or something else that would look cool in a memoir like this, but “ Tammy" by Debbie Reynolds. Always and since the lovely song that’s the sound of my nan's house back in Bootle to me. Checking on my phone just now I see the song came out in June 19572, three months before the Hughes family would move to a place called Maghull.
That's for next time, in Chapter 2, along with some back story about Rose, Joe and how come we’re moving to a suburb.
From “Bookends” 1968, a song and album that’s been in my life ever since. Written by Paul Simon, like poetry. “A newspaper blown through the grass falls on the round toes of the high shoes of the old friends.” A description that fits my walking boots.
Whenever I hear the song even now I’m three years old, in the hallway of a neighbour’s house in Diana Street. Looking up at the sparkly glass Lily had over her front door. Thinking I was looking at the stars.
An auspicious start in life, being directed to support Liverpool FC! My dad, coming from there, was a life long supporter even though I doubt he ever saw a match live. Sadly he passed away before their rise back to the top! Oh and I was in love with Debbie Reynolds too, especially when she sang Tammy.