THE SUBURBS
§ 1.
If one wanted very badly to indulge a passion for historical
retrospect, this chapter, of course, would provide the great
opportunity. For although it is customary to regard them as mere
upstarts, the Suburbs of Liverpool, like the suburbs of so many great
towns, are really much more venerable than the City itself. West
Derby, for instance, was a place of power and dignity when Liverpool
was a mere huddle of patched cabins on the marshes away below; and
Bootle, Litherland, Crosby, Walton, Kirkdale, Smithdown, Wavertree, and
Toxteth, unlike the place that now looks down upon them patronizingly,
are all distinguished by references in Doomsday Book. But in spite of
this, and although, as we shall see, some faint odour of antiquity
still here and there survives, yet to make anything more than the
barest mention of their fine old memories and traditions would be to
create a very false impression of the aspect they present to-day. It
would be quite possible, I imagine, to wander through Kirkdale for a
lifetime (an inspiring pilgrimage) without once suspecting that it owed
anything to any other era than excessively mid-Victorian; and to tell
over the far-off things that made Smithdown and Toxteth names of terror
or magnificence in old days would be to give about as fair an idea of
the expression now worn by those sober neighbourhoods as a description
of the old tithe-barn that once stood there would give of that cautious
ante-room in Tithebarn Street. The Suburbs are certainly older than the
City, but the City has infected them with her youthfulness. They do,
in cold fact, grow younger every day.
[Illustration: THE HORNBY LIBRARY.]
This double process of suburb-subordination and suburb-rejuvenescence
has always, of course, been dependent upon the progress of the arts of
locomotion; and its latest and swiftest phase was undoubtedly heralded
by the clangour of the gong on the first electric car. It is her
cars, as we have seen, that perfect Liverpool’s most characteristic
beauty. It is her cars, again, that have helped to perfect her
characteristic homogeneity and compactness, that have helped to bind
the whole sprawling mass, City and Suburb and all, more and more
tightly together, both physically and sentimentally, into one unigenous
organism. The London suburb, save in such districts as are tapped by
the Tube and its companions, is a fairly self-contained community;
it has its own shops, interests, concerts, society; and even in many
of our smaller towns and cities the general effect is that of a
number of self-interested _colonies_ pouncing upon the central spaces
for the mere means of life, and then returning to their own private
recesses to dispose of them. But in Liverpool the Suburbs tend more
and more to part with their independence, to “pool” their interests
and enjoyments, to form themselves into a kind of family party ranged
round the brightly burning grate of the City. And they grow more
like a family party, not only because of this absorption in a common
atmosphere, but also because of the increasing freedom which marks
their intercourse one with another. That division of the residential
semicircle into specific social _faubourgs_--Scotch engineers in
Bootle, for instance, Welsh builders in Everton, merchants in Sefton
Park--which subsisted very definitely until quite recently, is now in
large measure being broken down. Interfusion of social states goes on
with constantly increasing rapidity. Families who now migrate with
the utmost nonchalance from, say, Kirkdale to Aigburth, confident of
finding somewhere there precisely the strata to which they have been
accustomed, would have looked on such a flight only last generation as
being almost as impossible, almost as profoundly charged with social
significations, as a transfer from Poplar to Park Lane; and were
content, as I well know, to live and die and inherit without stirring,
without dreaming of forsaking an equally static coterie of friends.
Well, the chief agent in breaking down these social divisions was also
that art of locomotion to the encouragement of which Liverpool, as
I have said, has so peculiarly devoted herself, and the latest, the
most democratic, and the most mobile of the creations of that art,
the electric car, has inevitably increased that fluidity in a very
remarkable degree.[4] The overhead wires that bring every suburb into
vital connexion with the centre are like the radiating nerves of the
organism, flushing all the extremities with one sympathetic life.
[4] It is impossible to doubt that Liverpool’s conspicuous devotion
to the business of locomotion--a devotion that is briefly evidenced
by the significant association of her name with the first railway,
the first canal, one of the first sub-river underground railways,
the first electric overhead railway, the first sustained application
of electricity to long-distance railway traction, and now with these
electric road cars--owed its first impulse to that comparative
isolation of her early situation to which I referred in the first
Chapter, and that the eager continuance of that devotion was largely
due to the function of universal carrier which was afterwards imposed
upon her. It is equally impossible to doubt that it was that early
isolation which helped, at the outset, to foster her spirit of
independent and concerted effort. And it is, therefore (to me, at any
rate), rather a pleasant reflection, and not perhaps a wholly useless
one, that the circumstance which primarily and directly induced that
essential solidarity was also the circumstance which created the tools
for riveting it; and that the creation of those tools was considerably
aided by the apparition of precisely those forces which seemed to
threaten her with a disrupting cosmopolitanism.
§ 2.
