Liverpool Institute

 I’m 53 today (Monday 19^th July 2004) and apparently its also the 100^th anniversary of the laying of the foundation stone of the Anglican cathedral in Liverpool, which was not only opposite my old school but also provided a refuge from the drudgery of lessons (double physics with jo scho on a Friday afternoon – no thanks) in its labyrinthine towers and passages.

I spent countless hours exploring the place and probably know it better than its present custodians. In pursuit of the avoidance of learning we examined every inch of it from the curative spring and tunnels in the yawning abyss of a graveyard that provided stone then a final resting place for a motley crew from the unnamed child paupers of the Bluecoat struck down by typhus fever and diphtheria, whatever that is, to Huskisson the Foreign Secretary struck down by Stephenson's Rocket at the Edgehill trials – the locomotive was acquitted (clearly foresight and common-sense were as essential to the job then as they are today) – to the passages underneath the cathedral cut through the rock and industrially lit like mineworkings that seemed to lead to the interior of the earth.

Here we stumbled in prurient juvenile horror on Epstein’s massive Jacob and the Angel hidden from public gaze after an outcry at its first showing. I think much of my later sexual confusion can be safely ascribed to this sight. Seeing it confirmed in our fertile imaginations rumours of winged men and other assorted aliens hidden in the bowels of the Vatican.

We climbed the place, too, outside and in, from the three storied workings of the organ, up and down wooden ladders, in and out of the pipes, to the terrible vertiginous vastness of the belfry. So, in deference to my own sentimentality, I’m using this as a tenuous excuse to revisit the puzzle of the old school. So below is an e-mail in which I contacted the old boys association and relayed my experiences of the place. I don’t know what I was expecting – identification, vindication, confirmation of an easy scapegoat for my failings… well, whatever it was I didn’t get it. What I did get was a welcome exorcism of any sentimental delusions about the place that had crept in with the passing of the years. Here’s the letter. Read it with compassion. Bear with the pompous deferential style (schoolboy regression) and see through to the meat.

Dear Sir

I attended the Institute from 1962 to 1968 and have long harboured a sometimes baffling desire to find out whether the Liobians (Liverpool institute old boys association) as an entity was still extant with the long-ago passing of the school. So it was a joy to find your site. To this day I have mixed feelings about the school and can alternate easily, effortlessly, from rage in recollection to genuine affection for the place and its inhabitants. And some regret as to the possibilities of a now lost world that, of course, extends above and beyond the physical boundaries of the school and has much to do with a particular age and a particularly exciting period in the history of the city.

When I visit Liverpool now and stand musing before the paintings in the new Tate, ostensibly indistinguishable from this brave new cultural resurrection... there's a part inside that grieves, for god knows what. The empty river, childhood. I imagine one day the people wandering around the Liver buildings (if it hasn't happened already) will be as estranged from the people who conceived them and built them as the inhabitants of Cairo or Athens are from the wrecks that surround them.

Then again the scales fall away, the nostalgia disperses and I see clearly once more through the fiction of Old Liverpool to the misery of Renshaw street dole, ill-paid jobs with no future and what seemed almost like a different climate of fogs and interminable rainfall, short days marked by darkness and all reported in some kind of homage to the misprinted word in the Echo. No. Unlike Orpheus, Krishna, Lot's Wife and even Bob Dylan in a manner of speaking, I can afford to look back - but I wouldn't want to go there.

Meanwhile, as I write, a full moon - give or take a shaved edge - is rising over the rooftops and chimneys of Notting Hill contracting from a diffused yellow pumpkin to a pinhard silver coin and in the background Bill Evan's (to accompany the increasing pomposity of middle-age I've discovered jazz) piano quietly and unobtrusively tears holes in my heart.

I loved your joyfully accurate descriptions of the teachers. But the one that stood out for me, the one that awakened a sense of guilt and mild regret was Bullen, who you described succinctly and immediately recognisably as 'like Buddy Holly - dead'.

Our classes’ single term with him (his first in post) was marked by increasing chaos enlivened by flung oaths and missiles that increased in size till someone launched a piece of plaster prised from the rotting fabric of the building akin to a respectable souvenir from the Berlin wall that exploded above his head with the force of a mortar aided and abetted by the altitude from which it was thrown - the lofty heights of the back row of the chemistry lecture theatre (where the lost the hopeless the angry and the plain stupid gathered in daily re-enactment of some inner circle of the Inferno driven to despair by some disturbing foreknowledge of their fates). Naturally, I include myself in this number.

Him standing there at the blackboard still scribbling in his faint, ineffectual and almost indecipherable longhand, thin tweed shoulders covered in dust like he'd just been excavated from Pompeii. (To be fair - indecipherable to us. There were those at the front who increase in stature in my memory with the passing of the years who scribbled conscientiously and courageously through all, heads bowed, whilst objects flew and battles raged all around them. Their names unfortunately are lost to me).

