The Road to Little Dribbling (40 page)

I was thinking about this now because I was on a train from London to Liverpool and I was surrounded by people on cell phones. Behind me, unseen but nearby, a young woman was holding an intense and apparently endless conversation with a friend that appeared to involve saying everything three times: “He’s a knob. He’s a total knob. I’ve told you a million times, Amber, he’s a total knob…I told her, but she wouldn’t listen. She never listens. She never listens to anything…But then that’s just Derek, isn’t it? That’s Derek all over. Derek’s never going to change. He’s a knob…”

Across the aisle, a young woman was having exactly the same conversation but in a Slavic language. Once, I would have been helplessly trapped with these people, but now I can do something about it. I rooted in my rucksack and pulled out a small zippered case containing noise-reduction headphones—the very model I had played with at John Lewis in Cambridge recently. I had told my wife about them and she had bought me a pair as a surprise, as an anniversary present. I really wanted a red sports car, but that’s OK. The headphones are miraculous. It’s like being back in the Britain I used to know. I don’t listen to music or anything recorded. I just enjoy the silence. It’s lovely—like being adrift in outer space.

The woman across the aisle was still talking away but now I saw only silently moving lips. Looking around, I noticed that nearly everyone around me had wires dangling from their ears.

I turned on my laptop. “Installing update 911 of 19,267,” it told me.

So instead I closed my eyes and just drifted through space, like Sandra Bullock in
Gravity,
but calmer. The next thing I knew we were in Liverpool and my installation was nearly complete.

—

I was in Liverpool for a soccer match: Everton v. Manchester City. I can’t pretend that this was an event of huge moment to me, or even necessarily to many people who follow English soccer, but it was a big deal for my son-in-law Chris, who lives and dies for Everton. This is a trifle odd as he grew up two hundred miles away in Somerset. He became an Everton supporter simply because Everton (which I should note is an area of Liverpool) won the first match he ever watched on TV and because he quite liked their blue uniform. (He was ten years old.) I find that endearing and pathetic in roughly equal measure. In all his years of support, he had never seen Everton play at home, so for his birthday his dear wife, my dear daughter, had bought him four tickets to today’s match: for him, his two little boys, and for me. It was going to be a guys’ day out. I was very excited.

Chris and his boys—Finn, aged eight, and Jesse, six—had traveled up from London the day before, so we had arranged to meet in the city center for lunch. I spied them walking toward me up Chapel Street, all three of them dressed, without embarrassment, as if for a competition called “How Many Things Can You Wear That Say ‘Everton’ on Them?” They would easily have won for they were the only people in the center of Liverpool wearing anything at all with “Everton” written on it. You soon discover that Everton Football Club is something of a secret even in its own city.

We had lunch, then took a cab to the grounds, or at least to within about half a mile of the grounds, which is as close as it could get on a match day. Here there were tens of thousands of people dressed in Everton jerseys, scarves, hats, and other tribal regalia—a sight that staggered my two grandsons. These boys live in outer London, more than two hundred miles from Liverpool. Every one of their friends supports a London team like Chelsea or Arsenal. They had never seen another Everton fan before, and now here were forty thousand of them. It was as if they had died and gone to heaven, albeit a heaven populated largely by people with enormous bellies and neck tattoos.

Everton Football Club isn’t actually in Everton. It’s in Walton, a neighboring district full of boarded-up pubs, mean-terraced houses, and vacant lots filled with builders’ rubble. If you do an Internet search for “Walton, Liverpool,” what comes up is a succession of entries like “Two men arrested after stabbing in Walton,” “Off-license in Walton targeted by ram-raiders,” and “Walton burglary gang jailed.” I had never seen an area quite this rough at first hand in Britain. I stayed close to Chris. He’s a London policeman and, more to the point, retired Metropolitan Police Force middleweight boxing champion. The boys and I held his jacket.