It is by the presence of these wires, then, that you may recognize
the great suburb-reaching thoroughfares, the raying bones of our all
but unfurled fan, and by taking up a position at one of the central
junctions--that river-side terrace would be an excellent place--you may
traverse them all in turn, and examine almost all the details of the
residential plume, with no more trouble than is caused by stepping from
pavement to car-platform, from car-platform back again to pavement.
Seaforth tips the first bone; Litherland the second; Walton, Aintree
and Fazakerley, Everton and Anfield, Cabbage Hall, Tuebrook and West
Derby, variously feather the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth; whilst
Fairfield, Old Swan and Knotty Ash, Edge Hill and Wavertree, Sefton
Park and Mossley Hill, Dingle, Aigburth and Garston, fledge the
remaining branches in the east and south.
Great Howard Street, Derby Road, and Rimrose Road, the three nominal
sections of the first of these plangent ways, are tipped, as I say,
by Seaforth, and to reach Seaforth they have to bore their way
through the dense landscape of warehouses and timber-yards that lies
behind the northern docks. But out beyond Seaforth, through Waterloo,
Blundellsands, Altcar (its rifle-ranges crackling like a coffee-mill),
Formby, Freshfield, and Birkdale, that other humming river of
electricity, the most western arm of the Lancashire and Yorkshire
Railway, whose course the road from the first pretty closely follows,
drains (or, rather, feeds) a constantly spreading, bungalow-saturated
district of _bonne bourgeoisie_. It is all very prosperous, this new
rubicund neighbourhood: sand-hills and wide shore spread between it
and the sea; half a dozen golf-links accompany its brisk march by
the railway-side; and that march can really scarcely be regarded as
completed until the railway terminates, and plutocracy flames up in
a last supreme outburst, twenty miles away from Liverpool, among the
bathing-vans and pierrots of Southport: for Southport, too, in spite
of plutocratic hauteur, is being rapidly induced by locomotion to play
the part of Liverpool’s accessory. And Southport presents, anyhow, a
series of little paradoxes in appearance upon which one could desire
to linger. It is, for instance, at once the chosen home of countless
millionaires, and the chosen resort of countless cheap day-trippers.
(Although that, indeed, if all local tales be true, is less fundamental
a paradox than might perhaps be supposed.) Antitheses--at any rate
superficial antitheses--are in consequence engagingly plentiful, and at
night the place crowns this distracting effect by assuming all the airs
and graces of the Continent. Lights thickly sown among the prolonged
verdure of its central boulevard, a red-coated band and endless
promenaders, little tables beneath the trees--yes, it is all, to the
eye, very perfectly arranged.... And then, suddenly, disastrously,
there emerges the slow accent, the toilsome facetiousness, of
Chowbent.... But it is still very charming to have so many of the
materials of illusion so ingeniously provided; and one looks back at
evenings spent there, discreetly companioned, with a very quick tinge
of pleasure.
As for Seaforth itself, the first link in this chain of seaside
settlements--well, it, naturally, is the least personable of them
all. “The slums of the future,” say the pessimists sententiously; and
already a notable greyness begins to creep over its tightly packed
workmen’s cottages. It seems especially deplorable, for the shore of
the place (unbelievably peppered in the summer heats with naked pinkish
youngsters) is clean and fair enough, New Brighton glitters pleasantly
across the estuary, the Welsh hills heave up in the distance, and the
great ships of the world promenade before its parlour windows. A
little further along the coast, towards Waterloo, the Marconi station
leans upon its tall central mast like a sentry on his spear, and
listens to the cries of other great ships fighting in the clutch of
some blind Atlantic storm.
Not far away, and even more conspicuous, a high, livid convent,
many-windowed and forbidding, rises up out of the sand; and on its
flat roof, remote against the sky, you may sometimes see the good
nuns pacing to and fro together, or leaning solitarily against the
wind. They must survey a bold and various prospect. On the one hand
the level floor of the sea, here dusked, there silvered, marbled by
voyaging clouds, runs out until it meets a wide pure sky. Poised at
the western extreme of the long horizon blade, Anglesey rests like a
sapphire, and the hem of all the air that sweeps away to the south
is braided thereafter by the woven hills of Wales. From them the eye
stoops successively to the shimmering aura of the Dee, to the embossed
interspace of the Wirral, to the bright-mailed river down below, and
so to the louring masses of the City, ranging darkly out towards the
east, a creation more terribly unhuman than even the mountains or the
sea. Lastly, there is the scaly back of the suburb lying beneath, and,
beyond it, unfolding between that spreading blackness in the south and
a rim of purple woodland in the north, a fair carpet of meadowland
and cornfield runs clear and away. A rare white farm or so, set in
that green tranquillity, invest it with a kind of homely joy. And the
tender outlines of a sister convent near at hand, rising gravely among
the serene devices of its trees, touch that joy with a patience as of
evening.
§ 3.
