It's nearly dark as I head back down Bridge Street en route to the railway station but my eye is caught by a plaque in front of Boots. Right by the sign offering '1/3 Off Selected Fragrances' is a simple black marble oval set in granite. On it is a picture of a smiling young boy and a toddler and an inscription that reads 'In Remembrance of Jonathan Ball and Tim Parry 20th March 1993'.
I had forgotten that Warrington was one of the last British cities to be bombed by the IRA. It followed a bomb attack a few weeks earlier on a gas storage plant which caused major damage but no casualties. The second attack killed these two children and injured many other people. The bombs were hidden in cast-iron litter bins outside Boots and Argos and wreaked havoc among shoppers on a fine spring afternoon the day before Mother's Day. Three-year-old Jonathan Ball died while buying a card.
The attacks were the work of the Provisional IRA. A pointless, brutal assault on a northern working-class town; even those people who'd sometimes sympathised with the aims of the Republican movement were confused and despairing. As it turned out, it was one of the final and most horrifying and absurd acts of that whole Irish tragedy. Other fears, threats and bogeymen are alive in the British psyche in the late winter of 2006 as I walk through the chilly dusk back to the railway station. With newer anxieties to keep us busy, many of us may have forgotten the Warrington bombs. Warrington hasn't.
I pick up a discarded newspaper in the waiting room, having exhausted the news service offered by the graffiti on the wall (tonight they lead with 'Paul Burton is a child molester' and 'Robbie is shit scared of Wogle'). As opposed to the headlines of 20 March 1993, the news is comfortingly everyday and inconsequential. Local families are objecting to a planned mobile phone mast in a beauty spot and a man called Menzies Campbell who pronounces his name quite ridiculously has been elected leader of the Liberal Democrat Party. Ho hum. I can almost feel the grease of tomorrow's fish and chips forming on the pages as I read them.
So if for those heading west at least Crewe is the gateway to the north, and Warrington the first big proper indisputably northern town, then Cheshire is where the north begins: the Mild Frontier, complete with grazing cows and footballers' wives rather than buffalo and squaws. We may be 'up north' now but there are parts of Cheshire where the incomes and the wine bars and the 4X4s make Islington look like Ancoats. We'll be visiting there a little later in search of the posh north. But I've got a long, long overdue return visit somewhere else first. Home, soft lad.
Scally, Scally, Pride of Our Alley
For some people, going back to their place of birth must be really special. For instance, if you were born high atop a lofty Cairngorm peak or in a box at the Royal Albert Hall or, for some reason, in the penguin enclosure at Dudley Zoo. Or maybe like Tom Waits, who legend has it was born in the back of a New York taxi while stopped at some lights.
I was born in the big modern maternity unit of a big modernish hospital. For the purposes of this book I went back to see it, hoping for some epiphany, some flash of Proustian revelation. In fact all that happened is that I stood on a grass verge watching some out-patients being pushed about in wheelchairs, catering suppliers having a crafty fag and the odd ambulance come and go. Once upon a time, I might have been able to actually stroll into the hospital with impunity, maybe even ask a passing orderly or pretty nurse for the very ward I was born in and get a cheery patient in a head bandage to take a picture of me with thumbs aloft in front of the actual incubator I spent the first few hours of life in.
Not any more. Strangers in hospitals these days are seemingly only ever there to abduct babies or steal methadone or attack some overworked receptionist and this has made hospitals as security conscious as airports or nuclear power plants. Men in uniforms with badges and logos shouting 'ProtectoSquad Elite Team' prowl around constantly. One such began to take a keen interest in me. I wandered off just as a laundry van arrived full of sheets and towels.
The big modern hospital where I was born is called Whiston Hospital. The first recorded reference to the place is as Quitstan in 1245 and then Wystan, Quystan, Whystan, Whytstan, Whyghstan and Quistan, eventually reaching its present spelling of Whiston around 1355. Exciting, eh? The hospital is by far and away the most widely known building in the parish. The more aesthetically minded local often rails against the look of it. One correspondent to a local paper, voting it the ugliest building in the area, explains, 'I'm not against babies – or maternity per se – just crap architecture.'
