Five miles down the west bank of the River Mersey was Rock Ferry, a yellow and green ferry station made of wood and girders. It was the sort of grand Victorian structure the British were eager to demolish and replace with a building that did not need repainting — something made of corrugated plastic sheets bolted to iron pipes. That very day, the Kensington Town Hall in London had been pulled down, for although it was a fine example of a mid-Victorian baroque façade, the Tory Council said it was worth only half a million pounds. The site, they claimed, was worth eight times that to a property developer for a bombproof, high-density, Manhattan-style condo. So much for the Victorian baroque. Kensington needed cash, the councilors said. "We can't afford to be sentimental." It seemed only a matter of time before such a lovely building as this ferry landing was bulldozed into the river.
Liverpool — it was obvious from the ferry — was full of elegant old buildings. They were heavy but graceful. The city had three cathedrals and many church spires, and just as many open spaces from the blasts of German bombs. (We live in a time of short memories. A German tourist in Liverpool told me that he found the city rather wrecked and depressing — he much preferred Scotland.) Liverpool was not pleasant — no city was — but it was not bad. It was elderly, venerable, tough, somewhat neglected, and it had a very exposed look, because it was a city on the sea, one of the few large cities in Britain that was subjected to ocean gales. That was the Liverpool look: weatherbeaten.
I had expected it to be frightening: it was known as a city of riots. But it struck me as good-humored, and inhabited by many people as alien as I was, living more or less as they pleased in what had once been extremely fine houses — the Somali Social Centre was in a cracked Georgian house. It was the most Irish city in Britain, and so the most Catholic. The Pope had just visited and been wildly welcomed. The papal flags, yellow and white, were still fluttering from the beer signs on public houses and on streets down which the "pope-mobile" (it was bulletproof, in spite of its silly name) had passed.
Emboldened by the apparent calm, I decided to walk from the pier head to the black district of Toxteth, which everyone called Liverpool Eight. The previous summer at about this time the district had been in flames. Most of Liverpool's forty thousand blacks lived in Liverpool Eight.
I met a lady tramp. She was more gray than white, about sixty-odd, and had the self-indulgent look of the drunken duchesses who were pictured in the society pages of the Tatler. She wore a woolly hat. She was pulling a loaded cart and had a dog on a leash. I had never met a lady tramp with a dog. I had the impression that this was her whole household on the cart — all her clothes and furnishings. There was a stink in the cart that may have been food. Her name was Mary Wilson. She quickly pointed out that she was not the same Mary Wilson who was married to a former British Prime Minister.
She said she would show me the way to Toxteth if I pulled her cart for a spell. I did so and nearly wrenched my arm, the thing was so heavy. She said she had picked up some bottles. There was money in bottles if you knew where to flog them.
She took a blackened pipe from under her rags and puffed it.
"Like Harold," she said. "I enjoy my pipe."
She meant Sir Harold Wilson, the former Prime Minister.
Mary's uncle and aunt had gone to the United States. They had intended to settle, but they had returned to Liverpool.
"There was a depression on at the time," she said. "Like this one." And puffed her pipe. It smelled of burning rags. "We'll never see the end of this one."
She had the Liverpool knack of being able to speak without moving her lips.
"What do you want in Toxteth?" she asked.
"Just looking."
"They had riots there," she said. "They bayned the place."
"Who did?"
"The kids!" She didn't say blacks.
Liverpool used to be peaceable, she said. It wasn't peaceable anymore. It was a blewdy disgrace. It was dangerous.
But it did not look disgraceful to me. It was better than the corresponding part of New York City, near the docks in Brooklyn, but had the same bricks and the same pong of dirt and oil and old iron.
Mary Wilson finally shuffled away. Her little dog's claws scratched on the sidewalk like matches being struck as he trotted beside her.
Mr. Duddy, a street-sweeper I met at the corner of Windsor Street, said, "Toxteth. Go to the cinema that's bayned to the ground, and when you coom to Princes Road, tayn right."
But I was still smiling at him.
He became shifty. "What is it?"
"What was it like to sweep up after the riots?" I asked.
"Shocking," Mr. Duddy said.
"Give me an example."
"They baynt a car," he said.
"A lot of property was burned, I understand."
"They tried to bayn a skule," he said.
"But the whole place was in flames."
"They was poodles of petrol," he said.
"You must have seen some amazing things."
Mr. Duddy thought a moment, then said, "I saw a pule of blood."
I walked on, down Princes Road. It was shabby gentility mixed with unobtrusive ruin. There was something gothic about lovely old buildings half-burned to the ground, or turned into brothels (surely doorbells labeled Fiona and Janine and Miss Tress meant that?). Loud music came from the open windows of the Nigeria Social Club, and at the Sierra Leone Social Club there were fat blacks in bowler hats and shabby business suits on the steps, drinking beer out of cans. I assumed that the "social club" was a way of evading Britain's strict drinking hours, and the names suggested not racism, but rather nationalism or even tribalism; I could not imagine anyone from Upper Volta or Nigeria being welcome in the Ghana Social Club.
Princes Road was a wide boulevard lined with trees. I followed it down to Granby, counting policemen — eight in a matter of minutes. They walked in pairs, carrying steel-tipped canes about a yard long, the sort of weapon that usually has a poetic name, like "wog-basher." The policemen gave the impression of friendliness, and deliberately chatted with bystanders and small children, seeming to ignore the graffiti that said pigs out and Why are coppers like bananas — coz they yellow, they bent, and they come in bunches.
The shops on side streets had either boarded-up windows or else steel-mesh grates, and the same grates sheathed the public phoneboxes. I stepped into one of these phoneboxes and called the Central Police Station and asked the information officer how many black policemen there were in Liverpool.
"Who wants to know?" he asked.
"Just a curious American," I said.
"I should have known," he said. "I'll tell you something — Liverpool is nothing like America. I know about the trouble you've got over there, and compared to that, this is nothing. I could give you figures—"
"For starters, how many black policemen?"
"Twelve colored officers," he said. And the entire force was forty-six hundred.
"Twelve!" I laughed and hung up.
And the "colored" was interesting, too. Policemen were "colored," convicted criminals were "West Indian," and purse-snatchers were "nig-nogs." But when a black runner came first in a race against foreigners, he was "English." If he came second, he was "British." If he lost, he was "colored." If he cheated, he was "West Indian."
I kept walking. The riots had left marks on Liverpool Eight that were visible a year later: the broken windows had not been fixed, there were signs of scorching on walls and doors, and temporary barricades had been left in place. And there were posters advertising lectures by members of the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party — very angry lectures, judging by the titles ("Fight Back!" "We Demand Action!" and so forth). And yet this area was not the ruin I had expected. I had been promised a wasteland, but it was no more than fine decaying houses and rotting odors.