As Carol’s coeliac disease meant she couldn’t digest gluten, throughout our childhood my mum was constantly baking separate things for her. This meant our house very often had that warm smell of baking – although if you have ever eaten gluten-free food you will know the smell is a lot better than the taste. Nice-smelling cardboard is still cardboard.
I don’t have any memory of that first house, and it is no longer there. Someone came from the council and declared it unfit for human habitation, along with many others, as the city council progressed with the slum-clearing project which changed much of the centre of Liverpool in the 1960s. The declaration was upsetting for my dad, as he had just decorated, although I am sure the rats and lack of adequate sanitation had more to do with the council’s decision than his ability to hang wallpaper.
As a result of the clearing of the slum areas, various Scouse colonies sprang up as families were moved out to places such as Skelmersdale, Kirkby, Speke and Runcorn. Getting out of Liverpool was not something my mum and dad would ever have considered; it was all they had both ever known, and Carol was still being treated in the hospital. The council offered various alternatives and, like most decisions in parenthood, my mum and dad did what they thought was best for us.
They chose to move to Winsford, out in Cheshire, the option that was the furthest from the centre of Liverpool – if not in miles, then certainly in character. Winsford had been an old market town, but now had emerging council estates that needed to be populated by people ready to work in the factories of the local, rapidly developing industrial estate.
My dad went for an interview in a cable company called ICL and received a letter saying he had a job at the weekly wage of £21.60. This was a staggering amount at the time, when he was getting £9 a week on the building sites he had moved on to after too many falls into the Mersey had convinced him that tugs were not the future. So, without further ado, we moved. When the removal van arrived, such was the exodus from Liverpool that it was already half-full with furniture from another family, the Roberts, who actually moved into the same block as us in Severn Walk on the Crook Lane estate.
When my dad received his first week’s wages, he was paid £12.60.
Yes, thanks to a typing error, my mum and dad had made the decision to move all the way out to Winsford: a simple clerical mistake was responsible for where I was to spend my formative years. However, I have to say I am glad the lady who typed it (it was 1967 – men didn’t type letters, as they were busy doing man-things like fixing washing machines or carrying heavy stuff) made the mistake, because I cannot think of a better place to have grown up.
If you were a child in the 1960s and somebody showed you the council estate where I lived, you could not have imagined a finer location in the world. Rows of terraced houses that were built out of white brick reflected the sun and made everything seem bright. We lived at 9, Severn Walk, which I always thought was a great address as it had two numbers in it, until I realised the road was actually named after a river. We spent the first ten years of my life at this address. Coming from a slum area within Liverpool, it was an exciting place to be, and my mum even today comments about the joy of discovering such modern things as central heating, a hatch from the kitchen into the living room and, the biggest thing of all, an inside toilet downstairs. Opulence beyond belief to live in a house where someone could be on the toilet upstairs and someone on the toilet downstairs, at the same time, and nobody had to put their coat on to go outside.
When I started to write this book I wanted to go back to the estate and have a look, so, six months ago, I went for a walk there. It was night-time, and I sat on the wall and remembered all the times we had had on the estate, both good and bad, and I will always be grateful for the childhood I had there.
I have to say that the town planners of our estate did a brilliant job in setting out the rows of houses in such a way that you were never more than ten steps away from grass. Every house had a back yard and a front garden, and then beyond that there would be grass. I know that ‘grass’ is a very incomplete description, but that is basically what it was. You either had enough grass to host a football match, an area big enough for a bonfire on Guy Fawkes or any other night you felt like building a fire, or you just had enough grass for your dog to have a dump on when you let it out.
As a child, I don’t recall the concept of poop-scooping existing, and I can’t imagine anything more at odds with the world that I lived in than the image of a grown adult picking up dog shit. Dog ownership involved feeding the animal and giving it somewhere to sleep. Beyond that, nobody expected anything else. Nobody took their dog for a walk – you simply opened the door and let it out. The dog would then do whatever dogs do when left to their own devices, and it would come home when it was ready. The only dogs that had leads when I was a child worked for the police or helped blind people cross the road.
I am not suggesting that we were bad dog owners; in fact, I think the dogs were having a brilliant time, although you only have to slide into dog shit once as a child playing football before you think someone, somewhere should do something. I recall being asked to do a school project about improving the community and I suggested that dog dirt was a real problem. The teacher agreed and asked me what I would suggest to improve the matter. After some thought, I came up with the idea of the dog nappy. The teacher tried to seem impressed and not laugh, but sadly the idea never caught on – as there was no Dragons’ Den in the seventies where my eight-year-old self could have pitched the idea, it became no more than a few pages in my school book. And, instead, picking it up using a plastic shopping bag has become the norm. However, I challenge anyone who has to pick up dog shit first thing in the morning not to think the nappy idea has some legs.
Most of what I remember of my childhood happened outdoors. All we ever did was go out and play, and mums would stand on their steps shouting for us when our tea was ready. I should explain to people not from the North, or who may be too wealthy to understand what I mean by the word ‘tea’, that I am referring to the evening meal, which you call dinner, which is what we call the meal in the middle of the day, which you call lunch. It is important we clear this up, as I would not want you to think I am using ‘tea’ in the cricket sense, and that after a few hours’ play we retired for a beverage and a slice of cake. Instead, the call for tea was an important signal to let you know the main meal of the day was ready. The shout was not something to be ignored, or your portion of scouse (stew) or corned beef hash would end up in one of the other children in the family. Or the dog.
But if you didn’t hear it, someone on the estate would let you know. It is a great illustration of the sense of community we had that all communication was communal. If a mum shouted that her child’s tea was ready, all the other children would pass it on until that particular offspring was located and dispatched home. It was also a great way of getting rid of someone you didn’t like, but while kids can be cruel they can also be stupid. The estate wasn’t that big and everyone knew all the favourite hang-out spots, so when the now-hungry child returned to the gang you had to remember to blame the prank on whichever other kid had gone home for his tea.
I learnt what the place meant to me in 2010 when I was doing my ‘Sunshine’ tour. I was in the dressing room of the Echo Arena in Liverpool, about to perform for the sixth night. The venue had just presented me with an award for the most tickets ever sold there for a single tour: apparently I beat Mamma Mia! by 15,000 tickets. I was having a coffee in the dressing room and chatting with Lisa, my agent, when Alex, my tour manager, said my brother Eddie wanted to have a chat.
When family come to shows, I always see them either before or in the interval, as often I find it easier to do that than at the end of a show. At the end of shows I prefer to be on the road quickly; there is something very exciting and rock ’n’ roll about walking off the stage and straight into a waiting car. Eddie walked in with a gift-wrapped long, thin object. After kissing Lisa hello, he turned to me.
‘Do you want a drink?’ I asked, pointing to the fully stocked fridge that rarely opened as I only drink coffee and water before a show.
‘No. I just wanted to give you this. But don’t open it till I’m gone.’
‘Don’t be daft, you’re there now. I’ll just open it.’