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 voicedraws 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 entendre which 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.
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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.
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.'