But although it thus provides a very gracious incident in the
landscape, that sister convent, the Convent of Our Good Shepherd down
at Ford, plays no small part in increasing the dolour of the second
of our great northward-driving roadways. For its annexe, hidden among
those trees, is one of the chief of Liverpool’s Catholic cemeteries,
and since this second “bone” (Scotland Road, Stanley Road, Linacre
Road, are its successive names) passes through the very heart of the
Irish quarter of Liverpool, it follows that a grim pageant of rococo
hearses, plumes, and jaded mourners passes constantly along this
thoroughfare every Sunday in the year. It certainly stands in no need
of these aids to sobriety. Quite on its own merits it succeeds in being
the most profoundly depressing highway in all Liverpool. It plunges,
the moment it leaves the City, into the tawdry litter of shops that
edge the northern slum, and it is defamed, all thereabout, by the
sour sights and sounds and smells (the sights and sounds and smells
which we are to investigate in the next chapter) which the northern
slum exudes. It runs, after that, along the ragged fringe of the grey
curtain of shoddy streets that droops drearily down from the stooping
shoulder of Everton. And it winds up, at Linacre, with an altogether
abominable jangle of raw street-ends, waste lands, gasometers, and
factories. Its solitary moment of even comparative cheerfulness,
indeed, is to be set down to the credit of Bootle. At Bootle you catch
a glimpse of a couple of parks; a broad avenue--trim, well-treed, and
topped by an elegant spire--sweeps proudly across your track; and signs
of free-stone and prosperity are not wanting. Lacking that respite,
this arrow-straight four-mile stretch from the Old Haymarket to the
terminus at Linacre Road would infallibly induce neurasthenia.
[Illustration: OLD HAYMARKET]
Not that Bootle ever receives the slightest acknowledgment for this
fine alleviating effort. It is a curious thing, but no Liverpolitan
to whom you may ever speak will permit himself to refer to Bootle
except in tones of an amused contempt. In part, no doubt, this is a
result of Bootle’s obstinate, exotic retention of her independence.
In spite of the identity of interests, in spite of the physical
absorption which long ago took place, Bootle still clings vehemently
to her separate Boroughship; and not all the engines of suasion or
attack (and both sorts have been energetically applied) that Liverpool
can level against her seem able to encompass the surrender. Vividly
exceptional, breaking up, at any rate theoretically, the co-ordination
that would else be almost universal, she still adheres to all the
formulæ of a separate social and municipal existence: appointing her
own Mayor, lodging him in an impressive Town Hall, making him the hub
of a brightly revolving wheel of emphatically local sociabilities.
And Liverpool, incensed, no doubt, by this gross transgression of the
physical and sentimental laws that rule her life, responds with a dole
of contempt.
It is terribly unfair, of course; for Bootle, in spite of the fact
that its dockside quarters are not places of an overwhelming lucency
and charm, really does possess many gentle and engaging attributes,
not least among them being the spasmodic presence in its midst (even
yet in larger numbers than elsewhere) of the most delightful broad
Scotch seagoing engineers--sitters (when in port) in stifling back
sitting-rooms--smokers of incomparable cigars (on which duty may or
may not have been paid)--possessors of a very precise knowledge of
the healing virtues of strong waters.... And yet, in spite of the
unfairness of that contempt, one can’t help feeling that perhaps,
after all--independence or no independence--something of the sort was
inevitable. Frankly, what is to be expected by a place so unhappily
named? Its absurdity is crushing. Bootle, tootle, footle--and not
another rhyme-sound in the language. _Buckingham Palace, Bootle_;
_White Nights, Bootle_: clearly, note-paper could affect no address,
from the most stately to the most charming, that it would not instantly
convert to screaming farce. And to protest that the name is of the
most honourable antiquity is by no means to avoid the consequences. It
simply invests the whole business with an extra tinge of tragedy.
Independence of another sort, as yet untouched by tragedy, and
awakening in the soul of the Liverpolitan something more like envy
than contempt, is to be found at Litherland, which lies just beyond
that raucous Linacre terminus, a few steps nearer to the cemetery at
Ford. They are steps that provide an effective study in contrasts. They
carry one across a frail little swing-bridge; and whilst one end of
the bridge is immersed in that bad-tempered outburst of industrialism,
the other shares an atmosphere of positively Quakerish demureness.
Mild old Georgian residences, placidly sunning themselves among their
groves and lawns, are respectfully waited upon by an irresistible
village street of shops and inns and a post office. In the mildest and
sunniest residence of all the Urban District Council has comfortably
established itself; the village fire-escape sits contentedly upon the
lawn; and the orchard at the rear has been contrived into an alley
echoing with bird-song, where councillors and counselled may foregather
with their evening pipes.... It is that highly prosaic thing, the Leeds
and Liverpool Canal, that has apparently served to keep this idyll
unspotted by the world. It curves like a defensive moat between the
bird-song and the harsh imbroglio a biscuit’s-throw beyond, and upon
the frail structure that crosses it not the most reckless electric car
in the world would ever dream of venturing. It is the weakness of that
bridge that has proved the place’s strength.
