'A Time When Gangsters And Footballers Lived Among The Communities That Bred And Revered Them'

In the second section of Good Guys Lost, a novel of Liverpool life, meet Duke, a stylish local hoodlum, while Billy finds himself in a loveless marriage that ends in a flurry of violence

Part One of Good Guys Lost here

“WHY SHOULDN’T WORKING-CLASS men dress well? Why shouldn’t working-class men wear nice suits?”

The boy would hear the phrase again almost two decades later, as a declaration of class war. But this was the first time it reached his ears. The speaker was his uncle, Bobby Moran, responding to a barmaid’s flirtatious suggestion that he was a bit ‘flash.’ Uncle and nephew had been to Anfield together for the match and had stopped at the Honky Tonk on Scotland Road because Bobby wanted to see someone. Nobody called him by his real name, though. He had long been known as ‘Duke’ because of a childhood obsession with John Wayne.

Everything is connected. Duke was Billy’s cousin, too. The way the boy looked up to Billy, Billy looked up to Duke. The nickname suited him. He had something special about him. Perhaps it was the smell.

Duke smelled of the gym, of sweat and power, but all the pungency that drives people to shy away was absent, removed. He had the odour of distilled masculinity, a heady, magnetic hogo that needed no cosmetic cover. It contained the merest undercurrent of threat.

Duke wore midnight blue kid mohair suits and had an aura of confidence that seemed borrowed from a different social class. Stolen would be a better word, for he was a thief. “My name’s Crime,” he would say while selecting whatever he wanted in a shop. “And Crime doesn’t pay.” Shoplifting was just the beginning.

The age of the Cunard Yank had passed and the likes of Duke assumed the succession and the glamour, although their only voyaging came on the Seacombe ferry. Yet these were men who were also travelling beyond the limit of their horizons.

This was a time when gangsters and footballers lived among the communities that bred and revered them. Their income was maybe three times that of the average wage and they lived in tenements, terraces and semis in the suburbs. Some even felt responsibilities to those around them.

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Most people thought Duke could have been either. Both of the city’s football clubs had given him trials but the distinct and discrete mindsets of the gangster and sportsman were mutually exclusive and Duke’s talents pushed him towards darker games than passing and shooting.

He was a natural athlete and boxed almost as well as he headed the ball. Early on, though, he knew he was not belt-winning quality. In the ring at Lee Jones, better boxers were scared of him. They knew that in the less subtle arts of streetfighting Duke was championship material. The head that drove caseballs towards the net crushed noses and shut down senses quicker than his punches.

By night, he donned the tuxedo of a doorman. By day he stole, progressing from the shoplifting of his youth to breaking into bonded warehouses. By the mid-1960s, he was branching out to sub-post offices and dreaming of a lucrative bank job. His friends and accomplices had dangerous nicknames: The Gasman, the Panther, the Dog. They were feared figures.

Duke was born on December 21, 1940, as German bombs rained down on the city. Just before the raid started, his mother went into labour with her fourth child. As the sirens howled their warning, the pregnant woman was rushed to Mill Road Hospital from the family flat in Blackstock Gardens. The other three kids were ushered by neighbours down to the air-raid shelter in the block.

While Mrs Moran screamed in agony at Duke’s prolonged entry, a German bomb scored a direct hit on the flimsy shelter back home. There were hundreds of people inside: not only had locals flooded down the tenement staircases to find protection, two trains on the nearby line had been stopped and their passengers directed to apparent safety.

They lost count of the bodies after the 200 mark because rescuers could not jigsaw the mass of limbs and trunks together in a verifiable manner. Two of the Moran children were never identified nor found. The eldest, Joey, was at the top end of the shelter playing with a mate. When he recovered consciousness, 10-year-old Joey was trapped between his dead friend and an avalanche of rubble. It was not the end of the family’s anguish over that grim holiday season.

Their father, in the Merchant Navy, would never hear about his children’s deaths or the birth of his son. He was in the engine room of the SS British Premier off the coast of Africa on Christmas Day when U-65’s torpedoes sunk the tanker. His body was never found, either. The Morans were just another of the many families in the area whose lives were destroyed during that dreadful December.

