1.The Leaving of Liverpool

1. The Leaving of Liverpool

1. The Leaving of Liverpool

When I was about 10 years old, my parents, Ernie and Marion and I were living in a prefab in Liverpool and my dad had been ill with silicosis and pulmonary tuberculosis, contracted whilst serving in the army in North Africa during World War II.

One day my dad took a turn for the worse and my mum called our family doctor Saul Ellenbogen.  For several weeks my dad had been so ill that his bed was in the living room and it was the only room in the house where we could afford to have some heating.  In those days it was coal, which my dad and I used to collect on the railway embankment. The trains in the late fifties were all steam trains, and as they pulled out of Gateacre station, they would shed some of their load.

I overheard Dr Ellenbogen say to my mother that “if he doesn’t leave Liverpool soon, he’ll only have six months to live.”  In Liverpool in the late fifties the city was surrounded by a constant cloud of smog. During the winter months, it was so bad we had to wear smog masks whenever we travelled at night time.  Occasionally it was worse.  Sometimes if we went on a bus to see both sets of my grandmas and granddads, who lived in Wavertree, the conductor would walk in front of the bus holding a paraffin lamp to guide the bus and its driver through the city streets.  Such was the extent of the smog, that the gauzes fitted inside the masks were stained a yellow-brown coloration after just a few hours of wear.

With the doctor’s encouragement, my father applied for a training program in Enham Alamein near Andover. During the next two years, we saw him only about three times a year but his relocation saw his health vastly improved and in April 1960, he returned to Liverpool with his bookkeeping diploma. Within weeks my dad had a job with Everest (I think they made fridges) but this was short lived and my dad’s health declined once more and again he was not able to hold down a job. In 1955 he had a lung removed and the healing process was slow. His surgery scar was about two feet long and I didn’t realise then that in order to remove his lung, the doctors had also to remove a couple of ribs to gain access to the lung.

My parents decided that they needed to get out of Liverpool for health reasons, and started to buy the Daltons Weekly in order to secure a council house exchange to somewhere in the South of England. After many months of searching, they found an advert seeking an exchange to Liverpool. Tony Mayall and his family all drove from Hungerford to see our house in Liverpool, then picked up my mum and drove her down to Hungerford and back all in one day. So the decision was made to move to Hungerford in the summer of 1961.

And just in case you are wondering, why did Tony want to move to Liverpool?  He had been offered a good job with Walls--the giant paint firm of the day.