It was in the very shadow of that enviable fire-escape, by the way,
that I heard of another and a subtler way in which the electric car
carries on its business of subversion. My informant was an Urban
District retainer, whom I found, the other afternoon, bedding out the
Urban District geraniums. I spoke to him regarding the pleasantness
of the neighbourhood, praised its quiet, its salubrity, and so forth.
He merely subscribed a perfunctory assent. Judging that my pæan was
considered to lack the appropriate degree of fervour, I redoubled
my efforts. I waxed really eloquent. Superlatives abounded. But my
strophe aroused no antistrophe. The more loudly did I extol, indeed,
the gloomier and more perfunctory became his replies. At last I touched
on rates, and that proved the last straw. “They’re only two shillings
and ninepence,” he burst out wrathfully--I think it was two shillings
and ninepence; anyhow, something quite preposterously minute--“and over
in Liverpool folks is paying eight or nine shillin’.” It certainly
seemed an extraordinary sort of grievance.... And then “They use our
cars,” he went on savagely--“they use our cars an’ libries an’ baths.
Why shouldn’t they help to pay for ’em?... But they can’t ’old out for
ever; Liverpool will nab the place some o’ these fine days.” And he
glanced at the genteel old stucco with an air of malevolent triumph.
The man, it will be seen, was himself a Liverpolitan, and I dare say
he voiced very fairly the general Liverpolitan sentiment in these
matters. “You use our cars; clearly, then, you must be one of us; so
quit this foolish pose of independence.” And one day, no doubt, it
will quit the pose perforce. Liverpool will “nab” it, the moat will be
stoutly bridged, a troop of electric cars will storm across, and the
quiet little gathering among the trees will be rudely broken up and
submerged.
§ 4.
To witness the actual consummation of such a ravagement, it is only
necessary to follow the next “bone” as far as Walton-on-the-Hill.
Walton, to my mind, stands as a perfect embodiment of all the mingled
tragedy and triumph of this great process of suburb overthrow. For
centuries her Church was the proud hub of the parish in which Liverpool
was but an inconsiderable hamlet; and even so late as the last year
of the seventeenth century she compelled Liverpool to regard her as
its parochial superior, and to tramp every Sunday three miles out to
her and three miles back. There is little pride left to the old Church
now. It stands, bleak and friendless, in the midst of a dull pool of
gravestones; smoke from a railway siding blackens its walls; the cars
roar triumphantly past its very gates; it has been compelled to guard
its dead with rows of iron railings. In the lanes that cower behind
it, too, defeat is equally apparent: scraps of villagedom hunted down
by a rabble of red-faced tenements; a mass of garish brick squatting
blatantly in the ruins of a cornfield; jerry-builders evicting old
residents from the cottages they have lived in for half a century;
the old Hall, in its nest of trees, lying fouled and rifled. In the
shadow of the Church there is a little cottage that has the reputation,
significantly enough, of being the only thatched cottage in Liverpool.
It is delicately complexioned, daintily windowed, and altogether very
fragrant and delightful. But the poor soul, one fancies, is not long
for this world. A frenzied hoarding, horrent and gibbering, raves above
it on one side; on the other some kind of corrugated iron affair screws
its blunt shoulder into the frail old bones.... One seems to catch a
gleam of piteous supplication behind the leaded panes.
But just beside the Church one gets the modern touch that seems to make
amends. It is from here that the great new road--wide, much-foliaged,
grass-platted--begins the journey which is to result in a curving
band of ordered white and green being drawn right through the mass of
eastern suburbs: a noble avenue which posterity will pace delightedly,
thinking kind thoughts of 1907. It is an admirable project, and a fine
salve for outraged sentiment. It sets the seal on Walton’s defeat: more
even than the red-faced streets does it signalize her absorption in the
mass; but it is none the less a thing one welcomes with enthusiasm.
Thatch, after all, is not the final excellence of life.
§ 5.
And, in any case, if Walton still thirsts for redress, she can surely
regard herself as amply revenged by her sister suburb, Aintree.
For Aintree, to no inconsiderable proportion of the inhabitants
of the British Isles, is a vastly more important place than
Liverpool--Liverpool, indeed, for them, deriving its sole significance
from the fact that it is a well-trained and useful attendant at
Aintree’s door. The secret, of course, is the Grand National--most
searching of all the national rhapsodies we strum on horse-flesh--which
is performed here every spring.
