OF TIME AND THE CITY
LONG SYNOPSIS:
Opening with distant orange curtains of a cinema screen and a poignant piano melody, we are drawn into Davies’ world as the curtains, moving closer, lose their colour, darkening to black and white. Through the lens of an 8 millimetre camera, a train speeds into a tunnel and beyond the tunnel a railway track, a trumpet voluntary and the magisterial buildings of Liverpool in its heyday – the 1800s - as port on the estuary of the River Mersey and commercial centre. We wait by a gilded door and go beyond it into a glorious building of balustrades and balconies. The narrator’s voice draws us beyond these imperial dreams to his dream – a dream of finding peace in his struggling soul but a dream thwarted by the Catholic Church we see now in the images of saints and altars and hear in the choral music. This church will offer this sinner no divine balm, no forgiveness – only Satan smirking behind corners and saying: “I’ll get you in the end.”
We loop out of memory to contemporary Liverpool where “cocktails are consumed in Babylon” and diners eat out in smart restaurants housed in “deconsecrated churches” until we’re pulled back to a very different black and white past. Old photographs of ships on Liverpool’s river and the fast flowing choppy waters of the Mersey estuary which brought Liverpool its foreign riches across the nearby open sea. We see old footage of the ferry across the river, laden with passengers from the other side come to work in docks and shops and commerce. Then fifties football crowds and a radio voiceover of football scores. The narrator tells us of slow Saturdays and even slower Sundays when the whole world seemed to be listening to a radio programme –Round the Horne– a programme with bizarre English double entendrewhich spoke, in its other meaning, of the sexual practices of consenting adult males – buggery. And all this was before such practices were legalised in 1967. No dwelling here though because we’re drawn now into the wonderful world of cinema – Gregory Peck arriving at the Ritz Theatre in Birkenhead across the river for a replica glitzy London Royal film performance. No-one who grew up here, the director tells us, found any film too rich or too poor but rather “we gorged ourselves on Musicals, Westerns, and Melodramas.”
But here, in the cinema, our narrator finds a darker pleasure – a chime of recognition in Victim where Dirk Bogarde plays a professional man blackmailed because of his homosexuality. And now we see the wrestling matches between solid, meaty men in tight, black trunks where the narrator felt their body heat even as he begged to be saved from the wrath of God, “the world of flesh and the devil”. He is caught between the rules of the Catholic church and the criminal law. And the man he calls “Angel Eyes” – Christ – will give him no comfort.
Back in the world of the dark pre-war slums of “Little England” – of Liverpool – built in the 1800s but surviving till the 1970s, we are drawn through narrow, cobbled streets, long terraced rows of tiny houses – two rooms upstairs, two rooms down where the extraordinary images of the struggle for domestic survival are lived out – women carrying bundles of family laundry on their heads, women on their knees in the street scrubbing steps, woman singing as they press the grime from the weekly wash at the local municipal laundry. A woman’s voice from the 1940s tells us how she was left as a child to bring up her siblings when her mother died and her father took permanently to the sea.
Underscored by the raw melody, ‘Dirty Old Town’, our vision’s drawn back to the wider Cityscape – the sombre Liver buildings with dual clock towers topped with statues of the birds who gave their name to Liverpool, the city at night, the railway under the Mersey. Then a roaring, falling bonfire and another personal story – the narrator as a child at the November celebration of a traditional British festival – Guy Fawkes night – with Jimmy Preston “a real boy” who left the bonfire although the narrator asked him not to.
November wears on to December – the cold month of chilblains, raw swellings on little hands and feet, and Christmas: “the parlour cleaned, the annual exotic pomegranate,” everything paid for by the money his mother’s borrowed from The Leigh & Lend. And his sisters wearing inexpensive perfume which fragranced their world as if it were Chanel.
But memories march on – 1950 and The Korean War cometh. The narrator’s brother is in danger of being called up. We see images of soldiers saying farewell to their sweethearts at the docks, soldiers struggling through the snow on Korean hillsides and standing by the wooden crosses of their comrades’ graveyards. Although the narrator’s brother is spared, the powerful song which soars above these images moves beyond his family – ‘He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother’.
Weaving ahead and behind, we hear about the excesses of a very different British world - the 1947 marriage of the woman who will be Queen, Elizabeth, to Philip – Betty and Phil, the narrator calls them and he lists an astonishing array of wedding gifts including 76 handkerchiefs and 38 handbags. And then there was her dress sewn with 10,000 pearls– supposedly saved from her clothing coupons because all this extravagance is set against a backdrop of food and clothes ationing which still survives in 1953 when Elizabeth is crowned in great opulence and at abundant expense – “Betty and Phil and a thousand flunkies” – even as so many of her subjects continue to live in slums.
