by Hatch, Ben
‘I just can’t see how we can carry on without a car, my love. It might cost us more to abandon it.’
‘How?’ she asks.
‘Not writing the guidebook, not renting the house. Hiring the car might be the cheaper option. We just need to think about it.’
‘Let’s sleep on it.’
‘OK.’
She kisses me.
‘What’s that for?’
‘Yesterday. I was hopeless. I was all over the place. You were really calm. Thank you.’
‘I had no idea what I was doing. I was a bit concussed.’
She strokes the bump on my head.
‘You looked after us.’
I imagine what it would be like arriving back home in a few days, abandoning the guidebook, unpacking the house, explaining to the kids the holiday’s over.
‘Maybe we can get a deal on the hire car. Frommer’s might help out. The insurance could come through really quickly. Things might happen.’
‘I don’t think it’s fair on the kids.’
My phone rings. It’s my dad. I walk into the bedroom to answer it. He wants to know about the accident. He’s heard about it from Pen, who I called in the hospital. I explain what happened and the dilemma. Dad’s adamant.
‘Oh, you must carry on,’ he says.
‘It’s tricky.’
‘What’s tricky?’ he says. ‘You’ve been commissioned to write a guidebook and that’s what you must do. You have a contract. Honour that contract.’
‘Dinah’s a bit spooked.’
‘Of course she is. But she must understand that this is your job now.’
‘I know but…’
‘The family were pleased when you got this assignment, my son.’
‘The family?’
‘My son, when did you last finish a book?’
‘A few years ago.’
‘How many years ago?’
‘Four.’
‘Four,’ says Dad, leaving the word hanging.
‘It’s a difficult story and I’ve been looking after the kids and…’
‘Don’t waste opportunities. Life is about taking them.’
‘I know but…’
‘Anyway, I’m very glad you’re all right.’
‘And how are you?’
‘I’m fine. Carry on with the trip, my son. Goodnight.’
CHAPTER 14
On the banks of the River Mersey, amidst a landscape of rusting cranes, East Float Quay in Birkenhead was the departure point for migrants on ships bound for Australia. It’s also where in 1879 the world’s first submarine, the Resurgam II, was launched. Our two-bed apartment is in a rundown area of Birkenhead on the second floor of a converted mill. The streets are deserted. There are rows of red-brick terraced houses boarded up and the only shops open besides the Tesco Metro are Happy Shopper newsagents and tanning studios selling diet pills. Already I’ve counted seven kids in number eight Steven Gerrard Liverpool football shirts.
We drop the bags off and head for the Seacombe ferry terminal. Ferries operate as commuter shuttles in the morning and early evening, but between these times become river explorer cruises with tourist commentary. The Royal Iris stops at Woodside and Birkenhead before Pier Head on the Liverpool side of the Mersey. A ferry across the Mersey conjures up images from 1970s sitcoms. I’m expecting squawking seagulls, tooting ferries and women in electric blue miniskirts and mop-topped men eating chips from the Liverpool Echo. But it’s raining so hard we can hardly see the Royal Liver Building through the haze and instead of cool 1960s people in polo necks and beehive hairdos there are tourists in pacamacs and bobble hats reading guidebook entries about the World Museum. The commentary isn’t particularly inspirational either (‘The vessel is 42.7 metres long with a gross tonnage of 747 tons… A ventilation shaft was opened here in 1934 by King George V…’) and it’s all slightly disappointing.
It’s a short walk from the Pier Head to Albert Dock, where our first attraction is, The Beatles Story. It’s a modern museum with a disability lift that takes so long descending the five steps it’d be quicker to break both our own legs, reset them, wait for the bones to knit and then walk down the steps unassisted several months later. Inside, the museum’s rammed with school kids looking bored while their spellbound teachers hungrily consume every word on the information boards. I have an audio guide which Charlie delights in pinging away from my ears while Phoebe spills her Ribena in shock when ‘Twist and Shout’ comes on in the mocked-up Cavern room. The tour, conducted partly through the voices of John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Brian Epstein, is made up of recreated scenes, models and mementos from the era while the final room is all white. The piano is white, the floor’s white, the walls are white, the ceiling’s white. Everything is white except for Lennon’s round glasses on the piano that has a small sign on top of it – ‘This is not here’ – that we read as the lyrics to ‘Imagine’ are piped into the room. It gives us something to debate in the Starbucks we come out into – was the display not there as it was all in our imagination? Or was John Lennon not there as he’d been shot dead? Or was it something far deeper and impossible to decipher when you’re spooning HiPP Organic Spaghetti Carbonara into the reluctant mouth of an under-three while his sister’s running around shouting, ‘Daddy, I want that biscuit what I saw with chocolate on it and icing on it.’
