“Frying
eggs smell like hope”, I wrote on Twitter, from a greasy spoon in Formby at 11
o’clock on Sunday morning, waiting to join the rest of the group for day two of
Walking Through the Sands of Time, a
four-day series of artist-led walks along the Sefton Coast, from Crosby –
famous for Antony Gormley’s beach-men, Another
Place – to Southport, some twenty miles north.
After a
hiccup-free first day of travelling, taking 90 minutes from the door of my flat
in Chester to the meeting point at the car park by the Marine Lake in Crosby, I
was perhaps being a bit complacent thinking I could repeat the same feat of
good fortune on day two. I was: Merseyrail, like many transport networks,
operate less frequent services on the day of rest. I managed to get away by 9,
only 15 minutes later than the previous day, but my second mistake swiftly
followed, when I found myself at Kirkdale, heading towards Ormskirk, not Hightown,
the day’s designated meeting point.
I hastily
left the train, half-scoffed banana in hand, making a 180° trundle over the
footbridge. Next train not for 17 minutes. Hmm. I was keen not to be late – or
much later than I already was – so I asked a bloke in the waiting room if he
had a local taxi number, in the vague hope that I could stump up a fiver and
not be terminally late. “Metro Cabs are the best, mate, but I can’t remember
their number. Trade-unionised, though, so you get the best rates. Sorry, pal.
You from the North East are ya?” Cab was going to knock me back fifteen quid
and take as long as the back-tracked train journey, so I sat, waiting for the
yellow and grey carriage to roll in and get the day started, staring across the
platform, cursing myself for not knowing the name of the ubiquitous lilac
bushes that had followed me up the line, from Bache to Birkenhead. Buddleja, I
later (re)learned.
Cue the
Greasy Spoon, and directions from the weekend girl, whose instructions to “just
keep going through the forest” turned out to be about as accurate as anything
I’ve ever received in that department. I slurped the last dregs of tea and made
my way towards Lifeboat Road, and the delayed start to the day.
*
There are
three cities in the UK which, to my mind, are nearly one and the same:
Newcastle, Liverpool and Glasgow. While all have their differences and
idiosyncrasies, there are three, key shared characteristics which I think make
them startlingly similar: their proud river heritage; their love of football;
and most importantly, the spirit of their people. In this case, I want to think
about the river: the Mersey, gushing out into the Irish Sea, bordered for much
of its length by the Wirral, and famed for its ships and dockyards. When you
get the train out of Moorfields on the Northern Line, you pass a landscape of
old tobacco factories and grain silos; cavernous old docks are watched over by
wind turbines and recycling depots. And the train speeds through Bootle New
Strand and Seaforth and Litherland; and you see great Victorian pubs with weeds
in their gutters; and you see rows of tumbledown houses where shipyard workers
used to call home; and you see more modern social housing, with row after row
of trampolines and ladder-clad Transit vans parked outside. And if you’re from
Newcastle (or Glasgow), but in this case Newcastle, you feel like you’ve just
got on the Metro to the Coast at Monument and whizzed through Manors; and at
Byker you’re looking down at the Ouseburn and its vestigial chimneys; and at
Wallsend you’re looking at the same rows of Victorian terraces, with their
identikit trampolines and barbecues; and at Tynemouth you go underground again,
briefly, as the train chugs by the James Knott Flats, you think of similar 30s
structures at Bank Hall and Blundellsands; and depending on where you are, you
either look West or East and there’s sea: thick, grey and apparently
motionless; and beyond it, a Northern sky, with its clouds the colour of
concrete and its punctuation marks of wind farms, or marker buoys, or cargo
ships.
*
Sefton.