But for me, the only really interesting thing about my place of birth is that it was not in Wigan. That's where I grew up, an almost comically northern town, and that's another story. But due to a thrilling quirk of fate that my mother has never adequately explained, I entered this life many miles away, over the border in a strange and foreign land. Though everything about me – my views on sport, my taste in food, my accent – marks me out as a dyed-in-the-wool Lancastrian, I am in truth something else entirely: a double agent, a spy, a foundling, a mystery man.
A Scouser.
Well, sort of. Whiston is located one and a half miles south of Prescot, three-quarters of a mile east of Huyton, four miles south-west of St Helens and one and a half miles west of Rainhill. In Wigan, the hospital is called, simply, Whiston Hospital. In Rainhill, though, it's 'Whissie Ossie', as in the characteristic linguistic trope of Scousers that also gives you 'footie', 'leckie' and 'Tarby' for football, electricity and cheeky sixties comic Jimmy Tarbuck.
Prescot, you see, lies in the hotly disputed, semi-legendary borderland between what Scousers see as the primitive rural wastes of Lancashire – a dully undulating hinterland of chimneys, whippets and flat caps – and the bracing, lively, dynamic metropolis of Liverpool with its irresistible humour, joie de vivre and catchy tunes.
Now all this talk of hospitals and identity must seem parochial to those readers who were born in taxis and penguin enclosures, but it is something that seems integral to the north. Most big towns have maternity uber-factories where nearly all the local babies are churned out. Nearly every Wiganer I know was hatched in the maternity unit at Billinge, a part of the town famed for a very negligible hill and a very particular kind of misty rain - 'that fine rain that soaks you through', as it was famously described by Peter Kay. If I'd been born those ten or so miles away from Wigan in another direction, over into Oldham, say, or Bolton or Burnley or even Manchester, it wouldn't really have mattered. But I was born in the Tijuana of Lancashire, the Kashmir, the Korean Demilitarised Zone where two mutually uncomprehending cultures clash and trade insults in their native tongues.
In the language of the Scouser, people from Wigan, and for that matter Bolton or Oldham or Bury, are woollybacks. In fact, I tend to think that woollyback is really just an imperious racial generalisation, like those ex-colonels who think it's all wogs after Calais or all non-Jews being gentiles be they the Dalai Lama, L. Ron Hubbard or King Haakon XIV of Norway. I think most Scousers secretly think of both the Milanese fashion designer and the Bantu tribesman as woollybacks, united in their tragic non-Scouseness.
If you want to be specific, though, 'woollyback' means those sooty Lancashire textile towns to the east and north of Liverpool. Wigan is the crucible of all things woollyback. As for the derivation of the term, well, if it ever crops up on Mastermind I'm sure the explanation given will be, as it often is in polite circles, that the term originated in the cotton industry, which once dominated the whole county when traders from the Lancashire towns used to carry the cotton on their back to sell in Liverpool. (The Scousers, it seems, mistook 'cotton' for 'wool'.) I have long suspected that the real reason is that Scousers believe that in their isolated rural state, without nightclubs or Tarby or impish tunesmiths, the average Lancastrian of an evening seeks solace in unnatural congress with his ovine flock. I could be wrong, though.
In Alan Bleasdale's Boys from the Blackstuff a mild-mannered social security snooper finally rebels and in an act of defiance 'for a woollyback from Wigan' throws the keys to h
is DHSS car down a drain. When I first met legendary Liverpool band The Farm singer Peter Hooton, he was very excited that that night on Brookside ('Brookie', obviously) there was going to be a lesbian kiss between Anna Friel and 'that wool bird', i.e. the flame-haired actress from St Helens.
