And it is by personal associations alone that those secrets can be surprised. Directories carry us a little way: they tell us that two cabmen, a draper’s assistant, a cotton-porter, a stoker, a bricklayer, and a carter, live in that half-dozen liver-coloured brick boxes; and the knowledge certainly invests the place (it is a street in Anfield) with a tinge of actuality. But there are so many other things we require to know about that bricklayer—the colour of his wife’s eyes, for instance; whether he prefers hot-pot or Irish-stew; whether his youngest has yet had the measles. At Sefton Park, at Blundellsands, qualities analogous to these are easily discoverable, even by the outsider; but here they are hidden away beneath an unfathomable monotony. To discover the romance, to taste the secret drama that makes Anfield and Everton and Cabbage Hall habitable, it would be necessary to live in each of them in turn, to have an initiating friend in every road.... Thus, in a little street behind Netherfield Road there live a couple of dear old maiden ladies, whom the progress of education has prevented from teaching and taught to starve, and whose training has made them determined to starve respectably, in private; and knowledge of them and of their drama has made, for me, that street a shade less cryptic. And then, again, over in Edge Hill there is a little bed-sitting-room overlooking a stale back-yard where I used to go once a week to hear the Kosmos put in order by a poet who wrote bad verses, but quoted good ones. To the outsider Edge Hill must seem as inscrutably monotonous as its neighbours. But I know better. It revealed itself to me, in those days, as a wonderful avenue to all manner of tender and high-hearted possibilities; and I still recall evenings spent in the Botanic Gardens over there, with my poet mouthing some splendid scarlet thing from Whitman or Shelley in the afterglow, when the place seemed positively surcharged with vital and dramatic loveliness.
§ 8.
But revealing experiences of this sort are inevitably limited, and, lacking any great store of them, one is content to fall back on broad summaries, to say that this crepuscular region stretches from Anfield and Everton in the north, below Newsham Park, through Edge Hill, and so towards Wavertree in the south. It has its degrees of neutrality, of course—amenities creep occasionally in—but for the most part it remains a region whose intimate meanings are concealed by its monotony, but whose monotony gives it in the mass a deep and terrible significance.
And below this tract, gravely introducing its later passages to the City, there marches a dull, highly respectable quarter of streets and squares (rare episodes, these latter, in Liverpool), of which, again, one can only protest that it is really much more impressive than it seems. There is Abercromby Square, where the Bishop lives; there is Oxford Street, upon which the shade of Aubrey Beardsley is reported to make an occasional shrinking descent; there are Catherine Street, Bedford Street, Chatham Street, all earnestly pleading for geranium boxes; and Rodney Street, where many doctors and one small green slab combine to surround Gladstone’s birthplace with an appropriate atmosphere of dignity. And so at length to the verge of the hill that cups the City, with the Philharmonic Hall making one part of it a place, on winter nights, of ringing hoofs and thronging audiences, and the University, in another, looking gravely down upon the rooftops of the tense and vivid City which it is its duty by scholarship to serve.
And on the other side of that dumb territory there always sweep the suburbs that have the green fields for their neighbours: the suburbs that here delicately woo the country and there vulgarly accost it, and now stop short at the sight of it with a gorgeous affectation of surprise, and now stealthily seduce it into all manner of morbid episodes; but whose essential business is always, by this device or by that, to lure the fields into the state of urbanity, to establish fresh colonies and receptacles for the constantly swelling mass that seethes behind. Cabbage Hall, the northernmost, plays the part of stealthy seducer, dribbling out among the fields in colourless disorder, entrapping them in the dreariest fashion, without a hint of glamour. Next comes West Derby, a group of clean-faced cottages standing about its car-terminus like smocked village children gaping prettily at a lurid visitor, its neatly dignified church and deer-scattered park reflecting the outburst of ripe, authentic aristocracy that makes the country-side beyond so unexpectedly, so exotically, old English. And after West Derby come Knotty Ash and Old Swan: the first, in one’s pocket vision of it, a jolly stage-setting of taverns with farm-carts before them, of tiny, twinkling pinafores pouring out of a village school, of a neat spire (a property it doesn’t, however, do to investigate too closely) rising above a grove of realistic trees; the second—suffering in places from a bad attack of the scarlet-fever which is now ravaging domestic architecture—leading to a long surge of ambiguous ways and broken ends that spills out finally among the fields near Wavertree. The country on which it breaks has qualities of richness; little coils of woodland lie pleasantly among leaning meadows; and right in the midst of it, like a fleck of pure foam far cast by the muddy wave of the town, lie the lawns and gardens of Calderstone, the latest of Liverpool’s parks.
CALDERSTONES PARK.
§ 9.
For parkland proper, however, it is needful to return to the smoke. Wavertree lies at the end of the Smithdown Road bone of the fan. The next bone pierces that Bloomsbury-like district of highly respectable squares, and so comes out upon the tail of a long regiment of trees making a fine effort to live up to their reputation of being a boulevard. This is Princes Avenue, and Princes Avenue (familiarity breeding uncontempt) is sometimes spoken of in the same breath as Berlin’s Unter den Linden. But although the conjunction is scarcely wise, this broad way of trees and churches makes a wholly pleasant approach to the suavest of Liverpool’s inner suburbs; and it leads, too, to a deftly-handled space of open air, where it is certainly possible to think of the Champs Elysées without a blush. Sefton Park, although it may not serve so deeply human a purpose as, say, Stanley Park in the north, is certainly quite the most perfectly fashioned of Liverpool’s open spaces; and although it is the largest, it never commits the mistake that large parks sometimes make of endeavouring to appear like a piece of virginal country. It is always mannered, self-conscious, full of effects that are in the right sense “picturesque”; and the sheep that feed in one part of it do not seem much less deliberately decorative in intention than the peacocks that everywhere admirably strut and flower. To find one of these peacocks (the white one preferably) self-consciously posing on a meadow of rhythmical daffodils is to discover the true spirit of park artistry symbolized with absolute perfection.
Eminently Parisian in the morning, when the nurse-girls bring their charges here, and gossip and read and scold and perfunctorily play ball precisely as the bonnes do in the Champs Elysées, Sefton Park grows unmistakably British in the sacred hour that lapses between tea and dinner. For then young athletes like L——, and Hebes like our heroine, fill all its tennis-courts with a white-limbed energy.... It is not exactly a white-limbed energy that one observes in the adjoining bowling-green; and its laborious, stooping, shirt-sleeved figures may conceivably be regarded as striking rather a dissonant note amongst the clean-cut decorative activities which surround it. But none the less the sociologist in one eagerly welcomes and commemorates them. For their apparition is another evidence of that coalescence of strata with strata which is one of the features of suburb life just now. They mean that laborious, stooping, shirt-sleeved figures can live nowadays in the once exclusive neighbourhood hereabout; can demand, for their own especial pleasures, some share of the glittering accessory with which this suave neighbourhood once rather royally provided itself.