The sense of drama and tragedy that greeted Duke’s arrival in the world never left him. He followed in the footsteps of his big brother and became a bouncer.

Men feared Joey Moran, who developed into an expert with his fists during his adolescence and honed his violent skills while on National Service. Joey was recruited to man the doors of the more upmarket clubs in town after his discharge.

Duke was different even though he was nearly as dangerous. He had a swagger his brother was never able to carry off. At 26, the younger sibling was widely admired and the girls who worked in Tate and Lyle’s swooned when he walked along Vauxhall Road dressed, with no exaggeration, to kill.

Wiser women, like his mother, despaired. Any wife he took would have to live dangerously. In love, like everything else, Duke did his finest work outside the rules, beyond the law.

Duke had an eye for trouble. He sensed it first and dealt with it; some said prematurely. Initially he tried to avoid becoming a doorman. He worked in St John’s market, humping crates of produce on and off trucks before dawn for paltry wages and the odd box of unsold fruit. It did not take long for him to realise he had skills that someone would be willing to pay to use. His older brother had forged a reputation as a hard man and the youngster followed the family trade.

When Duke dropped the child at home after leaving the Honky Tonk, his sister-in-law told him that Billy was looking for him. “He said he wanted a word.” The boy was sent to run down the block to see if Billy was home.

Before phones, kids often acted as couriers. “Will you go on a message for me?” was a regular question asked of them by adults and it could mean going to the shops or passing on information. It usually came with a reward of a tanner or a shilling.

Billy wasn’t at home. The child left word that Duke was heading to town and would be about for the next few hours.

It took Billy a while to locate his cousin. He started off in Ma Moores, tried the Pieshop and looked about the Mitre. There was no sign, just the faint aftersmell of Duke’s presence overriding the tobacco, BO and ale fumes. He was directed across Dale Street to the Manchester Street Wine Lodge, where he found his quarry untangling from a conversation with a half-drunk middle-aged neighbour. Surreptitiously, Duke gave the man a brown ten-bob note and turned his attention to his relative.

They stood at the long narrow bar and talked football for a while, Billy basking in the reflected glory, until he felt brave enough to get to his point.

“I need a job,” he said. “Can I do anything with you?”

“You play guitar, I sing,” Duke laughed.

“On the door of the club?”

Duke smiled. “You look just about hard enough to collect glasses. What do you want me to do? If some buck kicks off, hold him while you hit him?”

Billy shrugged. “Go to sea,” Duke said. “Your Dad will sort you out. Get your ticket. Get out of here for a while. Take your guitar, see the world and practice in your cabin. You don’t want to be like me. Look at my nose.” It was flattened at the bridge. Billy thought it suited Duke’s face perfectly.

“Besides, what would your Dad do to me if you started running round the club playing the hard man? Get on a liner. Go around the globe. Get to know some exotic girls. If I was your age and had a chance to get out, I would.”

It did not take second sight to see that Billy was destined for at least a spell on the ships and the landing stage beckoned. Within weeks of the meeting in the wine lodge, he disappeared. People often did in these parts, for months and sometimes years. Inquiries about whereabouts were often met with the answer: “Gone to sea.” Occasionally, it was true.

*

There is a photograph of Billy’s wedding day that tells the story better than any words but to show it here would be a betrayal. It would prove that this is not mere fiction, and some fictions must be maintained. So all that is left is description.

Billy captures the eye. Ever the showman, he is trying to make the best of it. His hair is parted far on the right and has a lacquered stiffness. It would take prolonged shaking to make it Beatleish.

He is wearing a suit, modishly cut but without the flamboyance of Duke’s two-piecers. A carnation is angled across the narrow lapel, the petals dangerously close to a handkerchief fluffed out of the breast pocket. The shirt is white, basic and the tie thin and striped. He looks like a grammar school boy playing at being grown up.

