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could travel right up to the borders of
the Soviet Union for nothing. All ferries — to Ireland, the Isle of Man, the
Scottish Isles, across the Baltic and over the English Channel — were also
included in the deal. A lot of those who worked on the trains didn’t seem to
have the imagination or the desire to do more than make the odd free trip to
Blackpool, but Joe enthusiastically took advantage of these concessions to roam
across Europe. Sometimes he would do Communist Party work, attending labour
conferences or helping volunteers for the International Brigades travel from
neutral Ireland to fight for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War,
occasionally he would write articles on foreign affairs for the Communist Daily
Worker, but often he would go abroad on his own, simply travelling and
falling in with strangers.
    As soon
as they met, Joe invited Molly to join him on his travels — he loved showing
her the world that she had never seen before. In 1947 they joined a group of my
father’s friends, mostly couples, some married, some unmarried, all members of
the same left-wing drama group — Unity Theatre. They had rented a villa together
on the shores of Lake Como in northern Italy This was extremely bohemian
behaviour, associated more with groups of artists like the Bloomsburys than
with railway workers. Working-class society remained extremely conservative,
and unmarried couples did not go away to stay together in Italian villas — in
many homes a girl risked social exclusion if she even talked to the postman
without a chaperone. But then to outrage convention was part of the purpose of
the holiday Joe and Molly and their friends revelled in their difference,
their love of foreign food and foreign wine and foreign ideas, and had little
concern for what society thought.
     
     

     
    Unconventionally for
working-class people at that time, and very unusually for left-wingers, once
they were married my parents bought their own house. Just before I was born
they acquired 5 Valley Road, Anfield, Liverpool 4 for the price of one
thousand pounds. Molly borrowed two hundred pounds from bedridden Uncle Willy
to make up the deposit — a sum which she never paid back. The terraced house in
Anfield was not, however, the home she wanted. There had been another in the
more sylvan setting of West Derby Village, but at the last minute she and Joe
had been gazumped. So Valley Road was Molly’s second choice, and there
persisted a sense that she regarded our little house with a degree of
disappointment.
    There
was also something of a problem with the next-door neighbours at number 7, a
family by the name of Blundell. According to Molly these quiet and
self-effacing people had wanted our house for their own daughter to live in,
but for some reason, perhaps due to the buying power of Uncle Willy’s two
hundred pounds, we got it. Molly always felt that because of this they bitterly
resented us. This might not have mattered if the two houses hadn’t shared a
water pipe, so that the Blundells were able, if they so wished, to interfere
with the flow to our home. My mother was convinced that they would turn off our
supply from time to time — in fact she was certain that they somehow knew when
she was preparing a bottle of baby formula and would choose that exact moment
to strike. One of my first memories is of my mother at the kitchen window
screaming over the back yard wall at the neighbours that her child was dying of
hunger because they had cut off our water supply.
     
    We lived two miles from
the docks in one of the world’s greatest ports, ‘Liverpool that terrible city
whose main street is the ocean’, as the novelist Malcolm Lowry described it. A
sense of the sea and of infinite horizons was pervasive, though I don’t
remember anybody actually remarking on it — no one ever said, ‘Don’t you find a
sense of the sea and of infinite horizons is always pervasive?’ There always
seemed to be a parrot or a terrified