The Sunday Times Magazine, May 1976
The thing about Ormskirk was the women; they were voluptuous. For 20 years my mother and aunt between them must have clothed more bosoms and more bottoms than any other two persons in the whole town, and I grew up to admire the fulsome forms that carelessly undressed in my mother’s Moor Street clothes shop. There they were, grand, thigh-strong ladies who cared nothing for the gaping view between the fitting-room curtains.
So when I tell you that the average mature Ormskirk female bust is between 38 and 40 inches (C cup), and that hips spread towards 42 very quickly after adolescence, you will appreciate the authority from which I speak. Sadly, however, despite this early familiarity with the glories of the semi-clothed female figure, I must say that I was an unconscionably long time in getting to grips with it.
But then, that was Ormskirk—never a sexy place, as much as a town of romance. Indeed, although I was perpetually in a state of part-time love from puberty until I left to come to London in 1960, I have to say that I remained a virgin in Ormskirk. We all were: all my friends, boys and girls, all neatly uniformed, A-levelled virgins. I don’t believe we ever even thought to become otherwise. Ormskirk bred virgins, I think: fine, pedigree celibates, unaware and consequently unfrustrated. Not that we didn’t mess around a bit now and then.
Liverpool was only half an hour away by train, but it might just as well have been 200 miles distant for all the influence it had upon us. We even spoke a different dialect from Liverpudlians; indeed so great was our disregard for the people of Liverpool that I can remember turning down an invitation as late as 1962 to go to a club called the Cavern to hear a group called the Beatles. They can’t be any good, I remember saying, nothing any good ever came out of Liverpool.
From the age of 11 until I was 19 I lived in a very large house full of women – mother, elder sister, grandmother and aunt – and with another aunt and two girl cousins just round the corner. I suppose with that kind of matriarchal background we should all be thankful that I didn’t start dressing up in bubbly blond wigs and cami-knickers when I reached adolescence. Instead, I was a rustic lad. My partner at that time was John Rimmer of Swanpool Lane, and when we weren’t rearing chickens or watering his tomatoes we were stealing young Scots pine trees from Big Bob’s Wood.
It was all Boys’ Own stuff until one day it struck us both that there might be more fun ways of spending our time. All those boxes in my mother’s shop contained things that women put on. But what went on must come off. So we enrolled at a school of ballroom dancing in nearby Maghull. In those days you had to start somewhere.
It was about this time that I went to my first party which was held in a farmhouse in Bickerstaffe. A couple of sisters had organised the affair, and with the brazenness that young ladies possess, they quickly marshalled us into couples as the lights went out. Now, I wasn’t a complete innocent at this time. I knew a thing or two. I’d heard about nights like this: and I’d heard a lot about necking at parties. The only trouble was no-one had ever actually explained what necking was, and as a plump bottom crushed on to my knees I realised that I didn’t actually know what to do.
Were you supposed to kiss or just cuddle? And why was it called necking? Unfortunately the room was so dark I couldn’t see what any of the other couples were doing, so, deciding that the literal course of action was probably the most suitable, I spent the whole evening straining my head upwards so that I might rub necks like a rather coy giraffe with a succession of bewildered young girls. And never a lip was kissed.
My impressions of Ormskirk from that night on all concern girls, and indeed the whole structure of the town, with its one main street, its twice weekly market, its one coffee bar with Ray Conniff piped music, the two cinemas and the rugby and cricket clubs all seemed to have been purposely laid out for the ritual of promenading and courting. Whatever you did was converted into a purposeful courtship display.
Never a great sportsman, I found myself playing rugby twice on Saturdays in one season, in the morning with the school’s second team where you would attract the girl hockey players who finished first, and then, again, in the afternoon, with the O.R.U.F.C. where among the spectators would be older working girls.
I t was a town of Young Conservatives, blazers and ties and duffle coats; a place where you could borrow your parents’ car once you were 17 for Saturday nights out in Southport or parking in the sandhills at Formby or in the local woods and fields. Everybody knew everybody else, so relationships took on a form of serial petting monogamy (if you were lucky), a state only to be broken at parties when rampant petting polygamy (if you were luckier) would break out thanks to Babycham and pale ale.
There were some wonderful girls in Ormskirk: there was Clare, whom we called Boadicea because she carried all before her in a bra the size of Bootle. I would watch Clare going into confession at St Anne’s, and then strain my ears to try and hear if she had any more interesting sins to confess than I had. Everybody else had. There was Hilde, too, the French au pair I picked up in Alty’s Lane, who had obviously read more grown-up books than I had. And then there was Plum, whom I married because she was the best.
When I go back to Ormskirk now it’s the dialect that surprises me. Somehow Liverpool has spread out along the road towards Preston, and the Lancashire accent that I grew up to speak is fighting a losing battle against the newcomers from the city. A footballer has moved into Swanpool Lane and another has built a house over an old pond in Vicarage Lane. The place is virtually a soccer stars’ colony now. As Beverly Hills is to Hollywood, so Ormskirk is to Anfield.
