“If ever I had roots, they were here, and if a life’s foundation begins with the ground from which it emerges, then tough and blighted Bootle, and the people there who loved me, must go some way to understanding mine” – THE BOOTLE BOY, updated 2026 edition.
“A life builds on itself, but its architecture follows no rules. It can appear at the beginning to have a strong foundation and then be swept away in the first storm, mystifying those who failed to see the flaws in its design. It can seem ramshackle, yet rebuild itself to withstand whirlwinds. My own life has surprised itself again and again. In my first15 years, we moved so many times I didn’t understand what people meant when they talked about the comfort of being ‘home’. I still don’t get it, but eventually, when I was older, I worked out my own personal definition. We lived in Egypt, Eritrea, Libya, Singapore, and the British occupied zone in West Germany – all places where, for one imperial reason or another, the British had some kind of control. They were the dying days of the Empire, and everywhere we went the sun was setting on it.
Between these postings – most of them lasting a couple of years – we existed in a limbo the army called ‘transit’, which meant spending weeks or months any place the military could make a deal to accommodate us. We stayed at seaside boarding-houses in the seedy charm of Blackpool by the promenade and near the pier in Southend-on-Sea. We lived in a green, corrugated-iron hut, insulated with asbestos, in a Liverpool suburb; and spent six months in a worn-out village hotel in the Scottish Highlands.
The rest of my life might be explained by the ingrained restlessness his childhood wandering created in me. I went to so many schools I cannot be sure of the count – in some, I was only there a couple of weeks– but they number somewhere around 13 in 10 years. I didn’t keep any childhood friends until the age of 15, when Dad left the army and we went to live in Australia. The only name I remember is Brenda Laidler in Singapore, but she hardly even noticed me.
These foreign places evaporated behind us. Everyone was a nomad, so the families we left melted away as we did, off to their own new postings and own new worlds.
The only constant place for me was Bootle, a once-prosperousLancashire hamlet, jammed hard against the docks of Liverpool, and shattered by war. If ever I had roots, they were here, and if a life’s foundation begins with the ground from which it emerges then tough and blighted Bootle, and the people there who loved me, must go some way to understanding mine. First, I found safety and happiness there; then, in a complicated way, it was terrifying; and then, almost when I wasn’t looking, the heart of my childhood was lost forever, its people gone and all its physical evidence erased.
While Bootle was a wasteland when I was born, my Auntie Gladys’s parlour was meticulous. Families lived in cramped homes but reserved their front parlours for occasions. This is where people gathered around newborns and coffins. I would sit alone in my grandmother’s parlour as a little boy. The room was cold and stale with a frayed effort at gentility. Antimacassars rested on the backs of chairs of carved wood and satin. They were laced and bright white, and no heads ever touched them. A yellowing music book was opened on the rack of an untuned upright piano. A grandfather clock stood still at 5.26. Photographs of long-dead relatives made it a shrine. Beautiful Auntie May, who died aged 20 in 1922, regarded visitors with an unwelcoming gaze. The parlour was dense with unlovely aspidistra plants. Aspidistras thrive in heat, cold, drought, bad light, and poor soil. Such an unconquerable survivor, so well adapted for hardship, must have been easy to identify with.
I was born 110 days before D-Day, so there was a lot of grief to counterbalance this happy family moment. The four-page edition of the Liverpool Echo announcing my birth carried more significant news: ‘STUTTGART Attacked in GREAT STRENGTH By Our HEAVIES’ … ‘BATTERING FOR GREAT NAZI RAIL CENTER’… ‘NAZIS FALL BACK’… ‘DEAD GERMANS IN HEAPS’. After London, Merseyside got the worst of the blitz; newspapers said bombs destroyed or damaged 90 percent of the homes in Bootle …”
Excerpts from The Bootle Boy, updated 2026 edition. Copyright © Les Hinton. Buy a copy on Amazon https://mybook.to/TheBootleBoy
Les Hinton 
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