After a picnic on the cobblestones outside the Tate Gallery, overlooking the stretch of water Fred Talbot famously fell into leaping across a floating map of Great Britain and Ireland to give the weather forecast on This Morning, we try what proves to be a highly embarrassing tour with the Yellow Duckmarine. The Yellow Duckmarine is an amphibious 1960s landing craft that was used in Vietnam to put marines ashore. Refashioned, it now doubles as both a city sightseeing bus and, for the second half of the ride, a boat that cruises around Salthouse Dock. What it isn’t, is the submarine Dinah, for some reason, assumes it to be. Having misunderstood its purpose she’s understandably unhappy, when we board, with the Velcro straps holding shut the plastic windows, whose strength she guesses is about to be severely tested with a few thousand pounds per square inch of water pressure when we dive.
Dinah sometimes gets ‘urges’. These urges are irrational premonitions of doom that necessitate often quite mundane acts to prevent them. ‘Look at me,’ she will say out of the blue, very seriously. ‘It’s an urge,’ and at this point I’ll have to drop whatever it is I’m doing to stare at her for a few moments while she nods, say, or drums her fingers on a table. In the old days I used to ask what these urges were about. What terrible accident would befall me or her or someone we loved if I did not touch the side of my nose six times and pass her a saucepan from the cupboard handle first? Nowadays I just go along with them. ‘Touch your head. Quickly, it’s an urge.’… ‘Look round that bend and open your eyes really wide.’… ‘Hold up a pen. Now stick it behind your ear and clap.’ I’m assuming it’s one of these urges that makes her insist we put on the life jackets. I don’t question why we must do it, even though the first twenty minutes of the tour is on dry land, and thus still have no idea she thinks we’re on a submarine. It’s quite a humiliating hour in truth. In our bulky orange float suits we’re pointed and laughed at a) by passers-by at traffic lights outside the World Museum and b) by the tour guide himself. ‘Someone’s got a lot of faith in us,’ he says, walking past us to set up his mike. Later, as we splash down in Salthouse Dock and float, rather than submerge the 20,000 leagues Dinah was expecting, he says, ‘And finally ladies and gentlemen before I leave you, a big hand please for the Safe Family,’ and then when everyone’s looking round at us, ‘Yes, ladies and gentlemen. They’ve been wearing them since Gower Street.’
Caught in a rain shower we miss the last tourist ferry back to the Seacombe terminal and expect to pay a supplement on the next one because our Livesmart card is no longer valid but instead we’re waved through by the steward. Unbeknown to us the return ferry stops at places in a different order and, as a result, in cla
ssic sitcom style, thinking we have longer to wait than we do, we miss our stop. It turns out to be a blessing in disguise. Going round again, this time there are genuine Scousers reading the Liverpool Echo in boiler suits, seagulls follow us and the Royal Liver Building looks magnificent in the oily black sky. In the main saloon, Phoebe and Charlie are in the middle of a game of ‘weddings’ (hugging until they both topple over), when a woman, seeing Charlie has no socks on (his were drenched in a puddle), walks over and hands Dinah a pair. They’re brand new and the gesture is so transparently good-natured and unadulterated, it’s one of those moments that simply bowl you over.
We’re still marvelling at this when two middle-aged women start taking photos of Phoebe and Charlie. They ask if we mind, we don’t and they take our address to email them on to us. A few minutes afterwards Charlie wanders over with a microphone toy.
‘Charlie, where did you get that?’
