Chapter One: The Pool of Life
In the private storybook of her head this trip...was a return to
the mire of childhood; a reminder not of blissful, careless years, but of
an anxious, blinkered state from which adulthood had liberated her.
And Liverpool had been that state's metropolis: a city of perpetual
dusk, where the air smelled of cold smoke and a colder river.
When she thought of it she was a child again, and frightened of dreams.
Clive Barker, Weaveworld
Early in the twentieth century, one of our great thinkers, wounded by depression, found healing in a dream. His 'black and opaque' emotions took physical form as he walked the streets of a foreign city, grey with soot and dirt. 'It was night, and winter, and dark, and raining.' His footsteps wound out of a harbour and into the 'real city...up above', which was arranged radially around 'a broad square dimly illuminated by street lights, into which many streets converged'. At the centre of the square, and the city, waited revelation: 'a round pool, and in the middle of it a small island. While everything round about was obscured by rain, fog, smoke, and dimly lit darkness, the little island blazed with sunlight. On it stood a single tree, a magnolia, in a shower of reddish blossoms. It was as though the tree stood in the sunlight and were at the same time the source of light.'
The dreamer was Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung. From this poignant night-vision of a bleak but ultimately redeeming city emerged 'a first inkling of my personal myth' and his theory of the 'collective unconscious'. He awoke not only from his sleep, but also from his depression: 'I had had a vision of unearthly beauty, and that was why I was able to live at all.'
The city of Carl Jung's dream was Liverpool. He called it 'the pool of life'.
Fabled in the nineteenth century as the 'City of Ships', the dream and the reality of Liverpool are linked inextricably with water. One of England's principal ports an apex of the slave triangle and the cotton triangle Liverpool is located on the River Mersey, three miles inland from the Irish Sea. The natural gateway for the agriculture and industry of Lancashire, it prospered during the Victorian expansion; but despite its wealthy merchants and the splendour of their Georgian homes and magnificent churches, Liverpool was and is a working-class town.
The docks and landing stages on the tideless harbour of the Mersey once occupied seven miles of river frontage, and were filled with Alfred Holt's blue funnelled steamships and transports, ferries and dredges, the boats from Ireland and the transatlantic liners of Cunard and P&O and the Harrison Line. On the western bank of the river were the busy docks of Birkenhead, home of the Laird shipbuilding yard, famous for its battleships and passenger liners. The maritime trade brought heavy industry shipbuilders, repair stations, steel mills, chemical works, automobile plants; and what Charles Dickens had described as one of England's most beautiful cities was shadowed by industrialization. The destruction inflicted by Luftwaffe bombers during the Second World War and the dulling hand of time sent Liverpool into decline. The shipping industry shifted to the Southampton Docks, and the factories fell victim to low capital investment and labour unrest.
By the 1970s, Liverpool was a working-class town without any work; and when Clive Barker wrote his autobiographical and autumnal novel Weaveworld (1987), he invoked its spectre: 'Once this waterway had been busy with ships, arriving weighed down with their cargo and riding high as they headed for faraway. Now, it was empty. The docks silted up, the wharfs and warehouses idle. Spook City; fit only for ghosts.'
Today, Liverpool seems a very good place to come from; its population, estimated at 450,000, is ageing and declining and departing. The city centre is dark and imposing, and its two great churches, the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King and the massive Anglican Cathedral, tower like artifacts of an ancient civilization. There is a third, and quite different, cathedral located on Matthew Street, where a rough-and-tumble beat club, the Cavern, was once the venue for a rock-and-roll band known as the Beatles. Demolished in the 1970s, the Cavern has been rebuilt in honour of the city's new industry: tourism. The mighty seaport no longer trades on shipping, but with its brief flirtation with global attention and a hundred metres of street.
As working people, Liverpudlians are hard and hearty, many of them descended from sailors and Irish emigrants. One certain way to escape the docks and the factories was popular entertainment and sports; and the city is known for its rock stars and comedians the wit of the scouser is mythic as well as legends of the football field (Ian St. John), the boxing ring (John Conteh) and the stage (Rex Harrison).
The Beatles, like others before them and since, left Liverpool and never really returned. But their music did return, time and again, evoking its landmarks, some real, others imagined including the stretch of blacktopped road known as Penny Lane. It was there, on Penny Lane twenty years before John Lennon and Paul McCartney immortalized the street in song that music brought two Liverpudlians together, to find their own private island in the pool of life.
Near Penny Lane there was a barber (Bioletti's) and a banker and, yes, even a fireman with a clean machine, but there was also an imposing old family home called Cadby Hall, which in 1946 housed the Wavertree Community Centre. Operated by a sometime editor of the Shanghai Times, the Community Centre was a social club with a coffee bar no alcohol was allowed where servicemen returning from the War could meet and mingle, find new friends and, perhaps, even lovers.