Crowns for Convoy

By John Devlin

"He is neither a Valentino nor a Quasimodo, and if you don't know who they are, don't respond!" This stern admonition in a South African newspaper, May 1988, initiated the author's search for his third wife. Sixty one responses, and numerous rendezvous and meetings later, he found her: by no means all of them did know!
Crowns for Convoy is an autobiographical memoir of a full, varied and unordinary life. From wartime Liverpool, locations shift to Malaya, London, Thailand and, principally, South Africa. The book chronicles lifestyles gone forever, recounting regrets, changes of fortune, and serendipities.
The narrative style is dryly sardonic and succinctly mordant. The reader will find the journey absorbing, entertaining and unique.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Devlin
• Release date: Oct 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310719561

John Devlin

John Devlin is a celebrated designer and illustrator. One of the world's leading experts on football kit design, he regularly appears on both radio and television. For decades he has been documenting the changing kit fashions of the world's major teams, and is the author of the bestselling True Colours: Football Kits from 1980 to the Present Day. @TrueColoursKits

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BOOK SYNOPSIS

He is neither a Valentino nor a Quasimodo, and if you don’t know who they are, don’t respond! This stern admonition began the author’s somewhat unconventional search for his third wife. He expected perhaps six replies. Sixty one women responded. By no means all of them did know.

Ad-man, copywriter, journalist, proof-reader, editor, speech-writer, published poet, book reviewer and text-book author, it is hardly surprising that at some point in his life, the author would produce a book. It is, perhaps, unusual that he would be 76 when he finally did so, and that he has also been a restaurant critic, worked in and lectured on marketing, read for Tape Aids for the Blind, and at times owned a pair of fruit and veg. shops, a service station, a personnel consultancy, and a hi-tech industrial coating company. Plus three years in the RAF at the start.

This memoir is, however, by no means a simple recounting of places, people and events. Parallel with his career runs the personal narrative: three wives, four sons - one of whom he has never seen - and several other relationships. From wartime and post-war Liverpool, locations shift to Malaya, London, Thailand and South Africa, There are some major regrets, misfortunes and serendipities.

Crowns for Convoy is a chronicle of life-styles that no longer exist, in places that have changed for ever, presented in a dryly sardonic and succinctly mordant style, and enlivened by digressions, numerous anecdotes, and vivid recollections which bring the journey to life for the reader in an absorbing and entertaining narrative.

Crowns for Convoy

By

John Devlin

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2011 John Devlin.

This book is available in a print edition at most online retailers

ISBN 9781310719561

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"…That he which hath no stomach to this fight

Let him depart, his passport shall be made

And crowns for convoy put into his purse:

We would not die in that man’s company

That fears his fellowship, to die with us."

Henry V before Agincourt

16 CARRINGTON STREET, LIVERPOOL 8:

1934 to 1944

Despite being named after an illustrious politician, Carrington Street was, for all practical purposes, almost a slum .Two rows of terraced houses, fronted by wrought-iron railings (forcibly contributed by the patriotic residents to the War Effort around 1940, leaving uneven stumps like blackened English teeth), with two yards distance from street to front door, which opened directly into the living room. A postage-stamp back garden where not even weeds would grow, outside privy, no interior fixed bath or hot water, two upstairs bedrooms, dining-room, and a rear wooden gate accessed from an entry (the jigger), completed the lavish appointments.

I was born in June 1934, and not long thereafter semi-orphaned. Dad was an artisan, a motor mechanic in his earlier years, but now employed as Works Manager for a company manufacturing tombstones, memorial items, and granite and marble products. I know little about my mother other than that she was from Cornish stock, her maiden name was Jane (But called Jean) Thomas, and that she had a good singing voice. They had little money, but when I was en route, Dad wanted to provide the best confinement that they could afford, so instead of giving birth in the local hospital, as was customary, she was booked into a nursing home. This was, literally, a fatal mistake, for complications ensued, and she died of septicaemia within a few months.

