Footnotes Page 21

  I didn’t want to shout, so I wrote on the back of my chequebook, ‘I’m a bit in the dark, too’ and showed it to him. He looked down at it, baffled, and at that moment people came back into the room, and I snatched the chequebook away. God knows what he made of it.

  Beryl and Jack. They are both very easy to love.

  When Beryl was here in 1983 she met David Sheppard, the Anglican Bishop of Liverpool, who had coined the phrase ‘flickers of hope’. It was very soon after the 1981 riots and Liverpool was drained of funds and optimism and local control (the Thatcher government having decided the council couldn’t be trusted with the money), and the pair of them went looking for ‘flickers’ in the infamous Netherley Estate. Beryl found it distressing – and I don’t think she found the bishop very easy. ‘Having been an actress’, she wrote (and she was, for a while; she even had a small part in Coronation Street), ‘I was a bit self-conscious about what I would say to a bishop.’

  She was much happier on Hope Street. It is bookended by the two great Liverpool cathedrals, the Anglican to the south and the newer, Catholic cathedral in the north. Beryl had converted to Catholicism, having met a number of glamorous Catholics among the actors at the Playhouse, but she never reconciled herself to the Catholic cathedral, which she found ‘so ugly that in a hundred years, if it hasn’t collapsed due to faulty welding, it might conceivably become acceptable as an example of twentieth-century eccentricity’. Her main problem with it (‘I know little of architecture’) was that it had taken so long to build – and it is true that the Catholics of Liverpool spent decades scraping together the pennies to fund its construction, but in the end only the wondrous crypt was made according to Edwin Lutyens’s original, overblown, 1930s plans, and the main building (which I found soothingly austere) now trembles like the tip of a small jagged iceberg on top of its own massive, vaulted, underground chambers.

  Beryl may have converted to Catholicism (which irritated Austin), but I don’t think she was anything more than occasionally enthusiastic about its practices and strictures. She certainly preferred the Anglican cathedral and its sunken graveyard where she once roamed with her father. And she found it exhilarating to stand on Hope Street, ‘facing the river and the distant hills of Wales, the cathedral rising pink as a rose into the northern sky. The blackened city sails in an ocean of white cloud, perpetually racing before the wind.’ It is not often that cathedrals generate a feeling of awe, or that’s what I find, but the Anglican cathedral of Liverpool has power and purpose, the kind of certainty of spirit I had found in the tiny, living churches of Gerald’s Wales. There’s a large, swirling pink, hand-written neon statement floating over the western end: ‘I Felt You and I Knew You Loved Me’ (Tracey Emin, 2008). And that works, too. Even if the effect is slightly dampened by the lights of the over-eager shop and a clatter of cutlery coming from the café.

  So, there is still a lot of hope on Hope Street. Even Beryl was happy, and she hated much of what had happened to Liverpool, especially since the riots. Here she goes again: ‘Toxteth has been improved – that is to say vandalized – by the city planners and the architects. Terraces and churches, breweries and warehouses have been bulldozed into rubble.’ Well, I wouldn’t know (shifting baseline syndrome), but there’s still plenty to admire. The Philharmonic Dining Rooms, the churches and chapels, the art college and the cafés. The walk from cathedral to cathedral in the sunny morning of the day is uplifting. Beryl points out that Alois, Adolf Hitler’s half-brother, lived nearby on Stanhope Street with his Irish bride, Bridget Dowling. Their son was born there, William Patrick Hitler. Beryl was as preoccupied with the Second World War as the rest of her generation. She was seven when the war started and in 1947, aged fifteen, she started a love affair with an ex-German POW, a man called Harry Franz, whom she came across in the woods near her home. They met often, and when he went back to Germany they continued to send each other letters of love and longing, although in the end Beryl moved on more quickly than he did.

  Beryl and Jack and I all spent some time in the docks. Jack had ‘rarely seen anything more spectral and melancholy’, as he wandered in the gloom, with his hands thrust deep in the pockets of his overcoat, past decaying warehouses, ‘empty of everything but shadows’. By 1933 the Liverpool Docks had seen much better days. And of course, as Beryl says, those better days (for Liverpool and Britain, but most certainly not for everyone else) had involved sailing ships carrying cotton goods to Africa, refilling their holds with slaves, bearing them in misery to the West Indies, before returning in triumph to Liverpool ‘loaded with sugar and rum’. And, she says, ‘in the Gorée warehouses behind the offices of the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board, beneath the rusticated arcades supported on columns of cast iron, slaves were tethered (so they say) by long chains to the bulky rings projecting from the walls’.