Big race-meetings don’t vary very much; and Grand National Day at
Aintree presents much the same features as one finds elsewhere. There
are the same great stands, looking, from a proletarian distance,
like boxes crammed with flowers; the same sliding bourdon from the
betting-rings; the same sudden drift of music that means that Majesty
has arrived, that Majesty is mounting the Stand, that Majesty’s
binoculars are even now compressing the whole astonishing landscape
into one bright little picture for Majesty’s eyes. Follows, as always,
the remote, wavering crescent at the starting-point; the delicate
stream of coloured scraps, blowing as before a wind, rising and
falling here and there in easy, soundless undulations; the faint, raw
crash of sound as the stream flutters beneath the quivering sparkle of
the Stands. And afterwards, the usual black flood of people pouring
across the plain, the usual sententious groups about the jumps, the
usual rancid litter, the inevitable dizzy smell of trodden turf.
Only, right at the end, there is one amendment to note. The traditional
hotchpotch of home-returning vehicles has been replaced by something
else. Away in the centre of the City some one in a little office signs
an order; and when the mob pours out, it discovers long glittering
files of electric cars awaiting it at the entrance. So, independently
propelled no longer, but packed sociably together, they sweep back
to the heart of the City, past the sad walls of Walton Church, a
magnificent official cavalcade.
§ 6.
Walton’s drab neighbours on the other side, too, have also their
sporting associations, and, in consequence, some measure of
independent fame. Each Saturday afternoon throughout the winter grey
clouds of sound drift over all this northern district and out into
the country beyond: rivalling for a time the brazen rumours from
the River which are always visiting these airs. They rise from the
great football-grounds at Everton and Anfield, where some tens of
thousands of enthusiasts, incredibly packed together (any number of the
worst-paid of L----’s understudies among them), indulge, week after
week, a passion for vicarious athletics.
There is always something rather heartsome about the sound of distant
cheering, and in this case one welcomes these tumults with an especial
enthusiasm. It would probably be unjust to suggest that they stand
for the most positive moment in the lives of the cheerers, but it
is certainly true that they provide the most positive note in the
whole of the dull regions that surround them. Towards Stanley Park,
indeed, in Anfield, there is a momentary touch of something that is
almost sprightliness; and over in Everton, near the hill from which
De Quincey admired the view of distant Liverpool, there is a flavour
of dignified decay. But, for the rest, there are only labyrinthine
miles of gardenless, spiritless streets, neither new nor old, neither
vicious nor respectable--always tragically null and inchoate. They
involve Kirkdale; they trail out towards Cabbage Hall; they trudge
past Newsham Park, and so away towards the south. The main ribs strike
across them here and there, distributing a little colour--paper-shops,
tobacconists’, sweet-shops, the rich phials of a drug-store, butchers’
slabs covered with intricate runes of red and yellow; but these
respites are desperately restricted. The gleam dies away as quickly as
the sound of the car-gongs; the web slinks back into its old monotony,
into that grey neutrality which seems, somehow, to be far baser and
more vitiating than the brute positive blackness of the slums.
To explain these regions, to see them (as we ought to see them) as
something more than a dull and featureless enigma, it is needful
to regard them in relation to the City, to see them as one of the
essential whorls in the great hieroglyph which is Liverpool. Looked
at in this way, they do begin to reveal a kind of meaning, even to
assume a kind of magnificence. They mean that Liverpool demands, for
the prosecution of her so colourful adventures, the services of so many
thousands of grey lives, the efforts of a great brotherhood content to
labour all day long on her behalf in exchange for permission to return
at nightfall just here, to make themselves a home in just this stretch
of barren twilight. She cannot let them go further afield; she cannot
grant them space enough for brightness. This much she can afford them,
and no more.
So regarded, all this drabness becomes something much more terrible
and magnificent than a mere neutral foil to the City’s beauty, a mere
grey passage which throws the purple into relief. It becomes one of the
sources of that beauty, one of the processes by which that beauty was
attained--a grey and dreadful ritual observed by the City in the hope
of being granted strange powers. These dull houses are so much squeezed
dye-wood. Their colour, their brightness, have gone to stain the rich
fabric of the City’s enterprise, to paint the romantic emblem by which
she is known in dim corners of the earth, to illuminate the saga of her
career. And, remembering this, it becomes almost possible to regard the
dwellers in these regions less as prisoners in a dull and sorrowful
gaol than as priests in the recesses of some twilit temple, gravely
and honourably fulfilling sacred offices.
§ 7.
At the same time, it is, no doubt, only too easy to overestimate
the heaviness of the twilight. Here is human nature packed thick
and thick, and where there is human nature, there romance is also.
