“I’m sick of the smell of this fucking shite!”
Every member of my immediate family knows this phrase all too well. There is another, slightly less PG-rated one that I’ll refrain from repeating here for fear of offending Motherbear. The aforementioned smell is that of Sydney. The young female who utters it is a recent child immigrant from Liverpool and had the leading role in a programme I once watched called The Leaving of Liverpool.
That programme informed much of my understanding of the city of Liverpool. It was a place so dire, so murky, so dark and dank that people escaped to a desert on the other side of the world. Liverpool for me was one of those industrial cities that Dickens and Eliot described in their novels; a city where the fortunate children worked in factories and the unfortunate ones were sent to workhouses. Well it was that and a few boys in grey suits that sang a few songs.
My pilgrimage to Liverpool was planned quickly, on a bit of a whim, to fill a few lonely days on a long weekend. It was so very whimsical that I didn’t research my trip at all. I just bought a train ticket and a couple of nights in a hotel.
I arrived, with half the population of Northern England, on the same weekend as the International Beatles Convention and the Liverpool Folk Festival. Every hippie from here to Hull and back again was in town. With their tie-died t-shirts and scraggly beards, biker vests and slicked hair they are a generation lamenting their music and the lifestyle we youngsters quashed with wifi. There were Baby Booming Brexit Voters to spare…and the omnipresent gaggle of American tourists, loudly enquiring after restrooms and washrooms instead of toilets and loos.
Liverpool, the city centre, surprised me. It was much, much larger than I expected. Very wide streets filled with empiric buildings; a mismatch of bulky, bold architecture reflecting centuries as the leading trade port in the UK and the mouth from which Europe’s immigrants were spat into the Atlantic. Over the course of a little less than a hundred years, forty million beggared their way to the New World and the colonies beyond.
Poking above it all is the oddest looking Church I have ever seen. The architect, a protestant, must have been taking the piss with the Catholics who would worship there when he designed a giant concrete wicker basket that points to the heavens. It is no doubt iconic in it’s own 1960’s kind of way, but very difficult to digest when surrounded on all sides by the red bricks of Liverpool University.
There is a slightly taller structure, also built in the mid-twentieth century, a radio tower that must have been designed by George Jetson. That was the whole of Liverpool really, very ancient buildings sandwiched next to very new ones. Like in many British cities, a legacy of a Blitz that gutted anything of interest in a city that couldn’t immediately afford to rebuild.
As in any ancient working port, there has been a regeneration of the old docks. The stolid brick megaliths have been gutted, refitted and are now filled with museums, flats, restaurants, a Pizza Express… and on this particular weekend, families.
Living in London, I do see children, but never in the multitudes I’ve seen them up here. Rarely just one at a time, often in multiples of three, accompanied by the requisite strollers, forging a path up and down the docks with their loud orange mothers, their perfectly groomed tattooed fathers and at least one white Capri-panted grandparent. Hearing the kids call for their mooms in their little mini scouse accents shocked me. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I’m always surprised when I hear tiny cherubic kids with accents I only associate with middle-aged men like John Bishop.
Inspired by Gerry and the Pacemakers and a visceral desire not to be within earshot of quite so many other humans, I took a ferry across the Mersey. Trained as I was on the largest natural harbour on earth, I always think you get a better feel for a city from a boat than on dry land.
They played the song, we had a recorded tour guide pointing out all of the important landmarks and if you ever find yourself in Liverpool, it is a must-do. The banks of the river Mersey play out the history of the city and the many lives it has lived. Centre for emigration, slave port, shipwrights, containers, oil, war, tobacco and tourism. You see it all as the Be-Dazzled* ferry makes it’s way up and down the port.
Finally, after two days wandering, watching and weeping, I did what I came here to do.
Roll Up, Roll up for the Mystery Tour!
I was bitterly disappointed that I didn’t get an actual Mystery Tour Bus, she was in for repairs, but I did get a guide with an accent who knew someone who knew someone who once walked past Ringo and he had all the stories the eager tourists could stomach. I was the only one alone; there was a family of Brazilians, two young Asian girls and the requisite Americans. One regaled us all with her tale of being the great-granddaughter of Irish immigrants who sailed from Liverpool. She was none too impressed when I let her know that Irish immigrants who sailed from Liverpool populated most of her country and even less impressed when I explained that mine was too.
The music went on and off we went.
The tour takes you well outside of the city, to the houses where Ringo, George, Paul and John lived as children. You immediately understand that their houses belie a childhood spent in relative comfort unlike the image John described in Working Class Hero. You see the church, in front of Eleanor Rigby’s grave, where John met Paul and became the Beatles and then you drive down Penny Lane and stop at Strawberry Fields. That’s where I cried.
The song Strawberry Fields starts with a flute refrain that always reminds me of the Mr Men theme. After the flute burst it becomes a lament for childhood and would be among my top ten favourites. As the bus turned down towards the city and our final destination, the Cavern Club, they played In My Life. Then I really lost it.
My Dad loved the Beatles and his final journey was played out to In My Life. The words and music of the Fab Four were the soundtrack to my childhood. I’d wanted to visit and see where they were from, I wanted to experience a little bit of what they had, the city that inspired so many songs that live on today. I’m glad I came; I don’t think I’ll need to again.
*The Mersey Ferry is currently a floating artwork, a Dazzle Ship, designed by Sir Peter Blake who famously designed the cover for Sergeant Peppers
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