Everton’s ground is Goodison Park, which is not merely the most venerable stadium in English soccer, but in the world. It was built in 1892 and is evidently the oldest surviving purpose-built soccer ground anywhere. This sounds charming but what it means in practice is that even places like Liberia and Burkina Faso have more modern, up-to-date stadiums. Still, because of its cherished history, we assumed reverential countenances as we entered the stadium and found our way to the tiny vise-like numbered spaces that are called seats. They were unbelievably uncomfortable and so narrow that I could sit on only one buttock at a time, but eventually both cheeks became so numb that I lost any active awareness of discomfort.

And so the match began. I do love a live sporting match. I had brought some small binoculars and I spent much of the first half looking at all the peripheral things that aren’t shown to you when you watch on television, like what the goalkeepers do when play is at the other end of the field (stand there with their hands at their sides and occasionally jump up and down once or twice, then do some neck rolls, then stand some more) or what the players do when the ball is nowhere near them. I particularly liked watching the linesmen run sideways up and down the sidelines, as if imitating a giraffe.

I noticed, as I have often noticed at English soccer matches, that I was the only person in the stadium enjoying himself. The rest of the spectators, on both sides, were perpetually stressed and dismayed. A man behind me was simply full of despair.

“Now why did he do that?” he would say. “What was he
thinking
? Why didn’t he
pass
it?”

His companion seemed to have some issues with eighteenth-century German metaphysics because he kept saying over and over, “Fucking Kant.” I am not quite sure how he was relating this to the actions before us, but every time Everton failed to score he called them a “load of fucking Kants.”

“Oh, now why did they do that?” said the despairing man.

“Because they’re fucking Kants,” replied his partner bitterly.

At halftime the score was 0–0. Naively I said to Chris, “Well, you must be reasonably happy with that,” for Everton was the underdog, and he said: “Are you kidding? We had
so
many missed chances. We were just rubbish.” He looked wretched.

In the second half, Manchester City scored a goal, leaving us sitting in suicidal silence, but then Everton came back and drew level and it was like Mardi Gras. When the referee blew the final whistle with the score 1–1, I thought honor had been satisfied, but we were gloomy once more at our end of the pitch.

I chose to look on the bright side.

“It is, after all, just a game,” I pointed out philosophically.

“Fucking Kant,” said the man behind me, still philosophical himself.

—

In the evening, Chris and the boys and I walked around the city center and were dazzled, as all visitors to Liverpool are these days, for the whole place has been practically rebuilt. At the heart of the city now is the Liverpool One development—forty-two acres of stylish new apartments, restaurants, cinemas, hotels, department stores, and shops. It is like a new city. We dined at a Pizza Express restaurant and generally partied wildly, as four guys on the town do, until about 8:30 p.m., when we returned to the hotel and called it a night.

After breakfast the next morning, I walked with Chris and the boys to Lime Street station, where they were catching a train back to London. I had more of Liverpool I wished to see and walked out past the Anglican cathedral to a neighborhood known as the Welsh Streets.

John Prescott, a voluble and mystifyingly successful politician who was elected deputy leader during the last Labour government, had a mad plan, called the Pathfinder Initiative, to tear down four hundred thousand homes, mostly Victorian and Edwardian terraced houses, in the North of England. Prescott claimed, on no evidence, that house prices there were too low because of an oversupply of stock. Mercifully, Prescott didn’t have the brains or focus to complete the plan, but he still managed to spend £2.2 billion of public money and bulldoze thirty thousand houses before he was stopped. So at precisely the time that one part of the government was talking about the need to build hundreds of thousands of new homes, another part of the same government was trying to tear down as many of them as it could. You simply can’t get madder than that.

Nowhere were Prescott’s demented ambitions more keenly pursued than on Merseyside where forty-five hundred houses, nearly all comfortably lived in and doing no harm, were compulsorily purchased and swept away. Amazingly, the local council is still trying to tear down homes, mostly in the Welsh Streets district (so called because the streets have Welsh names) on the edge of Princes Park. It is a neighborhood of snug and settled terraced houses of the sort that people pay fortunes for in Fulham or Clapham in London. But here the houses are empty, their doors and windows blanked off with metal plates, as they await a needless destruction. It is a seriously dispiriting sight. So I strolled back to town through the university quarter, where the housing is pleasant and appreciated, and Liverpool doesn’t seem like a city run by idiots.