Most of the time this schism is acknowledged with good humour. For a few years I worked in a town called Skelmersdale while living in Wigan. It's a remarkable place worth returning to in a later chapter but for now let me just say that new Skem, as opposed to old Skem, a Lancastrian mining village with a Viking lineage, is a sprawling sixties new town in the Cumbernauld/East Kilbride mould populated almost exclusively by Scouse families moved out of Liverpool during the rapid development and population growth of the 1960s. Skem isn't far from Wigan but every day the bus felt like it was crossing some kind of border post when it went through Upholland. You could see the fashions change, hear the accent mutate so that it was a 'buzz' on one street corner and a 'bus' by the next. But I never got beaten up for being a 'wool', just gently teased by dope-smoking lads into Pink Floyd or cute girls in white fringed boots.
In other places, though, the tectonic plates of this very northern schism rub up against each other with a deal more edge and friction. Huyton and St Helens are five minutes' drive away from each other (in a hotwired Mondeo, Richard Littlejohn might add) but here the fault line between 'Scouser' and 'Woollyback' is a crackling seam of animosity among the population, particularly the younger end. Essentially, they fucken' hate each other, la'.
It gets really complicated here because a new social group enters the already heady mix: the plastic Scouser. 'Plazzie' has been a term of abuse among Liverpudlians since the sixties, when local movers and shakers like Alan Williams (the manager who gave away The Beatles; see Really Stupid Scousers) used it to describe those people who talked up their Scouseness, laying on the 'fab gear wack' stuff with a trowel but who were off to Surrey at the first chance they got, such as Cilla Black or, let's face it, The Beatles themselves.
But then it starts to mean someone who lives on the Wirral peninsula, particularly Birkenhead or Wallasey, who sounds to us woollybacks like a Scouser but is in fact a softie fellow traveller. To be fair, the posh folk on the Dee bank of the Wirral are quite happy to distance themselves from the scallies over the Mersey and their burning cars and look instead towards leafy, affluent Cheshire and its Alfa Romeos. A friend of mine met an apparently Scouse couple on holiday, but when he asked what part of Liverpool they came from was met with the instantaneous, haughty reply, 'Oh no, we're not from Liverpool. We're from the Wirral. Do you know the Peninsula?'
And these days 'plazzie' has a third meaning, drenched in spittie and loathing. A plastic Scouser is what the real Scouser and the woollyback alike (there will be a handout and a chance to ask questions at the end) call one of the despised breed of chav scallies from those west Lancashire towns like Huyton and Rainhill. They are a distinctive tribe, identifiable for their penchant for Rockport, Henri Lloyd and Lacoste brands and for the stylistic quirk of wearing their tracksuit bottoms ('trackies') tucked into their socks. This looks just as cataclysmically shit as it sounds but hang around Huyton bus station and you will see scores of weasel-faced youths dressed like this, pallid from lack of vitamin C and generally looking for something to urinate on or set fire to. Plastic Scousers of this ilk have no interest in being witty, vital or revolutionising popular music but merely in being thought of as hard or criminal, not 'nesh' or soft. They are the sort of lads who seen from a distance or singly are kind of ridiculous, even pathetic, but who look very different when they converge in a quintet on your bus stop at half eleven at night and ask you the time. In 2005, a young black student called Anthony Walker found himself in the wrong part of Huyton with the wrong kind of Scousers and his murder appalled the country. Scousers hate 'plazzies' because they aren't real Scousers but cheap wannabes with no style. Woollybacks hate them because at some point they may have pinched your Plasma screen telly to buy smack. Sadly, there is no such thing as a plastic woollyback, i.e. a Scouser who says 'alreet cock' and "ey up' and hopes to be taken for a Wiganer.
All of this geo-political analysis and ethnic labelling is simply to illustrate what all Merseysiders have known all along: that Scousers are different. They are the Basques of Lancashire, a race apart with a language and culture that seems to bear no relation to any of the people around them.
When I was planning this book (no, really, don't laugh) I always imagined Liverpool as a separate chapter. There was no sensible way it could be lumped in with Cheshire or Lancashire. The opening line of the city's current official glossy guidebook states: 'Liverpool is not really the north. Not quite Midlands. Closer to Wales and Ireland. And definitely Atlantic. Or is it just a state of mind?' Michael Swerdlow, an entrepreneur quoted in a Guardian piece, says, 'It's still an enigma. . . I don't think of myself as a northerner – what have I got in common with Newcastle or Yorkshire or the Lake District? What I am is a Liverpudlian.'
