When eventually my father returned and my parents set up home in Liverpool. I didn’t take to having a strange man around. After all I hadn’t seen as much of my mother as one would like. Similarly my father didn’t take to the demanding son. He wanted his gorgeous wife to himself. After all he had hardly had any time with her and they’d been married for several years.
It must have been a difficult time for them; restarting their relationship in totally different circumstances; finding jobs and somewhere to live; going back to civilian life; life with no war yet with more rationing than at any time during the war. They also had to cope with Mum-Mum. She hadn’t been a problem when they were courting as she had a house and my mother lived with her. She became a problem because she didn’t want my mother to leave her. Her husband, my mother’s father, had come from a poor family on a Scottish estate in Ayreshire and qualified as a doctor. He was a GP in Cockermouth when my mother was a girl, well to do, one of the first people to own a motor car in the town. Yet all was not well in the family. He had drink problem and didn’t get on with his son Rob, my mother’s elder brother, who apparently suffered horrendous beatings and was sent off to Rossall school and then off to a cattle ranch in Australia. My grandfather had fought in Gallipoli in 1915 and my mother thinks he never recovered from the experience. These days he would have been debriefed and, if necessary given counselling. In those days they didn’t even recognise shell-shock, as it became known later, as a problem.
Anyway as well as being not a very good father he became a bully to his wife. My mother reports huge rows and threats. Eventually he ran off with one of his patients to Sheffield. So my grandmother was left on her own and too conscious of the disgrace to admit it to anyone. I only learned the story after she had died aged 94.
The house we lived in in Liverpool had 3 floors and to help pay the bills my parents let off the top floor, first to a family with a girl about my age. I used to go into a corner of the room with her and we sing “Church bells,church bells.” They moved out in 1947 and my grandmother, Mum-Mum moved in.
Anyway it wasn’t long before my brother Chris was born. He fitted into the family much better and, in spite of my parent’s protestations and their attempts to treat us all equally, was always their favourite.
My other grandparents were away in Southern Africa. My fathers father, also a William Andrews, went out to South Africa after he had qualified as a vet. He was sent to the Eastern Cape and was put up on a farm with several daughters. He chose to marry my grandmother, rather than her prettier sister or so my grandmother told me. The family came to England when my father was only 4 – he’d already been named Digger by then because he was always looking for diamonds. My aunt, Betty, went back to the continent and married a Rhodesian policeman and I still have in my possession a knobkerrie that he purportedly confiscated from a murderer who had killed 4 people with it.
So I lived in Liverpool between 1946 and 1954. It was a pretty depressing place then. The end of our street was a bomb site and all the buildings in the town centre I remember as being coated in black. It was a different world back then. We were the only people in the road with a car; the milk was delivered and the rubbish collected with horse and cart. Rationing was in full swing so we had hens in our small back garden – otherwise it was dried egg powder – I still remember my first banana. We lived in a large detached Victorian house on 3 floors – sounds grand but I remember it as cold and draughty. Our bedroom had a paraffin heater in all night in the winter months. The neighbour opposite used to rush out and collect the horse dung for his roses and the one next door treated his family to a radiogram -I remember ‘Oh my papa’ by Eddie Fisher (Liz Taylor’s husband for a while) – I think it was their only record! My Dad hated it – he was a bit of an intellectual snob and only considered classical music to be worth listening to.
One Christmas my brother Chris and I were given roller skates and we both became expert skaters, especially when they put down new concrete paving stones. Our skates had metal wheels so made a real racket. We also had great times on our sledge, a heavy wooden one with metal runners that we would tow to nearby Princes Park, taking it in turns to be towed. I was always a bit of an entrepreneur and I made money by going round the houses in nearby streets, collecting their jam jars and selling them on at a half-penny a time to the local jam factory. I also used to help the milkman on Saturday mornings. I’d sit up beside him on his cart and when he stopped I’d take the required milk bottles to the door steps and collect their empties. I think I got paid 6d for the morning’s work. I loved that job but it wasn’t the same when the horse and cart was replaced by an electric float although the introduction of motorised dust carts partly made up for it in my little boy’s eyes. I loved machines, particularly steam trains. I was an avid train spotter, even playing truant from school if an important train, such as the Red Rose, was expected. My Dad took us to Speke (now John Lennon) airport sometimes – just a small place in those days – and we also went to some air shows where we could inspect the new jet bombers and fighters, like the Victor, Valiant and the Meteor.
I joined the cubs at about 7 and learned how to tell trees apart from their leaves and bark and how to tie knots. We went on the occasional camps and I remember loving singing songs like On Ilkley Moor Ba’tet round the camp fire. My worst memory was when I had just joined and got caught short. Too shy to tell the scoutmaster, the worst happened and I ran home with my pants full crying. Another time we went camping for the weekend and the scoutmaster mistook salt for sugar, yet insisted we eat the custard he’d made with it. Of course we were all sick and had to be sent home early.
We had a Morris 10 to start with – with the registration number US 8910 – but one day one of the back wheels came off and went rolling past us, fortunately doing no harm so this vehicle was replaced with a 1939 Studebaker which was the family car until I left home, although it always seemed to be breaking down.
