NOTES FROM ANOTHER WORLD
Memoir celebrates ‘optimism’ of growing up in postwar Liverpool, writes M.A.C. Farrant.
Reading Peter Haase’s buoyant memoir Liverpool Lad, which is about growing up in workingclass Liverpool in the 1950s and ’60s, is like taking a warm bath in the nostalgia of a bygone age. It is Haase’s first book. As writer Derek Lundy says on the book’s back cover, “This memoir comes at you like a homespun but eloquent and funny missive from another world.” I couldn’t agree more.
That other world is postwar Liverpool, a place “full of life and attitude,” Haase tells us, and yet a place where a “brightness of spirit amongst those dark, dank sooty streets” prevailed, giving rise to an “optimism amid the drudgery of daily graft.”
And optimism is surely a key ingredient in Haase’s memoir.
He was born at home in 1950, the youngest of four brothers, all of whom were born within five years of each other. His parents’ house, where he grew up, “was a run-down tenement, built in the early 1800s … in that famous inner-city working-class district of Everton, Liverpool.” Both parents worked.
Like many other families on his street of row housing, his was a resilient family, church-going, hard-working, practicing a kind of proud domestic thrift. Clothing was handed down, a Sunday roast made several appearances throughout the week, and nothing was ever wasted, including good stories.
Anecdotes about Haase’s street smarts — he describes himself as a “cheeky little devil” — abound throughout the memoir and are told with bluff, big-hearted humour. Abundant in detail, each of his tales is given a chapter: laundry day on Everton Road; going to the Protestant Sunday school; the local theatre, a place of wild chaos; a visit to the dentist; getting the cane at school; collecting birds’ eggs; a visit from the district nurse, to mention but a few. Especially entertaining is the writing Haase does about his teenage years spent as a part-time butcher’s assistant. It was a “macho bad-boy environment,” he writes, with constant larky behaviour that would “turn granny in her grave.” The chapter “Dinner’s Served” left me longing for a thick bacon sandwich and a mug of tea.
Throughout, Haase’s cheeriness is in play. He’s a likable fellow, a born entertainer, smart, lively and curious.
Self-perception is everything here. Haase’s memoir is not a survival tome about enduring poverty, and though he and his family were surely poor, Haase does not perceive himself as growing up disadvantaged. His father may be described as “stern,” but his was a loving home. The things he learned — independence, hard work, good humour, loyalty and, yes, thriftiness, have, he says, served him well.
His story, therefore, is not one of want and deprivation, or overt grimness along the lines of Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, though the trappings of poverty are mentioned in passing. Rather, Haase has given us a series of stories that lovingly details the workings of a close-knit family and of a flourishing street community.
His memoir reminds me very much of the stories my father, aunts and uncles told of growing up in working-class Liverpool in the early part of the last century and it’s true, I may be biased.
The stories I heard as a child were told with the same light spin as Haase tells his stories.
It’s refreshing, actually, to encounter this take once again. There’s not a whiff of angst or irony to be found in Haase’s memoir. Yes, times were tough then, but people got by, they had each other, they sang in the pubs and around the piano at home.
They did the best they could. Change a few of the details and it’s not much different from everyday life as it is now, if you think about it — people getting on, living life on life’s terms.
Enlivened with family photos, there’s a great measure of enjoyment of life to be found within the pages of Liverpool Lad. This is Haase’s gift. An exuberant storyteller, he could almost have written a guide for putting a bright and hopeful spin on things.