He points at another woman. She shouts over that her son already has one.
‘He can have it. It’s not’n’.’
At Birkenhead we again don’t have a ticket but the collector waves us through, and even gives us two helium balloons left over from some corporate gig in the terminal.
‘It’s unbelievable,’ says Dinah.
‘Imagine that happening anywhere else.’
‘It wouldn’t.’
‘In Brighton.’
‘No way.’
‘Everyone’s so nice. I feel humbled.’
‘Me too.’
Our final attraction is a tour of Anfield, the home stadium of Liverpool Football club. It’s an atmospheric ground that rises above the roofs of the terraced houses of its supporters in a neglected area of the city close to Stanley Park. It’s nearly teatime and Dinah’s not keen. But Liverpool is the team I’ve supported since Knutsford infants. Petty rules again don’t apply because although the 5 p.m. tour is full and has left, we’re squeezed on anyway. We catch up with it in the home team changing room. Dads with their football-mad sons cluster around the pegs from which Jamie Carragher’s number two shirt and the number eight of Steven Gerrard are draped. Although I notice there’s not much action around Sotirios Kyrgiakos’s number sixteen. The guide makes jokes. The floor is made of a special rubber to prevent players sliding around on their studs, he says. It’s different in the away changing room. There it’s quite slippy. ‘Yet Ronaldo never fell over in thuz,’ says the guide. ‘Evun whun we painted a punalty spot.’
I translate these jokes for Dinah: ‘Ronaldo used to play for Man United, and was well known for feigning injury, particularly in the penalty area.’
Before we walk through the players’ tunnel a tape is played. It’s a recorded crowd roar from the Liverpool heyday in the 1970s when the team was winning European Cups. It’s what opposing teams were subjected to before running out onto the pitch. Often, says the guide, opposition players were kept here for ten minutes listening to that. The noise, even diluted through time and the speakers, is like the cacophonous roar of an army. We pass underneath the famous ‘This Is Anfield’ sign that players touch for luck. ‘Although Michael Owun wuz ter short ter do dat,’ jokes the guide.
‘Michael Owen used to play for Liverpool and is very short,’ I tell Dinah.
I hold Charlie up to touch it. As we’re sitting in the dugout Liverpool legend Sammy Lee (He’s fat, he’s round, he bounces along the ground, Sammy Lee, Sammy Lee) walks past. Now a coach, he’s with a much a taller groundsman. ‘Me dad,’ jokes Sammy Lee.
‘Sammy Lee is another short Liverpool player. The other man is much taller so he’s making out…’
‘I get it,’ says Dinah. ‘I’m not an idiot.’
After a walk round the Kop, the tour ends in the museum. Trophies are displayed, old players’ signed shirts are framed on the walls and there’s a video of Liverpool’s 1977 European Cup Final triumph against Borussia Mönchengladbach. In the film the grass looks impossibly green and long. The players are in tight shorts with bouffant hair. And I can remember staying up and watching this match with Dad as a special treat in Knutsford. We nip into a chippie down a side street. The windows steam up from the piping hot chips. I finish mine and, waiting for the kids to do the same, to save time later, I edit the photos on my camera in preparation for downloading them onto the laptop. Flicking backwards through the internal memory over the last few weeks, deleting rubbish pictures, cropping others, seeing the kids in different settings, doing so many different things, I feel nostalgic for what we’ve done and sad for what we won’t now be doing.
In the distance, below us that night as we lie in bed, we hear boats on the quay chugging along, the grinding noise of a swinging crane.
‘That was a really good day.’
‘It was lovely,’ says Dinah.
‘It seems a shame. Just as we got into the swing of it.’
‘We can’t hire a car for two months, love. We can’t afford it. I do know what you mean, though. I was just thinking today how lucky we are to be doing this.’
‘It is incredible. Despite everything.’
‘It is,’ she agrees.
‘We might feel failures giving up, slinking back home. Imagine unpacking the house.’
‘I’m not looking forward to that.’
‘And there are some nice places coming up.’
‘The Lake District,’ she says.
‘I know, and Kielder Forest.’
‘We promised Phoebe Legoland.’
