I’m a member of a group on Facebook which posts old photos of the area of Liverpool I grew up in and where my family are from. Most of the schools and houses I grew up in have been demolished which I think is why I’ve moved around for large chunks of my life, subconsciously feeling like there is a wrecking ball hunting me down. Or it could just be that Liverpool city council just fucking love building things and then demolishing them like an angry kid playing Minecraft. For example, in the mid 1970s the council built a large housing estate in the inner-city suburb of Everton. Named the Radcliffe estate it was meant to resemble (and I shit you not) a Cornish fishing village. In the middle of Liverpool. A Cornish fishing village. Liverpool. Cornish. Fishing.
The estate’s cramped and heavily-built up design meant that it was perfect for crime as there were plenty of rat runs and places to hide while also being a target for arsonists and general vandalism. Within 11 years the whole area was abandoned and the bulldozers were ready to move in.
Anyway, here are some random memories of mine growing up:
Telly man
When I was a few years old I have vague memories of a bloke coming to the house to empty our rented television of its 50p coins. I remember thinking it was odd but was fairly common in the street we lived in. Apparently though people figured out that you could put a 50p coin in on a string and pull it back out before it was swallowed by the machine but long enough so that it reactivated the TV. I’m not sure how often we did this but I do know that one time when the collection bloke arrived and unlocked the back of the telly there were only three 50p coins in there. A bit perplexed, the bloke asked why and I can only assume that my parents said that they only watched television very occasionally if there was a Brecht play or a Puccini opera showing on BBC2. If there wasn’t then my family would have been too busy writing or performing our own plays and operas, obviously.
Football
Of course there was football in the street. In the 80s there weren’t too many cars in the street so you could still make a ‘pitch’ with the road being the middle and two garden walls being the goals. One of the lads was a couple of years younger than us so his mum wouldn’t let him play in the road, so obviously he was always in goal. And apart from the odd broken window, oil stains on your clothes where you have had to retrieve the ball from under a leaky Ford Fiesta or the odd pitch invader (car) they were fun times.
Every now and again one of my older brothers or a parent would take us around to a concrete pitch a few streets away called the ‘rec’, short for recreational but in my mind it was the wreck. Mainly because the railings around the pitch were mostly absent or there was the occasional bombed-out car in a corner of the rec. Sliding tackles were not recommended as most of the floor was covered in broken glass. Still, fun times.
Living a couple of minutes away from Anfield Stadium (boo), lots of people would park their car in our road on a matchday. I was never allowed to (on pain of death) but some of the older kids would hang around these cars when they were parking up and when they got out would ask ‘Mind your car, mate.’ To this day, I don’t know if it was a statement, question or mild threat or possibly a combination of all three but usually these fellas would throw a quid or two at the kids. Sometimes it is what is unsaid that is important i.e. if you say no, we won’t just not mind your car, we will probably let all the air out of the tyres and scratch cartoon cocks all over the bonnet; now is that worth a pound or two?
Sex education
Okay, time for the filth. As mentioned previously I went to a Roman Catholic secondary school. So you can imagine how liberal and informative the sex education was. Essentially all we learned (from Religious Education) is that Mary had a magic fanny that immaculately conceived Jesus and (from biology) that boys and girls both had different looking fun parts. You have to admit this is not a lot to go on in terms of setting us up for life and I was in the generation where there was no way I could ask my parents so I needed another source. It came in the form of a cable TV channel called Live TV.
It’s hard to know how to describe Live TV. It was a smutty, alternative, tabloid channel owned by the same group that published the Daily Mirror newspaper. To give you an idea, one of the programmes shown was the UK weather which was presented by a dwarf on a trampoline who had to jump higher the further north the weather forecast went. This was an actual thing in the 90s. For sports, the channel had Topless Darts which is listed on IMDB but is still waiting for a user to ‘Add a plot’. I suspect this will be a long wait; sometimes a name tells you all you need to know. They had financial news on a programme called Tiffany’s Big City Tips where a model gave stock advice while stripping down to her underwear. I did briefly become suddenly interested in darts, the financial markets and these big tips although these were not the source of my sex education.
After all of the classy programmes described above had finished, Live TV went a bit more adult. Not in the obvious way like Babestation but I guess in more of an educational way (bear with me). They definitely had a show called something like, erm, The Sex Show, where they would, well, talk about sex in a practical way. You have to remember the Internet wasn’t really the thing it is today so this was quite, ahem, a big thing. After this program they used to show old foreign dirty movies under the umbrella name of Exotica Erotica. Be careful how you Google things but there are actually message board forums on the Internet where people fondly recall watching these movies and some people actually remember the titles and plot (these are not typos). Thus proving the point that on the Internet, between old photos of long-demolished estates and old filthy movies, there really is something for everyone.
Daniel McChrystal 