1995. Brookside Close. Jimmy
Corkhill; Tin’ead; double-denim. These are the things I associate with this
coast — a TV exec’s 90s pastiche of life in Liverpool. Which is to say that
really, I associate nothing with this
part of the world. If you’d asked me a week ago what was between Liverpool and
Blackpool on the North West coast I’d have shook my head. Not a Scooby. This is
why we walk: why we butter our sandwiches at 8am on a Saturday; sausages and
dippy eggs for breakfast. Why we Google map the area and try on for size the
place names on our tongue: Formby, Ainsdale, Southport. But none of that
prepares us. Until we stand on the wild coast, sand in our shoes, sunburn on
our hamstrings, we don’t really know what’s here, nor what it means, could
mean.
*
“I’m
setting out, armed with curiosity rather than expertise, to pay a different
kind of attention to what I see” writes Jean Sprackland in her preface to Strands, her ‘year of discovery’ on the
Sefton Coast. “I hope to cut through the blur of familiarity,” she continues,
“and explore this place as if for the first time. Some of my finds may be real
surprises, and others more predictable; but I shall pick them up and hold them
to the light, regardless.”
Oh, Jean,
what am I doing here, at half past eleven on a Sunday morning, in a sleepy
commuter belt, searching for a path I don’t really know, to meet people I don’t
really know, to trundle over more sand dunes that I don’t really know?
These are
the questions I ask myself on Lifeboat Lane, Formby, by St Luke’s Church, which
I later learn was once nearly entirely covered in sand during a particularly
fearsome storm. It’s a story you’d think more than just a bit hyperbolic,
until, on Ravenmeols Dunes, you see the size of these beasts. Piles of sand,
netted in Marram and Sea Holly, as high as my four-storey apartment block. This
is when you begin to believe the submersion of St Luke’s, drowned in sand,
proper biblical.
Formby
lies below sea level. It relies on mountainous dunes and rigid Pines. Formby
smells of wind-whipped sand and money: Gerrard and Rooney both have houses
here; Shearer lived in the area during his tenure at Blackburn Rovers. Rivers,
football, people. On a lamppost, I spot a warning sign for a rogue-trader,
known to have conned locals into dodgy swimming pool installation. Your average
cowboy brickie, he is not. Google Earth Formby and you’ll see a lot of blue
rectangles in gardens. Trampoline country this is not.
*
In the
1955-56 season, Manchester City beat Birmingham City in the FA Cup Final.
What’s remarkable about this game is not so much the score line, but the fact
that Manchester City’s goalkeeper, Bert Trautmann, played the last fifteen
minutes of the game with a broken neck. Football trivia aside, what you learn
at Hightown, if you’re being guided by natural historian John Dempsey, that is,
is that only metres back from the high tide line of the beach, half hidden
beneath Pyramidal Orchids and Sea Buckthorn, lies the remains of Fort Crosby,
where Trautmann was interned as a prisoner of war during World War Two. And two
or three miles north, covered in a different kind of thicket – that which comes
in a mist from a paint can to expresses social discontent – is a store house
for Operation Starfish, when, during the War, dummy fires would be lit in the
country to resemble the shape of nearby port cities, the thinking being that
enemy bombs would drop early, ideally causing plumes of sand rather than plumes
of munitions, and bodies.
*
And you
stand and watch the tide roll out, which it does quickly, the markers growing
by the inch every minute, erect like giant fly swatters or cocktail sticks; and
on the wind you hear the crack and whizz of bullets from the rifle range at
Hightown; and at Altmouth the lazy boats slumber into marshes as the breeze
strums their riggings in cowbell clatter; and a few dog walkers litter the
coast, along with the rubble of blitz-bombed Liverpool and cooking oil drums
chucked overboard from some distant tanker in the Atlantic; and the skyline of
Liverpool, its cathedrals and Radio Tower, are silhouetted to the South as the
wind makes a marathon dash for the Mersey and you think of the opening scenes
of Atwood’s dystopia, Oryx and Crake,
all howling winds, jetsam and distant, empty skyscrapers; and the clouds lift,
the sun opening them like blinds, to show you Hoylake, Flintshire, Snowdonia.
And you stand, with your face to the sea, arms at your side like the Gormleys,
asking yourself what it is you’re shoring up against, out here, on the wild
coast of Sefton.
No comments:
Post a Comment