Despite all this, when J. B. Priestley undertook his famous tour of England in the 1930s for his book English Journey, he never thought for a second not to place Liverpool stolidly in Lancashire. Glance briefly at JB's chapter tides and at first you think he's missed the whole city out. In fact it's the very first place he visits at the beginning of the chapter 'In Lancashire', and he ends up, after a day mired in the city's then endemic poverty and squalor, dining alone and thoughtfully smoking a good cigar in the restaurant of the Adelphi Hotel. But never for a moment does he think that the city is anything other than Lancastrian.
That notion seems faintly bizarre now, not just because Scousers relish their outsider status but because we have become so comfortable with the idea of Merseyside. It may be the only one of those new-fangled seventies appellations that has actually caught hold and come to mean anything. The reason, as far as I can see, must be because rather than make a nonsense of local kinships and ties (like putting Wigan in some abstraction like Greater Manchester or the Old Man of Coniston in Cumbria or Hull in Cleveland), rather than putting local noses out of joint, it actually confirms what those locals have believed all the time; that they are different, separate, sovereign.
Merseyside was created, entirely seriously we should point out, on 1 April 1974 from bits annexed from the counties of Lancashire and Cheshire, along with the county boroughs of Birkenhead, Wallasey, Liverpool, Bootle and St Helens. Like much else about Scousers, the Tories were never very happy about the concept of Merseyside. It embodied everything they feared and distrusted about big Soviet-style seventies socialism in the region: men with northern accents sitting behind big desks in massive new civic centres drinking keg bitter and calling each other 'comrade'. In 1986 Thatcher abolished the county council (bet she had a whisky or two that night) although it still exists legally, and as a ceremonial county. But everyone still refers to it and still uses the term. It is that curiosity, a piece of governmental jargon and red tape, that ordinary people have taken to their heart, so much so that when Liverpool played Everton in the FA Cup Final of '86, the fans of these two fierce and historic rivals sang 'Merseyside, Merseyside' in unison. This was their chance, at the high point of the city's demonisation as Britain's capital of crime and corruption, to wave a cheery two fingers to London and the world.
Of course, others would see it as yet more evidence of the city's mawkish sentimentality. In October 2004, Boris Johnson, the likeable, buffoonish right-wing media personality, wrote a Spectator editorial in the wake of the horrific murder by beheading of Ken Bigley, a British hostage in Iraq. It was a fairly sober article in general, bemoaning the fact that since Princess Diana's death, we have become a nation of cry babies. But one thread of Johnson's argument provoked an outpouring of red, red rage.
'The extreme reaction to Mr Bigley's murder is fed by the fact that he was a Liverpudlian . . . They see themselves whenever possible as victims, and resent their victim status; yet at the same time they wallow in it. Part of this f
lawed psychological state is that they cannot accept that they might have made any contribution to their misfortunes, but seek rather to blame someone else for it'.
He goes on to quote Captain Scott's last journals and bemoan the disappearance of the British buccaneer, etc., etc. But the hot stuff is right there in that paragraph above, a petrol bomb lobbed from the reading room of the Athenaeum Club and scoring a direct hit on the streets of Toxteth.
In the vernacular of the north, it all kicked off. Bigley's brother Paul denounced Johnson as a 'pompous twit' who should 'get out of public life'. The then Tory leader Michael Howard denounced the article as 'nonsense' and demanded that Johnson, up until then a rising star of the Tory Party, go round and apologise, like a schoolboy who's put his neighbour's window through with a football. Like that other blond Tory underachiever before him, Michael Heseltine, Johnson got a train to Lime Street and mooched about town looking sheepish and concerned, doubtless having health centres and renovated bus stops pointed out to him by local dignitaries.
Pies and Prejudice Page 7