Now, 2nd November, 2023
In finally beginning the writing of this story, which I'd prevaricated over for some time, I'm actually continuing a process of slowing down and simplifying my life that I began a couple of years ago, after I'd found a book called "Waiting For the Last Bus" by Richard Holloway. Reading that I realised my own life was approaching his kind of later lifetime too. So I began what turned out to be two years of thinking and clearing. Aiming at only being left with doing stuff that really matters to me, as I am now, while waiting for that last bus to arrive.
Stuff like writing this book. Which I'm enjoying and hope you are too. And which is so far, in what I've written and the little I've got planned ahead, turning out to be more of a story and less the book of reflections I'd thought it might be. Maybe the reflections will come, like they did, as the story's central character gets older. Let's see?
But for now let's get on with the story.
Then, 1955/58
Walton, Bootle & Maghull
Which I think we'll pick up in July 1955, when I'm eighteen months old. Since writing Chapter 1 I've remembered this from then. Me and my dad, Joe Hughes, walking through the gates of Walton Hospital, me proudly pushing my own push-chair, to go and pick up Rose, my mother, and new baby brother Colin one late in July day. I definitely won't have walked there, all the way from Diana Street, but I do have this almost ceremonial memory of my change to "big brother" being marked by my walking into the hospital.
That's the memory. A few walking through the gates moments at what's now a local health centre with an Aldi Supermarket down the main drive where I once pushed that pram.
Back in Diana Street I'm guessing the presence of two Hughes infants must have so disturbed the peace in our now overcrowded shared house, that before too long Rose and Joe had felt forced to move us all out of there. To our nan's in Bootle, while we waited for our new house in Maghull to be ready to move into. Which it was, in September 1957.
The street was called Hillary Crescent after one of the recent conquerors of Everest. Nearby streets being "Tensing" (yes, spelt like that)1, "Hunt" from the same ascent, and "Scott" as in "of the Antarctic." Because the house builders had run out of mountaineers, I suppose.
Anyway, in September 1957 the streets outside were still a building site and my memories are of running in and out of the not quite finished other houses and sitting up on steam rollers, left out in the still being made roads, after the builders had finished work each day.
Maghull you see, was basically a new town, or a kind of overspill estate. Though it was never called either of those things, like nearby Runcorn, Skelmersdale, Norris Green or Speke. But in one of those names, "Norris Green," lies the story of how come we were there at all in that early autumn of 1957.
My parents had both been born down by the docks, both in 1928. Rose at Canal Street, next to Miller's Bridge in Bootle. One of the main roads, then and now, into the North End docks. Her family, the Gerrards, would move to a new Bootle Corporation house in Orrell Park while Rose was still young. Whereas Joe's family never did get very far away from Chisenhale Street, in the crowded warehouses area near the city centre docks, where he was born. Not for the want of unsuccessful trying by his parents, particularly when the big new council overspill estate out at Norris Green began to be built in the early 1930s. But they never got there. And by the time war broke out young Joe's abiding memory was not of being safely out of harm's way in Norris Green, but of night after night sat on the roof of their Liverpool Corporation walk-up block in Kirkdale watching the docks burn.
So it was that not much more than a decade later him and Rose began dreaming of moving their little family out of any more shared spaces in the city, to a place my Dad once described to me as “the Norris Green where you bought your own house if you were lucky enough to be able to, rather than waited in vain to be given it.” So in the post-war Nye Bevan and (whisper it) Harold Macmillan house-building boom they got a mortgage and bought 12 Hillary Crescent in Maghull for £2,000, the equivalent (I’ve just checked) of a bargain £59,000 today and we all moved in.
And though I'd later come to dislike Maghull it was undeniably a good place for a little child in those early days. And when I last went there I could look around and genuinely say "I remember when this was all fields." Because much of it still had been in 1957. Beyond our "Everest and Scott of the Antarctic" streets and the Neighbouring "Lake District" ones there were fields. One of the fields and at least one remaining farm, I remember, we'd have to cross to get to the nearest shop. There was space, big skies and, on the farm, interesting pigs. I also remember though, most of our shopping got done at the mobile co-op van when it would noseregularly into our road between the builders and their steam rollers. As, like with many another new town I’d later learn about, the shops in Maghull wouldn’t arrive until well after there were a lot more people to shop in them.
Anyway, we’d moved.
Our house, like all the others in the street, was a three bedroom semi. And since we only occupied two of the bedrooms between us, Colin and I always shared, we became a bit of an overspill estate ourselves. Joe's sister Terry coming to live with us for a while. Then, more controversially, a cousin from Rose's side of the family called Ronnie. Yes, generally referred to, to my profound dislike, as "Big Ronnie." He stayed long enough to have started at the local secondary school but eventually returned to Bootle for various not settling in reasons. And I've always suspected I might have been one of them.
In any case we'd have needed the third bedroom back before too long as the Hughes family was soon to expand. But that's for the next chapter. For now I'll end this one with two football-connected memories, both from 1958.
The first one happens when I've come downstairs one winter morning, a couple of weeks after my fourth birthday, so only a few months after we've moved in. Joe's sat at the dining room table with a newspaper open in front of him and he's crying. "Bobby Charlton's alive but they're not sure about Duncan Edwards" I remember him saying, before he lifts me up on his knee and explains who they are and what's happened to the Manchester United team last night in Munich.
My dad's also in the second and much happier football memory. It's June now, of the same year and we're both in the living room. Joe's up a step-ladder, supposedly painting the ceiling. And I'm sat on the floor "keeping out of his way." But really we're both watching the new television. Just arrived, our first and rented specially because of what's on it now. The 1958 World Cup Final. And I don't really understand what's happening on the screen, but so clearly remember how excited Joe gets every time a particular player goes anywhere near the ball, that when Rose and Colin come in later on I'm delighted to give them the news that "Pelé's won the World Cup!"
And next time...? Well actually I've got up the morning after writing all you've just read and, picking up on my own introduction about simplification, I've decided to do some simplifying of what I'd got planned for the next chapter. After all, I'm still only four years old when this one ends and, charming as little children can be I know I didn't stay charming. So next time, well, there'll be more years covered with probably a bit more grit in the story. And I'll be on my way to moving back into Liverpool.
His name was Tenzing Norgay, spelt like that.