The Bootle Boy

by Les Hinton

  This may have been a tough and sooty dockland, but its streets bore incongruous names bestowed by high-minded Victorian burghers. They evoked Oxbridge colleges — Pembroke, Balliol, Exeter, and Hertford — and Shakespearean characters — Othello, Romeo, Juliet, and Viola. ‘William Shakespeare’ was the name of a local pub, and the art deco facade of the Commodore cinema stood between Portia and Falstaff streets. Malcolm Street was named after the good guy in Macbeth. My younger brother was given the name of the next street, Duncan. My name was more up to date. I was named after Leslie Howard, who was a matinee-idol when the Luftwaffe shot down his plane 8 months before I was born.

  Once a village seaside resort, Bootle had long ago been swallowed by Liverpool; its gentility sacrificed for the industrial prosperity that made Merseyside one of the great trading posts of the British Empire, and a place of riches and proud architecture. By the end of the nineteenth century, Bootle was itself thriving. New railways crisscrossed the town, and its riverside houses and pubs had yielded to bustling docklands.

  Bootle’s promise made it a mecca for hopeful young men, including James Downie Bruce, a Scot from Kilwinning, Ayrshire. James was an apprentice boilermaker, and would become my maternal grandfather. On 15 September 1897, aged 21, he married a local girl, Edith Emily Brooks, who was 19. They had 10 children. My mother, Lilian Amy, was the eighth but only just; her twin sister Gladys arrived 10 minutes later.

  My grandmother’s marriage was unhappy. No one said a fond word about James Downie. The Bruce daughters repeated stories about their father: he had been a violent drunk whose arrival home, swaying and swearing, filled the house with fear.

  One night, Grandma mistakenly put her hatpin into her husband’s flat cap on the hallway hat stand. The hatpin was still there when James Downie put on his hat and walked to the pub. When he came home, my grandfather beat his wife for the mockery he had suffered from his drinking pals.

  My grandmother attempted several times to leave her brutal husband, but he tracked her to every rooming house. When he died in 1916 after an accident at work, he left his wife seven gold sovereigns. My mother told stories of her unloving father as if she had been an eyewitness, but she was only two when he died.

  If my grandfather was a brute, Grandma was forgiving to the point of saintliness. She always kept her dead husband’s picture on the wall in the back room above the fireplace. It was a huge photograph of a solemnly handsome man who always seemed about to speak. His apprehensive gaze may have represented some quality of his personality, but was possibly nothing more than shock at the strange, new-fangled camera equipment that would have confronted him. He wore a fine moustache that was beginning to curl at each end, and a stiff Edwardian collar. A watch chain looped neatly across his waistcoat. To his left, in an elaborate pot, was an aspidistra.

  All her life, my mother told stories of my grandmother’s difficult life with her father. But the deepest sadness of the Bruce family was for my grandmother’s lost children. Even allowing for the working-class mortality rates of the time, this was an unlucky house. Edith, her first-born, died as baby; John Douglas was 15 months; Auntie May was 20; Bill was killed in the blitz at 34. In 1916, a few weeks after the death of her 40-year-old husband, Grandma’s tenth and last child, Jean, died aged three months.

  Growing up with tales of James Downie seems to have rendered Bruce women suspicious of men. It was clear to me even when I was small, listening to my mother and her twin sister. They didn’t often talk warmly of men. With the exception, that is, of Gregory Peck. My mum liked him, and always told me we looked exactly alike.

  She also loved her older brothers, and her cousin Don, who had been brought up as a brother after his mother died. I think they were the big laughing men who threw me high in the air until I touched Grandma’s ceiling. Mum made them sound wild and admirable.

  Dad was short and, when Mum brought her fiancé home to meet the family, her tall brothers walked around on their knees. She said her brothers were always in trouble, but smiled when telling stories about them. Uncle Jim, she said, had fired an air gun through the front door letterbox at a passing policeman’s helmet and knocked it off.