  I can’t find the rings, but I may be looking in the wrong place. Even so, and despite Beryl’s qualifying ‘so they say’, there’s no doubt that African slaves were traded in Liverpool – bought and sold and kept in chains on the steps of Custom House. You can read about it in a book called Liverpool and Slavery, written in 1884 ‘by a Genuine “Dicky Sam”’ – and a ‘Dicky Sam’, I now know, is another word for a Liverpudlian. He says the trade was still going on in 1766. Eighty years later, in October 1846 the escaped American slave, Frederick Douglass, was in Liverpool, speaking to a crowd of over 3,000 people, and he cursed the churches of the southern states of America:

  Ministers of religion defend slavery from the bible – ministers of religion own any number of slaves – bishops trade in human flesh – churches may be said to be literally built up in human skulls, and their very walls cemented with human blood …

  What Douglass wanted more than anything was for British Christians to join him in denouncing the churches of America’s south. In Scotland, the ‘Free Church’ had recently split from the established church and had raised some of its funds from American slave-owners. And so, when Douglass got to Paisley, just outside Glasgow, and spoke in the Exchange Rooms, he made this simple suggestion:

  We want to have the whole country surrounded with an anti-slavery wall, with the words legibly inscribed thereon, SEND BACK THE MONEY, SEND BACK THE MONEY.

  Which has a certain timeless resonance.

  The docks have been transformed, again, since Beryl was here in 1983, and they’re now spruce with salmon-pink columns and clean empty walkways and a map of Britain floating perilously in the harbour, from which I’m told someone occasionally presents the weather. There are statues everywhere – Liverpool seems to have a fixation with large bronze memorials – and I get my photo taken in front of the Fab Four: vast, grinning, hurrying away from here and out to sea. Later, outside the Cavern, I will ask another tourist to snap me hanging on to the shapely bronze figure of Cilla.

  The docks, though, don’t feel right, despite the rolling revamps. Are we all (Jack, Beryl and I) picking up on the misery of ages? The slaves and the decay. Is it hanging in the air? Ploughed into the ground? ‘This unspeakable development, this act of outrage’, snarls Beryl. And, yes, the Liver Building looks disconsolate; the ships have gone; there’s no one working here, other than the uniformed staff at the galleries, hotels and museums. I drop into the Merseyside Maritime Museum where there’s an exhibition about black sailors in the British Navy, and I think: here’s yet another part of our history that needs digging up, turning over and holding up to the light. About four percent of the British Navy was black at the time of Trafalgar, and some of them, presumably, were ex-slaves who were now seeking perilous refuge in British ships – and whose stolen forebears had left in chains from these very docks. One thing’s for sure: we’re going to need a lot more historians.

  Beryl spent five days wandering around Liverpool. She was happy to find that the Nook pub in the Chinese quarter was still there, and still ‘full of Chinamen speaking their own tongue’. The Nook used to be run by the grandfather of her editor, Anna Haycraft, who when Beryl
first met her in the early 1950s was Anne Lindholm, and later wrote novels as Alice Thomas Ellis. They were great friends, although in later years that friendship was tested to destruction by Beryl’s long-running affair with Anna’s husband, Colin, who ran Duckworth, the publishing house for Beryl’s novels and indeed her English Journey. If you want the full tangled details (of this and much more) you’ll find it in Brendan King’s biography, Love by All Sorts of Means. Beryl seemed to have a talent for confusion in her private life and absolute, heart-tugging clarity in her fiction.

