excerpt: Birkenhead - A Brown Town

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Pedro and Sinter were from Birkenhead, a strange brown coloured town that used to smell of booze and the exhalations of a million cigarettes, of ash-trays of industry and later on in time, the material of cheap clothes wafting in the air as it hung-up for sale in the towns large market. Brown booze, fags, cheap material, boiling hot-dogs and onions and the merged smell of catering canister sauce and red plastic sauce dispensers. It was a town with an inferiority complex, which in many respects stemmed from its proximity to the popular once busy port of Liverpool which was a stone’s throw away on the other side of the Mersey. Although they were only separated by a mere strip of water, the girls on the Liverpool side would always be dressed like fairy cakes, all ribbons and bows, and suntans and cigarettes. The scruffy looking girls from Birkenhead would look at them with envy, and exaggerate the strength of their diluted Merseyside accents to make up for the misfortune of being born on the wrong side of all of the action.

           Everyone seemed to start smoking in this part of the country around the average and collective age of 9. It was a place where age defied convention. Grandmothers with hands covered in the glimmering sunset colours of eighteen carat gold would blow smoke rings into the sky like teenagers on acid. Ponytails perched on the tops of weary heads, navigating there Giro-pensions around shopping precincts, in their days punctuated with bus stops, and waiting and smoking and waiting and bus stops.

            With the assistance of the mystery cash flow that is the European Fund, Liverpool began to smarten up its image and its act. Weird looking attempts at postmodern architecture growing from the ground at weird angles. 'Oh to defy convention, a little bit more to the right and yes, that will do, now that’s postmodern isn’t it, oh the postmodern, oh it doesn’t look quite right, oh great, it must be right then, oh but there’s no such thing as right, alright, what, you want a fight?' This ‘is’ Liverpool. Don’t you just love the anti-ossifying flow of postmodernity, posteternity, I wonder what would happen to Liverpool if there was such a thing as postmaternity? But the truth was, it always had a lot going for it because it had a population of people that were unpretentious and talkative, talkative and argumentative. Families battled it out but often stayed together, and didn’t care if you were watching them as they slapped there cheeky teenager, or spouse, or boyfriend or girlfriend or neighbour or stranger, or baby in public. It was by all accounts what seemed to be a population that was in dialogue with each other, a populace that interacted. They didn’t just commute around all day in Liverpool; they weren’t just a population of individuals carving there way through the hustle in search of individual pursuits. It was a city that was united.  It was a place that if you glanced through the window of an Indian restaurant on Aigburth Road for example, you might see Alexis Sayle tucking into a vindaloo with his ageing mother.

            And so it was Liverpool that had a big heart, in a world that has lost its way and in many ways, lost its heart, which is why year after year new people visited – Japanese kids – mutton dressed as lamb in 60’s Beatles clothing. There were graduates refusing to return to their snotty places of birth after university, and professionals crawling out of the woodwork en masse to move into the renovated dockland apartments in their attempt to rejuvenate the word ‘trendy.’  

            The brown town on the other side of the Mersey was a different story. Pedro’s Birkenhead was a place of railways and corner pubs, and poverty, and women chatting while sitting on old three piece suites on street corners, chin-wagging their way threw different horizons. It was a more casual kind of place, a downgraded, less glitzy version of Liverpool. It was a place of boxing clubs and fitness centres and of tapping-off inside nightclubs called 'The Pleasure Drome' and 'Atmosphere.' It was a place with an ageing population of bikers and punks and had-beens and head-bangers. It was a place of taxi-cues and pissed people chewing clumsily on burgers and donna kebabs. It was a place at weekends that smelt of the type of freedom that accompanies lack of parental guidance. It was a place where women went to the shops in their slippers and called their dressing gowns ‘house-coats.’

            It was an evolving town with a sense of respectability that was most profoundly witnessed in the Georgian houses that made up Hamilton square, in the pseudo Greek façade of its town hall, places where posh people might have once lived that were now offices for solicitors or other colourless professionals that could afford the high rents. If you closed your eyes and stood at Woodside Ferry Pier and breathed in, you could smell the significance of the place, of its history.  It was the kind of smell that was accompanied by a feeling in the pit of ones stomach. On the surface it would be of salt and sea and seaweed and other estuary delights, but underneath that, if your eyes were closed tight enough, you could see the past, see the story of the place before your eyes, hear the voices of the dead, hear the laughter pour out of the doors of pubs that no longer existed. It was a town of ghosts. It was a big brown ghost town.

            And big things once happened in Birkenhead, and that was the building of big ships. Camel Lairds Shipping Company, the landing strip of work contracts that would put high carbohydrate food on the tables of most of the houses in its shadow closed, and the town seemed to loose its pride, it lowered its chin and its bar prices, and its young dreamed up ways of escaping to places and destinations that they passed each day on the polished windows of Lunn Poly or if they dared Thomas Cook, now that’s evolution for you. Its skyline looked like it had been mined. All that remained were different shades of grey and brown and memories and pockets of postmodern subjugation. It had new ugly architecture, which would have had the architects of the past turning in their graves. And so it was from this brown town that lacked its neighbour’s decadent skyline where the two creators of the paradise of dysfunction met and grew up. Pedro was pleased that he came from the brown side; at least he could look out and see something great when he stood at the perimeter of his existence at Woodside’s Pier. He might have had to live in Birkenhead, but at least he didn’t have to look at its ramshackle skyline and crush his dreams of a better tomorrow.