Dad was aged 33 years, and most of these had been hard. His father, William, had been working for one of the giant shipyards that fronted both sides of the Mersey. Excessively fond of John Barleycorn, Friday paydays were regularly a photo-finish between his wife and the publican, to determine which of them received most of his wages. This parlous state of family finances worsened abruptly when Dad was 12, as William, presumably on a payday, slipped off a high walkway, and plummeted too many feet into a dry-dock, which regrettably happened to be dry at the time. Dad was now de facto Man of the House, with his mother, two younger sisters, and the family’s tiny general-shop in Vine St. Of course, in those days, there was no compensation, which, under the circumstances, might have been hard to justify, nor was there a pension of any kind. To generate extra income for the four of them, he was employed part-time on a milk-delivery round: in those days it was carried to houses in metal cans in the early morning, and I vividly recall him telling me that often in winter, even wearing rudimentary gloves, his hands would freeze to the handles.

Not long before World War II began, I was enrolled at St. Margaret’s Church School at the top of Carrington Street. The Church to which it was attached was C.of E. but of very high denomination. The only practical feature that distinguished it from the Catholic persuasion was that services were conducted in English rather than Latin, for all the other attributes (Mass, confession, holy water, incense, lengthy recitative, prostration of the clergy at Easter and so on) were present. To a goggle-eyed boy of five the impact of this ritual and pomp was profound, as it was intended to be, and when invited to join the choir as a treble, I accepted with alacrity. The Supreme Being presiding over his congregation, with a direct line to the Almighty, was Father Morris, an austere, remote, condescending and totally unapproachable figure, inadequately equipped with the attributes of humility, warmth and compassion more commonly expected in his calling: he would have qualified as a Grand Inquisitor with virtually no prior training, and, I am sure, he regretted that burning at the stake for miscreants was no longer as popular as it once had been.

Social highlight of every week for local children was the de rigueur visit to the cinema in nearby Granby Street on Saturday morning. For sixpence, the small-fry of the environs would descend on the hapless management, yelling, scuffling and throwing anything to hand at each other, totally oblivious to the invertebrate threats by authority - until the house-lights faded. While Tarzan, The Lone Ranger and Johnny Mack Brown strutted their stuff in front of us, the cinema was absolutely silent, and any transgressors were immediately disciplined by the audience until the film ended, and the clear and present Wild West resumed where it had left off until the next film commenced.

The other principal source of education in those TV-less and computer-deprived years was, of course, comics, avidly devoured and then keenly traded. All children commenced their literary learning with picture-comics like Beano, Dandy, and Film Fun, graduating, as their skills developed, to reading-comics, Wizard and Hotspur for instance, which carried stories and few illustrations. Richmal Crompton’s William books could be said to represent a third stage of literary development: role model, icon, and hero, tilting against the windmills of parental dictatorship.

And so the war began. Dad’s age, 38 at the outbreak, made him too old for active service, and he had been far too young for W.W.I, but he joined the Home Guard, kept an allotment, and became a local ARP organiser. Liverpool, with its miles of docks and shipyards, was a prime Luftwaffe target, and Carrington St. was only a couple of crow miles from the Mersey. The street was bombed on several occasions, houses turned into rubble and school-mates no longer around, but we survived, falsely feeling secure under our solid kitchen table, and my most enduring impression of those early war years is scouring the streets, in the early mornings after a raid, for shrapnel and other detritus of war, my most treasured trophy being an almost intact small incendiary bomb, extinguished on landing in Carrington Street by my intrepid father. His Home Guard duties were at Sefton Park, where his office sat on top of an ammunition store!

Everything that could be was rationed, and this continued for most commodities into several post-war years. Powdered egg and milk replaced the natural products, the quality of meat should have created a nation of vegetarians (except that vegetables were also in short supply), American tinned Spam was a great luxury, and queuing for essentials was endemic. Petrol too was restricted, the monthly ration linked to the engine capacity, and even furniture was subject to a rationing system (We can buy a new bed or a wardrobe this year: I know which one you’d choose, but I would like the wardrobe!). Everyone carried a gas-mask everywhere, civilians in a cardboard box and service personnel in a canvas shoulder pouch.