There is a discernible gap between Billy and his new wife. They are not a couple: they are still too young to show intimacy in public. Marie – pronounced, ironically, as ‘Marry’ – has her head angled slightly towards the groom, her very dark hair under a lace veil. The face is bowed, with her chin sucked in. The initial impression is that she is trying to avoid the scrutiny of the camera. Her dress is lacy at the sides with a plain front panel. It is flared at the waist. The shapelessness is deliberate.

The hem stops two or three inches above the knee. It would make a fine communion dress.

Billy’s hand rests on a little boy’s shoulder. The child is wearing short pants, as if to give Billy’s grown-up demeanour a frame of reference. Under a v-neck jumper the boy has a white shirt and an elasticated bow-tie. Like Marie, the youngster has that timid, embarrassed smirk of someone feeling uncomfortable.

Looking again, it is not Billy that stands out, but a chain of hands, a train of contact that runs across the centre of this photograph. Billy’s fingers grasp the boy’s right shoulder, seeming to propel the little arm across the child’s body to where it meets Marie’s gloved hand. That is the path of touch on this sad little snapshot. A young couple forced into marriage while incapable of showing direct affection in public. You could write a novel about this picture. It would not be a book about love.

It was a registry office wedding. That itself signified shame. Afterwards, a strange little celebratory dinner was held at The Mons, a new pub on Breeze Hill in Bootle. There were less than 20 people present; it was for immediate family and the very close. No friends of the couple invited were invited. Even Duke was excluded.

Everything had been arranged quickly.

Less than two months earlier Billy had returned from his travels. His tan and newfound confidence made it clear that he had really been away to sea. He was a boiler-room man on the Canberra, transporting ten-pound Poms to freedom in Australia. Friends were beguiled with tales of exotic beauties from Suez to Sydney. Home-town girls were entranced by his apparent sophistication and freespending attitude. His contemporaries saw a new worldliness about Billy but his mother was less easily fooled.

“Hey, you, dirty ticket,” she said as he admired himself in the mirror before heading out for a night in town. “You be careful.” Billy just laughed.

She was particularly concerned about Marie, a plain but flighty little thing from Burroughs Gardens. Lilly began counting off the days until her son was back on the high seas. It could not come quickly enough.

Disaster came sooner. It takes many forms but this calamity began with a knock on the door at 4.30 on a Tuesday afternoon. Lilly opened up to find a woman on the landing, headscarf pinched under her chin and a determined expression on her face. It was Marie’s mother. The two women knew each other by sight but had never spoken.

“Mrs Green, I need to talk to you about our Marie and your William.” Immediately, Lilly knew her worst fears had come to fruition. “You’d better come in,” she said. It was not how she had imagined finding out she was going to be a grandmother.

Billy could not believe how fast the world changed. It was a matter of weeks from the rather unsatisfactory premature ejaculation that precipitated the crisis to the hasty legalities that tied him into a loveless marriage. This was no way to lose your virginity.

The ostensibly childlike Marie was more experienced than her husband but no less bewildered by the whirlwind wedding. She looked even more of a lost adolescent than the boy she had married. One of the waitresses at the reception asked Marie if she had enjoyed her day as a bridesmaid. “I’m the bride,” the young girl replied haughtily. The server guffawed at what appeared to be a joke. No one else was laughing. There were no tips that afternoon.

This slight was the only memorable part of the day. There were no speeches. At the end of the meal the group split up. There would be no long night of singing in Burly; no guitar playing; no old songs. There were none of the usual rituals of union and celebration. Billy went back to his in-laws and a different life. Any drinking was mournful. This had not been a marriage. It had been a public disowning. Things would never be quite the same again.

*

The phrase “gone away to sea” was often a euphemism for jail. For Billy, work was a release. It was a relief to be away from his in-laws. Home and family were the prison. He was used to being in cramped quarters with people he would not choose for room-mates but life in his new home made the existence below decks feel like a holiday cruise.

This trip did not have the carefree nature of his previous voyage. He did little socialising when in port. He was reluctant to spend as before. With the money he saved, he was hoping to rent a place of his own when he got home.