But through the global lens that Davies gives us now we also see the 1950s as the end of The British Empire. Into the 1960s and the Liverpool slums are being cleared. Despite the miseries of that life, there’s a sense of loss and nostalgia in Peggy Lee’s song – ‘The Folks who Live on the Hill’ – but there’s grim reality too in the images of the broken windows in tiny Victorian houses, the old people plodding through squalor, the derelict urban wastelands. And the paradise sought and promised fades into towering, barren high rise blocks. There’s a Davies irony here too when the camera scrolls down the anonymous concrete buildings following the steel verandas which look out onto more new concrete slums and Peggy Lee sings, “our veranda will command a view of meadows green.”
“How shall we sing,” asks the narrator, “in a strange land?” But this time there’s a new sound – The Swinging Blue Jeans’ ‘Hippy, Hippy Shake’ and our guide is not impressed. He has lost his interest in popular music after Rock and Roll, drawn into a classical world of Sibelius, Shostokovitch and Bruckner but he’s still enchanted by the look of ballroom dancing – “hectares of tulle, Brylcream and The Fishtail.”
Now memory bubbles back again – the 1950s when all Britain listened to The Grand National – a horse race run in Liverpool (Aintree) on radios “as small as a brown Hovis” bread loaf. And Davies unfailing dark humour tells of a horse running called Quare Times and his Mum who always had a flutter on this race backs it – the winner. “I really fancy Quare Times,” she says unaware of the double meaning.
Another memory now as we watch the sashes and white dresses of a July 12 Liverpool Orange Parade, when Protestants of Northern Irish descent celebrate the victory of William of Orange in 1690 over the Catholic King James. And the narrator remembers the marchers return home, “howling at the Papist moon.” But his street is not sectarian – Catholics are simply people who do things in mysterious Latin while everyone else sings ‘Jesus wants me for a Sunbeam’ “in plain, no nonsense English.”
But there is always light in this marginal, dark world and no brighter light than a day trip across the Mersey river on a ferry to New Brighton. And, in a beautiful change of mood, the crowd boards the boat in black and white but “disembarks in colour.” There are the vivid reds, and blues of beachside Bathing Beauty costumes, deck chairs and the floral clock, gobstoppers, dancing and New Brighton rock. “The world was young and oh how we laughed.”
Now we are drifted back to the people in the slums who hope for paradise and we see that what they get is the anus mundi – the anus of the world. Two young girls push a baby in a pram through a wasteland of almost demolished houses and on the horizon the tower block they’re going to – their new home, another slum. The people, often children, in these and other images are underscored by sad and soaring music and they take on the humanity of characters from Davies’ narrative films.
Bubbling on the memory of this bright new horizon is the opening of the new Catholic Cathedral of Christ the King in 1967, inaugurated by Cardinal Heenan seen here in scarlet – “his brand new frock, the Vatican’s answer to Schiaparelli” and for the narrator now a liberating realisation – he’s born again as an atheist.
The footage weaves us back once more to devastated housing. An Evangelical band plays and then we’re at a very genteel tearoom in the City – a lady decked in hat and strings of pearls is served afternoon tea by a waitress in a black dress, white ruched cap and apron. Then juxtaposed are tenement slums, large flat buildings which once housed many families in as many rooms – now with windows smashed or boarded – Liverpool 8 – the Anglican Cathedral, a place of artists, students, slums.
For the narrator, the relentless march of a new Liverpool is blending unimaginative Municipal architecture with a strong British sense of the dismal, leaving the Cityscape much less than beautiful and we see the remains of dockside buildings – the empty shells of half demolished warehouses.
On the waterfront now the grey chunky waters of the Mersey river break against the shoreline and for Davies water is an image for the beginning and end of life. In his reflections upon the life spread out behind and still before him, he mourns the passing of the Liverpool he’s loved. He sees “frail time hanging by a thread above the world” but he is not yielding to the night because hope lies always in children. To the background of piano music from BBC Radio’s ‘Listen With Mother’ we see today’s Liverpool children tottering, walking, pushed in buggies, wandering lost and confused, then finding someone. “You my dear children,” says the voiceover, “you are the earth.”
