Owning Up: The Trilogy Read Free

pregnancy. When she got into bed my father would say: ‘The Dreadnought is now in dock.’
    At the time of his marriage, as my father had shown no aptitude or liking for shipping, my grandfather bought him a partnership in a firm of woolbrokers, founded by his late Uncle Hugh, and registered as ‘Seward & Melly’. Here he was his own boss but, although well liked, he never displayed much enthusiasm for business. He told me once that he would have chosen to manage a country estate but that the family wouldn’t hear of it. Burdened by expectations – he was to inherit a considerable fortune from his mother only a few years before his own early death in 1961 – he did what was expected of him. His last words to me were: ‘Always do what you want to. I never did.’
    *
    I was in Liverpool recently, singing for two nights at Kirklands, originally an elegant nineteenth-century bakery, now a wine bar with a music room above it. I stayed, as I usually do, with the painter and poet Adrian Henri and his companion, the poet Carol Ann Duffy. Before my second gig, Adrian having left to recite his poems somewhere in Cumbria, I invited Carol Ann to dine with me in a bistro in Lark Lane in the suburb of Sefton Park and as it was a fine evening in late March, I suggested we took a short bus ride to the gates of Prince’s Park and walked from there. Carol Ann didn’t know this part of Liverpool very well, but I did. It was where I lived until I left to work in London in the late forties.
    We caught the bus opposite The Rialto, a ‘Moorish’ cinema built during the twenties and now a furniture store, and moved smoothly up Prince’s Boulevard. There is a statue of a Victorian statesman at each end of the tree-lined yellow gravel walk running up its centre, and I could see the ghosts of the tramlines where the 33 used to rattle and sway from the Pier Head to distant Garston. My maternal grandmother always advised her friends to wait for a 33. It took, in her view, ‘a prettier way’ than either the 1 or the 45 which ran to the Dingle through slums and dilapidated shops closer to the river.
    Prince’s Park, an alternative childhood walk to the far larger, almost adjacent Sefton Park, is long and narrow, surrounded by the backs of big houses and mansion blocks, and enclosing a chain of artificial lakes, duck-strewn and the colour of Brown Windsor soup, fenced in by croquet-hoop-like railings. At the entrance to the lakes is a small gravestone commemorating ‘Judy, the children’s friend’, a donkey which died at an advanced age in 192.4. My mother, wearing a sailor’s blouse and a wide straw hat, had ridden on Judy as a child. On the edge of the largest of the lakes is a disused boathouse in the style of a Swiss chalet; a mode much favoured at the turn of the century for park-keepers’ lodges and other small municipal buildings connected with recreation. At the end of the lakes the park, shedding its shrubs and marshalled flower beds, widens out into a bare and scruffy valley with trees on the further slope. Carol Ann and I left the park and, crossing UHet Road, entered the district of Lark Lane itself.
    Ullet Road is, I was always being told, a corruption of Owlet Road and, given that Linnet Lane runs off it at right angles to meet Lark Lane, I think this is probably the case. At the other end of Ullet Road is the Dingle where the 33, leaving ‘the prettier way’ behind it, joined up again with the 1 and 45 emerging from the slums to service Aigburth Road. Ahead of us, enclosed within this rectangle, lay my childhood.
    Most of the suburb consists of Victorian and Edwardian family houses with quite large gardens, but within it is a smaller, more consistent grid of streets and it was through these we strolled. Built presumably by a firm of speculative architects, the three-storeyed terraces are named after the novels of Sir Walter Scott and display late nineteenth-century romanticism on an absurdly miniature scale. Of red or