Wirral Voices: A Chorus

Mersey Rail, Under the Water

(from Liverpool Central to Birkenhead Park Station)

The names of the stations are like a litany – Rock Ferry, Green Lane, Hamilton Square. Hear the words often enough and they loose their meaning and dissolve into sounds spoken by the electronic female voice that reminds us, now and again, to keep our feet off the seats. It’s a prayer. A song. An electric poem.

We’re meters and meters underwater and the air smells like old coats and unwashed upholstery. There are too many copies of yesterday’s Metro, my head buzzes with the ring of the bell after each stop and the air is cool and dry. Next time, we’ll take the Ferry.

Sometimes we hear announcements for places that we’ve never been to and we let our mind wander there. Ellesmere Port. Port Sunlight. St James.

Port Sunlight – our mind snags on it and the suburb built by Lord Lever becomes a glass city – a palace for the King of the Fabric Softeners. There the sky is always sunflower blue, the river is filled with bubble bath and everyone’s clothes are always whiter than white.

We’re looking for others like us. We’re ghosts. We are the remnants of memories still trapped behind the boarded up windows and metal shuttered doors. We drift around the gaps in the streets where our houses used to be and inhabit the tunnels like a wind.

Where do we go to during the day?

Today we are going to Birkenhead. To the park. Park Station, and we step onto the grey and greasy platform as the doors suck shut behind us and the yellow train vanishes down the black mouth of the tunnel.


Birkenhead Park: The Mystery of the Wedding Dress

‘We’ve got stories here – right back to the summer the ladybirds came.’

taken by Margaret

The one we remember best was told to us by a man and his wife who come here every day to feed the squirrels – have come so often they can tell them apart and have given the one with no tail a name. They shook an old ice-cream tub filled with red-skinned peanuts as we talked.

‘Central Park in New York is based on this place,’ the woman said, waving her hand around as if the grotto and grass were her own front room.

She told us about the wedding dresses that appeared in the park, the empty gowns hung over the trees like bodies and crumpled on the climbing rocks like puddles of milk.

Night-time cyclists perhaps? No-one would admit to it. Some of us wondered about jilted brides, about pregnancies that showed too soon, and the grim-faced nursing homes in Rock Park stuffed with girls who would, for one reason or another, never get married. Others, the newer ones, decided these dresses were nothing – were just pretending to be a mystery. Students on art projects, a piece of theatre, art in the park.

taken by Keith

We imagined a miniature white bride twirling in front of the library, tiny waist and a pair shoes so light she could feel the cracks in the pavement when she walked. We remembered confetti in the grass of Hamilton Square, clambered over the green climbing stones, counted the fishermen and felt jealous.

Tranmere: Gaps in the Street

Someone said to me once, ‘the best view of Liverpool is on this side of the water.’ Up on this hill you can see everything, but Billy was too short sighted to see further than the edge of the park and the green corrugated iron studio the kids went to to learn how to box.

His name is George, and when he first met Billy, so he told us, he looked him up and down, past the greasy lenses of his glasses, his white, too skinny arms, the grey school shirt untucked and the school shoes that had been better days, and shook his head. Billy just smiled. There were gaps in his teeth and his breath smelled like fish: his dad ran a chippy in Rock Ferry.

Days of this, and he was on the brink of calling his father, then George says he relented and let him in. Won’t say what made him change his mind – goes quiet on the subject when pressed, but there’s a smile in his eyes. Billy went every day for a year. He couldn’t believe he didn't have to pay, said he wouldn't take something for nothing so George made him put the towels in the washing machine, swab the floors down after practice, go around with the water bottles while the older lads were sparring.

He went home at night to a street where almost everyone has given up and gone except the butcher.

taken by Elaine

This is no fairy story. Billy didn’t bulk up, grow a few inches and discover the girls liked him after all. He kept his head back – was more scared of what his mother would do to him if he broke his glasses than the bigger boys who tried to hit him in the face – and never really learned to move his feet.

‘What happened to him?’ we ask, collecting another ghost story.

George shakes his head, ‘they moved. They had to move,’ there are gaps in the streets here, like the teeth missing from Billy’s mouth. When the houses have gone, they don’t grow back. ‘Don’t know where he is now.’

George leans, stares out of the back door at the lights twinkling over the water, blows smoke into the blue evening air.

‘Funny thing is,’ he said, ‘the boy used to stand out here with me. Staring. I could have sworn his eyes got better. That he was learning to see.’

‘You think so?’ we say, but George is shrugging, locking up. He won’t talk any more.
It’s time for us to go home.

Home: 294 Eureka Villas, Rock Ferry

We have a tree in our back garden with eighteen pairs of trainers hanging on it. No-one can see it from the front of the house – it is a secret that the people walking past on their way to the post office or the library don’t know exists. We live in this abandoned shop next to a Chemist that used to be called Foggs and we are a secret no-one knows exists too.

It isn’t only the tree and the shoes. We are not supposed to be here.

From the outside this house looks like its empty – the net curtains are thickened and clogged with dust and some of the curved panes in the windows are long gone – boarded up. The only new thing is the number – 294 painted new and white and in contrast to the old and flaking wood of the door.

Inside, the shelves are still stacked with old tins and packets. Everything is out of date and wearing its own jacket of dust – labels faded by the dim sunshine filtering through the grey curtain. We don’t sleep: our only bed is a pile of old fur coats behind the counter.

At night when Rock Ferry is silent and the only light that is here comes from the moon, we stare through the window into the back garden and look at the trainers hanging from the tree like pupae and we tell ourselves the story of how they got there.