  I only remember Cousin Don and Uncle Dave. Dave was once a musician, and on the piano in the parlour he appeared in a framed photo, wearing a tuxedo, with a trumpet on his lap. He had a neat Clark Gable moustache and dark hair pasted back from his forehead. As a young man, he had played with big orchestras, but took a job in insurance after catching tuberculosis. Cousin Don had gone to night school, qualified as a ship’s engineer, and gone on to a successful career in the maritime industry. All my childhood, he was held up to me as an example. Uncle Dave gave me a few piano lessons, and I wish I had kept them up.

  Grandma Bruce — Edith Emily Bruce — was monumental to me. Born in 1878, when Disraeli was prime minister, she was a widow at 38, and worked two shifts a day as a cleaner while caring for her family. She had little money and no prospect of improving her circumstances, but was proud never to have ignored the landlord’s knock. Her children were educated away from home by a charity for the poor.

  Somehow she managed to save, and after her death in 1960 my mother bought me my first typewriter with the little she inherited. It was a portable Olivetti Lettera 22, a sleek and beautiful machine that travelled the world with me and now sits nearby, a battered veteran in happy retirement, as I type this on a MacBook Air.

  Grandma Bruce was held in awe by her daughter as a woman of indestructible will who kept everything together in the face of engulfing challenges. When her son’s wife committed suicide, she had taken in their two children, a baby and a toddler, and raised them as her own. When another son had a daughter, and abandoned the mother, she had paid for the baby’s upkeep — seven shillings and sixpence each month until she was 15. Nothing made her break.

  It would be too tidy and romantic to say she coped with it all and managed to bring up a healthy and happy family. I’m not sure she did, but it must be some success in such a hardscrabble life that none of them ended up in prison.

  Unable to support a big family, she had sent Mum and her twin sister Gladys to a children’s home 55 miles away in Lancaster. They were eight years old. It was called the Ripley Hospital, but Mum always told us it was the ‘Ripley School for the Children of Poor but Respectable Families’. The school had been built with the legacy of Thomas Ripley, a Lancaster publican’s son who made his fortune as a merchant prince of Liverpool. It was a home for orphans and fatherless children in Lancaster and Liverpool, and there was an idiosyncratic condition for entry that qualified my mother and her twin; they lived within seven miles of Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral.

  Ripley offered strange lessons to its poor pupils, teaching little girls how to curtsy when presented in court, or how to behave in front of their servants. They were taught how to talk and how to walk. Mum liked demonstrating how she was made to walk balancing a book on her head, while making sure her toes touched the ground first with each step. I was confused, never having seen anyone walk in this fashion, before or since.

  This kind of finishing-school learning was not much use when my mother left at the age of 14 for a job operating the lift in a dry-cleaning factory. It was a tough life in Bootle for a girl, her Scouse accent sanitised by elocution lessons, who had been given the sense of entitlement that goes with preparations for the moment she would curtsy before the King.

  Ripley teachers were strict. Talkative pupils were made to sit cross-legged facing the corner with large cotton reels thrust into their mouths. Ripley helped poor families for years after my mother left, but it became a regular school after the war when the support of the welfare state allowed one-parent families to stay together.

  The Bruce clan, my mother’s side of the family, had more difficult lives than the Hintons. Dad’s family was a success compared with hers. The Hintons had migrated to Australia and thrived in farming, real estate, and the
food business. A distant cousin was a veteran of Gallipoli and Passchendaele who won the Military Cross, was twice Mentioned in despatches, and became a brigadier. Dad’s father had worked at Boodle’s, an exclusive gentlemen’s club in St James’s, London. His name appeared in a 1922 edition of The Times in a story headlined ‘The Cook’s Art’ registering his attendance at the opening of the 26th Universal Cookery and Food Exhibition.

  For a long time, the Hintons earned their living from food. My dad, Frank, was a chef. His dad, also Frank, was a chef. His grandfather, another Frank, was a baker. Isaac Langley Hinton, my great-great-grandfather owned his own bakery in Great Chapel Street, Soho, in the mid-nineteenth century.

