Jim did well at the job and at the age of 28 he was promoted to cotton salesman. This was considered a big success for an ordinary lad. Cotton salesmen usually had more of a middle-class background. Jim was always neat and dapper with a gentle open face.
When he got his big promotion, they put him up to £250 a year. Not a great salary, but reasonable.
Jim was too young for the First World War and too old for the Second, although with the use of only one ear — he broke an eardrum falling off a wall when he was ten — he would not have been liable anyway. But he was liable for some sort of war work. When the Cotton Exchange closed for the war, they sent him to Napiers, the engineering works.
In 1941, at the age of 39, he got married. They moved into furnished rooms in Anfield. Jim was working at Napiers during the day and firefighting at night when Paul was born. He was able to go in and out of the hospital as he liked, instead of during the normal visiting hours, as his wife had worked there.
‘He looked awful, I couldn’t get over it. Horrible. He had one eye open and he just squawked all the time. They held him up and he looked like a horrible piece of red meat. When I got home I cried, the first time for years and years.’
Despite his wife’s medical work, he’d never been able to suffer illness of any sort. The smell of hospitals made him nervous, a fear he has passed on to Paul.
‘But the next day he looked more human. And every day after that he got better and better. He turned out a lovely baby in the end.’
One day when Paul had been out in the garden at home, his mother discovered some specks of dust on his face and said they must move. The work at Napiers on the Sabre engines was counted as working for the Air Force so through that Jim was able to get a house on the Knowlsely Estate, Wallasey. They were council houses, but some were reserved for Air Ministry workers. ‘We used to call them half houses, they were such small, diddy houses, with bare bricks inside. But it was better than furnished rooms with a young baby.’
His work at Napiers came to an end before the war finished and he was moved to a job in Liverpool Corporation Cleansing Department, as a temporary inspector, going round making sure the dustbin men did their job properly.
Jim got little money with the corporation and his wife went back to health visiting for a while, till the birth of her second child, Michael, in 1944.
But she never really liked health visiting as much as nursing. It was too much nine to five, like an office job. So eventually she went back to midwifery. She took two domiciliary midwife jobs, which meant living on large estates and looking after all the mothers-to-be in that one area. There was a council house thrown in with the job. The first post was in Western Avenue, Speke, and the second in Ardwick Road. She was called out every night.
Jim says she worked far too hard, more than she should have done, but she was always over-conscientious.
Paul’s earliest memory, probably from around the age of three or four, is of his mother. He remembers someone coming to the door and giving her a plaster dog. ‘It was out of gratitude for some delivery she had done. People were always giving her presents like that.
‘I have another memory, of hiding from someone, then hitting them over the head with an iron bar. But I think the plaster dog was the earliest.’
One of his other early memories of his mother is when she was trying to correct his accent. ‘I talked real broad, like all the other kids round our way. When she told me off, I imitated her accent and she was hurt, which made me feel very uptight.’
Paul started primary school — Stockton Wood Road Primary — when they were living in Speke. His mother decided against a Roman Catholic one as she had seen too many as a health visitor and didn’t like them. Michael soon followed at the same one. ‘I remember the headmistress saying how good the two boys were with younger children,’ says Jim, ‘always sticking up for them. She said Michael was going to be a leader of men. I think this was because he was always arguing. Paul did things much quieter. He had much more nous. Mike stuck his neck out. Paul always avoided trouble.’
When the school became overcrowded, they were moved out to another primary school in the country, Joseph Williams Primary School at Gateacre.
Paul perfected his quiet diplomacy even more as he got older, still always doing things quietly — like his mother — instead of noisily like Michael.
‘I was once hitting Michael for doing something,’ says Jim. ‘Paul stood by shouting at Mike, “Tell him you didn’t do it and he’ll stop.” Mike admitted he had done it, whatever it was. But Paul was always able to get out of most things.’
‘I was pretty sneaky,’ says Paul. ‘If I ever got bashed for being bad, I used to go into their bedroom when they were out and rip the lace curtains at the bottom, just a little bit, then I’d think, that’s got them.’
Paul easily passed the Eleven Plus and went to the Liverpool Institute. This is the best known of Liverpool’s grammar schools. It was founded in 1825 as a Mechanics’ Institute which is how it got its name. Liverpool Art College, which shares the same building, was part of the Institute until the 1890s. The University of Liverpool also shares the same origins. It became an ordinary boys school, giving up all adult classes, around the turn of the century. Its old boys today include Arthur Askey, James Laver, Lord Justice Morris and the late Sydney Silverman also.
Michael also passed for the Institute but he eventually ended up in the lowest stream. Paul did very well and was always in the top forms.
‘Paul was able to do his homework while watching TV,’ says Jim. ‘I used to tell him not to, that he couldn’t possibly do both. But I once asked him exactly what had been on, and he knew, and he’d also done an essay. He was smart enough easily for a university. That was always my intention for him. Get a BA or a BSc behind his name, then he’d be okay. But when he knew what was in my head, Paul tried to stop himself doing well. He was always good at Latin but when I said he’d need the Latin for a university, he started slacking up.’
At the Institute, Paul became about the most sexually precocious boy of his year, knowing what it was all about, or almost, even from his early years.
‘I once did this dirty drawing for the class. I was the lad who did them. It was folded so you just saw the head and the feet of a woman, but when you opened it out, she was all naked. The full schoolboy bit, with pubic hair thrown in, not that I had any idea what that looked like. By mistake I left it in the top pocket of my shirt. This was the pocket I used to keep my dinner tickets in and my mother always searched it before washing as I often left some.
‘I came home one day and she held it out to me. “Did you do this?” I said no, no, honest, no. I said it was Kenny Alpin, a boy in our class. He must have put it there. “I’d tell you if I’d done it.” I kept it up for two days. Then I admitted it. The shame was terrible.’
After the first year, when he got 90 per cent for Latin, he got fed up with school work. ‘It was nice and easy that first year. I kept myself clean and eager because it seemed the thing to do. Then it all became woolly. Never once in my school days did anyone ever make it clear to me what I was being educated for, what the point of it was. I know my dad went on about needing certificates and all that, but I never listened to that. You heard it so often. We had masters who just hit you with rulers, or told us a lot of shit about their holiday in Wales or what they did in the army.
‘Homework was a right drag. I just couldn’t stand staying in on a summer night when all the other kids were out playing. There was a field opposite our house in Ardwick and I could look out the window and see them all having a good time.