Great Howard Street, Derby Road, and Rimrose Road, the three nominal sections of the first of these plangent ways, are tipped, as I say, by Seaforth, and to reach Seaforth they have to bore their way through the dense landscape of warehouses and timber-yards that lies behind the northern docks. But out beyond Seaforth, through Waterloo, Blundellsands, Altcar (its rifle-ranges crackling like a coffee-mill), Formby, Freshfield, and Birkdale, that other humming river of electricity, the most western arm of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway, whose course the road from the first pretty closely follows, drains (or, rather, feeds) a constantly spreading, bungalow-saturated district of bonne bourgeoisie. It is all very prosperous, this new rubicund neighbourhood: sand-hills and wide shore spread between it and the sea; half a dozen golf-links accompany its brisk march by the railway-side; and that march can really scarcely be regarded as completed until the railway terminates, and plutocracy flames up in a last supreme outburst, twenty miles away from Liverpool, among the bathing-vans and pierrots of Southport: for Southport, too, in spite of plutocratic hauteur, is being rapidly induced by locomotion to play the part of Liverpool’s accessory. And Southport presents, anyhow, a series of little paradoxes in appearance upon which one could desire to linger. It is, for instance, at once the chosen home of countless millionaires, and the chosen resort of countless cheap day-trippers. (Although that, indeed, if all local tales be true, is less fundamental a paradox than might perhaps be supposed.) Antitheses—at any rate superficial antitheses—are in consequence engagingly plentiful, and at night the place crowns this distracting effect by assuming all the airs and graces of the Continent. Lights thickly sown among the prolonged verdure of its central boulevard, a red-coated band and endless promenaders, little tables beneath the trees—yes, it is all, to the eye, very perfectly arranged.... And then, suddenly, disastrously, there emerges the slow accent, the toilsome facetiousness, of Chowbent.... But it is still very charming to have so many of the materials of illusion so ingeniously provided; and one looks back at evenings spent there, discreetly companioned, with a very quick tinge of pleasure.
As for Seaforth itself, the first link in this chain of seaside settlements—well, it, naturally, is the least personable of them all. “The slums of the future,” say the pessimists sententiously; and already a notable greyness begins to creep over its tightly packed workmen’s cottages. It seems especially deplorable, for the shore of the place (unbelievably peppered in the summer heats with naked pinkish youngsters) is clean and fair enough, New Brighton glitters pleasantly across the estuary, the Welsh hills heave up in the distance, and the great ships of the world promenade before its parlour windows. A little further along the coast, towards Waterloo, the Marconi station leans upon its tall central mast like a sentry on his spear, and listens to the cries of other great ships fighting in the clutch of some blind Atlantic storm.
Not far away, and even more conspicuous, a high, livid convent, many-windowed and forbidding, rises up out of the sand; and on its flat roof, remote against the sky, you may sometimes see the good nuns pacing to and fro together, or leaning solitarily against the wind. They must survey a bold and various prospect. On the one hand the level floor of the sea, here dusked, there silvered, marbled by voyaging clouds, runs out until it meets a wide pure sky. Poised at the western extreme of the long horizon blade, Anglesey rests like a sapphire, and the hem of all the air that sweeps away to the south is braided thereafter by the woven hills of Wales. From them the eye stoops successively to the shimmering aura of the Dee, to the embossed interspace of the Wirral, to the bright-mailed river down below, and so to the louring masses of the City, ranging darkly out towards the east, a creation more terribly unhuman than even the mountains or the sea. Lastly, there is the scaly back of the suburb lying beneath, and, beyond it, unfolding between that spreading blackness in the south and a rim of purple woodland in the north, a fair carpet of meadowland and cornfield runs clear and away. A rare white farm or so, set in that green tranquillity, invest it with a kind of homely joy. And the tender outlines of a sister convent near at hand, rising gravely among the serene devices of its trees, touch that joy with a patience as of evening.
§ 3.
But although it thus provides a very gracious incident in the landscape, that sister convent, the Convent of Our Good Shepherd down at Ford, plays no small part in increasing the dolour of the second of our great northward-driving roadways. For its annexe, hidden among those trees, is one of the chief of Liverpool’s Catholic cemeteries, and since this second “bone” (Scotland Road, Stanley Road, Linacre Road, are its successive names) passes through the very heart of the Irish quarter of Liverpool, it follows that a grim pageant of rococo hearses, plumes, and jaded mourners passes constantly along this thoroughfare every Sunday in the year. It certainly stands in no need of these aids to sobriety. Quite on its own merits it succeeds in being the most profoundly depressing highway in all Liverpool. It plunges, the moment it leaves the City, into the tawdry litter of shops that edge the northern slum, and it is defamed, all thereabout, by the sour sights and sounds and smells (the sights and sounds and smells which we are to investigate in the next chapter) which the northern slum exudes. It runs, after that, along the ragged fringe of the grey curtain of shoddy streets that droops drearily down from the stooping shoulder of Everton. And it winds up, at Linacre, with an altogether abominable jangle of raw street-ends, waste lands, gasometers, and factories. Its solitary moment of even comparative cheerfulness, indeed, is to be set down to the credit of Bootle. At Bootle you catch a glimpse of a couple of parks; a broad avenue—trim, well-treed, and topped by an elegant spire—sweeps proudly across your track; and signs of free-stone and prosperity are not wanting. Lacking that respite, this arrow-straight four-mile stretch from the Old Haymarket to the terminus at Linacre Road would infallibly induce neurasthenia.
OLD HAYMARKET
Not that Bootle ever receives the slightest acknowledgment for this fine alleviating effort. It is a curious thing, but no Liverpolitan to whom you may ever speak will permit himself to refer to Bootle except in tones of an amused contempt. In part, no doubt, this is a result of Bootle’s obstinate, exotic retention of her independence. In spite of the identity of interests, in spite of the physical absorption which long ago took place, Bootle still clings vehemently to her separate Boroughship; and not all the engines of suasion or attack (and both sorts have been energetically applied) that Liverpool can level against her seem able to encompass the surrender. Vividly exceptional, breaking up, at any rate theoretically, the co-ordination that would else be almost universal, she still adheres to all the formulæ of a separate social and municipal existence: appointing her own Mayor, lodging him in an impressive Town Hall, making him the hub of a brightly revolving wheel of emphatically local sociabilities. And Liverpool, incensed, no doubt, by this gross transgression of the physical and sentimental laws that rule her life, responds with a dole of contempt.