  My father was born in London. He grew up in leafy suburbs in the southwest, near Wimbledon Common. His main mischief was squeezing through the fence to watch tennis at the All England Tennis and Croquet Club. He augmented his pocket money foraging for lost balls and selling them to departing players.

  Seen from the tough streets of Merseyside, the Hintons were lucky people. My mother told stories of lost wealth and hardship. Her mother’s parents had a thriving leather processing business. They had lived in a big house with their own housekeeper, and travelled the prosperous streets of nineteenth century Liverpool in their own horse and carriage.

  All this was lost when Grandma’s father died, and his grief-stricken widow turned to drink and ended up penniless. Grandma Bruce, still a small girl, had been raised by her own grandparents.

  Frank met Lilian in Liverpool when she was 19 and he was 23. She became engaged to him when she was 20, but Grandma wouldn’t let her marry until she was 21. Her birthday was 27 May 1935, and she married on 8 June. They posed on the steps of St John’s Anglican Church in the next street. The wind had caught my mother’s long white dress, sweeping it to one side. In her left arm, Lilian carried a huge bouquet of namesake white lilies. With her right, she seemed to hold my father tightly. He was wearing a large white carnation and a dark suit with gigantic lapels, the sort that have gone in and out of fashion ever since. Mum was beaming brightly, a picture of happy sweetness that was to fade with the years. My father was taking the day more seriously, only a slight smile breaking round his mouth. He was never a big smiler.

  It was a happy start to an unsteady relationship. For my mother, marrying Frank Hinton was to be a way out of Bootle. Before the war they moved frequently around Britain, travelling with Marilyn, who was born 11 months after their wedding. My father changed jobs often. One of the quirks of this otherwise quiet man was his quick temper. Kitchen conflicts led again and again to him storming out of a job, or being fired. My mother said she dreaded the days he brought home the black canvas bag that held his work knives — they only came home with him after he’d lost another job.

  Dad volunteered as an army chef in February 1940, six months after Britain declared war. Dad liked telling us that Napoleon had said an army marched on its stomach, and that helping them march was his job. He spent the war in Britain. He wanted to go abroad, and once got as far as the dock before his departure was cancelled. Dad remained a soldier for 19 years: Army no S/173319.

  My mother was one of millions of women who volunteered for non-combatant jobs. There was the Women’s Land Army, whose members stood in for farm workers conscripted to fight, and ‘Canary Girls’, who worked in munitions factories, earning their name because exposure to toxic TNT turned their skin yellow. For ATS volunteers like my mother, duties stretched from driving and repairing vehicles to acting as kitchen maids. My mother could never drive, or even ride a bicycle. She did her share of humdrum work, but most remembers waking to sirens, and running through dark woods to anti-aircraft guns. She would provide the ammunition while men did the firing.

  The war brought the first of my parents’ many separations. Dad’s peripatetic military life caused most of these separations — but not all of them. They tested their marriage without ever quite breaking it.

  The war years gave women left at home a new sense of independence. Between 1939 and 1945 divorce petitions increased fivefold. In a reversal of pre-war trends, two out of three were filed by men against their wives, many on the grounds of adultery, brought by soldiers returning from the front.

  When the war was over, and soldiers returned looking for jobs, most women went back to being housewives, many reluctantly. By the late 1940s fewer than 20 per cent of married women worked. Mum returned to being a housewife, and my sister Mal, who was nine, had to get to know her parents all over again. Her grandparents hated parting with her.

  Fifty-nine years after the war, when I was running Rupert Murdoch’s British newspapers, Baroness Boothroyd visited my office in London. Betty Boothroyd, a former Labour MP, had been a colourful and popular Speaker of the House of Commons. She strode forcefully into my office, immaculate in red, her shining white hair perfectly in place, and said immediately: ‘I need you to give me some money.’

  The baroness was raising funds for a monument to the women of the Second World War. She visited me on 27 May 2004, and could not have chosen a better moment. It was Mum’s ninetieth birthday.

  My company offered a generous donation, and I was told Lilian Amy Hinton’s name would be placed in a time capsule beneath the monument, along with many thousands of others who had joined the war effort.

