Flesh and Blood Read online

  Local INP politicians smelt a rat. They believed that the religious and political power-base of the Liverpool Irish was being gerrymandered by slum clearances in order to re-establish a Protestant control in north Liverpool. The INP demanded that all slum clearances be accompanied by healthy and affordable new housing for their tribe, close to their dockland place of work. It was an issue they were willing to fight for, and one that soon arrived at Eugene’s own doorstep.

  The death of Eugene and Mary McGann’s eldest son was followed by the birth of two more children, James and Owen Joseph. This time, thankfully, their boys thrived. As the twentieth century dawned, Eugene, Mary and the now teenaged James and Owen Joseph were living in nearby Whitley Street. Yet this street had been earmarked for slum clearance, and Eugene’s family were facing eviction. The INP stepped in and urged the tenants to refuse to leave unless they could be guaranteed cheap replacement housing – but to no avail. In August 1902, Eugene and his neighbours were forcibly smoked out of their dwellings. The next time I’d see them, they’d be living hand-to-mouth on the other side of the city. The McGanns’ four-decade-long residence in the pestilence-ridden Irish ghetto of north Liverpool had come to an end.

  Despite the loss of Whitley Street, the INP would eventually win its battle to balance slum clearances in the north end with cheap new housing for residents. Liverpool Corporation started to design and build local tenements: multi-storey municipal workers’ dwellings that to our cosseted eyes might seem like a grim kind of gift. In fact, these tenements were by orders of magnitude more safe, clean and disease-free than the slums they’d replaced. There were windows for ventilation, a balcony for hanging washing and gas for cooking and heating water. And flushing toilets! Future generations of my family would call these tenements home. And they really were. It was real progress: a sword taken to the first head of the beast of pestilence – a humane, methodical approach to public health that married environmental policy with the aims of medicine to eradicate infectious disease. Hygiene, sanitation and public space: the potent new cicatrix scratched into the arm of civic life. By the start of the First World War, the city would be a noted international pioneer of social housing. Of the 22,000 court dwellings that had existed when Owen arrived in Liverpool, only 2,771 remained, and these too were scheduled for demolition. The grand epidemics that had plagued the city for nearly a century were at last on the run.

  It may seem odd that the place that brought my family such misery and malady would be somewhere from which they’d finally have to be smoked out. But maybe it shouldn’t. A family can stretch itself beyond the flesh and blood of the bodies that constitute it. It can grow by necessity to embrace those other families that live in the same fetid spaces; fused in the sweat of the dockyard or in shared eulogies over children’s corpses. Those courts – however pestilential – were home to my forebears. For every tribe, even an infected one, needs a shared canvas on which to paint its identity.

  The Liverpool Irish have always occupied a rather dowdy corner of the Irish emigration story. They were flotsam – washed up on a nearby shore while the rest travelled on to brighter lands across the oceans. As the twentieth century arrived, waves of Irish emigrants would continue to pass through Liverpool, yet these would quickly travel on to newer, more promising destinations. The Liverpool Irish were no longer replenished by people from the old country and as the first generation of arrivals died off, their children became increasingly detached from the culture that had defined them. They were left with the customs of a land they’d never seen, and a religion that offered joy in the next world but little in the way of social and economic redemption in this one. What would happen when the hovels of the north end were finally razed, and its people scattered throughout the city? Would the social pestilence that had characterised them in the eyes of others finally be consigned to the past?

  The most poetic irony was that, as this ghetto tribe slowly dispersed, their culture and high birth rate eventually came to redefine what it meant to be a Liverpudlian in the eyes of the outside world. No longer was it the bourgeois Victorian seaport shaped by a south Lancastrian mercantile middle class; it would in future be known as an insular, working-class, essentially Irish-Catholic city. In a way, the worst fears of those genteel Victorian stone-throwers had been realised: the Irish slum dwellers had infected them all. Yet the infection was cultural rather than epidemiological. Half the population of modern Liverpool can now claim Irish ancestry. The north-end ghetto grew to embrace the image of the whole city.

  Yet this view risks being just another form of cultural shorthand; a compressing of nuance that flattens out the many delicate human distinctions existing within the population. Liverpool has a proud Welsh heritage too – not to mention Protestant, Jewish, Chinese, Caribbean, Polish, African, Greek and a hundred other cultures that any cosmopolitan seaport can throw into the mix. All humanity is there, yet popular shorthand can easily compress this variety into a single convenient pen-sketched caricature, however benign.

  *

  The Irish of north Liverpool had always had a very particular relationship with the benign, in the shape of the Catholic faith they’d brought with them from Ireland. The Church’s schools and parishes, with their associated sporting and social clubs, now became the glue that bonded the former Irish to their lost heritage. Attempts were made to import ethnic Irish games such as Gaelic football and hurling into the Liverpool Catholic sporting leagues to help retain some cultural link to the old country. Yet these attempts at cultural implantation were all in vain. The Liverpool Irish were now keener to test their tribal mettle across sectarian boundaries, partaking in the new English ball games enthusiastically adopted by the working classes of Britain. The greatest of these games was Association Football.

