Mersey
Let those lights go on. Let: my favourite word from the beginning: let. It speaks authority. Let the party begin. Let the dust settle.
....After seventy years it has. Here I am coming down Dale Street into Queensway, looking down the mouth of the old Mersey Tunnel. In 1934 the biggest road tunnel in the world. Who then said: Let the lights be switched on—? It was bearded King George V of England.
....At the end of North John Street, notepad in hand, my future dad, tall, blue eyes, straw-coloured teeth, was standing listening. Simmering still from a row with his editor at the Daily Post. My mum with her mum. 200,000 people including entire schools who had trekked into town from all over, Allerton, Huyton, Toxteth, Bootle and Anfield, down Mount Pleasant and Scotland Road, in the heat that followed the cloudbursts in the night.
....The union jacks waved, the green and gold curtains drew back, jerkily, pulled by strong arms because the gold switch pushed by the King failed to start the motors; the strong arms pulled their strongest because 200,000 people, a crowd rippling with the emotions of expectations, can't give up their day not to see a tunnel mouth. They have to be able to salute the engineering which drilled the two pilot bore-holes to within one inch of each other, which saw the roof defy the very Mersey by just four feet of rock. They must have their aspirations as humans reflected in the perfection of the broad bends of roadway, divinely lit; the sight of the tunnel mouth is their due as citizens, even if some, like my mum's mum, had been content enough to see Queen Mary's dress and hat, or stare at the raindrops on the teakwood and cream enamel of the royal train stopped in Lime Street.
....My dad felt his own switch thrown. Glory be, someone in the crowd called when the tunnel mouth appeared in all its lights, green and gold and warm just as my mum's mum could have hoped for. The tiles were exactly the right cream. May, my grandmother said to my mother, remember that colour. That cream on the walls is just the colour I want for the living room. What? said May, who had just noticed my dad—not of course with a label stuck to his forehead saying dad, or husband—but getting purple over this shout of Glory be.
....Are you all right? May said to him.
....What?
....That was his first word to my future mother. My mother. His greeting: What?
....You look, well, you don't look ill exactly, but you're not enjoying yourself.
....Enjoying myself?
....He glared. Angry that this could be a possible description of his state. Enjoying yourself is what moon men might do. Rabbits. Girls with dolls' houses. Fred Astaire.
....I've got trouble at work, he said. Now there'll be more.
....Come on dear, said May's mother, we shall see better from up the steps. I want to see for myself if his trousers are creased at the sides, as they say, not at the front and the back.
....Oh no, said May. Not these steps, my dress won't like it.
....It could be your last chance, said my future dad prophetically. That man'll be dead in two years.
....We must go down the tunnel soon, mother, said May. Father will take us. He said so. We didn't go to the peek previews and now we will be going in style.
....Have you noted down the opening hours, dear? said my grandmother.
....Just daylight hours—at first, my father informed them. The next thing we know there'll be operators at the booths at all hours, at Christmas even. ....But is my paper going to say that?
....Paper? said my grandmother.
....I work at the Daily Post.
....Look, said May, he's giving those children medals.
....They'll be commemorative, my grandmother commented. You won't be wanting one?
....I'm 24 years old, mother.
....Blushing, she looked at my father, who was scribbling hectically on his notepad. My mother watched but didn't want to interrupt. His absorption with his notebook, his blue eyes fixed there, let her do as she liked. She daydreamed. His hair was fair and neatly parted and wavy, like hair sometimes was in the cartoons. He wrote frantically no matter how jostled he was by the crowd, no matter how much she looked at him and loosed her guesses. What could he dance? Maybe he played tennis, cricket? Or maybe a newshawk had no spare time? He would definitely be too busy writing up events in London and America. About Bonny and Clyde (maybe he knows why the car they died in had a half-eaten sandwich and a saxophone inside?), about the revolution in Mexico. China. Oh what a whirlwind the world was in, what a giddy maelstrom. Look at all these people. Those people on the rooftop there. And there, clinging to the chimneys. What a calamity if they fell. And see that woman in the white suit with that priceless necktie, trying to be Marlene Dietrich (...)