In this profoundly moving (not to say disturbing) extract from Nobby’s diary, our hero indulges in anecdotage, penning a familiar portrait of the kind of compassionate antecedants that we seem no longer to have as 21st century dystopia looms ever larger.

My Father’s childhood and adolescence was blighted by a decade long infestation of head lice, a badly knitted Balaclava that only provided him with one eye hole, and him having to troop to school daily dressed in an Army Surplus outfit once worn by a highly decorated World War 2 Japanese Naval Sea Admiral who’d sported a decorative sword presented to him by the Emperor of Japan after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

During his early primary school days my Grandmother would accompany him off The Moor on a ten mile walk to School. Navigating the numerous mosquito infested swamps, the cat, and rat traps that provided the family with meat, she would arrive at the school gates to endure the usual embarrassing daily stamping of feet, temper tantrums, crying, wailing and screams of, ‘Don’t Leave Me. Please Please Don’t Leave Me With Your Son’.

It was at School that father became noted as a prodigious Teller Of Tales on his fellow school mates and where the first signs emerged that he had an uncanny knack of grassing up anyone who was stupid enough to believe that he could keep a secret. As years passed and he went on to fail his Eleven Plus examination with remarkable ease, he developed into a prolific eavesdropper on conversations he wasn’t invited to join in with. Indeed, his first taste of major success, that singled him out to be a ‘Right Twat’, was when he left the Moor unaccompanied for the very first time to report his own Mother to the Constable for Theft By Finding.

Mother, a woman, who back then still identified as being a woman and more than capable of strangling the family pig without any assistance from others in restraining the struggling swine, was returning to the Moor – after a morning shift of prostitution with a dozen Stevedor’s in a disused Albert Dock Grain Store – when she found an unopened wage packet. Thrilled with her good fortune, she tucked up her skirts, hurtled across the Moor, deftly avoiding the Moors many hazards, opened the door to their detached hovel of a home and announced, ‘Everyone! Our luck has changed. I’ve found an unopened wage packet’.

Together, the entire family, numbering about nineteen, gathered in joyful anticipation around the dimly lit candle light. Then, as she gingerly opened the wage packet, she screamed in dismay, ‘The lazy bastard had four days off.’

Father, who after leaving School was widely known as The Grass or, to those who’d been the recipients of his Telling Of Tales, The Twat or The Dirty Rotten Stinking Grass, answered an advertisement in the Liverpool Echo that read, ‘Help The Police And Grass A Mate Up.’
Suffice to say my Father got the job and thereafter it was Judge Justice Tucker who became his task master.

Appointed as the Judge of Bootle, is was Justice Tucker who first chose to steer the Constabulary away from investigating Organised Crime and concentrate their time and efforts investigating Disorganised Crime. His view was Organised Crime implied some sort of criminal mastermind of superior intelligence being behind the ghastly criminal act which then might make the Police feel somewhat inferior and disheartened, whereas, investigating thieves who were disorganised might give the lads a bit of a boost in confidence. Indeed, it was Justice Tucker, again, ahead of his time, who after some forensic examination of crime data in Bootle, was the very first to point out to the Police that there was a strong connection between thieves and the disappearance of other peoples property that had been stolen and misappropriated.

Father’s first and perhaps greatest success was infiltrating The Birkenhead Bull Buggering Society – a group of some twenty Wirral lads who were intent on making romance to a herd of consensual members of grazing bovines. Apprehended in a field in close proximity to Port Sunlight in acts of physical love and bestiality, all twenty were arrested and conveyed to the Police Station and subsequently charged.

During his judicial deliberations that began and ended before the trial even began, every one of the Twenty, the Birkenhead Twenty received 45 years of Treble ‘T’. This was Tough Tucker Time, where for 45 years the convicted were hung upside down to teach them a lesson for breaching their holy covenant with God that specifically mentions that any man, sane or otherwise, should not sexually violate any member of the animal kingdom.

Justice Tucker was a remarkable man. Despite numerous suspensions imposed upon him by Her Majesty’s Master Of The Rolls for repeatedly leaping from his chair, pulling out a small pocket Derringer and shooting a defendant dead, or unauthorised hangings and public floggings, he continued to serve the people of Bootle with Tough Tucker Justice that was delivered to teach offenders a lesson.

He was a man who’d never considered transitioning, and thus a Judge ahead of his time. T’was he, who, with the help of my father, to prevent bail jumpers and absconders evading their custodial  incarcerations and being hung upside down from their Cell ceiling, introduced a number of innovative technical aids that prevented any escape. The T.L.B for example, the Tucker Lead Ball was affixed to the convicted man’s ankle thus preventing them travelling further and beyond their front garden fence. The T.S.H, the Tucker Shock Helmet that activated when the T.L.B was removed and delivered the wearer a short burst of electricity of five thousand volts was more often than not enough to convince the would be absconder to hire a welder and affix themselves back onto the Tucker Lead Ball.

And to those few, the T.L.F, The Liverpool Few who managed to escape the terrors of the Lead Ball and the Shock Helmet and flee Lancashire as fast as they could,  my Father would release the T.R.H.P, the Tucker Rabid Hound Pack. After one single sniff of the absconders soiled pants, the demonic canines would track, locate, corner and then rip the poor bastards to death.

Yes, with hindsight, it cannot be denied that Justice Tucker created havoc in Bootle. The conviction of the innocent New Brighton One, a local arsonist named Wild Billy Burnham, imprisoned for forty years for being the second gunman off the grassy knoll, being Lord Lucan, borrowing Peter and Sonia Sutcliffe a hammer, purporting to be Wearside Jack and being the writer of that dreadful song Billy Don’t Be A Hero, all served to diminish any good Tucker did before the howling mob hurtled into his Chambers and ended his tyrannical rule.

As for my father, after the bloody death of Tucker, he returned to The Moor and lived out the rest of his days consuming handfuls of psilocybin mushrooms and trying without any measurable success to teach hand reared ferrets to levitate.

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