How many people have read it? The directors, some civil servants, a few politicians? I would hazard a guess the number is in single figures. And how many copies were printed? At what cost? Therefore, what is the cost per reader? The price of an original copy of one of Shakespeare’s plays? As I read, I again ask myself, how much time have any of them spent in the actual wards, done the nightshift? How many nights have they slept in a hospital bed? How many times have they washed their hands in the bathroom, tried to sleep without any curtains and surrounded by noise? How many of them actually have private health insurance? The agenda and minutes of board meetings should be available to the public as well as to all staff members – redacting, of course, any particularly sensitive matters.

  Have you read your local NHS trust annual report? If so, let me know.

  My brilliant surgeon tells me that he is having a battle to obtain a vital piece of equipment for his department without which patients’ treatment would be compromised. I’d bet the cost of the annual report would cover the cost comfortably.

  With the Pandemic of 2020 (and beyond), the situation must be very different now. From what I can see in the papers, it is even worse, with staff being worked to exhaustion and more nurses leaving than ever.

  “There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action.”

  Bertrand Russell

  21

  Liverpool, My Career Prospects

  Now I am back home, I am very tired and drift again into the dreamy half-sleep. I recall my return to Liverpool after university. Strangely, I think of Lesley Malone again, and the young musician, and wonder what has happened to them.

  I returned home from university, heavily in debt, and with a dismal academic record. Unemployed, but with that misguided optimism of youth, I was confident that fame and fortune awaited me. But, what to do? The law had not seduced me as my wife had done, but I had no other qualification. Was it back to the docks or the bakery to avoid bankruptcy? No, my only option was the practice of law. Maybe I had underestimated her, seen only her cheerless, uninspiring exterior and missed her inner beauty and intrigue.

  With my mother’s proven literary ability, we wrote to twenty firms in Liverpool. In her eyes, my talents had blossomed even more, and my musical, social, charitable and sporting achievements were considerably enhanced. My new-found interest in “The Law of Property Act 1925” had to be a clincher.

  I got two replies. “Two,” my mother explained in triumph, particularly as one was from a leading firm in the city, the other a firm I had never heard of.

  With my new suit, shirt, tie, and shoes polished to army standard, I attended an interview with the latter first.

  I turned up at this sole solicitor firm to find the office comprised of one very large room in the Victorian style. Sitting in the centre of the room on a raised platform was the principal, presumably like Mr Scrooge, to keep an eye on the employees’ productivity and shout instructions to them. The temperature was kept low with most of the staff wearing overcoats. Typists, on old-fashioned typewriters, noisily typed, while clerks (now legal executives) scribbled away, some still hand-writing deeds on vellum.

  My potential employer indicated that I could sit and pointed to a chair some feet below him. As I nervously sat down, I noticed first of all that the chair had only one armrest, and part of the seat was missing with some springs exposed, and secondly that, as I was 13st. 7 lb. at the time, the chair was not going to take my full weight. So, I adopted an awkward, semi-squat position, so as not to put all of my weight on the chair.

  “What are you?” he yelled down from his celestial seat, leaning forward so I could see his face.

  “A graduate,” I replied.

  “You must remember the solicitor’s profession was not an all-graduate profession then, and most solicitors did five-year articles in family firms, who expected a premium for the privilege of joining them or at best provided a modest salary. My future guide to the mysteries of the law had disappeared over the horizon back into his seat and suddenly erupted in a high-pitched laugh which was quickly copied by his staff. After a minute or two, the laughter subsided, and he reappeared over the front of his desk.

  “A graduate! What use is a bloody graduate to me?” However, as an act of charity, he added, “I’ll give you £1 a week.”

  I realised that this was not going to be a winner and asked if I could think about it. The final embarrassment was that my squat training was not enough, and the chair collapsed beneath me. I could still hear the laughter as I stood in the street outside the building. Anyway, another chance beckoned from a leading firm in the city.

  I arrived at the interview even smarter than the first, having added a new shirt with a detachable, starched collar and tie that might give the impression that I was an alumnus of one of Britain’s great public schools (it was very much a public school profession).

  The offices were palatial – Georgian furniture, portraits of former partners, the smell of success. “This is where you were meant to be,” as my ever-supportive mother said as I left home. I was ushered into a large board room with an enormous mahogany desk where three elderly gentlemen sat, dressed immaculately in beautifully tailored three-piece suits.

  It was obvious that they hadn’t read my CV because the gentleman in the middle pulled out the document and handed copies to the other two. They all studied the CV for about a minute and then the senior partner asked, “Waterloo Grammar School?”

  “Yes,” I replied.

  “We’ll be in touch,” he said with the voice of an upper-class undertaker.

  Surprisingly, I never heard from them.

  The law had jilted me again. My original view was correct: the law is an ass! Particularly not to spot my obvious talent.