And yet we survived as a nation. To an extent that would be laughed at today, people looked out for people. Propaganda abounded: we were told that Careless talk costs lives: Loose lips sink ships, and encouraged to Be like Dad-keep Mum. The populace gave their all, in metal collections and salvage drives. One city, I think it was Bristol, urged their citizenry to donate unwanted books and periodicals to the War Effort, with large collection sites featuring a caricature of Hitler with an open mouth, into which you were admonished to Ram your books down Hitler’s throat/ And help to keep our ships afloat!

No-one who wasn’t there can begin to imagine the camaraderie and cooperation that spanned those years: and no-one who was there can understand what went so appallingly wrong sometime over the next fifty years.

The Vine St. shop had been sold before the outbreak of war, as Gran was becoming increasingly arthritic: her younger daughter, May Smith, lived across the Mersey in Birkenhead, with husband Jack and daughters Pam and Pat (Pauline, their third child, is ten years to the day younger than me, and arrived later). Pat was close to me in age. For about eighteen months of the war, I went to live with the Smith ménage, a sort of evacuation to their small terraced house very similar to my own (outside privy again!), but the assumed greater safety factor in Birkenhead was dubious, for it was also heavily bombed: with hindsight, I sometimes wonder today if someone was trying to tell me something! Sleeping space was very limited, and Pam, Pat and myself shared a bed. Fumblings were fun! The wealthy (everything is relative) branch of the family were the Hepples: Dad’s second sister Elsie had married Norman, and they ran a very successful bakery and confectioners in the Liverpool suburb of Walton, not far from the Grand National race-course. They had only one child, Peter, but although geographically closer to us and also being my god-parents, we saw a lot less of them than of the Smiths.

In 1942, when I was eight, Dad remarried, and the Devlin modus vivendi changed spectacularly for the better.

Brought up principally by an increasingly immobile grandmother, and with Dad at work every day, I bore a much closer resemblance to William the rebel than to Christopher Robin. The neighbourhood, although by today’s standards it might be regarded as unremarkable, was in fact far from it: the children mostly were latch-key kids with single or multiple parents, all at work all day, friendly, urgent men in raincoats frequented street corners, numerous gangs abounded, and petty crime was prevalent. Children played in the street, of course, with no idea of danger, and because there was nowhere else.

Dad was a quiet man, very strict as a father, totally honest and straight in everything he did, ill-educated, devoid of ambition, and a devoted son. Fond of aphorisms, as a child I would frequently be admonished by him to remember that If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well, or The man who never made a mistake never made anything His chain-smoking, which ultimately killed him at 67, really was his only vice - and it was not so regarded then. His essential goodness and integrity made him an outstanding husband, well-liked by his peers, and enabled his employer of 38 years to take massive advantage of him: not an uncommon occurrence then.

Ernestina Hayes was Secretary to the M.D., at the same company as Dad: her shorthand ability was something of a legend in the office. In 1942 she was 32, had never been married, but some years earlier had been engaged for 12 years before they parted. Her social standing was considerably superior to ours: she lived in a good suburb in South Liverpool, had been educated at one of the best girls’ high schools in the city, and was well-read and well-spoken, out-going and intelligent. Her family was quite extensive. Youngest of four, she had a brother and two sisters, one of whom had four children, so there were many new aunts and cousins for me to absorb when she married Dad. One new girl cousin. another Pat, was close to my own age.

From the outset, the step-mother relationship worked spectacularly, as she provided in full measure the maternal love and attention hitherto totally absent in the life of this only child. Over the next ten years, until summoned by Her Majesty to save the Free World from the barbarians, I never once heard my parents exchange a harsh word. Much more dynamic than my father ,Mum, by mutual consent, ran every facet of our family life, and ran it superbly .From the outset, she inculcated in me the love for literature and good music that I otherwise probably would never have developed, and which are permanent parts of my life; she disciplined me in a gentle but effective way; and she injected a quantum leap into our domestic cuisine, which hitherto almost exclusively revolved around scouse, Irish stew (scouse), and vegetable casseroles (blind scouse). Inhibited by severe war shortages of food, this was a considerable achievement. But the greatest innovation, which changed everything for me, was her insistence, over some opposition from her by now virtually bed-ridden mother-in-law, in relocating her family out of scurvy Liverpool 8 to a lovely rented semi-detached 3-bedroom house close to where she had previously lived, in the up-market suburb of Allerton, and my enrollment at a new, greatly superior Temple of Academe, Booker Avenue Primary, 250 yards from our front door. O frabjous day!