He also worried that, like his father, he would be at sea when the baby arrived, although his older crewmates averred that it might be for the better if he missed the drama of birth. And so, with history repeating itself, he arrived back in Liverpool to be welcomed by a son as well as a wife. Neither seemed particularly happy to see him. His new wife was resentful at his presence and experience. Billy had not shared her life for long enough to make any sort of imprint; and while she grew and groaned he had surely been exploiting the full potential of the glamorous fleshpots of the east, at least in her hormone-fuelled imagination.

There had been friction between the families, too. Marie, heavily pregnant and heavily indignant, had loudly complained at bingo that Billy had not sent her any money for weeks and that life was a cakewalk for seamen compared to her lot. Gossip like this spread widely and rapidly and, two days later, the young wife emerged from the same bingo venue to find her mother-in-law waiting. Billy might be in disgrace in Lilly’s household but no one – not even his spouse – was going to badmouth him in public. A short, intense exchange took place and Marie departed in tears. The women never spoke again. In the space of a year, Billy’s future had gone from one of endless horizons to being at the centre of a domestic conflict he could not control.

Home was no longer welcoming. So this is how it feels to be a man, he thought: claustrophobic, powerless and terrified. He would have taken solace in his guitar but he had already been shouted down by his in-laws for attempting to strum a lullaby for his baby son. For the first time he understood the urge to run away to sea. He was 18 and the Sixties had ended for him two years early.

*

It might have been easier if the mutual antipathy with his young wife did not stop at the bedroom door. Sex was the only time they came together. The mistake that led to the shotgun wedding was compounded by two more errors. In 1969 another boy was born and in 1970 a girl came along.

Life was getting more difficult. The liner trade was dying as aeroplanes made international travel quicker and easier. Now Billy waited to be allocated a ship from ‘the pool’, the list of sailors looking for work. While he mooched about Liverpool the money started to run low and the already strained relations with his young wife – now almost old enough to get the key to the door – grew worse.

Shortly after his third child was born Billy sailed on the Axina. The relative luxury of the Canberra was gone and the future would consist of grittier vessels and voyages. The age of the tanker was arriving.

It was a perilous career. Transporting highly flammable material is always a risk. Two years earlier three tankers exploded while their storage areas were being cleaned. Oil carriers on the Vietnam run had been shelled by the Viet Cong.

Going away to sea for long periods is fraught with different kinds of danger, too. While Billy was moving slowly south from the Persian Gulf happily strumming his guitar, something hit the rocks: his marriage.

The crisis was provoked by fears that he was dead. The Axina’s radio officer had a breakdown mid-voyage and failed to maintain contact with the outside world. He ignored all attempts to communicate with the ship. Concern mounted across the maritime industry for more than a week. Meanwhile, Axina steamed on oblivious to the growing panic ashore.

Newspaper reports tried to play down the seriousness of the situation. “It is possible that they may be having some engine problems,” a Shell company spokesman said. The lack of radio contact told its own story to the experienced sea salts in the dockland pubs of Liverpool. One of Billy’s old schoolfriends listened in to the downbeat conversations in the bar of the Glass House. He decided to visit Marie that night to console her. She welcomed the attention. It felt like this was the first man to show her any interest since her marriage – and that included her husband.

In the next few doom-laden days, Mike Larty was almost an ever-present in Marie’s life. He gave her the sort of emotional support she had never felt from her absent spouse. He was different, too, from many of the men from the area. Larty was studying for a degree at the Polytechnic and hoped to become a teacher. He was mockingly nicknamed Bamber, after the presenter of University Challenge, a TV quiz show. She was smitten. For the first time in her life Marie was in love. She was secretly delighted Billy was dead.

Then the good news came through that the Axina was safe. The ship’s first officer had been relaxing on Sunday and had tuned in to the BBC World Service. He almost choked on a cup of tea when he heard the grim report about his missing ship. He charged up to the bridge to inform the captain and the pair stormed to the radio room. Nearly 10 days’ worth of messages had been unsent and desperate attempts to make contact had been left unacknowledged. The emergency on the high seas was over.

Back in Liverpool the crisis was just beginning. Billy would not know. He was a month away from being paid off. His wife’s new romance still had plenty of time to germinate.