  The bank wrote to me to advise me that my account was closed, and exorbitant monthly repayments were required. So, it was the docks or the bakery. The sawmill was out of the question. I might have been broke, but remaining a ten-digit man was, I though, crucial.

  “Friends, yesterday we stood at the edge of the abyss, but today we have taken a great step forward”

  Russian politician addressing his fellow parliamentarians.

  22

  Send in the Clown

  On lunchtime soon after my return home, I got talking to a guy in the pub I frequented, who always seemed to be flush with cash and enquired what I did.

  “A comedian,” he replied, which surprised me as he never told a joke and seemed rather depressed.

  Now, remember this is Liverpool 1968, the centre of the cultural universe. The Beatles, the Mersey Poets, the Everyman Theatre, young, exciting playwrights and of course COMEDY following in the great tradition of Liverpool comics.

  I told him that I had done a bit of after-dinner speaking.

  “And you’re still alive?” he said. “You must be useful.”

  I wasn’t sure whether that was a joke.

  “You can help me out, pal,” he said. “I’ve got a double-booking next Thursday. Could you do one for me? It’s an easy gig. I’m a regular.”

  “I better check my diary and speak to my manager,” I said, hoping to give the impression that I was a real pro and worth a decent fee.

  “Give me a ring tomorrow,” he said, taking out a fiver and buying me drinks all night.

  I rang the next day to say that I was free, but that my manager was concerned about the fee.

  “Ten pounds,” he said.

  I was speechless, which must have led him to believe that I was thinking about it.

  “OK, twenty quid.”

  This was as much as I had earned in a week before and it was for one night only.

  “Great,” I stammered and, shaking, wrote down the address of the club.

  “Next Thursday. Be there at 7,” he said, ringing off.

  My God, I thought, this is the opportunity of a lifetime.

  My mother dissolved into tears when I told her, and mouthed, “You always were a funny baby.”

  The following day, I looked up the address. It appeared to be part of the university, so I started to think about my script. Intellectual satire, irony, mockery, and a parody of student life, I decided, having experienced it myself.

  After days and nights of work, and avoiding the pub, I came up with an adaptation of T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland as a caricature of Liverpool student life.

  Steve, my mate in the pub, said, “No more than thirty minutes, but keep something back. If they really like you, they will want an encore, and you are certain to get more bookings.”

  When I had finished crafting my repartee, I was quietly confident that it would be good enough to get a bunch of drunken students laughing or at least to keep them awake.

  The following Thursday, I went early to find the venue so as to have a pint and calm my nerves. But no club could I find. I asked a passer-by whether he knew of the club.

  “You’ve got the wrong address, mate. There are two streets with the same name. The place you want is a about half a mile away,” he said, pointing me in the right direction.

  I trudged from the academic area to the darker side of Liverpool and found the venue, “The Naughty Nipples Club”. Should I run? No, this was a place that looked like they would find you and make sure you never had children. I went down a flight of stairs into near darkness but, as my eyes adjusted, I discovered the club was packed with middle-aged men, some of whom had kept their raincoats on although, as far as I knew, rain was not forecast.

  On my way down the stairs, I passed a door that had The Library painted on it. The barman pointed me to the manger’s office. His door was covered in a hand-painted mural of an enormous pair of breasts with large, protruding nipples. Across the impressive embonpoint, somebody had written, “Kenny Lane, the King of Liverpool Light Entertainment.”

  At some point, no doubt as a tribute to the Beatles, the K had been crossed out and a P inserted.

  I knocked.

  “Come in.”

  My first impression was that Kenny was not too fastidious about cleanliness or tidiness and had other virtues that followed godliness. The room was small, badly-lit, with Kenny sitting behind an old, damaged desk with one leg shorter than the other and levelled by copies of magazines. The top one, I noted, was Snow White Takes the Seven Dwarfs. Kenny was short, aged about fifty, grossly overweight with a face so pale that it was obvious it had not been in contact with sunlight for many years. Although light on top, he had a broad ponytail. Lying beside him was a sleeping pit-bull terrier.

  “Nice dog,” I said. “What’s its name?”

  “Cilla,” he replied.

  “Does she sing?” I said, trying to impress him with my quick wit.

  “Does she bite?”

  “Only when I tell her to,” he replied with a hint of menace, at which point Cilla opened one eye as if to confirm the truth of that statement.

  “Are you married?” I asked nervously, trying to engage him in polite conversation.

  “No way, mate. Shag ’em and leave ’em is my motto,” he replied, confirming that he was not quite ready to settle down in a loving, committed, monogamous relationship. His clothes also reflected the fact that he didn’t live with his mum. Kenny’s office was made even smaller by the walls being stacked with pornographic magazines which, on closer examination, were produced for different countries.

  “Me biggest seller,” he said proudly, “an international market.”

  I thought, to cement our relationship, I should show an interest, so looked with affected curiosity at the shelves. The magazines were arranged alphabetically by country.

  “You have a global readership?” I said.

