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Saturday 17 May 2008

Diary

Beryl Bainbridge puts on a Liverpudlian accent and goes searching for St George

Last week several people — well, two to be exact — asked me if I was looking forward to St George’s Day. One of them was a road-sweeper. Apparently it falls this year on 23 April, although in 1861 its date appears to be two days earlier. I know this because I looked it up in the Book of Days. I keep thinking how confusing it would be if one came back from the dead and tried to look things up in newspapers. I visited Liverpool two days later, the road-sweeper’s query still in my head, and inquired of a girl loitering beside the paper stall at Lime Street Station what she thought of St George. She said, ‘He’s a goner, isn’t he?’, and turned away. She was using slang, of course, which is a term meaning secret language. I only learnt that interesting piece of information because someone divulged it on the wireless the other morning. By the way, I mention coming back from the dead because a lot of my outings these days consist of going to funerals.

I didn’t enjoy being in Liverpool, mainly because the city I once knew no longer exists. To dwell in the past one needs the buildings that used to cast shadows on the romantic meetings, the tragedies, the twists of fate that affected one’s life. For me, I wouldn’t ever have become a writer if I hadn’t lived in Huskisson Street, that decaying Georgian terrace yards from the once-crowded, long-since-destroyed sunken graveyard below the Cathedral. I do acknowledge that the world has changed. It’s called progress. My parents gabbled on about the relaxation of morals, of the emergence of unmarried mothers, whose numbers doubled in Liverpool after the government promised to provide them with accommodation. Fortunately my Mother and Father were both in the ground before I could have been a recipient of such largesse. In my case, my departed husband provided the necessary housing.

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