Finally the great day arrived when electricity came into the house, putting an end to the evening lighting of gas lamps and the lack of broadcast entertainment. Uncharacteristically, we were the first family on the block to get a television, conferring upon us an instant popularity among neighbors wanting to watch. Like the rest of the neighborhood, we had no indoor toilet in the house and no hot running water. I remember being terrified of having to go outside in the evening down a dark brick passageway to the ancient outdoor toilet behind the house. For our weekly bath on Saturday night, my parents would heat big kettles of water on the coal fire and pour hot water into a tub in which we’d bathe consecutively, starting with the youngest.
Frugality was bred into our bones. The bus ride to and from school cost a couple of pennies each day, so Ger and I would on occasion walk home in order to save the fare, not for ourselves but to give back to our mum. “Oh, aye,” she’d tease us, “but what about the cost of wearing out your good shoe leather with all that walking?”
“We walked on the grass wherever we could, to save leather,” Ger assured her, and I nodded. Never wasting money and contributing however we were able to the family coffers were unquestioned values to us. Largely because of my mother’s wit, these economies were considered not something shameful that poor people were compelled to do, but rather something terribly clever that smart people did. One time my dad brought home a large, flat wooden crate of glazed pears, a luxury item we’d normally never have in the house. He’d been given it because one corner of the crate had been gnawed by rats, but the remainder was perfectly fine. For the next little while we dined like princes on glazed pears.
My father kept a flock of chickens in a small barn in the backyard, and I was morbidly fascinated by how he could expertly kill a chicken with a quick snap of its neck. Every year he’d have a local farmer drop off several big sacks of parsnips from which he’d make his parsnip wine. We kids would help keep the wine cellar stocked too by harvesting clusters of blue elderberries from vacant land, hauling shopping bags full of them back to the house for our mum’s elderberry wine. We’d secure an enormous and rare treat by occasionally weaseling a couple of pennies from our mum so we could go to the little store around the corner and purchase a bottle of ginger beer.
There was no crushing sense of deprivation in any of this, and we were capable of what passed for extravagance, especially at Christmastime. We’d have the splendid treat of going into the city to see the captivating Christmas scenes on display in the department store windows, to meet Father Christmas and go to a theater to watch in wonderment a pantomime, none finer than Peter Pan with Tinker Bell and Peter flying miraculously above our heads. Somehow excellent presents and stuffed stockings always awaited us on Christmas morning, and Christmas dinner remains vivid with nostalgic affection. It seemed the grandest affair, carried on in the seldom-used front parlor at what was by our standards an elaborately laid table. We had roast turkey and stuffing, mashed potatoes with gravy and brussels sprouts. Always a homemade Christmas cake with marzipan icing and Christmas pudding with brandy and soft sauce. We older boys were permitted a thimbleful of wine. All of this was better than Dickens ever dreamed of.
The inescapable school Christmas pageants were sometimes less successful, and I achieved a personal worst in my early thespian career when I was cast to play the feature role in a re-enactment of Good King Wenceslas. The rest of the class was to sing the carol while another kid, playing the page, and I as king would act out the requisite coming hither and going forth through the rude wind’s loud lament. Preparations were proceeding brilliantly until about a week before the night of the pageant when I developed an enormous boil on the back of my neck. Red and painful pus-filled lumps, boils were not uncommon afflictions, and I remember a number of times suffering from my father’s attempts to “bring the boil to a head” by applying a scorching hot mustard plaster. Unhappily for the pageant, my kingly costume included both a ruff and a crown. The ruff, rubbing against the agonizing boil, caused me to tilt my head forward, which in turn caused the crown to slip off my head. I think I acted out the whole scene with my head facing straight down and one hand clamping the crown to my head, leaving the other arm free to point toward yonder peasant, the miracle of preheated footsteps and all the rest.
Nobody we knew owned a car. A holiday would be a one-day outing by train to Blackpool or the Chester zoo or the seaside at Rhyl in Wales. But these were splendid expeditions, rife with adventure and excitement, like the time when Mrs. Richter came along with us only to have the sea wind lift her dainty little hat off her head and send it skittering along the beach with all of us boys in hot but futile pursuit. As with everywhere else, dangers lurked along the shore. There were deadly riptides and undertows ready to suck us out to sea. One time my father showed us an enormous jellyfish stranded above the tide line. He nudged it quickly with the point of his shoe and we all jumped back as the creature flicked out venomous tentacles. “One sting of those and you’d be paralyzed,” he warned us. The thick grasses growing in the sand dunes were capable of slashing bare legs like rapiers. We viewed with dread a notorious stretch of quicksand where it was said a horse and cart and its unwary driver had all been fatally swallowed up in a matter of minutes. In later years my mother would marvel, “I can’t believe you chose to live on an island that you have to take a ferry to get to,” because, she said, as a child I’d wept uncontrollably and fought against getting aboard the ferry to cross the Mersey River. Fear of water prevented my learning to swim, even with a swimming pool next door, just as fear of heights kept me firmly on the ground while Ger and his pals would clamber recklessly in treetops. One thing I could do in those days was run, run like the wind, run like the great Roger Bannister, whose “Miracle Mile” and subsequent victory over the Australian John Landy in the “Mile of the Century” in 1954, in the far-distant city of Vancouver, swelled our English schoolboy hearts with pride. An old photograph shows myself and Ger, along with ten other comical-looking lads in short pants and fallen socks, proudly posing as the Saint Anthony of Padua track team with our captain holding a large plaque signifying our triumph over the other parochial schools of the district.
What I loved best about outings away from town were the woodlands and patchwork fields and old castle ruins we’d pass on the train. I vividly remember a school outing we took to a medieval site, a sacred place whose ancient stone buildings held the relics of saints as well as marvelous swords encrusted with jewels. These spoke to me of another time and place, sacred and mysterious in a way that our own lives weren’t.
In Woolton Village I found grasses and trees again in Woolton Woods, a park just up the hill from our house. It had open fields we kids could run in and a woodland with wide pathways through it. In autumn my brothers and I would gather up huge piles of leaves and bury ourselves inside them, becoming leaf people. Tree children. Somewhere beyond the trees there was an area of gardens with a large floral clock as its centerpiece. Though first dazzled by it, I came to dislike the clock, its fussy Edwardian ingenuity. The woods and fields were what called to me. At eight years of age I was already confronted with primitive forms of the timeless questions of how nature, art, and gardening intersect. There was an artificial cuckoo sound that I associate with the clock. I remember hearing the cuckoo sound while walking with my parents through the woods to see the gardens. “Oh, listen! Do you hear the cuckoo?” said my parents, laughing. But I soon figured out it wasn’t a real cuckoo and I resented its fake intrusion into the woods. I wanted a living cuckoo to be singing from the trees. I wanted the mystery and wildness of a real wood with real creatures in it, not a park with high palings all around it and a foppish floral clock at its center. Why would you want a clock in a woodland anyway, a place that should be too primal to be measured or divided, a place, as John Fowles wrote in The Tree, “teeming, jewel-like, self-involved, rich in secrets just below the threshold of our adult human senses.” My child’s heart knew instinctively the secrets of trees, and already back then I may have set my sights upon living among them.
Then, suddenly, a seismic shift. Just as we’d left the fields and trees and animals of Knowle Park five years earlier, now a second great change was about to occur: a decision had been made that our family would leave England entirely, leave behind the crowded houses of Merseyside and everything we’d known there, to start a new life in Canada.