  Liverpool’s visceral love for the most popular sport on earth stretches back to the beginnings of the English Football League in 1888, when north Liverpool club Everton became one of the twelve founding members. Four years later, Everton would spawn another local club called Liverpool. These two teams grew to be giants of the nation’s national game. Their vast commercial stadia now stare out over the cramped back-to-back terraced streets near where I grew up; a reminder of the clubs’ humbler beginnings, and their previous close proximity to the supporters who followed them.

  Liverpool’s deep passion for football never divided along sectarian or social boundaries, making it distinct from other cities or regions with a religious or cultural divide. Whereas Glasgow had two clubs, Celtic and Rangers, that declared separate ethnic and sectarian affiliations, Liverpool’s did not. A Catholic was just as likely to support Liverpool as Everton. Football was therefore a neutral space into which one could declare tribal allegiance without violent consequences. To the Irish of Liverpool, it was also a pastime as infectious as any pestilence. While the Catholic sporting leagues largely kept to themselves at amateur level, the urge to test footballing skills against the ‘other lot’ soon led to much greater cross-cultural cooperation. Football became a sporting lingua franca – common turf that helped to take the Irish Catholics of Liverpool beyond their ghetto walls and into wider British cultural life. Later, military service and its accompanying regimental sport would further cement a love of the beautiful game with a wider sense of British identity.

  As the twentieth century got into its stride, the two-headed beast of pestilence seemed finally to be in retreat from my family. The first head, pestilence itself, had been cleaved by a marriage of medical science with enlightened social policy. Once the slums were flattened and government healthcare could organise widespread approaches to prevention in the form of vaccination and hygiene, the infectious scourges that had tortured my family for generations were finally eradicated.

  But what of the second head? The pestilent people – those incurable carriers of Dr Duncan’s ‘moral contamination’? Did my family’s dispersal from the ghetto, and the uniting cultural influences of workplace, barrack room and sports field, finally wash
us clean of our ancient moral stigma?

  Not entirely. A traumatic incident in my own life taught me that a cultural pestilence is a far more subtle and enduring pathogen, more likely to mutate according to expediency than to be entirely eradicated. Stones may be dropped, but they can remain forever near to hand.

  The bitterest irony was that this lesson was communicated through the supposedly benign lingua franca of football.

  TESTIMONY

  By their example and intercourse with others they are rapidly lowering the standard of comfort among their English neighbours, communicating their own vicious and apathetic habits, and fast extinguishing all sense of moral dignity, independence and self-respect.

  Dr William Duncan, on the character of the Liverpool Irish in ‘Local Reports on the Sanitary Condition of The Labouring Population of England’, July 1842

  Liverpool is a handsome city with a tribal sense of community. A combination of economic misfortune … and an excessive predilection for welfarism have created a peculiar, and deeply unattractive, psyche among many Liverpudlians. They see themselves whenever possible as victims, and resent their victim status; yet at the same time they wallow in it. Part of this flawed psychological state is that they cannot accept that they might have made any contribution to their misfortunes, but seek rather to blame someone else for it, thereby deepening their sense of shared tribal grievance against the rest of society.

  Spectator, 16 October 2004

  ‘Nobody dare say anything about [Liverpool] supporters for fear of being accused of insensitivity. But some of them were like animals. They were drunk and violent and their actions were vile.’

  A senior police officer, speaking four days after the events that led to ninety-six Liverpool football supporters being unlawfully killed at Hillsborough Stadium, Sheffield.

  Daily Mail, 19 April 1989

  Mostly I remember the sound. Snatches of colour. The persistent low roar of human shock mixed with confusion. The red of football shirts on lifeless bodies. The gruesome crimson of a young man’s face, dead from asphyxiation, his corpse lying on the pitch. The sound of my brother Paul crying next to me – something I’d never heard before. Twisted sobs that fought against their own release. A day of gasping breaths squeezed out against their will.

  It’s 15 April 1989. The kind of clear, clean spring day that promises are born in. Liverpool are playing Nottingham Forest in the semi-final of the FA Cup, and brother Paul and I have tickets to the game. The tie is taking place on neutral territory in Sheffield, in the faded grandeur of Hillsborough Stadium. There had been complaints from Liverpool supporters about the venue. Earlier matches had exposed organisational problems at the old ground – insufficient ticket allocations, ineffective crowd control. Yet these were small details. Complaints now gave way to the excitement of the moment, the celebration of a game that formed a common language for families displaced by geography, age or social class. Families like mine.

  By 1989, our separate careers had propelled my family away from Liverpool, and, like all expanding universes, the galaxies of our individual lives had also accelerated us away from each other – geographically, emotionally, socially. Yet there was always football. That emotional and spiritual language which, for a brief time, enabled us to combine our disparate voices into a single oral history: a portable heritage that we carried with us throughout our new cosmos.

