Читать книгу Liverpool - Tony Lane - Страница 3

Encounters with Liverpudlians followed by enquiries about their families lead to the sea lanes of the world. So many people from this city were once crew members of merchant ships that almost everyone can find a seafaring relative. Struggling with the first chapter of this book and temporarily escaped, my car broke down outside a Victorian pub. The Pontack, named after a tribe of North American Indians, itself suggested Atlantic voyages, and conversation with the landlady soon revealed a connection. Once at sea as a stewardess, she proudly told me how she had sailed on the Queen Mary’s last voyage, round Cape Horn to Long Beach, California.

In Liverpool the sea cannot be avoided. All the arterial roads to the city converge on the river at the Pierhead. The main streets collect the prevailing westerlies and send them swirling past shop and office windows. Standing outside the Town Hall and looking down Water Street at high tide, inward and outward bound ships move across the frame made by the Cunard and Liver Buildings.

A Southerner from the Isle of Wight, I first arrived in Liverpool in the spring of 1955 to be interviewed for an apprenticeship by the marine superintendent of Ellerman Hall Lines. Although I was turned down, I was back in the city less than a year later. This time, like millions before me and after me, I came by sea. It was the end of my first voyage. Home from Australia and with the ship’s belly full of frozen meat, shelter deck stuffed with bales of wool and tinned pineapple, we had almost a week in Liverpool before going round to London to pay off.

On my first run ashore I took the overhead railway that followed the line of the docks at a height just above the top of the massive granite dock wall. Looking down into the docks, I was as amazed and delighted as every other novice to Liverpool. There were a lot of strange ships with cargoes smelling a good deal stronger than anything on my ship. Already, after only five months at sea, I reckoned that this was my world. After another eight years or so I changed my mind about seafaring – but never about Liverpool. Like many other seafarers, I believed – but without thinking about it that way – that Liverpool was the place that most perfectly expressed ships and seafaring. This was a port that bundled everything together that was to do with ships and the solidarity of seafaring. In this city it was as if ships entered its very heart. The river sounds were scored into those of the streets, and the tram and bus terminus was within heaving-line distance of passenger ships bound for every continent except Europe. Liverpool looked outward, not over its shoulder.

Among Liverpool residents there were thousands who were at sea on ships and tens of thousands who had once been to sea and who on the first warm day of spring and the first drear day of winter dreamed of going back ‘for just one more trip’. There were also further thousands of children and adolescents who would unquestionably follow their brothers and cousins, fathers and uncles – and even handfuls who would follow sisters and aunts. Among this multitude, visiting seafarers were family members.

I loved the city streets which opened to the river and the brass plates announcing ocean connections. I loved the blunt self-confidence of the people who would claim a stranger as a fellow member of the human race. I loved the anarchic, sharp ironic mockery of a people who refused to be servile and defiantly guarded their independence. I think I quickly noticed this social character that has made Liverpool such a decidedly distinctive place. I found myself thinking that this was where I felt at home. Fifty-five years later, and even though I no longer live in the city that no longer belongs to the sea, it’s still a place that understands the necessity of solidarity. It was in Liverpool that the families of the Hillsborough dead and the drowned crew of the Derbyshire, for fifteen and twenty years respectively, successfully fought the British establishment and the world’s shipping industry. In the one case to expose the lies of the police, the evasions of the judiciary and the malevolence of the popular press, in the other to find the truth about the sinking of a container ship, initially – and falsely – blamed on the crew’s negligence, the two campaigns were testament to Liverpudlians’ remarkable solidarity, endurance and resilience.

This is the book’s third edition and I have taken the opportunity to make some amendments and amplifications. A great deal more has been written about Liverpool since the book was first published in 1987. There has been some outstandingly good new work and I hope I have noticed everything that matters. On the other hand, I have largely ignored those contributions made by journalists who have passed through Liverpool in pursuit of periodic calamities.

Liverpool has not yet fallen into good times and, given developments in Britain as a whole, this is not to be wondered at. Villages and market towns no less than the big boroughs and the cities have been scarred by widening social divisions. Those who have always had least have inexplicably been punished and given less. The unemployed have become more numerous, more desperate and more excluded; the recently fractured working class has kept its head down, as it always has in bad times; the middle classes have felt ever more threatened and insecure. The rich have flitted between their globally dispersed bolt-holes, oblivious to the troubles of others but sensing the precariousness of things.

Britain in the early twenty-first century is not a pretty sight. Considering how wonderful the world could so easily be, the absence of optimism and realisable dreams is extraordinary. Instead, imaginations have been screwed down, caged, made pallid and become shrivelled by their imprisonment. Anxiety seems to hang in the air and be almost tangible. But if all of these characteristics of modern Britain can be found in Liverpool, this city is still a different place. The comments of newly arriving and well-travelled strangers are so utterly predictable. Noticing first, how un-English the city feels, they then talk of the energy, the self-confidence and the democratic habits of the natives.

And so it is impossible not to believe that, when there is a revival in the belief in the improvability of the world, Liverpool people will be marching with the band at the front.