The length of Portman Road shortened as I lengthened but in the early days it seemed to be an endless row of neat terraced houses, each with its own distinctive style of net curtains and appropriately neat ornaments or vases sitting in the windows. I can barely recall a shabby blue pram and the feeling (as a three year old?) of being wheeled up 'to the top of the road' where the family shopping was done on an almost daily basis. Along with this and the story of where I came from these are the two defining images of my early childhood.
Number 52 was home for 18 years from April 1959 and it was there that the various stories of my origins evolved over the years.
"You're not like the other boys and girls, you're special. We went to a place where there were lots of babies and we chose you because of your eyes."
"Tell me again, Mummy."
It was a story I loved hearing and, although I had no idea where other children came from, I still had a sense of being special; different from the others. I was different from the other kids in the street, because I was Jewish; I was different from my Jewish friends at school because I was working class and lived in Toxteth; I was different from any other kid anywhere because I was adopted. At the age of eight I can remember feeling sad at school because I was an only child and a couple of young friends, Avril and Keith, reassuring me that it was ok as they were only children too, but I was still set apart from the others in so many ways that I felt alone and separate from as early as I can remember.
Toxteth in the '60s hadn't yet become notorious for riots and racial tensions and in fact we were actually living in Wavertree which back then still had pretensions of being "upper working class" and certainly highly aspirational as the increase in cars and louvre windowed bays seemed to indicate.
The key people in my life back then were my mother Bessie, my father Sydney and his brother, my Uncle Harry. We all shared the small terrace at number 52 with its tiny back yard and outside toilet.
Bessie was the youngest of six children of Russian Jewish parents. The two eldest children, my Auntie Hetty, the family matriarch and another Uncle Harry were born in Russia and had come to Liverpool with their parents in search of a new life. Most Jewish migration was to America and this time and Liverpool was often regarded as a stopping point on the way to the 'New World', but the Cherniavsky family (or Shenofsky as they were more commonly known) couldn't afford the onward journey so they settled in Crown Street in the centre of Liverpool where a small but thriving community of Russian and Polish Jews were now congregating. Typcial of any immigrant community a micro economy soon established itself and Bessie and her brother, sister and many cousins lived a happy life speak mostly Yiddish at home and English at school.
Her two eldest siblings had been born in Russia at the turn of the 20th Century and had arrived in Liverpool in the first decade of the century fleeing increasing anti-Semitism
