Mersey mission

We’re on TransPennine, 8.39 from Darlington. As usual it’s rammed – “quite busy,” translates the guard – and as usual there’s a hen party.

In truth it’s more like a Hallowe’en party, or the opening action from Macbeth. They cackle, hackle, in concert. Liverpool has the Cavern, TransPennine the coven.

The Merseyside A-Z in my pocket was bought for £1.70 on the day after Hillsborough – a reminder of terrible times but also of overwhelming dignity, and kindness, in the bleak face of disaster.

THEY’D sent us down, Sharon and me, on that solemn Sunday morning in 1989. On every street corner a story, on the Shankly Gates at Anfield a vast fountain of flowers – sold at cost price throughout the city.

Didn’t it seem odd, a French television journalist asked an Evertonian, that so many blue-and-white scarves interleaved the requiem red? “Not at all,” he said. “We are one.”

With every bulletin, the grim casualty list rose. We spoke to Art McHugh, on the Sheffield terraces with his 10-year-old son who’d seen bodies with clothes over their faces. Did it mean, he asked, that they were dead?

Liverpool that morning could so easily have retreated from the hundreds of journalists seeking to bare its soul, claimed without complaint an intrusion into private grief, assumed a city-wide “No comment.”

Instead the Scousers were gracious in their grief, understanding and accommodating in their anguish. In short they were magnificent.

Monday morning’s Echo carried the report over much of the broadsheet front page. Why Liverpool? Why them?

Maybe only two things seemed sure, we wrote, the first that the city would unite. “The other,” we added, “is that the Liverpool fans were innocent and that South Yorkshire Police (and not just at six minutes past three) were not.”

It took others a little longer to reach the same conclusion.

A YEAR before Hillsborough, I’d been down to interview the great Bob Paisley, retired after nine years as Liverpool’s manager in which they’d won three European Cups, six league championships and goodness knows what else besides.

“I was only doing me job, and that” said Bob – carpet slippered, cosy cardiganned and unable to remember where Jessie kept the coffee.

Was it, with hindsight, the onset of his fearful dementia? “Will you have a pale ale?” he asked.

He was (of course) a Hetton-le-Hole lad, worked as a brickie on Saturday mornings before being taken by Rolls Royce taxi to play Northern League football for Bishop Auckland. He was in the 1939 Amateur Cup-winning side, joined Liverpool and the Desert Rats – the latter claiming priority – and thereafter settled on Merseyside.

The room was decorated with football awards, with his OBE insignia and with Jessie’s certificate for 25 years teaching. “Do you know,” said Bob, “I’d be absolutely nothing without her.”

In February 1996 I attended his funeral, football’s family including Alan Kennedy, Penshaw and England. He and the manager had got on so well, said the man the Kop called Barney Rubble, because he was the only one who understood a word that the gaffer said.

“An ordinary man with extraordinary achievements,” Canon John Roberts told the service. “God loves ordinary people; that’s why he makes so many of us.”

AMONG Liverpool’s great glories are its pubs, none finer than Peter Kavanagh’s – architecturally and atmospherically perhaps the best in all England. We’re outside by 12 o’clock opening, though it’s ten past before a breathless barmaid arrives clutching the keys.

“I stank of Brasso, I had to go home and have a shower,” she explains, accent like the Liver Birds at high tide.

A witch’s broomstick hangs from the ceiling, beside it a sign reading “Rita’s stretch limo.” Apparently it’s a nod to Rita Smith, the landlady, and must under no circumstances be assumed a reference to Rita Everett, mysterious matriarch of Darlington Snooker Club.

We head next to Ye Cracke, strummed by the Beatles when they had nowt, but at 1.15pm – bad Cracke – it remains closed and is subbed by The Fly in the Loaf.

The pub’s name is something to do with Joseph and his Technicolour Dreamcoat, they reckon. Old Testament scholars may better be able to explain.

The Roscoe Head, next port, is one of just five pubs to have been in Camra’s Good Beer Guide every year since its debut in the early 1970s. Snug and unchanging, and with a top notch pork and black pudding pie, it’s been bought by developers amid much concern about what’s likely to develop.

The taxi driver to the ground says that Liverpool’s pubs aren’t closing at the rate they used to. “Mind,” he adds mournfully, “that’s because most of them have shut already.”

PETER Kavanagh’s myriad, museum-vault attractions include the framed sheet music from a song called Goodbye Polly, sung by Gateshead lad George Leybourne.

Born in 1842, Leybourne was by his early 20s among Britain’s top music hall performers and composers, his other songs including The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and Champagne Charlie, the name by which – familiar in white tie and tails – he became generally known.

By 1868 he was earning £25 a week at Canterbury Music Hall, the contract also including a carriage and four white horses, and with other earnings could pull in £120 weekly.

When he died, aged just 42, the bubbles had burst. Champagne Charlie is said to have been penniless.

Since none of us knows Goodbye Polly, we head along Hope Street carousing Goodbye Dolly I Must Leave You. It has the makings of a very good day.

LITHERLAND Remyca – an amalgam of YMCA and Remploy (or some such) – play in the second tier of the North West Counties League, that of Daisy Hill, Prestwich Heys and Charnock Richard (which may better be recalled for its motorway service station).

Litherland Sports Park, their home, is described in the programme as “among the finest facilities in the region”, and no doubt it is. It’s just an awful place to watch football.

The pitch is surrounded by an expansive running track – an atoll in a great ocean – and obscured by athleticism’s assorted impedimenta. The ground’s enclosed by the sort of fence which normally guards a Category C prison and from which an assortment of Shildon flags are suspended.

One identifies the South Uist branch of the supporters’ club, another the Stoke City branch. What the branches have in common is that both have but one member.

Though it’s clear that they’re the better side, such is the distance and the detachment from the action that few spectators seem certain of the score.

In the pub afterwards, someone checks the FA website and then asks the result. Three of the four around the table believe it to have been 3-1: only one, the Mister Magoo of sports journalism, correctly supposes it to have been 4-1.

The trick is to count how many times visiting fans break into “We all live at the top of Eldon Bank”, that having been adopted as Shildon’s answer to the Te Deum whenever there’s something to celebrate.

The hosts are smashing, welcoming, good natured in defeat. In Liverpool, more than anywhere in the land, they know that it’s only a game.