Theoretically, therefore, the whole place is seething with adventure,
and each one of these drab doorways is an entrance to a palpitating
epic. Theoretically, all this monotony is but a mask, and beneath it
there are warm human features, quick and variable with terror and
pity and passion and quiet joy. It may be so; but those doors remain
implacably closed, the mask is never dropped; all this great romance
is writ in cipher. Here and there a phrase emerges: a couple of youths
whispering at a corner; a woman wrapped in a shawl singing drearily
in an empty street; an old man solemnly tapping at a door; a child
running screaming from a curtainless house; and one fingers them for a
little, and pores over them, but in the end is always forced to push
them despairingly aside. The key is lacking; they remain enigmatic; and
one might wander these grey sad streets for ever and learn nothing of
their secrets. Every house is inarticulate; a menacing dumbness broods
over the whole region.
And it is by personal associations alone that those secrets can be
surprised. Directories carry us a little way: they tell us that two
cabmen, a draper’s assistant, a cotton-porter, a stoker, a bricklayer,
and a carter, live in that half-dozen liver-coloured brick boxes; and
the knowledge certainly invests the place (it is a street in Anfield)
with a tinge of actuality. But there are so many other things we
require to know about that bricklayer--the colour of his wife’s eyes,
for instance; whether he prefers hot-pot or Irish-stew; whether his
youngest has yet had the measles. At Sefton Park, at Blundellsands,
qualities analogous to these are easily discoverable, even by the
outsider; but here they are hidden away beneath an unfathomable
monotony. To discover the romance, to taste the secret drama that
makes Anfield and Everton and Cabbage Hall habitable, it would be
necessary to live in each of them in turn, to have an initiating friend
in every road.... Thus, in a little street behind Netherfield Road
there live a couple of dear old maiden ladies, whom the progress of
education has prevented from teaching and taught to starve, and whose
training has made them determined to starve respectably, in private;
and knowledge of them and of their drama has made, for me, that street
a shade less cryptic. And then, again, over in Edge Hill there is a
little bed-sitting-room overlooking a stale back-yard where I used to
go once a week to hear the Kosmos put in order by a poet who wrote
bad verses, but quoted good ones. To the outsider Edge Hill must
seem as inscrutably monotonous as its neighbours. But I know better.
It revealed itself to me, in those days, as a wonderful avenue to all
manner of tender and high-hearted possibilities; and I still recall
evenings spent in the Botanic Gardens over there, with my poet mouthing
some splendid scarlet thing from Whitman or Shelley in the afterglow,
when the place seemed positively surcharged with vital and dramatic
loveliness.
§ 8.
But revealing experiences of this sort are inevitably limited, and,
lacking any great store of them, one is content to fall back on broad
summaries, to say that this crepuscular region stretches from Anfield
and Everton in the north, below Newsham Park, through Edge Hill, and
so towards Wavertree in the south. It has its degrees of neutrality,
of course--amenities creep occasionally in--but for the most part
it remains a region whose intimate meanings are concealed by its
monotony, but whose monotony gives it in the mass a deep and terrible
significance.
And below this tract, gravely introducing its later passages to the
City, there marches a dull, highly respectable quarter of streets and
squares (rare episodes, these latter, in Liverpool), of which, again,
one can only protest that it is really much more impressive than it
seems. There is Abercromby Square, where the Bishop lives; there is
Oxford Street, upon which the shade of Aubrey Beardsley is reported
to make an occasional shrinking descent; there are Catherine Street,
Bedford Street, Chatham Street, all earnestly pleading for geranium
boxes; and Rodney Street, where many doctors and one small green
slab combine to surround Gladstone’s birthplace with an appropriate
atmosphere of dignity. And so at length to the verge of the hill that
cups the City, with the Philharmonic Hall making one part of it a
place, on winter nights, of ringing hoofs and thronging audiences, and
the University, in another, looking gravely down upon the rooftops of
the tense and vivid City which it is its duty by scholarship to serve.
And on the other side of that dumb territory there always sweep the
suburbs that have the green fields for their neighbours: the suburbs
that here delicately woo the country and there vulgarly accost it,
and now stop short at the sight of it with a gorgeous affectation
of surprise, and now stealthily seduce it into all manner of morbid
episodes; but whose essential business is always, by this device or by
that, to lure the fields into the state of urbanity, to establish fresh
colonies and receptacles for the constantly swelling mass that seethes
behind. Cabbage Hall, the northernmost, plays the part of stealthy
seducer, dribbling out among the fields in colourless disorder,
entrapping them in the dreariest fashion, without a hint of glamour.
Next comes West Derby, a group of clean-faced cottages standing about
its car-terminus like smocked village children gaping prettily at a
lurid visitor, its neatly dignified church and deer-scattered park
reflecting the outburst of ripe, authentic aristocracy that makes
the country-side beyond so unexpectedly, so exotically, old English.
