Read Online Everyman's England by Victor Canning - Free Book Online

surprising that the same people who have produced the dignity of the Merseyside should also have perpetrated the urban monotony of the rest of the district, for it is literally true that the whole of the peninsula has become a suburb of Liverpool and Birkenhead.
    In Birkenhead it was slightly disconcerting to discover in the middle of the town, after wandering around acres of dingy streets, the entrance to the Mersey tunnel, an omnivorous mouth guarded by coloured pay-boxes and sentinelled by a tall black column, decorated in an Egyptian fashion that struck a bizarre note amongst the dirty buildings of the rest of the town.
    As I stood by the tunnel a couple of Lascars from some ship walked by me and stood staring a while at the gilded column and the dark tunnel mouth. They were undersized, thin men, dressed in crumpled reach-me-downs and wearing caps too large for them. They had that timid, chastened air which characterises poorer orientals in a foreign city. They stood for a moment eyeing the tunnel and I wondered if each time they came off ship at Birkenhead they walked solemnly to this place to pay silent homage to the one touch of the Orient in the town.
    I lost myself several times in the maze of Birkenhead’s streets. One thing I could not lose and that was the docks; Birkenhead has been a shipbuilding town since the beginning of the nineteenth century and the feeling of ships and the sea is everywhere.
    It was from the great Laird yard here that the ill-fated Alabama sailed in 1862, during the American Civil War. The Alabama , a disguised privateer, was allowed to sail from Birkenhead, despite the fact that the United States consul at Liverpool had acquainted the authorities with her real character. For two years she harried the shipping of the Northern States until she was sunk off Cherbourg. That she had ever been allowed to sail was a direct breach of England’s neutrality. It also showed how ignorant of American feeling were the statesmen of that time. ‘If Lord John (Russell) had known Boston society as well as he knew the Italian exiles,’ says G. M. Trevelyan, ‘he would have taken a little more trouble than he did to prevent the sailing of the Alabama .’ And he would have saved England, and future tax-payers, the enormous claim of over three million pounds which was awarded against her ten years later by an international court of arbitration.
    From the Laird yard, in 1829, came the first iron ship ever launched in England, to mark the beginning of the mythical Mother Shipton’s prophecy that ‘iron should float and carriages without horses run.’
    I wanted lunch while I was in Birkenhead, and I asked a policeman to direct me to a good cafe.
    â€˜You won’t do better than that,’ he said, nodding across the roadway to where a notice was fixed to the railings of a tall house.
    I thanked him, and crossing the road, went down the area steps which led to the cafe. I found myself in a large room, lit by two windows that looked out into the well of the area and brightened by the polish on the brass utensils which hung upon the walls. At the far end of the room a huge kitchen range smiled the blackest and shiniest smile I have ever seen. I knew that I was in a place where I should be well satisfied for a few people, obviously regular patrons, looked at me with the scarce-hidden annoyance which comes over one’s face at the intrusion of a stranger into one’s favourite cafe. In Birkenhead, the city of the tunnel, perhaps all good things are found underground.
    At the next table were two young men and it was obvious from their talk, which I could not help but hear, that they were actors met for a while in Birkenhead before passing on with their respective companies. Their talk was mostly of common acquaintances, and went like this:
    â€˜What’s happened to Charlie these days?
    â€˜Never hear anything about him.’
    â€˜Him? Oh – is that French