A blaze of flutes and trumpets speed us over the Regal splendour of Liverpool’s great old Municipal Buildings, still spared from the nineteenth century for the future: “All shall be well,” says the voiceover as we cross over the waters of the Mersey, “all manner of things shall be well.” And we’re grounded now amongst groups of young people, girls with silver cowboy hats, strung over their shoulders. Then a full screen old photograph of a woman and her children. “We are being gathered in,” says the narrator and we swoop with soaring music over housing slums and high rises, then the regal nineteenth century pillars of St George’s Hall, the statues of those deemed great and good.
Then memory bubbles back into the camera viewfinder – old fuzzy picture of places past. But time’s rushing forward now – there are fanfares of fountains and a freeze frame on the waterfront – the Liver building shot from the river and above it a rainbow. As the sky darkens, fireworks explode over the riverfront and we hear, in the words of T.S. Eliot, the last words of the narrator to his Liverpool and perhaps to the people he most loved there, his mother, his sisters: “Goodnight Ladies, Goodnight Sweet Ladies. Goodnight. Goodnight. Goodnight.”
LONG SYNOPSIS:
Opening with distant orange curtains of a cinema screen and a poignant piano melody, we are drawn into Davies’ world as the curtains, moving closer, lose their colour, darkening to black and white. Through the lens of an 8 millimetre camera, a train speeds into a tunnel and beyond the tunnel a railway track, a trumpet voluntary and the magisterial buildings of Liverpool in its heyday – the 1800s - as port on the estuary of the River Mersey and commercial centre. We wait by a gilded door and go beyond it into a glorious building of balustrades and balconies. The narrator’s voice draws us beyond these imperial dreams to his dream – a dream of finding peace in his struggling soul but a dream thwarted by the Catholic Church we see now in the images of saints and altars and hear in the choral music. This church will offer this sinner no divine balm, no forgiveness – only Satan smirking behind corners and saying: “I’ll get you in the end.”
Back in the world of the dark pre-war slums of “Little England” – of Liverpool – built in the 1800s but surviving till the 1970s, we are drawn through narrow, cobbled streets, long terraced rows of tiny houses – two rooms upstairs, two rooms down where the extraordinary images of the struggle for domestic survival are lived out – women carrying bundles of family laundry on their heads, women on their knees in the street scrubbing steps, woman singing as they press the grime from the weekly wash at the local municipal laundry. A woman’s voice from the 1940s tells us how she was left as a child to bring up her siblings when her mother died and her father took permanently to the sea.
Underscored by the raw melody, ‘Dirty Old Town’, our vision’s drawn back to the wider Cityscape – the sombre Liver buildings with dual clock towers topped with statues of the birds who gave their name to Liverpool, the city at night, the railway under the Mersey. Then a roaring, falling bonfire and another personal story – the narrator as a child at the November celebration of a traditional British festival – Guy Fawkes night – with Jimmy Preston “a real boy” who left the bonfire although the narrator asked him not to.
November wears on to December – the cold month of chilblains, raw swellings on little hands and feet, and Christmas: “the parlour cleaned, the annual exotic pomegranate,” everything paid for by the money his mother’s borrowed from The Leigh & Lend. And his sisters wearing inexpensive perfume which fragranced their world as if it were Chanel.
But memories march on – 1950 and The Korean War cometh. The narrator’s brother is in danger of being called up. We see images of soldiers saying farewell to their sweethearts at the docks, soldiers struggling through the snow on Korean hillsides and standing by the wooden crosses of their comrades’ graveyards. Although the narrator’s brother is spared, the powerful song which soars above these images moves beyond his family – ‘He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother’.
Weaving ahead and behind, we hear about the excesses of a very different British world - the 1947 marriage of the woman who will be Queen, Elizabeth, to Philip – Betty and Phil, the narrator calls them and he lists an astonishing array of wedding gifts including 76 handkerchiefs and 38 handbags. And then there was her dress sewn with 10,000 pearls– supposedly saved from her clothing coupons because all this extravagance is set against a backdrop of food and clothes ationing which still survives in 1953 when Elizabeth is crowned in great opulence and at abundant expense – “Betty and Phil and a thousand flunkies” – even as so many of her subjects continue to live in slums.
