SEVEN“WHAT BRINGS MR. EPSTEIN HERE?”Each Wednesday night in the late 1930s little Joe Flannery would be dressed in his nightclothes and taken to spend the evening at the house of his father’s best customer, Harry Epstein. Joe’s father, Chris Flannery, was a cabinetmaker specializing in the heavy sideboards sold at Epstein’s Walton Road shop. “Mr. Harry” was a stickler for quality, refusing to accept any piece whose drawers did not slide in as easily upside-down. But on Wednesday evenings formality relaxed. The Flannerys and the Epsteins drove into Liverpool together to attend the weekly wrestling bouts. Seven-year-old Joe would wait for his parents at Mr. Harry’s house, playing upstairs in the nursery with the Epsteins’ son, Brian.This other boy was not like Joe. He was slender and delicate; he had a nanny to look after him in his own softly lit upstairs domain. He did not speak like Joe, nor like any Liverpool child. And he had many beautiful toys. Joe, in particular, loved the model coach that Brian had been given to mark the 1937 coronation of George VI.