  Much of Beryl’s life appears in her fiction, only tidied up, after a fashion. In English Journey she passes the Playhouse Theatre and tells us that ‘I was fifteen when I joined the company as an assistant manager and character’ (she was seventeen), and then remembers her time as a young actress and stagehand, when she understudied Cleopatra (‘and every day I prayed for the continuing good health of the leading lady; I would have died rather than prance about the stage with nothing more substantial covering my bonny legs than a wisp of gauze’), and how she fell tumultuously in love with the designer, who was much older than her, and the actors talked Catholicism and sexual despair, and one of them ‘placed me across his knee and beat me with a rolled up newspaper. I thought he didn’t like me’, and she ended up marrying an awkward but persistent young man from the Art School (Austin). This is basically the plot of An Awfully Big Adventure, one of her sweetest, saddest novels.

  In the end, though, and just like Jack, Beryl was undone by Liverpool. ‘I don’t understand the malevolent force behind the destruction of this city,’ she wrote, in pain. I like to think (but how can I know?) that she might be heartened by some of what has happened since. Certainly there is more obvious money around, prettifying the streets; and there’s also a liveliness to this city – its shops and squares, restaurants and pubs – that made me happy. Perhaps I am still reeling from Bradford. But it was different for Beryl. Liverpool had been her home – she felt it still was – and so on the last day of her trip she stood for a long time at the window of her room in the Adelphi Hotel, staring down Church Street, and all she could see was what was no longer there.

  All the landmarks I remembered, gone without trace. No Boosey and Hawkes … No gunsmith’s … No ice-warehouse, no Bears Paw restaurant, no pet market … Gone … Obliterated … slung onto the refuse tips … I could blame the Conservatives for greed … the socialists for naivety … But it hardly matters now. It’s too late. Someone’s murdered Liverpool and got away with it.

  Maybe that’s the message. Don’t ever look back.

  ‌Eight

  ‘The Doncaster Unhappiness’

  ‘Time would pass, old empires would fall and new ones take their place, the relations of countries and the relations of classes had to change, before I discovered that it is not quality of goods and utility which matter, but movement; not where you are or what you have, but where you have come from, where you are going and the rate at which you are getting there.’

  C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary

  Charles Dickens & Wilkie Collins,

  Cumberland to Doncaster, September 1857

  And here comes Dickens. Racing up the country on the London express. Wheels spinning, engine roaring, throwing out steam and sparks and clouds of black smoke, battering through the stations, with horses and cattle (and even once a crowd of fear-stricken pigs) scattering across the fields in their wake. Dickens is riding high, first class, up front, on board with his friend Wilkie Collins, and even the voluble Wilkie must be temporarily stunned into silence in the presence of his employer, the Chief, the self-styled (half-mockingly, but with unassailable truth) ‘Inimitable’ Charles Dickens.

  He is even more restless than usual. He had written to Wilkie only a few days earlier, pleading with him to come on a trip (‘anywhere’ would do), and had then dismissed Wilkie’s suggestion (‘Norfolk?’) and announced instead they were going to Cumberland, inspired, he told his friend John Forster in yet another of his many letters, by the thought of some ‘promising moors and bleak places’ he had read about in a book. This was The Beauties of England and Wales (Vol. III) by John Britton and Edward Wedlake Brayley, written in 1802 – and the fact is he’d just snatched it up and plumped for any old place, so long as it was somewhere North and not too far from Doncaster, where an eighteen-year-old actress called Ellen Ternan was due to appear later that month, with her mother and sisters, at the Theatre Royal. Dickens was forty-five years old, married to Catherine, with ten children, and right now he was being tossed around in the jaws of an existential, exponential mid-life crisis. ‘I want to escape from myself,’ he had written to Wilkie. As if that were ever possible.

  He must have thought Wilkie would make the ideal travelling companion. For one thing, they knew each other well (there was that jaunt to Italy with Augustus Egg in 1853), and they could also use the trip to generate some articles for the magazine he edited, Household Words. There was never any question that this would be a real holiday for Dickens (nothing ever was, for long), but for the purposes of the journey, or rather the journalism, fictional stories and book that would emerge from their collaboration, he suggested they adopt the personas of ‘Two Idle Apprentices’ on a ‘Lazy Tour’. They called themselves Francis Goodchild (Dickens) and Thomas Idle (Wilkie) after Hogarth’s series of ten prints, Industry and Idleness. Which is pretty odd when you consider that in Hogarth’s version Francis Goodchild, a paragon of hard-working virtue, ends up Mayor of London while the shiftless Idle is hanged at Tyburn.