And after West Derby come Knotty Ash and Old Swan: the first, in
one’s pocket vision of it, a jolly stage-setting of taverns with
farm-carts before them, of tiny, twinkling pinafores pouring out of a
village school, of a neat spire (a property it doesn’t, however, do
to investigate too closely) rising above a grove of realistic trees;
the second--suffering in places from a bad attack of the scarlet-fever
which is now ravaging domestic architecture--leading to a long surge
of ambiguous ways and broken ends that spills out finally among the
fields near Wavertree. The country on which it breaks has qualities
of richness; little coils of woodland lie pleasantly among leaning
meadows; and right in the midst of it, like a fleck of pure foam far
cast by the muddy wave of the town, lie the lawns and gardens of
Calderstone, the latest of Liverpool’s parks.
[Illustration: CALDERSTONES PARK.]
§ 9.
For parkland proper, however, it is needful to return to the smoke.
Wavertree lies at the end of the Smithdown Road bone of the fan. The
next bone pierces that Bloomsbury-like district of highly respectable
squares, and so comes out upon the tail of a long regiment of trees
making a fine effort to live up to their reputation of being a
boulevard. This is Princes Avenue, and Princes Avenue (familiarity
breeding uncontempt) is sometimes spoken of in the same breath as
Berlin’s Unter den Linden. But although the conjunction is scarcely
wise, this broad way of trees and churches makes a wholly pleasant
approach to the suavest of Liverpool’s inner suburbs; and it leads,
too, to a deftly-handled space of open air, where it is certainly
possible to think of the Champs Elysées without a blush. Sefton
Park, although it may not serve so deeply human a purpose as, say,
Stanley Park in the north, is certainly quite the most perfectly
fashioned of Liverpool’s open spaces; and although it is the largest,
it never commits the mistake that large parks sometimes make of
endeavouring to appear like a piece of virginal country. It is always
mannered, self-conscious, full of effects that are in the right sense
“picturesque”; and the sheep that feed in one part of it do not seem
much less deliberately decorative in intention than the peacocks that
everywhere admirably strut and flower. To find one of these peacocks
(the white one preferably) self-consciously posing on a meadow of
rhythmical daffodils is to discover the true spirit of park artistry
symbolized with absolute perfection.
Eminently Parisian in the morning, when the nurse-girls bring their
charges here, and gossip and read and scold and perfunctorily play
ball precisely as the _bonnes_ do in the Champs Elysées, Sefton Park
grows unmistakably British in the sacred hour that lapses between tea
and dinner. For then young athletes like L----, and Hebes like our
heroine, fill all its tennis-courts with a white-limbed energy.... It
is not exactly a white-limbed energy that one observes in the adjoining
bowling-green; and its laborious, stooping, shirt-sleeved figures may
conceivably be regarded as striking rather a dissonant note amongst
the clean-cut decorative activities which surround it. But none the
less the sociologist in one eagerly welcomes and commemorates them. For
their apparition is another evidence of that coalescence of strata with
strata which is one of the features of suburb life just now. They mean
that laborious, stooping, shirt-sleeved figures can live nowadays in
the once exclusive neighbourhood hereabout; can demand, for their own
especial pleasures, some share of the glittering accessory with which
this suave neighbourhood once rather royally provided itself.
§ 10.
But the neighbourhood that immediately environs the Park still remains
fairly costly and responsible, and that it seems a little to fall short
of absolute impressiveness is doubtless largely due to the overwhelming
nature of its accessory. And then, too, it should be remembered, these
yellow, uneasy houses came before the bungalow had taught a reasonable
compromise between dignity and domesticity. A little further away, up
towards Mossley Hill, the success is notably greater. Grave roads,
filled with that indescribable hushed exclusiveness which only tall,
ripe, sandstone walls and overarching leafage have power to confer,
lead up the hill towards the Church. There are deliberate lodges and
sudden glimpses of deep-breathing lawn; life grows leisurely and
communicative; the silence is full of confessions.
The Church itself, bulking monumentally against the sky, continues the
warm, grave intimacy: even the green stillness that encircles it seems
fuller of humanity than all the acres, dense with flesh and blood,
over at Everton and Anfield. It is always worth while, therefore, to
step through to the farther wall. There, in a flash, you find you
have come again to the uttermost edge of the town. A great landscape
leaps suddenly out from beneath your feet, woods curve distantly about
it, sweet airs bring a company of quiet sounds. A chalk line being
softly ruled across the green map means that half a hundred people
who have just had tea in town will see the buses in the Euston Road
before dinner. A vague smear on the far sky stands for Widnes and
poison. A fainter smear above the tree-tops to the right reveals the
neighbourhood of Garston.
§ 11.
And with Garston we reach the tip of the last of the plumes of our fan.
Viewed _de profil_--as, for instance, from the River--it would appear
to be furnished chiefly with gasometers. The concomitants of gasometers
are as invariable as those of race-meetings: Garston is grimy.
Considered more closely, however, it breaks up a little, and reveals
here and there some wholly pleasant incidents. And on its inland side
it yields very gracefully to the influence of the shadowed lanes from
Allerton.
