A Life
The queue for the late show at the Liverpool Empire begins on Lime Street and right angles east up Lord Nelson Street. This is where a young man and woman – not much more than a boy and a girl – are in a section packed together like a Roman Legion, heavy overcoats and mackintoshes offering scant defence against the wind and drizzle sweeping up from the river. They are on a first date, but have known each other for some time and are holding hands. Some people curse the weather and others are excited about the show, while he is talking about Egypt. In two minutes he will be telling tales from the butcher’s shop. He won’t stop talking. He never stops talking. He will never stop talking and he will be known for it, but not in a bad way. One of his sons – they will have five children – will be the same and there will be other more distant relatives who never stop talking. This is a gene that runs strong in one tributary of a vibrant and meandering family that will come together for the next sixty-something years at baptisms, birthdays, weddings, anniversaries and funerals.
He puts an arm around her when he hears her teeth chatter. He tells her about the house where he lived with his mother and grandparents until he was seven. It was a house of love and friendship, the kind where the front door is never used and the back door never locked. He’ll return to this house, which doesn’t leave the family, over and over until he no longer has the strength to do so. He moves on to something else. Perhaps this is the moment he talks about the show. Neither of them will forget who is top of the bill that night, but sixty eight years later, when a man who had been training for the priesthood delivers a eulogy for the young man queuing outside the Empire, only two or three of the mourners will sit up when they hear the singer’s name.
One of those mourners will be his cousin. She also grew up and still lives in the house to which our young man returns so often. As they drive to the wake she will tell her son about how the young man, married by now, had had a spare ticket for another show because the young woman was too far along with their first child to stand in yet another queue outside the Empire. This was the cousin’s first concert and she will remember that top of the bill was Lonnie Donegan and at the bottom, wearing the luminous socks favoured by the Teddy Boys (although he himself was never one) was Des O’Connor. She loved Lonnie Donegan, but could never stand Des who, it’s safe to say, divided opinion. The son, eyes on the road and ears alert to the satnav as they snake around Lancashire lanes in search of a sports and social club where his brother played cricket thirty years ago, will smile because he knows all about Lonnie Donegan’s place in the history of British rock and roll. He had smiled earlier, was moved to tears in fact, when he had heard that he had been born in the same hospital as the young man, albeit thirty six years later. This son grew up in the same house, to which he returns over and over and where he hears stories about brothers and cousins and mums and dads and aunties and uncles and as he listens he fears that one day he will wish he had written some of them down.
The cousin tells her son how the young man loved music for the whole of his life. His children did too, but who didn’t in those days? The young man in the queue, who will work three or four jobs at a time to feed and clothe his growing family, will get himself a stage name (ah, that would be telling) and compere and sing in pubs and clubs around Liverpool and beyond. He will enter talent shows at places like Southport Floral Hall – but really, who can compete with a girl in communion dress singing Ave Maria or a dog walking on two legs while dressed as Pierrot – and when that other man who had so nearly become a priest relates these and many other stories in a crematorium sixty-something years after the queue outside the Empire, the cousin’s son will also learn that somewhere along the way (perhaps during the years when a milk round is the first job of the day) the young man will develop a liking for three Weetabix, a pint of milk and half a bag of sugar for breakfast. The son will reflect that Tate and Lyle have a lot to answer for, but now is not the time. What’s significant is that this habit will continue until all of his teeth are gone and after that, so what? Bring on the biscuits and sweets, which despite his best efforts the children will always find.
The almost-priest, whose plans were scuppered by Cupid’s arrow, will tell of how the young man becomes a car swapper and how theirs is sometimes a three car/one driver household. There will be an E-type Jaguar, which the cousin’s son will salute, remembering how his father had dreamed of owning one. He doesn’t have hobbies, that’s what they will say, because when he isn’t working he is sleeping. The cousin will attest to this, since whenever he visits the house he first lived in the young man will talk and talk and then fall asleep. Perhaps the truth about the hobbies is that for him it will always and forever be about the young woman and their children, one of whom will die a year before him, and then grandchildren and great-grandchildren who will toddle around a sports and social club blowing bubbles to cheers and applause, not much younger, when you think about it, than those kids with voices of angels who took the prizes which our young man should have won. But he will be happy to take part and be a part of something bigger, which brings us to the last words the woman will say to the man, when claims of youth have long since been set aside: ‘You’ve done your work, love. It’s time to rest.’