THE ALBERT DOCK.
For it is not that the wage of a dock-labourer is insufficient to grant life its decencies. It would, on the contrary, be quite possible for a dock-labourer, constantly employed, to live in one of the suburbs—out, say, at Seaforth—and come to the wharves each day by electric car. But the majority of these men are not constantly employed, and much of that inconstancy would seem to be inevitable. Ships come, ships go, and the tide of labour waxes and wanes as ceaselessly as the tides about it, and vastly more capriciously. And thus not more than twenty-five per cent. of these workers receive a full and constant wage; quite fifty per cent. average less than one-half; and fully a quarter are fortunate if they are permitted to work a couple of days a week. For the greater number of these ministers to Liverpool’s efficiency, then, the Slums, obviously, are inevitable. Equally inevitably, the Slums form a topographical annexe to the Docks, a hinterland behind its gates. Out of the bodies of the battered and congested people who crowd there Liverpool contrives a suave unguent, more dreadful than adipocere, which enables the great ships to slide so smoothly to their berths.
§ 2.
That, then, is the first broad feature of Liverpool’s poverty—the frankness and completeness with which it is involved in the processes which grant her all her wealth. I have already spoken of its physical distribution: two dirty smears, one on either hand of the clean-swept central spaces. Of the two, the northern is the larger; and together they probably contain some six thousand adults and some thirteen thousand children. Of these (and this is the second and more interior peculiarity), the majority are either Irish or of Irish descent.[5] It follows, therefore, that here alone in Liverpool do you get a specific dialect. They speak a bastard brogue: a shambling, degenerate speech of slipshod vowels and muddied consonants—a cast-off clout of a tongue, more debased even than Whitechapel Cockney, because so much more sluggish, so much less positive and acute. It follows, too, that the ruling religion of these quarters is Roman Catholicism. There are about a dozen Catholic churches actually in the Slums, and to pass suddenly into one of them out of the stench and uproar of some dishevelled court is to taste again, in a very peculiar measure, the sweet, rich silence that has so often broken on one’s palate in the towns and villages of the Continent. Here, as on the Continent, too, the people slip in and out all day long, genuflecting, sitting in apathetic huddles, going back once more to their sorrowful outer world. And you constantly see the figures of priests moving to and fro among the lanes and alleys.
[5] The northern Slum forms a large part of the only English constituency returning a Nationalist Member to the House.
§ 3.
It would be an easy matter to add to this list of the region’s peculiarities: to speak of its food—chiefly bread and tea, with, upon occasion, the viler parts of pig; of its queer parasitic industries; of its dress, its habit of early marriage, its extravagant fecundity. But to do this would be simply to repeat, with a difference, that oldest and unhappiest of slum-induced habits, the habit of regarding the people who live there as, in some sort, a race apart. We speak largely of the Underworld, the People of the Abyss, the Submerged Tenth, and gradually we drift into a way of considering them as a strange breed of degenerates, mattoids, morlocks.... It is an offence that all the friendships I have formed amongst these people make me especially anxious to avoid. They are all, really, much more like the suburbans than the suburbans are themselves. Each one of these so bedraggled humans is really a rinsed and expurgated bundle of just those passions and emotions which form the unalterable nucleus of every character in the world. Life for them, you see, is so astonishingly shorn of the complexities and elaborations. All its circumstances—those levers at the Docks amongst others—have tended to fine everything down to the blunt, primary facts; and it is here, accordingly, and not amongst the lettuce-eaters who read Nietzsche in lonely country cottages, that you may discover the authentic simple life. They are always undisguisedly face to face, for instance, with that most ancient and inveterate of human problems, the problem of getting food. They start, so to say, from scratch. They tear the day’s vitality out of their own vitals. They know the pains of hunger on the one hand, the pains of satisfying hunger on the other; and they are constantly preoccupied with the fundamental human business of reconciling that great antithesis. It is the same throughout. Birth and Death, Hunger, Love and Hate, the Terrors of Damnation and the Hope of Heaven, become constant and vehement companions. The bones of life show through. Here, certainly, plus ça change plus c’est la même chose. And the people who live here are simply our simplified selves.
§ 4.
Take, for example, the case of Esther—of Esther (I’m sorry) Grimes. She lives in one of those blind-backed courts off Blenheim Street—quite one of the most malodorous corners in the whole of Liverpool’s Underworld. Her father (like so many of the fathers here: they seem to wear rather worse than the women) is dead, and Esther keeps herself and a vile-tempered, rheumaticky old gargoyle-crowned stick of a mother by tramping amazing distances through the northern suburbs—Anfield, Kirkdale, and so on—selling “stuff.” “Stuff” is Liverpool Irish for cheap fruits and vegetables, and she carries her ill-favoured tomatoes or oranges or whatever it may be in a great basket poised on a turban perched on the top of her head. Also, she bellows. By getting to the market by six in the morning and steadily walking and bellowing until five o’clock at night she can sometimes make quite as much as twelve shillings a week, which is more than she used to make in the tin-works. (It was Mr. Upton Sinclair, by the way, who really expelled her from there. “The Jungle” had some unsuspected sequels in this and that odd corner of the world.) She wears one of those local accretions of innumerable petticoats which so successfully attain all a crinoline’s ugliness without any of its precision, and her mass of red hair is scraped back into a tumbling knot above her neck, and drawn over the forehead of her pointed face in a broad fringe. She speaks the hideous jargon of the district, and when the suburban sees her in his own streets thus fringed, petticoated, bawling, and besmeared, he very naturally wonders what kind of preposterous nature must lurk beneath so preposterous an exterior.