Netherley

NG: Appleby Walk, that’s where I lived. Next to Scafell Close, and other thoroughfares with Cumbria-referencing names. How are these things decided? To whom was such nomenclature an interesting idea? No high-rise blocks on this part of the estate, these are gridded terraces of five or six two-storey red-brick and slate homes built around central squares of grass which would be used as football pitches, often heavily fouled with dog shit. I remember running across one once, alone, late for the school bus, and tripping and falling face-first into a coil of cack.

PF: The place I point out to Niall bears little resemblance to the house where I grew up. But the estate always was a work in progress and by the time I left in the mid-1980s, a programme of demolition and rebuilding was already well under way. My walk to school took me through Brittage Brow, a canyon of damp and dangerous ‘deck-access dwellings’ (industrial, pre-assembled high-density housing) and I’d study the way the wrecking ball went about its business every day. Things were left abandoned for years, half finished. Roads seemed to change their minds and just stopped. Unpredictable foot-worn ribbons and diagonals soon cut across greens and along verges everywhere, what the urban geographers call ‘desire paths’. Even language has proved provisional: the street names have been changed, the postcodes and house numbers shuffled. My childhood and adolescence took place on shifting sands: I watched it all go up, and I saw it all come down.

To some extent I must have absorbed and simply accepted this rate of change, but I wonder now how it was for my parents’ generation; for those who’d grown up decades earlier within social networks and spaces where everything seemed to exist in a more reliable and recognizable relationship to everything else. Huge economic and social forces made and shaped places like this, then seemed to dump us here, sealed off from history, from our own pasts. There was nothing like a broad mix of social classes or incomes: all the people we knew were semi- or non-skilled, working class, and all of our fates were bound to the caprices of a shaky global market and a local economy that had yet to reinvent itself. I suppose I grew up surrounded by the ways in which the unlucky ones reacted badly, or didn’t adapt, or failed to cope, drinking themselves stupid, damaging their families, hanging themselves from the cock loft. Many – my parents included – slowly turned inwards.

NG: It’s cold today, and the frost that has carved the grass into grey lancets has yet to thaw. The goalposts painted on the gable end of Kirkbride Close have long been scrubbed away. We’d play ‘shite’ against that gable end, too; you’d take turns to kick a football against the wall and the other player would have to return the shot. Miss the wall once and you were awarded an ‘s’; miss again and you were given an ‘h’, and so on. It was best to blast the ball against the wall as hard as you could so your opponent would be more likely to miss the return and have to chase the ball. It must have been terrible for the residents of that house, but I remember being shocked and hurt when I was bellowed at by them; God, we were only having a kick-about. Grumpy ahl get.

PF: Niall remembers the white bridge too, and we walk down towards the woods that begin where the houses end, scrubby and dendritic after the rectilinear world we’ve just left. We talk about being on the very edge of the city, and I realize just how keenly I’ve felt that, even from an early age.

As a kid, I took the Cold War very personally, and would lie in bed at night worrying over the effects of an all-out nuclear strike on Liverpool. Perhaps the Russians wouldn’t bother with us: I knew the seaport was in decline, not because I understood how gross tonnage had been in free fall since the 1960s, or how container trade had shifted to other, more profitable commercial hubs (in 1981, Felixstowe had become the country’s biggest container port), but because my uncles and grandfather had stopped going to sea on the liners years before.

Still, I’d lie awake counting the blast rings. Ground zero was the Pier Head, the centre of a circle with a radius demarcating the edges of the city centre: total devastation. The second ring reached as far as the Picton Clock: widespread structural damage, fires, etc. Netherley, six miles out, was in a zone where there might be pockets of survival.

I must have been very taken with the acronym for Mutually Assured Destruction, because I wrote a poem in school that ended with the line, ‘They’re all fucking MAD.’ I was sent to see the Head of English and didn’t write a poem again for a long time.