Referred to colloquially as ‘getting off at Edge Hill,’ the withdrawal method didn’t work for Joe; a shotgun wedding was hastily arranged a month before Peggy’s sixteenth birthday and she was delighted... Three children later, Stoker 2nd Class Joe returned from the deep sea to find his new-born baby the victim of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Accusing Peggy of rolling over drunk, he beat her up and stowed Tommy and Owen away under a lifeboat canvas. (If he hadn’t, his boys wouldn’t have suffered the systematic abuse by paedophile priests; no ten-year jail sentence and no Maori love affair.)

After losing his second wife to the global flu pandemic, Joe retreated to in the penury of the New Zealand slums. He later found some solace in Uncle Spike’s outback Sly Grog Shop, but the outbreak of World War Two soon put pay to that. It prompted his return to blitz-ravaged Liverpool where he was imprisoned for the ‘wilful abandonment’ of his family. Young Owen and Maori chief Hankgora were reunited at a MENSA concert in Alexandria, but all too soon the Maori was recalled to arms and seriously wounded in action. After Germany’s surrender, he was discharged from a Maltese hospital ‘with only one thing on his mind’…