  On 9 July of the following year, I watched Queen Elizabeth unveil this monument to my mother — a 22-foot tall bronze monolith set in the middle of Whitehall, north of the Cenotaph. London was in the grip of a new wartime tension; two days earlier, Islamic extremist suicide bombers had killed 52 Londoners and injured more than 700. It was a difficult and moving day.

  It was also 10 months after my mother had died. I think that day would have pleased her.

  CHAPTER 2

  149 St John’s Road

  Bootle is an unprepossessing place even today, and back then it was especially battered and bleak. But I loved Bootle because I could count on it. I probably loved it more than those people who had no choice but to live there all the time. Bootle was always there when not much else was. Even Dad vanished for a while when I was very young — it was years before I found out about the army butcher Mum met in Egypt.

  Our life abroad was luxury compared with life in Bootle. Dad was only a staff sergeant, but we had maids and houseboys who cooked and cleaned. We ate bananas, tangerines, prickly pears, coconuts, pineapples, and pomegranates. In Britain, all I remember were pears and apples.

  It wasn’t easy leaving the heat and bright skies, but nothing could beat a foggy Bootle homecoming — seeing the weary flicker of old gas street-lamps on the wet pavement, breathing in the familiar coal-filled air. Even the cold wind cutting through my hot-weather clothes felt like a welcome. We always spent time there during our periods of ‘transit’. We stayed at my grandmother’s terrace at 149 St John’s Road.

  My grandmother’s house was as predictable and comforting as a favourite story. The same two wooden pickets would be missing from the green fence around the weedy patch beneath the front window. Below the pickets were the rusty stumps left when the original iron railings had been taken away to provide metal for the war effort. Inside, across the brass doorstep and beyond the unvisited parlour, was the back room where everything happened. The big black kettle would sit above the fire in the tall hearth. On the ledge next to it was the long fork for making toast. Fire-toasted bread was crisped on one side only and covered with Tate & Lyle Golden Syrup or a thick layer of bittersweet lemon curd.

  A plastic red-checked tablecloth with the same two burn rings covered the table beneath the window overlooking the backyard. You couldn’t actually look at the backyard because Grandma kept the curtain drawn so visitors couldn’t see the weeds fighting through the dull white distemper peeling off the brick walls.

  In the lightless hallway, on a small table next to the hat stand, was a heavy black Bakelite telephone. I was allowed to answer it
, always with the words ‘Bootle 3048’. Lifting the receiver required both hands, and you placed a call by giving the operator a number.

  The only lavatory was at the bottom of the yard. The seat was cold and there was no toilet paper, only torn squares of the Daily Mirror on a hook. This might be how printer’s ink got into my blood. Or maybe it was because of Uncle Joe, the Burma veteran who worked for a while as a watchman and cleaner in the offices of the Daily Post and the Liverpool Echo, and brought home large and exciting black-and-white photos he picked out of the waste bins.

  Grandma kept a mad Border Collie named Bobby in the backyard, where he had nowhere to run and nothing to chase. Whenever Bobby was let into the outside world, he went wild with excitement, which Grandma said was bad for him.

  Bath time was Saturday morning, when a small zinc tub was placed in front of the hearth and filled with hot water from the black kettle. When I was older everyone had to sit among the aspidistras in the cold front parlour before I took off my clothes.

  The only heat in the house came from the back room fire, which was fed with real coal. The pyrotechnics of real coal was lost long ago to the tame glow of smokeless coke, which is healthier but not so much fun. Real coal was fierce, and unpredictable. It crackled and sizzled, and its flames changed colour — blue, orange, white, yellow. Sometimes it spat out tiny red missiles, filling the back room with the singe of the hearthrug.

  Upstairs, we slept in beds with noisy springs. The mattresses were old and sunk in the middle; it was like cradling in a big nest. Beneath each bed was a metal bed pot to avoid a trip outdoors. When Grandma’s scary sister, my great aunt Grace, stayed, I would get into bed with Mum and put the hook on the door, while she wandered the house crying about creatures she couldn’t identify that were crawling on the walls.