‘And what about Scotland? We don’t have to make a decision now, do we?’ I ask.
‘But shall we?’
‘What do you mean?’
She looks at me.
‘Fuck it,’ she says.
‘Really?’
‘Yeah, let’s go for it.’
‘You sure?’
‘We’ll manage somehow,’ she says. ‘It might bankrupt us but I’m enjoying myself too much. What do you think?’
‘Definitely.’
She kisses me.
‘What swung it?’ I ask afterwards. ‘The free socks?’
‘I think it was.’
She laughs.
‘It was nothin’, love,’ I say.
‘It’s not’n.’ Dinah spells it out. ‘N-O-T-apostrophe-N.’
‘Dinah, it was not’n.’
‘I feel better now,’ she says.
‘Me too. Hey, we’re back in business.’
She smiles.
‘It was nottin.’
‘NOT’N! Apostrophe N,’ she says.
‘Now tell me,’ I ask, leaning up on one elbow and looking down at her. ‘Because I’d really like to know – why did you think the Yellow Duckmarine was a submarine?’
‘Well, it was yellow.’
‘And…?’
‘We’d been in The Beatles museum.’
‘OK.’
‘Where we heard the record “We All Live In A Yellow Submarine”.’
‘Ahhh, I see. You put the two together.’
She laughs. ‘Plus I don’t think I really understood the word amphibious in that context. I thought it was a war word.’
‘And the first submarine in the world was launched at Birkenhead quay. The Resurgam thing. So you had submarines on your mind.’
‘Yes.’
She laughs.
‘There’s still one thing, though.’
‘What?’ She looks up, sensing a trap.
‘You thought it was a submarine?’
‘Yes.’
‘And because of this you were worried about the Velcro straps holding those plastic windows shut?’
‘I knew if it went underwater they wouldn’t be strong enough. I’m not daft.’
‘But you still got on.’
She laughs and shoves me across the bed.
‘I was looking out for us.’
‘Knowing we would all die if it went underwater you still got on. That’s like knowing the plane you’re getting on is certain to smash into the Alps and instead of changing y
our travel plans merely packing an extra cardy.’
‘I didn’t know for sure it was a submarine.’
‘So why didn’t you ask?’
‘I was embarrassed. Leave me alone.’
CHAPTER 15
I was seventeen years old when my dad tried something else with me. He was the controller of Radio 4 and very much a management suit by the 1980s, but he still liked to keep in touch with his comedy roots. He put it to me that Mum could do with a break from ‘clearing up after you’. That’s how he sold me on the week in Blackpool. He was scouting out a couple of up-and-coming acts appearing at the city’s Grand Theatre for the BBC and we had to meet with the Grumbleweeds, a comedy troupe he was thinking about bringing back to Radio 4. Although I only grudgingly accepted his offer, I remember my slight disappointment when it emerged that it wasn’t to be just Dad and I, but that we’d be joined by his two greatest friends – John Ithell and Duncan Thomas – from his BBC Radio Manchester days. Duncan was a very precise engineer, and John was a gentle, very tall, softly spoken Man City supporter from human resources. I worried a little that they’d spend their time discussing the beeb. Instead they spent the week taking the piss out of each other. They’d take it in turns to gang up on one of their group until this person reached breaking point and was about to lose their temper and then they’d switch sides and it became someone else’s turn to take the flak. When it was my dad’s turn he was mocked for his control freakery, and his sense of self-importance. Given a free pass because of my age, I wasn’t targeted at all and was allowed carte blanche, for the first time in my life, to join in and make fun of my dad. I loved it. And so, to my surprise, did my dad. I was only forced onto the back foot once during a mock serious debate about handkerchiefs. They each carried one up their sleeves and couldn’t understand why I didn’t. What would I do if I needed to blow my nose, cut my finger, or a woman needed grit removing from her eye? ‘Benj, how will you help her? With toilet paper? I think you need to listen to your father.’
I struggled to match their drinking, the enormous Chinese meals they consumed as well as the hectic show schedule Dad had lined up. ‘He hasn’t got us down for the matinee as well, Dunc?’