  Support for Liverpool Football Club was rooted deep in my family’s mythology. It even had its own creation myth. My father’s older brother Jimmy began support for Liverpool in the early 1930s, when his uncle took him to a department store to buy a football kit. At the time, Liverpool was a small and unsuccessful club, dwarfed by the successes of their city rivals Everton. It was expected that young Jimmy would select the blue of Everton to wear. However, in an epiphany worthy of the saints, Jim saw the red kit of Liverpool covering a lowly shop dummy, and knew in an instant he could wear no other. His uncle pleaded, but to no avail. From then on Jimmy and Dad were lifelong reds and we inherited this tribe as children. When Liverpool later rose to dominance, the story was related as one of prophetic vision – the alignment of our family with a glorious future. Red was our talismanic colour: the irrepressible symbol of blood, passion and success.

  Or so the story went. My brother Mark later made a wry observation about the mythical power of the colour our uncle had chosen. Jimmy, Mark said, suffered from a form of red-green colour blindness, which would have rendered the red he’d seen as a dull, muddy ochre. Like bird lime, or the cement between old bricks. Not quite so talismanic. But then that’s what happens when medical reality meets a grand narrative: variations in human colour are secondary to wider imperatives.

  A young girl’s face, bleached white by savage experience, streaked with mute tears.

  Paul and I had first noticed the pretty teenage volunteers of the St John’s Ambulance charity walking down the touchline about ten minutes before the match started. Two girls smiling in the sunshine, flirting back at the young Liverpool supporters who threw grins and come-ons at them from the stand. They looked about seventeen, and had clearly modified their St John’s Ambulance uniforms to better suit their figures and youth: skirts raised a little, caps worn at an angle. Paul and I laughed. The timeless dance of it. The joy and novelty of spectacle. The endless blue skies of the young. Barely twenty minutes before the blackness descended.

  The sun blazed down, and we had good seats near to the pitch in the North Stand, a little way from the old terraces allotted to the Liverpool supporters. We’d been lucky; ticket allocation had been down to chance, one’s place in the ground depended entirely on the final digit of a serial number printed on your season ticket. We’d both fallen within the digits entitling us to seats. Other supporters had to stand in the Leppings Lane end of the ground. We looked over there; it was still strangely unoccupied a few minutes before kick-off, although the central area behind the goal seemed full. Crammed, even. We had no idea then just how lucky we’d been – how a single digit on a ticket could mean the difference between a harsh experience and extinction.

  The football game started promptly at three o’clock, although few supporters standing in the Leppings Lane end had yet taken their places. The terrace was divided into five separate enclosures accessed from the rear. The front of these were caged off to prevent supporters invading the playing area. The areas to the sides were sparsely populated. The one directly behind the goal was now a writhing mass of red. We could see fans pressed tightly against the bars at the front, even as more supporters were arriving at the back.

  A few minutes in, and I remember striker Peter Beardsley hitting a beautiful shot that rattled off the crossbar. It felt like a good sign.

  Then everything went still. The Liverpool goalkeeper became distracted by events behind his goal. The referee waved for play to stop. There were minutes of confusion. We could see that supporters were struggling to climb over the fences in the central Leppings Lane area to reach the pitch. Rumours flew to compensate for a lack of announcement. It became obvious that something was wrong. If one looked carefully, one could spy supporters lying on the ground.

  Soon all careful vision was unnecessary. We watched a Liverpool supporter walk off the pitch accompanied by police officers, and pass directly in front of our seats. He seemed perfectly alert – almost angry. As he passed, he raised his arm towards the crowd. There was a collective intake of breath. The bones in the man’s arm had been crushed by some terrible force into the stepped shape of the staircase he’d been standing on. At the top of his misshapen arm his hand, like a grotesque puppet, wriggled freely. Even as I recall this, I find it hard to comprehend. My mind – like the public’s mind in the disaster’s aftermath – searches for a more accommodating explanation in the face of discomforting evidence. Yet sometimes comfort must give way to truth.

  The minutes inched by. The pitch became filled with a roaring confusion of bodies and unfocused urgency. It was clear to anyone watching tha
t we were witnessing an act of tragedy rather than violence. The opposition supporters stood, like we did, in their own enclosure, waiting for an announcement to explain the things we saw. After what seemed an age the police arrived, marching in long, close lines from the stadium entrance onto the pitch. To our disbelief, these close lines formed up next to our own immobile stand, and the terraces from which bodies were still being hauled – rather than going to assist the injured and the dead littering the field. The police turned towards Liverpool supporters in a defensive posture – as if to guard against a violent pitch invasion. We screamed in desperate objection. One could see the discomfort on the policemen’s faces, yet they stood their ground. They were evidently under specific orders, which served a different narrative.

  A few feet behind them, citizens lay dying – their faces discoloured by asphyxiation.

  Looking back, it was the moment that the first uneasy hints of a further malady began to creep like vomit from the gut. The sense that we were witnessing not simply a terrible human tragedy, but the birth of something uniquely cruel – something perpetrated by the powerful that would transform the tragedy of innocents into an instrument of torture. However, hindsight is a tower, and we were still in the long grass, searching for a more accommodating explanation in the face of discomforting evidence.