We used to escape Liverpool for 3-week camping holidays. Apparently we did go to hotels and guest houses for a while but as the family increased in size that became too expensive. Port Loe in Cornwall was a favourite destination. We camped in an open field overlooking the sea. It was primitive, a pit for a loo, another for rubbish; water from a well – the type you had to prime, then pump with a handle – had to be fetched in a canvas bucket which leaked over your footwear unless it had been properly treated; a tent for the adults and another for the children + a third when the family increased to 6. We went walking and swimming and very occasionally into the nearby town of Falmouth. That was my Dad’s regime. We wanted more life. He cooked a fried breakfast every morning even when, one year he was on a milk-only diet – an experiment for the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, where he worked. Although to the die hard camper these holidays sound romantic – no one else camped in the area those days – there was quite a lot of friction between family members, particularly the day of setting off when my poor father had to pack everything into the old car. There were no roof boots in those days and polythene hadn’t been invented and the boot wasn’t enormous.It used to take 2 days to make the journey with a lot of ‘Is it much further?’ and complaints because Chris was allowed to sit in the front with the grownups because he suffered from travel sickness. The overnight stop entailed unpacking everything, usually in the pitch dark – because we’d set off so late because of the enormity of the task of packing up, erecting the tents and packing everything away the next morning. Every chore was a source of fresh friction and it can’t have been easy catering for us all with just a couple of paraffin-fueled Primus stoves. The main tent, about 2m square with a maximum headroom of about 2m was for my parents but also had to serve as the kitchen, dining are and living room when the weather was bad. Children had to wash up, fetch water and peel spuds. Sometimes there were accidents. I trod on a broken bottle hidden in the sand one year and couldn’t swim for the rest of the holiday. I remember getting told off when my youngest brother David was sick. He was sitting on the potty and said he wanted to throw up and I tactlessly said ‘Surely you can’t have stuff coming out of both ends at once’. Towards the end of the camping days we had a trailer with the rear end specially converted into a kitchen area with wind breaks and a zinc work surface. We also had a homemade loo tent made of four poles with Hessian between offering more cover than the two hedges we’d had before. One year the loo tent was blown away in a gale in the middle of the night. I remember a lot of shouting and the fear that some of the other tents which were taking a heavy battering might also get blown away.
I have 3 siblings and we’re roughly 3 years apart with me the eldest. My parents claimed they had a large family to help balance the breeding of the intelligencia because the ‘lower classes’ would otherwise have swamped the country.
I loved these holidays and hated the return to Liverpool which seemed dirty and claustrophobic. A few things I remember liking about Liverpool – the Mersey tunnels and the Catholic cathedral seemed very modern and modern was good in the 50’s; the Mersey ferry and the overhead railway which ran north to Southport and gave an amazing view over the docks which were very busy those days – these were another escape from the blackened, bombed out city; the parks – we lived midway between Sefton Park and Princes Park. The former park had a boating lake, on which I sailed my toy yacht, and caged birds – I particularly remember of the magnificence of peacock tails – and the latter great hills for our sledge. My brother, Chris, and I would take it in turns to pull or be pulled there and back on the heavy wooden toboggan with its polished steel runners.
I began my schooling early and could recite most of my times table by the age of 5. I first went to a kindergarten on the Aigburth Road run by Miss Gertrude who seemed like someone from the dark ages to me. Later I was sent to Abbey Holm High School for boys which involved a bus trip right across the city. I remember missing the stop to get off the first morning I went alone and bursting into tears. Another memory was being pushed off the rear standing platform moving bus by some bigger boys as it approached my stop. I remember little of this school, although I went there until I was 10. I loved to sing, particularly solos, but there was a boy a year above me who was deemed to have a better voice than mine so I rarely was given the opportunity to show off my skill. I also remember a naughty boy who liked to get his penis out under the desk and even had the nerve to urinate on the floor as a way of showing off. I must have been naughty too as I received the punishment of having my knuckles wrapped with the thin edge of a ruler in front of the whole class for some misdemeanor. Playtime provides me with more memories:playing with Dinky cars – the game was to take them to the top of a particular bank and see whose car went the furthest – racing cars such as the Ferrari, and the BRM spring to mind as being the most successful; seeing if you could reach the ceiling when peeing in the urinal; discovering that Father Christmas was not real; seeing a fat boy bullied; seeing another boy with blood streaming down his face after someone had hit him with a broken cast iron drain pipe. I injured myself once by failing to make the distance when jumping across a flight of steps and cutting my shin badly. My mother came and took me home. She also had to fetch me several times when I became ill with stomach cramps, something I’ve learned to live with all my life.
One of the pupils, Geoffrey, lived reasonably close to me and we became friends. He was a very bad influence on me and led me into all kinds of mischief of which I am profoundly ashamed now. We used to drop pebbles on to blind men’s hats from a high wall and watch their efforts to find out where they were coming from. We used to pull stones from the rockeries of the nearby posh houses onto their drives. I was dared to go round to the back of one of these houses and smash a window. The owner caught me as we tried to run off. I refused to tell her my name so she looked at the name tag on my school cap. That night I was very withdrawn and the policeman arrived when I was in the bath. It was the worst moment in my life to date. I must have been around 8. Geoffrey also tried to get me involved in shop lifting but I was too much of a coward and only was prepared to act as lookout outside the targeted shop. A cousin of his came for the day, a girl a bit younger than us, and we were left alone for a while. When his mother came back we were all naked – somehow we managed to dare her into this. Geoffrey went on to much worse exploits which I wasn’t involved. A gang of several boys of 10 and upwards to early teens used to accost girls on a bomb site nearby which served as a short cut and take off their knickers and touch their private parts. The activity that I am so ashamed of that I can hardly bare to confess to it is throwing missiles at passing trains from the sides of a cutting. Pure senseless vandalism.I just hope I never hurt anyone.
I was also very interested in flowers and birds and, as was the fashion in those days, had a collection of birds’ eggs. I collected stamps, British Commonwealth only at the advice of my Dad, and this gave me a good grounding in geography and history. As my grand parents lived in southern Africa and my uncle was in the army in Nigeria I had an advantage over most of my school mates and managed some very favourable swapsies. I became interested in Africa then, particularly southern Africa, and this subject still interests me.