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make sure that I always put a rubber on it. Having sowed my wild oats I’d prayed for crop failure, as some old drag queen once said, but my prayers had obviously fallen on deaf ears as the bloody crops had gone and flourished this year.
‘Are you absolutely sure the baby’s mine?’ I blurted out.
    ‘Of course it’s yours. There’s been nobody else. Cheeky sod.’
    A lad came down the steps carrying a wicker basket on his head and began moving amongst the tables, shouting, ‘Prawns, cockles, whelks.’
    ‘You don’t want to get married or anything, do you?’ I asked her hesitantly after the seafood seller had passed by.
    ‘No, I don’t,’ she replied, a little too quickly for my liking. ‘What do you think I am? Mad?’
    ‘That’s all right then. In that case are you having …’
    ‘No, I’m not having an abortion!’
    ‘Who mentioned abortions? I was only going to ask if you where having another drink.’
    And so on 16 May 1974 I became a father.
    I rang the hospital as soon as I got into work.
    ‘Can I ask who’s calling?’
    I hesitated before replying, ‘I’m the … er … father.’
    It sounded strange admitting to a complete stranger that I was the father as so far I’d kept the news of impending fatherhood to myself. My mother had no idea. Ignorance is bliss was my maxim as far as she was concerned. My sister Sheila was about to drop her fifth child and thankfully her constant visits with the children had kept my ma preoccupied and her suspicious mind off me. If there was one thing my mother worshipped above all else it was her grandchildren.
    There was a woman at the Citizens Advice Bureau I’d spent an hour with, pouring my confused heart out to her in her little office in Hamilton Square. She was sympathetic and very kind but in the end she was unable to tell me anything that I didn’t already know. I was grateful to her though, then and now, but failed to keep my promise to stay in touch and let her know what the sex of the baby was. She knows now if she’s reading this.
‘Mother and baby are doing well.’
    ‘Great. Can you tell me what she had?’
    ‘A little girl.’
    Well, it would hardly be a six-footer, would it, I wanted to say but chose not to. Instead I answered flatly, ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ my tone of voice lacking any conviction or enthusiasm whatsoever.
    ‘You can visit any time after lunch … and oh, congratulations,’ she said somewhat doubtfully as I thanked her and placed the phone slowly back on the receiver, returning to the bar unsure of just how I should be reacting to this news. Worried and scared were the top notes, but surprisingly there was also a slight whiff of pride lurking in the background. Maybe I’d enjoy being a daddy after all? Unable to resist the urge to break the news to someone, I told Jean.
    ‘I’m a father, Jean.’
    ‘You’re a what?’ she asked, slightly irritated at being bothered by what she considered nonsense. I tried to explain the saga as she poured wine from a tap in the barrel into a dock.
    ‘You mean you’ve got a girl into trouble.’ She shook her head as she tried to make sense of it, and after serving her customer went off to tell Molly, who was sat as usual at the end of the bar perusing the Echo .
    ‘Bloody fool’ was Molly’s only comment, and she didn’t even bother to look up from her paper. She let me go early though to visit mother and child. ‘Here,’ she said as I was leaving, pushing a tenner into my hand, ‘a bit of luck for the baby. You’re going to need it, lad.’
A smiling nurse showed me into a shiny ward where Diane lay in the middle bed of a row of three, beside which the tiny newborn babies lay in their cots. Nervously approaching the cot next to Diane’s bed, I felt the blood rush to my cheeks as I became conscious that the eyes of all the new mothers and nurses in the ward were on me. All of them were waiting to get a kick out of seeing a young father’s reaction to the first sight