  “It’s a global product, mate,” he said with the passion of a true entrepreneur, “constantly expanding. I am adding a new country every month.”

  I looked back and indeed it was. The As began with Afghanistan and the stock finished with Venezuela and the Vatican City.

  “I refer to it as an art collection,” he boasted, “combining the beauty of the body with that of literature.”

  The largest section was the German one so, again, to ingratiate myself with him, I picked out the top publication. On the front cover was a naked colossus (Koles Riese) named Gunther Grober Schwan – for between his legs hung a phallus of breath-taking length and width, which he affectionately and patriotically called the “Obergruppenfuhrer”. The magazine appeared to be designed to showcase Gunther’s comprehensive range of interests. It showed him playing golf without a putter, and tennis without a racquet, interestingly double-handed on both sides. The centre pages revealed his avian interest, for it showed Gunther standing in a state of full tumescence with a huge, multi-coloured parrot perched on it, seemingly enjoying an afternoon siesta.

  “Impressive,” I said to Kenny. “The parrot looks very happy. Did it have a name?”

  “Engelbert,” he replied. “Gunther loved Engelbert Humperdinck’s opera Hansel and Gretel. He was also handy on the cello.”

  Don’t ask, I thought.

  “They look very happy together,” I said, playing to Kenny’s obvious love of animals.

  “They did,” he replied mournfully, “but sadly it came to a tragic end.”

  “Oh my God,” I replied, again trying to be witty, “Did Engelbert bite the pecker that fed him?”

  “No,” said Kenny ruefully. “Gunther tried to get Engelbert to participate in a threesome with one of Germany’s leading adult actresses, Kiera Klitoris.”

  Engelbert took to it like a duck to water. He told me that when Kiera tried to mount the Obergruppenfuhrer from different directions, one of Kiera’s breasts fell on Engelbert, causing fatal injuries. He lived on for a few days. Gunther never left his side, while Kiera sued for damages as her contract didn’t include a “feathered creatures” clause.

  “But there is no writing in this high-quality example of your art collection?” I said, both out of interest and to further ingratiate myself with a man who was going to give me £20 for 30 minutes’ work.

  “Gunther was a man of few words,” he replied with a sense of intellectual disappointment.

  The tribute to Gunther was completed with a large group of athletic young women admiring and enjoying the Obergruppenfuhrer in ways that seemed somehow uniquely German and were not on my mother’s list of dangers to look out for. I suspect that Gunther’s antics would now be either the stuff of a book or a six-part Channel 4 series encouraging us all to make our sex lives more imaginative.

  Looking back I am left with that eternal question: “Does size matter?”

  The remaining space on Kenny’s walls was covered by a female tennis player bending over to pick up a ball, although she had obviously, in the course of a particularly exhausting rally, lost both her racquet and knickers.

  As we had by now bonded through a common interest in German literature, I felt emboldened to enquire about the library. Did Kenny support and encourage young Liverpool poets? After drinking from a bottle of whisky, Kenny was in a reflective mood.

  “Would you like a drop, pal?” he said.

  “No, thank you,” I replied. “A beer will do.”

  “Well done, lad,” he agreed. “Many a comedian has been ruined by the booze. They finish up forgetting the fuckin’ jokes.”

  “The library has been one of my best ideas,” he said with his usual self-confident air.

  He told me that it had used to be the Spanking Salon, run by a lovely girl, Sal, married to a plumber with three children. She was an artiste, providing a satisfactory level of arousal with minimal injury. Her most popular routine involved the use of a horsewhip with peacock feathers attached. “Sting and Stroke,” she called it, and it was apparently very popular.

  “Anyway, after having her third baby, she put on a bit of weight and, unknowingly, was applying rather more force than before. We started getting complaints from the local A&E, and women getting upset when their man was coming home with his arse in shreds.

  “Eventually, I had a visit from the boys in blue, threatening to take my licence away. Fortunately, one of our members was a chief inspector locally, and together with £200 and a crate of whisky, they turned a blind eye. But Sal had to leave. I gather she has lost some weight now and is doing home visits. Wonderful mother!

  “How to replace a considerable loss of revenue was my problem. So, my brainwave! Most members read the Sun with the tasty bird on Page 3 showing her tits. Let’s do it live, I thought. A tasty bird reads to the lads. The art college next door does nude modelling for the students. So, I made enquiries and found a couple of girls studying English at the university who were looking for some extra cash. Well, I tell you, it has been a real winner. You won’t believe this, but some of the members have moved on from the Sun to more serious reading matter. I warned the girls to steer clear of any erotic material to avoid any unpleasantness and warned the lads that it was a no touching activity,” Kenny told me nostalgically.

  “The effect on some of the regulars has been amazing. Some of the insomniacs have been sleeping like babies after being read “to sleep” by a big girl called April. ‘Twitcher’, who has suffered from his nerves for years, is as calm as a cat since soft-spoken Katie has been reading about ‘Daffodils’.

 

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