Netherley

NG: We cross the white bridge over Netherley Brook, at its junction with Mill Brook, a concrete and steel structure that spans a few feet of dirty water and under which, I thought, Gila monsters lived. I’d often take running leaps across the brook or the sluice gates – sewer jumping, it was called – or swing across it on a knotted rope tied to a tree branch. There were many fallings-in. The brook borders fields, across which we’d trespass, once to see a heron feeding at the pond; I can feel again the thrill as I watched it take off, pterodactyl-big, those huge beating wings, the ghostly silver and grey of its colouring. To keep us off the fields, farmers would often release bulls into them, or ferocious dogs, or, sometimes, load their shotguns with rock salt and shoot at us.

The woods hereabouts are today supposed to be junkie-haunted, but I see no evidence of that; no syringes, no burnt scraps of foil. Not even any empty bottles or cans. There’s mud, and slime, and graffiti, and a not-quite-pleasant smell, but there are also many robins, thrushes and blue tits in the trees and I have no reason to suspect that the red-bellied sticklebacks I would see flashing with fire in the water are now gone. Water boatmen, too, their reflections on the muddy bed as if they were holding pompoms. The farm over the brook was a threatening and perilous place but there was magic on this side.

PF: The woods still feel like the brink, and the white bridge is like the border between us and another world. This was a prime hang-out, well away from the main road, and a good place to swig cider or smoke hash or sniff solvents. Beyond it lay open country, impossible places like Tarbock or Cronton where they spoke completely differently. Farmers were feared. Open country appealed, but was circumscribed by anxieties: hounds with mantrap jaws, bird-scarers, barbed wire. The urban had crept up on the rural and something of a siege mentality prevailed.

We were forever going on expeditions, sorties into a wilderness of drainage brooks, arable fields, sewage farms, disused railways: in today’s A–Zs, the white pages, the blank edges.

This is where Tony Griffiths and I and scores of others raided the nests of blackbirds and dunnocks and song thrushes, building up our sense of what birders call ‘the jizz’: knowing a bird from a glimpse of its flight or a snatch of song, understanding its likely habitat. Skylarks were very common and we spent hours trying to find their eggs. The skylark was regarded as cunning, its song petering out as it dropped back to earth, always landing some distance away from its nest and scuttling along the ground to distract and confuse us.

NG: I remember it as an urban upbringing but it wasn’t, really,
and I’m startled, on this return journey, at the proximity of the green fields and the brooks and the copse of trees still standing, unconcreted. Netherley feels urban, undoubtedly, with the almost palpable pulse and pull of the big city a few miles away to the south, and images of the estate removed from the surrounding green belt would certainly suggest atypical inner-city housing developments, but I can remember a dawn chorus and can smell, here and now, cow dung and grass.

This is borderland, where the urban becomes the rural; the zone between ways of life, between specialized vocabularies, two localized lexica. As I recall, no one I knew had their place of work over the yard or so of sluggish brook; all worked in the city, or in the factories that lined the arterial roads into it, or down towards Speke or Garston or Halewood. The rural was there, close enough to smell, touch, taste; one bound over the brook or six paces over the bridge and you’d land in that world. Yet it remained very, very far away.

PF: We were great den builders, and for two or three summers dens were a huge part of my life; spaces cleared inside overgrown whitethorn hedges, fully carpeted with offcuts, furnished with pallets and those abandoned dark woods, ventilated to allow fire-setting. Some nights we’d go lamping with our neighbour Billy, who kept lurchers and Patterdale terriers.

Somebody discovered a Victorian dump on the town side of Netherley, and digging into its black oily earth littered with the broken clay pipes and Bovril jars and highly prized soda bottles from another age, I realized how this ground had once been deemed beyond the pale, a suitable site for the disposal of waste, out of sight and out of mind before the city had gradually caught up with its past. At that dump, in these fields and woods, we learned how to explore and find pleasure in our surroundings, and it feels to me now like the last moment when a generation of young lives could be lived largely out of doors.