§ 12.
I have just spoken of the stony slopes of the Wirral. The stones, of course, are houses, and the houses form themselves into suburbs, and those suburbs troop all about the coast, and pour inland, and tend to fill all the green peninsula with pleasant cubicles. But of those suburbs and all the tranquil spaces they lead to and enclose I must not now attempt to speak. Their qualities are many: river and sea, heather, champaign, woven coppice, and swart fir-wood grant them a procession of aspects no mere generalization could include. Port Sunlight set out as though for an old English festival; Eastham with its woods and booths; New Ferry and Rock Ferry, the stony slopes that lead at length to Birkenhead; Birkenhead itself, a march played like a dirge; Seacombe, Egremont, New Brighton, promenade-linked, wide-shored, flickering out into all manner of watering-place delights; Leasowe, whose sea-beaten coppices are wonderful in spring with ranks of praying white and hymning purple; Hoylake, with its famous links and golfing fishermen; Thurstaston, with its legendary hills and dear memories; Heswall, sunset-saturated among its heaths; Prenton, with its pine-woods and its water-tower; Oxton, mellow and meticulous upon its height: so do I content myself with naming them, and, so naming them, add one word of admiration for the dainty fashion in which, in her green chamber, Wirral makes the beds for so many of the workers in the streets across the way.
BIDSTON HILL.
But there is one place in the Wirral about which I must inevitably add another word. Both practically and sentimentally, indeed, Bidston Hill belongs to Liverpool: practically because it is the property of the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board, and because its Pharos plays so large a part in directing the courses of the fleets; sentimentally—well, sentimentally for a dozen excellent good reasons. It would be from here, no doubt, in the old days, that the traveller from the south would catch his first glimpse of the River and the hamlet; it is from here that generation after generation of townsfolk have come to see their City in its bulk; it is here still that they bring the good stranger, hoping secretly that he will find their Liverpool a rather wonderful and alluring sort of place. And certainly it is from here, among this almond-scented gorse, that Liverpool builds up most perfectly into a visible entity. The City and its outposts draw easily together; the Dock Board Building makes an ivory nucleus; and Walton Church on the left, and Mossley Hill Church on the right, seem, in actuality, as they are in essence, but two organic incidents in the great design of which it forms the centre. The bird-song and the dumbness, the green spaces and the grey, the hid tragedies, the fair buildings, the lavish, roaring ways, are now merged wonderfully together, and, in their fusion, form one supreme attribute, nameless because it is unhuman. Smoke-scarves of her own weaving and vapours of the air binding her and her children together, Liverpool broods there in the sunshine, sole and indivisible, a splendid seaward-facing Presence. And the River flames at her feet.
CHAPTER V
THE SLUMS
§ 1.
She couches there like a vast Presence, seaward-facing but inly brooding, and, indeed, it is profoundly true that the remote adventures she surveys draw much of their range and splendour from the darkness of her private dreams. For in a manner much more direct and unescapable than those dumb grey regions in the east, these black abysses of her underworld are intimately bound up with the chief sources of her efficiency and power. It is their main purpose to provide the human fulcrum demanded by those monstrous levers at the Docks, and the strange motions of those engines are of a nature that inevitably leave the flesh hideously excoriated and crushed. The bedraggled humans whom we saw running hither and thither among the unhuman silences and uproars are drawn almost wholly from the Slums, and it is, quite undisguisedly, the incalculable necessities of those silences and uproars that have condemned them to the slums and kept them prisoned there.