The rib that joins it to the centre, sweeps, in the first place,
through an easy, spacious district of private parks and well-preserved,
middle-aged mansions, and, in the last place, through the débris
of the southern slums. Its name in this last phase is Park Lane.
If, perceiving that, the visitor feel impelled to smile as at an
anticlimax, he would perhaps do well to hesitate; for this Park Lane
has probably a wider reputation than any other thoroughfare in Europe.
In and about this débris stand the sailors’ quarters, the foreign
quarters, the Chinese Colony, the emigrants’ lodging-houses, the
Sailors’ Home; and the street that threads these things (“Parkee Lanee
Street” the coolies call it) is spoken of affectionately in every
corner of the Seven Seas. Park Lane probably spells home to half the
sailors in the world.
Midway in its course this last rib separates the decaying gentility
south of Princes Park from the frankly homespun suburb of the Dingle.
But even the Dingle, since it marches cheek by jowl with the River,
cannot escape being occasionally infected with romance. There is one
little row of apparently quite subdued little tenements, for instance,
whose lives must really be one long debauch of raw sensation. I do not
insist upon the haunting presence of the Fever Hospital at one end of
them; nor upon that of the lean bridge which stalks appallingly across
a ramping railway-siding at the other; for these are incidents of a
sort that make other neighbourhoods tremendous. But these cottages
have perched themselves exactly on the brink of the ragged cliff which
surrounds that ultimate dock, the Herculaneum, and beneath them a group
of black monsters are always at work plucking trucks of coal bodily
from the railway and plunging them into the bowels of chained ships.
Further over, there are the peering heads and shoulders of embedded
liners; further, again, the wide manuscript of the River, lurid with
adventure; and, beyond that, the stony slopes of the Wirral. Nor is
this all; for immediately below their doorsteps some thousands of
gallons of petroleum are stored in the live rock, and somewhere beneath
their kitchen floors the Midland expresses race and hammer all day long.
[Illustration: HERCULANEUM DOCK.]
Certainly, if it is roaring melodrama one thirsts for, the Dingle, in
spite of its drabness, is clearly the place to dwell.
§ 12.
I have just spoken of the stony slopes of the Wirral. The stones, of
course, are houses, and the houses form themselves into suburbs, and
those suburbs troop all about the coast, and pour inland, and tend
to fill all the green peninsula with pleasant cubicles. But of those
suburbs and all the tranquil spaces they lead to and enclose I must not
now attempt to speak. Their qualities are many: river and sea, heather,
champaign, woven coppice, and swart fir-wood grant them a procession of
aspects no mere generalization could include. Port Sunlight set out as
though for an old English festival; Eastham with its woods and booths;
New Ferry and Rock Ferry, the stony slopes that lead at length to
Birkenhead; Birkenhead itself, a march played like a dirge; Seacombe,
Egremont, New Brighton, promenade-linked, wide-shored, flickering out
into all manner of watering-place delights; Leasowe, whose sea-beaten
coppices are wonderful in spring with ranks of praying white and
hymning purple; Hoylake, with its famous links and golfing fishermen;
Thurstaston, with its legendary hills and dear memories; Heswall,
sunset-saturated among its heaths; Prenton, with its pine-woods and
its water-tower; Oxton, mellow and meticulous upon its height: so do
I content myself with naming them, and, so naming them, add one word
of admiration for the dainty fashion in which, in her green chamber,
Wirral makes the beds for so many of the workers in the streets across
the way.
[Illustration: BIDSTON HILL.]
But there is one place in the Wirral about which I must inevitably
add another word. Both practically and sentimentally, indeed,
Bidston Hill belongs to Liverpool: practically because it is the
property of the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board, and because its
Pharos plays so large a part in directing the courses of the fleets;
sentimentally--well, sentimentally for a dozen excellent good reasons.
It would be from here, no doubt, in the old days, that the traveller
from the south would catch his first glimpse of the River and the
hamlet; it is from here that generation after generation of townsfolk
have come to see their City in its bulk; it is here still that they
bring the good stranger, hoping secretly that he will find their
Liverpool a rather wonderful and alluring sort of place. And certainly
it is from here, among this almond-scented gorse, that Liverpool builds
up most perfectly into a visible entity. The City and its outposts
draw easily together; the Dock Board Building makes an ivory nucleus;
and Walton Church on the left, and Mossley Hill Church on the right,
seem, in actuality, as they are in essence, but two organic incidents
in the great design of which it forms the centre. The bird-song and
the dumbness, the green spaces and the grey, the hid tragedies, the
fair buildings, the lavish, roaring ways, are now merged wonderfully
together, and, in their fusion, form one supreme attribute, nameless
because it is unhuman. Smoke-scarves of her own weaving and vapours
of the air binding her and her children together, Liverpool broods
there in the sunshine, sole and indivisible, a splendid seaward-facing
Presence. And the River flames at her feet.