21 MELBRECK ROAD, LIVERPOOL 18:

1944 TO 1952

Allerton is a reasonably up-market suburb to the south of Liverpool. A sufficient distance from docks and ship-yards, the danger from nightly bombing raids was much less, and besides, by 1944, it was becoming obvious after D-Day that the Germans were being forced onto the defensive.

Melbreck Road, like Gaul, was divided into 3 parts. Wide and tree-lined at both ends, the houses were separated by The Woods, spanning both sides of the centre section and running down to a railway line. Odd-numbered houses like ours were, happily, on the upper side, so although engine noise (steam, of course) was audible as the London expresses gathered speed from their Lime Street departure some ten minutes earlier, it was reasonably minimal and infrequent.

One of the unusual claims to fame that the road boasted was that the family of one of the original stars of Coronation Street lived there, and Peter Adamson occasionally visited and was paraded by his proud parents.

Booker Avenue Primary differed from my first school in just about every conceivable way. Modern, light, airy class-rooms, playing fields, and dedicated teaching staff all promoted a desire to learn and achieve that the children absorbed. At 10 years old, scholarship time was imminent.

Although there are doubtless several knowledgeable opinions concerning the best Grammar Schools on Merseyside at that time, it is a given that The Liverpool Institute would automatically feature in the first rank. Later made permanently famous as the alma mater of two of The Beatles, the smoke-blackened pile had brooded over Mount Street, in the very centre of the city, since 1825, literally a stone’s throw from its sister school, Blackburne House (where Mum had been a pupil), and close by were The Liverpool School of Art and the Philharmonic Hall.

Now long closed as a school, an academic catastrophe, it is a school of dance and drama today, owned by ex-pupil Sir Paul McCartney.

Entrance to Grammar Schools was normally via written annual exams , but in the Institute’s case there was an additional route, thanks to a long-departed benefactress, Margaret Bryce Smith, who endowed a scholarship and bursary, which were subject to a considerably more difficult series of exams. My especial friend at the primary was John Stringer, and after a number of eliminations and oral interviews, we found ourselves as the two final contenders. John was more studious and serious than I was (where else could you possibly find two 10-year olds whose speciality was to learn by heart most of the seventy stanzas of Macaulay’s Horatius and regularly chant them in the playground, to the bemused amazement of the onlookers?), and both his parents were well-educated professionals. In short, he won: today he is an academic living in California, and we are still in contact. My parents could have used the bursary money!

In 1945 I began my secondary education at the Institute, having passed the standard scholarship exam reasonably easily after the M.B.S. exercise.

It was a formal school, with gowned prefects and teachers (one bizarre feature was the custom of also calling the small number of female teachers Sir, which perhaps gave them an occasional twinge of identity crisis), Speech Day with an address in Latin by a Sixth Form boffin, and a very strict headmaster, The Beak, J.R.Edwards. Respected rather than feared, he administered canings for heinous crimes, a practice which did not catch up with me until my fifth year, but luck finally ran out, and for a mano a mano battle in the then deserted dining-room, using empty school milk bottles as weapons of class destruction, during a period set aside for private study, Mike Corrin and myself were awarded six of the worst.

The system of foreign language study allocation was totally arbitrary: each new year’s intake were divided into three groups, and for a minimum of four years, and possibly six if one stayed on into the Sixth Form, like it or not, a new generation of French, Spanish or German scholars was born. In my case, 3B was Viva España.

The Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Remove years passed very pleasantly. I developed a talent for soccer, playing goal-keeper for the school, and was a chorister at Liverpool Cathedral, located close by: the Institute was the regular source of treble voices. I appeared eponymously in the school production of The Mikado, but my object all sublime clearly was not academic achievement, for my exam performances during these four years were inevitably in the middle of the rankings. A trip by the Engineering and Transport Society was arranged to Ireland in 1948, crossing by sea to Belfast, we youth-hostelled down the coast and into Eire, returning from Dublin. It rained incessantly for the entire fortnight, but my principal recollection from that trip was the border crossing into the Irish Republic. Austerity in the U.K. was still alive and well, even three years after the war. Rationing still existed in several categories, including sweets, and city lights were sparse and dim. Crossing into Eire at Dundalk, we were suddenly in an Aladdin’s Cave: shops and buildings ablaze with glaring illumination, windows displaying goods we had never seen (bananas, for instance) and, above all, sweetshops! Like wolves on the fold, a dozen or so Assyrians invaded the first confectionery emporium encountered, and probably doubled its turnover for the month, staggering out soon thereafter loaded with loot such as Mars Bars, by the box of course, to pay the predictable gastronomic price over the next couple of days. But it was worth it!

When I was 16, the Institute and a body called the Hispanic Council arranged a schoolboy exchange, whereby seven of us sixth formers hosted Spanish boys from a school in Salamanca, as guests for a month, then we would travel to Spain, staying with their families for an equivalent period. I must assume that our expenses were subsidised by the school, for we would never have been able to afford the cost. Dad never earned as much as £1 000 a year (although by now he did have a company car- a Ford Anglia), and Mum presumably was paid rather less than him: hardly the stuff to excite a banker, footballer or pop star.

Luís Perez Martín Martín was my allocated guest, and for 4 weeks he lived with us. The language problem was substantial, because our knowledge of Spanish heavily outweighed the visitors’ English, but we managed, with Mum and Dad discovering a definite talent for hand-signing after a few days .He had brought several items of his national cuisine along, altogether evil-smelling, unhygienic-looking, and very foreign to my parents: finding out how to prepare and serve them was a major gastronomic coup, but I am sure that he enjoyed himself, for we showed him all the holiday spots in the Wirral and surrounds, taking him everywhere on week-end outings.

On arriving for the return leg of the project, my destination was not immediately to Salamanca, but to a North Coast village holiday resort called Suances, where his Doctor-headed and extensive family spent every summer. The socio-economic gap was seen to be enormous, for they were- certainly by British standards -extremely wealthy. It didn’t matter, for they welcomed me, indeed all of our group whole-heartedly, and could not have been more generous or solicitous. It is one of my regrets that I lost touch with Luís soon after the project was over. I returned to the bosom of my family with much improved Spanish - and gout, the result of consuming not only unaccustomed rich and spicy food for a month, but, equally contributory, imbibing daily and substantial quantities of Benedictine, a liqueur I had tasted only hitherto at Christmas. In Spain it was one fifth of the price in Britain: how on earth could a mere schoolboy resist? Our astonished family doctor told Mum after my examination that I was about fifty years too young to have gout, the ailment that is the butt of many jokes about red-nosed Colonels, but in fact extremely painful when contracted.

It must have been soon after joining the Institute (school motto; Non nobis solum sed toti mundo nati: Born not for ourselves, but for the whole world) that serious sexual stirrings began. Initially these consisted of close encounters with neighbours’ girls, as we explored each other’s differences (Come on, Joan, a feel for a look), and, especially in the case of only children or those lacking a sibling of the other sex, an absorbing interest in these matters developed. Older role models who were said to have gone all the way were regarded with awe, and beseeched for details and practical tips on how to achieve this supreme objective. An all-boys school, with ages from 11 to about 18, was naturally a place with testosterone overload, and unilateral sexual activity was the norm, both in and out of the classroom, Onan would have been proud of his acolytes, the would-be stallions of the Third Form.

Apart from local dances and similar social events, a principal meeting-place for Secondary and Grammar School children was on the morning and afternoon buses. Most of the secondary schools were in or close to the city, and everyone therefore in our part of south Liverpool caught the 80 bus to and from town each weekday. Many a match was made, not in heaven, but on the top-deck of the green and cream Transport of Delight. It was through this door that love first walked into my life.

Brenda Moore was an unusually pretty girl, buxom and well-rounded in the right places, with lovely long Titian hair. Our mothers knew each other, she lived about half a mile away, and her daily bus schedule coincided with mine. Beginning with the usual insulting banter (it was not desirable to evince any romantic interest in girls when accompanied by your peers), the relationship developed more personally, and before long we became what today would be called an item, meeting in the evenings and attending social events