*

Duke was used to starting dialogues that other people did not want. Now he had to instigate a conversation he dreaded. Again, he met Billy in the Manchester Street Wine Lodge. It was quiet there in the first hour after opening and they were unlikely to be interrupted. They embraced in the long, brown, smoky bar. A drunk sat nursing a glass of Aussie Whites. Other than that there were just the two of them and the barman. The older man ordered two whiskeys with the pints. His companion raised his eyebrows. It was only just gone five in the evening.

Billy had returned home the night before to a very strained reception. He knew something was wrong – it always had been difficult but now it was worse. The married couple barely spoke.

When Billy complained about his rather sour welcome, Duke was relieved. He had feared an explosion of violence if Marie had admitted her new relationship. People were talking, though, and it was only a matter of time before Billy heard the gossip.

“Bamber?” the cuckolded husband said, aghast, when the news of the affair was relayed. “Are you sure?” Duke nodded.

“He’s my mate. I went to school with him.” They moved on to Bismarck, a fortified port, to supplement the pints of Guinness. “Well, not my mate. He was in our class, though. I’ll kill the fucker.”

“If anyone does any killing it’ll be me,” Duke said sternly. “I wanted to wait until you got home before doing anything serious. I warned him off. I spoke to Marie. Go home and make it up with her. She’s only a kid. You’re only a kid.”

“I’m going back to my mam’s tonight,” Billy said. “I’ll come to the club first.”

They left the Wine Lodge heading for the Hotsy Totsy in North Street. It was only 300 yards or so away. Duke was on the door that night. They were passing the Mitre as Mike Larty emerged laughing with four mates. Everyone froze except Larty, who ran back into the pub followed by Billy. Duke said nothing but scanned the faces of the adulterer’s three mates, who he knew fancied themselves as hardcases, catching the eye of each. They had the good sense to know when to back off. “Stay out of it,” Duke said. No one argued.

Larty exited the Mitre on Dale Street and crossed the road. It was a mistake. He was not quick enough and Billy caught him after about 40 yards and sent him skidding with a blow to the back of the head. Larty scrambled on all fours, reached the wall guarding the approaches to the Queensway tunnel and tried to use it to stand up. Billy kicked his legs away and began punching, blow after blow raining on to the victim’s head. The attacker felt his knuckles break and the power begin to leave his fists so he picked up a short length of wood that was on the floor and used it to beat his quarry. The stick became bloody and Larty lapsed into semi-consciousness.

Duke took his time following. He walked through the Mitre slowly, poised. He had an image to maintain. It became clear that the chase had exited the pub and his pace quickened as he went back on to Dale Street. A small crowd of people were standing watching the beating. Immediately, Duke could see things had spiralled out of control. A woman was yelling, “where’s the police, we need a policeman.”

“Enough,” Duke shouted. Billy looked over his shoulder, turned back to the lifeless body he had been hitting and seemed to relax. “We’ve got to go, Billy,” Duke said.

Instead of turning to leave, Billy picked Larty up. Duke was confused for a moment. Then he saw his cousin lift the man and haul him to the crest of the wall. “No!”

Billy got the body to the top and pushed him over. Even with the traffic noises, Duke could hear the thud when Larty landed. Beyond the wall, ten feet below, was one of the exit lanes of the Mersey tunnel.

“Fuck,” Duke said grabbing Billy and pulling him away. “He’d better be dead.” Then he looked at the watching crowd and changed his mind. “He’d better not be dead.” Duke leapt up on the wall and peered over. No car had hit Larty and he was moaning and moving. Tunnel police were swarming towards the victim. “You need to get out of here, Billy. Let me see what I can do.”

“I’m going to jail,” Billy said walking back towards the Mitre. “It can’t be worse than my life now. I’ll have another drink or two. I’ll be off the ale for a while. You go the club. You don’t want to get nicked as well.”

Duke shrugged sadly. It was all so obvious and public that no one would be able to claim Billy was back at sea.

Next: Fast forward to the age of TV talent shows and meet Missy, the queen of the genre