Don't Wake Up George Brown!

By Alan Jones

Alan Jones shares his reminiscences of growing up in South Liverpool during the forties and fifties in the aftermath of the Second World War - the most destructive war the world has ever known. It was a time of austerity, of rationing, but also a time when the extended family was still largely in existence.
As part of an extended family, he recalls how he spent as much time with his grandmother as he did with his parents, and given she had brought up nine children, it was a family of sizeable proportions.
It was a time when children had much more freedom to roam the streets and when corporal punishment was woven into the fabric of school life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: A H Stockwell
• Release date: Nov 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9780722351321

Alan Jones

Alan Jones was born in 1943 and grew up in Liverpool during the post-war years. He trained as a teacher at Chester College and pursued a career in Primary Education as a class teacher, headteacher, and university tutor. He is a Church of England Lay Reader Emeritus. Alan has published two other books, both of which are in the adult social history genre. They are, Don’t Wake Up George Brown! and Parishioners at War.

Book preview

Don’t Wake Up George Brown!

1.jpg

Chapter 1: 28 Royden Street

Well, It Was Only a German Goat!

It was around midday and a warm summer’s day had brought the Royden Street housewives to their front doors, chatting to their adjacent neighbours. Mum was talking to Maisie, our next-door neighbour, and I was riding my three-wheeled tricycle in the road opposite the house. Suddenly, the calm was not just broken but shattered as Mrs Corkhill, our next-but-one neighbour, flew out of her house screaming, ‘He’s dead, he’s dead!’ Some of the older neighbours rushed to her aid and led her gently back into the house.

The Corkhills were a childless couple, probably in their late fifties and, it transpired, Mr Corkhill had died of a heart attack while eating his lunch. Mum was mortified at not having had the courage to rush to her aid and later apologised profusely to those neighbours who had responded so readily.

Apart from the initial shock of the screams, it was the unpredictability of this event that played on my young mind. I could not come to terms with the fact that someone could wake up one morning and go about their business, totally unaware that they were going to die that day. This discomfort was further heightened, sometime after, by the local murder of Gladys, a gentle shop assistant and friend of my mother’s, who was stabbed to death one evening outside the newsagent’s in Parkhill Road.

As part of their enquiries, the police visited every home in the neighbourhood. I remember Mum telling the two policemen who called on us that Gladys was her friend and that she had only been talking to her that day. The policemen had three questions: ‘Who lives in your house?’, ‘Were they out on the night of the murder?’ and ‘Who lives next door to you?’ This last simple line of enquiry proved to be highly effective when the family of the teenage murderer tried to pretend he did not live with them at their Beloe Street address.

Apparently, the boy was scratching at the newsagent’s window grill with his knife when Gladys passed on her way home. Her quietly spoken words, ‘Don’t do that, son,’ prompted him to stab her to death with a single blow. Once again, I was discomforted by the death of someone I knew well which occurred without any warning.

Number 28 Royden Street was a rented terraced house off Mill Street in the Dingle area of Liverpool which had belonged to my father’s parents, Alfred and Bridget. The Dingle took its name from the Dingle Brook which rose at High Park Street and roughly followed the path of Park Road towards The Ancient Chapel of Toxteth. It entered the River Mersey at Knott’s Hole. However, the Dingle in which I grew up was as far from this rural idyll as could ever be imagined. To the north of Royden Street was the famous Liverpool ‘Holy Land,’ of Jacob Street, Moses Street, Isaac Street and Grace Street, and to the south were the, rows of steep streets with close terraced houses leading down to Herculanean Dock. The Shorefields were to be immortalised, in later years, in the television sitcom Bread. The weekly rent for our house was 12s. 6d.

In my early days, our house was extremely poor, although we ate well and were never short of decent clothes. There was gas lighting in two rooms downstairs, but nothing upstairs. We had to rely on candlelight upstairs and I can still, vividly, remember, one evening, being carried downstairs in the light of a candle, by my cousin, Gordon, who must have been ‘babysitting’. He had given the candle to me to carry and the wax scalded my fingers as it dripped down on to them. The front room or parlour was derelict and the living room or ‘kitchen’ as we called it had a tiled floor covered partly with coconut matting and only wooden upright chairs, grouped round the blackleaded fireplace, which incorporated an oven. It was in this oven that we heated the house bricks which were put in our beds to warm them up during cold weather. Also, during the winter months, the blankets on our beds were supplemented by every coat in the house. The absence of an indoor toilet meant that under each bed was what we called a ‘jerry’, for toilet purposes. It befell to Mum to empty these each day.

Above the kitchen table, attached to the ceiling, was a washing rack from which steaming clothes hung in the winter months. The back kitchen had a brick-built washing boiler in one corner, a cold-water tap over a stone sink and an ancient gas stove. The only storage was a shelf running round the wall. Our ‘bathroom’ was a three-feet-long oval galvanised metal bath which hung from a hook in the backyard. Apparently, when in 1943 I was brought home to Royden Street from Oxford Street Maternity Hospital, I spent my early days in a drawer because there was no money to waste on a frivolous accessory like a cot!

At the bottom of the yard was an outside toilet which, when I was about five or six years old, collapsed into a heap of rubble. I remember being horrified at the sight of one brick in the middle of the pan, prompting macabre thoughts of what would have happened to me if I had been sitting there at the time! Evening and night-time visits to the toilet were made with a candle in one hand and a piece of the Echo newspaper in the other. One errand I never minded was collecting the bread from Begg’s bakery on the corner of Whalley Street and hoarding the tissue paper put round the ‘split-tin’ loaf for my own personal toilet use. Compared to the Echo it was utter luxury! If only I had had the foresight to patent this idea, I would now be a rich man, benefiting from the millions of soft toilet-tissue rolls sold today!

Not surprisingly, the house was extremely damp and, as a baby, my sister, Diane, caught pneumonia twice in a short space of time. I can remember her cot being placed in the kitchen and the nurse coming daily to give her penicillin injections in her bottom, which, understandably, prompted screams of agony. The arrival of Diane meant regular visits to the health centre at the bottom of Beloe Street. It was there that we were given supplies of National Dried Milk, malt, the most delicious orange juice I