  A joke, of sorts, runs through the book, The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices, in which Goodchild/Dickens is not really lazy at all, but Idle/Wilkie is catatonically so. It is telling, or perhaps sad, and also infuriating, that Dickens was pretending to be a much younger man than he was, with time on his hands, going wherever the mood or the weather took them. This really wasn’t true. Dickens liked to plan ahead – and his and Wilkie’s rooms in Doncaster, not to mention a carriage and driver, were booked as soon as he decided on the trip, to coincide with the week of the St Leger Stakes, and most especially the arrival of the (probably) unsuspecting Ellen Ternan. And that’s the other great thing about Wilkie, Dickens must have thought: he was unmarried, and he had a mistress, a widow called Caroline Graves with a young child, so he was never going to give anyone a hard time about young actresses.

  It is seven years since we left Wilkie in Cornwall and much has changed. Most obviously, he has allowed his inner bohemian to emerge, in his increasingly outspoken opinions, his fast-spreading beard and his flamboyant clothing (just like Dickens, he sports a florid waistcoat). He is now thirty-three years old. Since Rambles Beyond Railways appeared in early 1851, he has published five more successful and sensational works, including the novels Basil, Hide and Seek and – hot off the press – The Dead Secret. He is a contributor to Household Words and other magazines. His greatest fame is still ahead of him (The Woman in White in 1860 made him, briefly, the most sought-after man in London), but he is already a well-known literary figure. Being adopted by Dickens certainly helps. They have just co-written and starred in a play, The Frozen Deep, the preposterous plot suggested by Wilkie, which ran for four nights to vast applause at Dickens’s home in Tavistock Square (he had hired Britain’s greatest maritime painter to provide the scenery), before transferring to the professional stage in Manchester. And this is where Dickens had met the enchanting Ternan sisters and had given such an overwhelming performance in the character of Richard Wardour, the self-sacrificing sea captain who allows himself to freeze to death in order to save the life of his love rival (played by Wilkie), that Maria Ternan, Ellen’s older sister, appearing as Clara, the woman Wardour loves, had wept tears of genuine grief on stage, in front of an audience of thousands, straight into his open and gasping mouth.

  So the train steamed north. At one point they thundered between Liverpool and Manchester (hello, Jack and Beryl) and Dickens, in the guise of ‘Francis Goodchild’, presses his
nose to the window as the engine, ‘the greatest power in nature and art combined … shrieked in hysterics’, and ‘the pastoral country darkened, became coaly, became smoky, became infernal, got better, got worse, improved again, grew rugged, turned romantic; was a wood, a stream, a chain of hills, a gorge, a moor, a cathedral town, a fortified place, a waste’. After a lot more of this, they arrived in Carlisle. It looked, wrote Dickens, ‘congenially and delightfully idle’.

  There is a bond, something umbilical, between Dickens and trains. He defined his age just as much as they did (and isn’t that a surprising thought?). You could almost say they grew up together. The first commercially successful steam locomotive started running in 1812, the year of his birth; and he turned eighteen when the railways came of age with the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. ‘The Age of the Railways’ jostles with the ‘Dickensian’. Of course, he was just a reporter to their all-conquering revolution, and filling his novels with their heat and fury, and no one can deny the way they transformed Britain and then the world, but even so, in his pomp, and on through the decades that followed, it was also Dickens who changed our language and our dreams. Readers in New York stormed the wharf when the final instalment of The Old Curiosity Shop was rumoured to be arriving by ship from London. ‘Tell us about Nell’, they screamed up at the sailors, ‘does she live?’ Printers’ lads would tear the sheets hot from their presses to find out what was happening to Oliver, Fagin and the Artful Dodger, Pickwick, Scrooge, Squeers, Sykes, Smike, Copperfield, Micawber, Pip, Uriah Heep … ‘I’m a very ’umble person’, ‘What larks, Pirrip!’, ‘Barkis is willin’’, ‘It was the best of times …’, ‘I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness …’, ‘Something will turn up’, ‘Fog everywhere’, ‘Wery good’, ‘A mist hung over the river’, ‘Please, sir, I want some more?’, ‘A Merry Christmas to us all; God bless us every one!’ … ‘Bah humbug!’