—

I returned to Lime Street station to catch a train to Birkenhead Park, across the Mersey. I couldn’t see from the departures board how to get there, so I asked at the information desk and the young man who served me was an American, which fairly astounded me. We ended up talking about the Chicago White Sox, which I believe may be a first at a British Rail information booth. He pointed me in the right direction, and twenty minutes later I was at the main entrance to Birkenhead Park.

It is a typical large Victorian city park, with playgrounds and playing fields, some woodlands, a picturesque lake with a boathouse and rustic bridge. Couples walked, dogs and children scampered, men in shorts chased after a rolling ball on a soccer field. It was a pleasant, wholly conventional urban park on a Sunday morning, but Birkenhead has one special feature: it is the oldest city park in the world.

It was designed by the great Joseph Paxton, former head gardener at Chatsworth, and laid out to resemble the grounds of a stately home. It opened in 1847 on 125 acres of former wasteland. It is almost impossible to imagine now what a novelty this was. There were parks of a sort already, mostly in London, mostly on royal land like Kensington Gardens and Regent’s Park, but admission was limited, tacitly or even sometimes explicitly, to people of an elevated class. Birkenhead was purpose-built for the amusement of all people, and it was an immediate success.

Four years after it opened, Frederick Law Olmsted, an American journalist, was on a walking tour of the north of England when he stopped at a Birkenhead bakery and the proprietor urged him to go and have a look at their new park. Olmsted was so taken with what he found that he went back to America and became a landscape architect. He designed Central Park in New York City, then went on to build more than a hundred other parks all over North America. So this was the template from which all other public parks are descended, rather a remarkable thought.

—

Back at Lime Street station, I boarded a train for Manchester. We trundled through a featureless landscape of boggy-looking farms and worn-out suburbs. You would never think it (I was having a day of “you would never think its”) but this was perhaps the most historic stretch of railway on the planet, where the very first passenger trains ever ran, on thirty-three miles of track linking Liverpool with Manchester.

My interest was to do with a forgotten nineteenth-century politician named William Huskisson, who was once widely esteemed—at one point he was even tipped to be prime minister—but is remembered now chiefly for being the first person in history killed by a train. The occasion for this emphatic milestone was the official opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the line I was on right now, on September 15, 1830. Eight hundred of the most eminent people in Europe, led by Britain’s prime minister, the Duke of Wellington, came to Liverpool for the entirely novel experience of riding a man-made conveyance at speed. They were loaded, chattering, onto eight separate trains.

Near the halfway point, at Newton-le-Willows, Huskisson’s train stopped to take on water. Most of the passengers got off to stretch their legs and chat. As they stood alongside the tracks, George Stephenson’s
Rocket,
the fastest and most famous train of its day, came hurtling toward them on a parallel line at twenty miles an hour. It takes a little imagination now to conceive of people being confused and put to flight by the approach of a train at twenty miles an hour, but of course they had never seen a machine moving laterally and it left them a touch disoriented, Huskisson most of all. He moved about in contrary directions, and somehow managed to get himself between the train and where it was going, with predictably grisly consequences.

Dreadfully mangled, he was lifted onto the train that had just struck him and rushed to Eccles, the nearest town. As the
Rocket
sped onward, Huskisson had the satisfaction, if he could feel any, of knowing that he and his fellow passengers were now traveling faster than any humans had ever gone before—thirty-five miles an hour. Huskisson was taken to the vicarage at Eccles, where he was attended by a local doctor, but his injuries were too severe and he died that evening.

A few hundred yards beyond Newton-le-Willows station, on the right-hand side as you travel toward Manchester, is a memorial to Huskisson, fixed to the wall of a little service building, at the spot where he met his tragic fate. The memorial is only visible from a passing train, and you have to look out carefully for it. I watched as the monument flashed past—much too fast to read—very possibly the only person on the train who knew the history of this line, even more possibly the only one who cared, very certainly the only one who wasn’t listening to music or shouting at a child.