It came as a big shock when in June 1970 we all had to move out of the pub. Dad had lost his job with the brewery. That meant we had lost our home as well, Dad was all a panic and rang round all morning until he found a friend that owned a caravan site.
It was done all of a rush and we did not have time to pack anything. We moved to a caravan in the sand hills at Freshfield near to Formby. I couldn’t take any of my pets and Brutus had to go to a new home as he was just too much with six of us in a caravan. I did see him again about 2 years later when I was working in Waterloo. He recognised me too.
We could take the essentials like clothes and things we could use every day but everything else was packed away and put into storage in a barn on a farm down the road. Dad and Mum were arguing a lot and I did not know why until one day Dad moved out. It seems he was seeing the barmaid Pauline and he moved in with her.
I loved it in the sand hills, always plenty to do and see. I escaped from all the hastle of my rowing parents, the loss of my home and belongings by wandering off for hours on end. There was the nearby RAF station and the planes would fly in and out all day. I found an asparagus farm in the woods, he supplied the local restaurants with asparagus spears and the local florists with the big bushy flowers. The red squirrel reserve was just a short walk away along the road back towards the railway station. This is and was one of the few sites in the country where the red squirrel is the dominant species. They are fascinating little animals, they would come right up to your hand if you had a nut for them.You could walk along the tide line and pick up sea coal, this was very handy for the fire in the caravan, we picked bags and bags of it and took it with us when we moved the van off the site. There were other teenagers who spent the whole of their summer holidays in their caravans. We would walk for hours in the pine woods during the day and spend our evenings on the beach with fires lit from drift wood. Sitting watching the sun go down into the sea was amazing for a romantic 16 year old or should that be a randy teenager.Laying on the beach at midnight with the sea lapping on the sand in the distance was so different from anything I had ever known. The sky was so clear on those short summer nights there was no street lights and you could see right out to the horizon. Blackpool tower was off the north in the distance and to the south was the Mersey estuary with Perch Rock light house at New Brighton. You could see the big ships coming down from the Irish sea to dock in Liverpool or the tankers going down to Stanlow refinery. I was more interested in the girls that were staying on the caravan park for the summer holidays. Some would come down just at the weekend but most were there for the full six weeks. It was swim suits and shorts all the time, The ballad of John and Yoko by the Beatles and in the year 2525 by Zager and Evans are two tunes that always remind me of that summer. I learnt a lot in those sand hills and pine woods that summer of 1970.
While we were on the caravan was I looking for work when an old friend of my mum’s Beryl offered me a job in the off licence she was managing. I started in the September working at Carless and Horton in Formby village and I was to be a warehouse man and shop assistant. It had a delicatessen and I used the knowledge I had from working in the pub to good effect. Within a few weeks the area manager, Jack Fryer, offered me full time work, he was setting up a chain of delicatessens in their off licence shops and he needed an assistant to show the other new staff how they worked. I was trained how to operate the slicers and the scales, how to set up the shelves to show off the stock to the best advantage. I was to pass all this knowledge on, it was a bit hard at times a seventeen year old boy telling middle aged liverpudlian women how to do their job. I had not expected to be working I had hoped to go to catering college but we needed the money for the family. Dad was out of work and not living with us. Mum was on benefits and I gave her as much of my wages as I could to help out. I kept £2.00 of my weeks wages of £9.10/-d for myself.
No comments:
Post a Comment