A few days later Naylor (the formidable head of the chemistry department who reputedly lost his leg in the Battle of Britain) in his full Charles Laughton old testament majesty entered the suddenly, immediately silent room and surveyed us (the occasional creaking of his false leg merely serving to increase the gravitas of his presence - like Ahab on the deck of the Pequod buying souls for gold while the
lightning flashed and the storm raged all around).

"I want to congratulate you," he said. We sat up pleasantly puzzled. Praise of any kind was something that seldom came our way. "Because of your behaviour Mr Bullen has decided to abandon his chosen career path and seek a more civilised occupation".

Whether we did him a disservice or a favour in the long run I've no idea
but as the years pass the desire to make amends to the Bullens of this world
has gradually overtaken the once stronger impulse to seek out and physically
batter not so "Jolly" Rogers, Les Morgan, Jo Scho and "Cookie" burn, to
name but a few of the resident inadequates who even within the ethos of
institutionalised violence that then prevailed clearly exceeded their
brief. I've yet to find anyone who benefited from such unjust handling and abuse
of power. I include this because if it goes unmentioned then the good stuff
gets lost too because the whole memory becomes romanticised and its
richness, its power, is lost.

On a lighter note a final word on the deserved potency of the myth of the "Baz" (even now I write his name with trepidation. He was the epitome of the old grammar school headmaster, stern, just, and possessed of an intimidating physical presence allied with a fierce intelligence). When I first found your site I went to an associated site and the first thing that loomed up on the screen was the name and indeed image of the Baz. I immediately ducked down below the keyboard to the amazement of my 21-year-old son. "It’s the Baz, I think he saw me!" He returned disdainfully to the pages of his newspaper. But for me it was as though the years had fallen away and I was back purposefully headed past Mrs "G's" tuck shop escaping early via the side door past the gym when our scout dodged back past us a look of pure terror on his face "Run! Its the Baz. He’s seen me!"

I crouched down by a car too frozen with fear even to run - and of course the Baz swept past blithely, completely oblivious to my existence (I know this now as a rational adult but then I merely assumed - the Baz clearly being omniscient - that it was simply retribution suspended until some terrible future time… of His choosing).

Since then, as I stumble around the - as yet, for me - brave new world of
the Internet the merest inclination to investigate some of the more
interesting sites immediately invokes the dreadful visage of the Baz - a
wrathful deity comparable pound for pound with any found within the vast
and elaborate pantheons of Hinduism.

Love Peace and understanding to you and yours (in the words of another
notable Scouser who isn't an old Liobian but should be - Elvis Costello -
'What's so funny about that?')
Nick
----- Original Message -----

It ain’t necessarily so

Monday 12th July a 23-year-old mother is surrounded by six youths of ‘North African appearance’ on a commuter train north of Paris. Her bag is snatched she is racially abused as they conclude from her address garnered from the contents of her bag that she is Jewish - “the 16th arrondisement, only Jews live there!” Her clothes are cut from her at knifepoint and swastikas are drawn on her belly. Her 13 month old baby is tipped out of his pram and – of the at least twenty commuters watching, no one does anything.
So, there you have it. A tale to make the blood boil. And it did. A wave of national and international outrage – the tabloids talked lynching and the broadsheets talked of Islamic disaffection in the new ghettos. The passive spectators who had failed to go to the woman’s aid came in for particular condemnation. We all seethed. Well, it got me. The receptors were ready and waiting for just such a story.
That was Monday. The airwaves were full of it. Come Tuesday, nothing. I search in vain then eventually a subheading somewhere back of something underneath something else – “Woman arrested for making false allegations.” CCTV footage had shown nothing. No youths, no incident, nothing. Apparently her boyfriend, also arrested, had drawn the swastikas. Apparently she’d made previous claims of this nature. As I say, unlike the blazoning of the original story this latter a mere footnote.

When British troops lead the march past the Arc de Triomphe for the first time in history on this sombre grey rainy north European Bastille day I for one will be watching it a wiser man chastened into emotional sobriety by this reminder of the power of prejudice to overcome reason in all of us. That story, give or take a change of costume and scenery has been around for a long time. Those charges have been levied at less powerful cultures forever, wherever an inkling for action required a causus bellus. The Irish were subject to the same accusations by the English preparatory to the first English invasion in the 12th century (“catholic by name pagan by nature”) and again in the 17th century by Cromwell. Engels in the condition of the working class in England made similar accusations. The one thing in common was that none of them were true. The problem has always been the readiness of some of us to accept them unquestioned. Time for us all to be vigilant around our own errant desire to blame and demonise. The key is not to suppress and deny our fears and the resultant fictions but to acknowledge and examine. Then anything is possible.