But through the global lens that Davies gives us now we also see the 1950s as the end of The British Empire. Into the 1960s and the Liverpool slums are being cleared. Despite the miseries of that life, there’s a sense of loss and nostalgia in Peggy Lee’s song – ‘The Folks who Live on the Hill’ – but there’s grim reality too in the images of the broken windows in tiny Victorian houses, the old people plodding through squalor, the derelict urban wastelands. And the paradise sought and promised fades into towering, barren high rise blocks. There’s a Davies irony here too when the camera scrolls down the anonymous concrete buildings following the steel verandas which look out onto more new concrete slums and Peggy Lee sings, “our veranda will command a view of meadows green.”
Now memory bubbles back again – the 1950s when all Britain listened to The Grand National – a horse race run in Liverpool (Aintree) on radios “as small as a brown Hovis” bread loaf. And Davies unfailing dark humour tells of a horse running called Quare Times and his Mum who always had a flutter on this race backs it – the winner. “I really fancy Quare Times,” she says unaware of the double meaning.
Another memory now as we watch the sashes and white dresses of a July 12 Liverpool Orange Parade, when Protestants of Northern Irish descent celebrate the victory of William of Orange in 1690 over the Catholic King James. And the narrator remembers the marchers return home, “howling at the Papist moon.” But his street is not sectarian – Catholics are simply people who do things in mysterious Latin while everyone else sings ‘Jesus wants me for a Sunbeam’ “in plain, no nonsense English.”
But there is always light in this marginal, dark world and no brighter light than a day trip across the Mersey river on a ferry to New Brighton. And, in a beautiful change of mood, the crowd boards the boat in black and white but “disembarks in colour.” There are the vivid reds, and blues of beachside Bathing Beauty costumes, deck chairs and the floral clock, gobstoppers, dancing and New Brighton rock. “The world was young and oh how we laughed.”
Now we are drifted back to the people in the slums who hope for paradise and we see that what they get is the anus mundi – the anus of the world. Two young girls push a baby in a pram through a wasteland of almost demolished houses and on the horizon the tower block they’re going to – their new home, another slum. The people, often children, in these and other images are underscored by sad and soaring music and they take on the humanity of characters from Davies’ narrative films.
Bubbling on the memory of this bright new horizon is the opening of the new Catholic Cathedral of Christ the King in 1967, inaugurated by Cardinal Heenan seen here in scarlet – “his brand new frock, the Vatican’s answer to Schiaparelli” and for the narrator now a liberating realisation – he’s born again as an atheist.
The footage weaves us back once more to devastated housing. An Evangelical band plays and then we’re at a very genteel tearoom in the City – a lady decked in hat and strings of pearls is served afternoon tea by a waitress in a black dress, white ruched cap and apron. Then juxtaposed are tenement slums, large flat buildings which once housed many families in as many rooms – now with windows smashed or boarded – Liverpool 8 – the Anglican Cathedral, a place of artists, students, slums.
For the narrator, the relentless march of a new Liverpool is blending unimaginative Municipal architecture with a strong British sense of the dismal, leaving the Cityscape much less than beautiful and we see the remains of dockside buildings – the empty shells of half demolished warehouses.
On the waterfront now the grey chunky waters of the Mersey river break against the shoreline and for Davies water is an image for the beginning and end of life. In his reflections upon the life spread out behind and still before him, he mourns the passing of the Liverpool he’s loved. He sees “frail time hanging by a thread above the world” but he is not yielding to the night because hope lies always in children. To the background of piano music from BBC Radio’s ‘Listen With Mother’ we see today’s Liverpool children tottering, walking, pushed in buggies, wandering lost and confused, then finding someone. “You my dear children,” says the voiceover, “you are the earth.”
A blaze of flutes and trumpets speed us over the Regal splendour of Liverpool’s great old Municipal Buildings, still spared from the nineteenth century for the future: “All shall be well,” says the voiceover as we cross over the waters of the Mersey, “all manner of things shall be well.” And we’re grounded now amongst groups of young people, girls with silver cowboy hats, strung over their shoulders. Then a full screen old photograph of a woman and her children. “We are being gathered in,” says the narrator and we swoop with soaring music over housing slums and high rises, then the regal nineteenth century pillars of St George’s Hall, the statues of those deemed great and good.
Then memory bubbles back into the camera viewfinder – old fuzzy picture of places past. But time’s rushing forward now – there are fanfares of fountains and a freeze frame on the waterfront – the Liver building shot from the river and above it a rainbow. As the sky darkens, fireworks explode over the riverfront and we hear, in the words of T.S. Eliot, the last words of the narrator to his Liverpool and perhaps to the people he most loved there, his mother, his sisters: “Goodnight Ladies, Goodnight Sweet Ladies. Goodnight. Goodnight. Goodnight.”