She said she would show me the way to Toxteth if I pulled her cart for a spell. I did so and nearly wrenched my arm, the thing was so heavy. She said she had picked up some bottles. There was money in bottles if you knew where to flog them.
She took a blackened pipe from under her rags and puffed it.
"Like Harold," she said. "I enjoy my pipe."
She meant Sir Harold Wilson, the former Prime Minister.
Mary's uncle and aunt had gone to the United States. They had intended to settle, but they had returned to Liverpool.
"There was a depression on at the time," she said. "Like this one." And puffed her pipe. It smelled of burning rags. "We'll never see the end of this one."
She had the Liverpool knack of being able to speak without moving her lips.
"What do you want in Toxteth?" she asked.
"Just looking."
"They had riots there," she said. "They bayned the place."
"Who did?"
"The kids!" She didn't say blacks.
Liverpool used to be peaceable, she said. It wasn't peaceable anymore. It was a blewdy disgrace. It was dangerous.
But it did not look disgraceful to me. It was better than the corresponding part of New York City, near the docks in Brooklyn, but had the same bricks and the same pong of dirt and oil and old iron.
Mary Wilson finally shuffled away. Her little dog's claws scratched on the sidewalk like matches being struck as he trotted beside her.
Mr. Duddy, a street-sweeper I met at the corner of Windsor Street, said, "Toxteth. Go to the cinema that's bayned to the ground, and when you coom to Princes Road, tayn right."
But I was still smiling at him.
He became shifty. "What is it?"
"What was it like to sweep up after the riots?" I asked.
"Shocking," Mr. Duddy said.
"Give me an example."
"They baynt a car," he said.
"A lot of property was burned, I understand."
"They tried to bayn a skule," he said.
"But the whole place was in flames."
"They was poodles of petrol," he said.
"You must have seen some amazing things."
Mr. Duddy thought a moment, then said, "I saw a pule of blood."
I walked on, down Princes Road. It was shabby gentility mixed with unobtrusive ruin. There was something gothic about lovely old buildings half-burned to the ground, or turned into brothels (surely doorbells labeled Fiona and Janine and Miss Tress meant that?). Loud music came from the open windows of the Nigeria Social Club, and at the Sierra Leone Social Club there were fat blacks in bowler hats and shabby business suits on the steps, drinking beer out of cans. I assumed that the "social club" was a way of evading Britain's strict drinking hours, and the names suggested not racism, but rather nationalism or even tribalism; I could not imagine anyone from Upper Volta or Nigeria being welcome in the Ghana Social Club.
Princes Road was a wide boulevard lined with trees. I followed it down to Granby, counting policemen—eight in a matter of minutes. They walked in pairs, carrying steel-tipped canes about a yard long, the sort of weapon that usually has a poetic name, like "wog-basher." The policemen gave the impression of friendliness, and deliberately chatted with bystanders and small children, seeming to ignore the graffiti that said pigs out and Why are coppers like bananas—coz they yellow, they bent, and they come in bunches.
The shops on side streets had either boarded-up windows or else steel-mesh grates, and the same grates sheathed the public phoneboxes. I stepped into one of these phoneboxes and called the Central Police Station and asked the information officer how many black policemen there were in Liverpool.
"Who wants to know?" he asked.
"Just a curious American," I said.
"I should have known," he said. "I'll tell you something—Liverpool is nothing like America. I know about the trouble you've got over there, and compared to that, this is nothing. I could give you figures—"
"For starters, how many black policemen?"
"Twelve colored officers," he said. And the entire force was forty-six hundred.
"Twelve!" I laughed and hung up.
And the "colored" was interesting, too. Policemen were "colored," convicted criminals were "West Indian," and purse-snatchers were "nig-nogs." But when a black runner came first in a race against foreigners, he was "English." If he came second, he was "British." If he lost, he was "colored." If he cheated, he was "West Indian."
I kept walking. The riots had left marks on Liverpool Eight that were visible a year later: the broken windows had not been fixed, there were signs of scorching on walls and doors, and temporary barricades had been left in place. And there were posters advertising lectures by members of the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party—very angry lectures, judging by the titles ("Fight Back!" "We Demand Action!" and so forth). And yet this area was not the ruin I had expected. I had been promised a wasteland, but it was no more than fine decaying houses and rotting odors.
In a ploy to gain entrance to a house, I asked a shopkeeper (Ma-nubhai Patel, formerly of Kampala, Uganda; dry goods and sundries) if he knew of a person who might sew a button on my leather jacket. Yes, he knew a karia —Gujarati for black—just around the corner.
"Thanks very much," I said.
"Kwaheri, bwana."
God, I thought, that feels good. It had been years since anyone had called me bwana.
Mrs. Luster was from Barbados. She had lived in England since 1953, when West Indians were encouraged to leave their homes and immigrate to Britain by the Conservative government—it was thought there would be a severe labor shortage very soon. Mrs. Luster had worked for about twenty years in a shirt factory, and then it closed ("all these imports from Hong Kong"). She was fifty-seven and had been married twice; both husbands had died. Every night she said a prayer for God to send her another husband: it was no fun living alone. In her Council flat, four upstairs rooms of an Edwardian terrace house (rent: £9 a week), she had pictures of the Queen, the Pope, Prince Andrew, the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana, and Jesus Christ showing his heart in flames. Most of the pictures she had cut from magazines, but she also had postcards stuck to the wall, and five calendars, and there was so much furniture, I had to walk very slowly, sliding between heavily upholstered chairs.
I asked her what she thought of Britain.
Mrs. Luster said, "It ain't what it was."
Not far from Mrs. Luster's house I saw three young men standing on the sidewalk. Their names were Pitt, Oliver, and Peery. They had all been born in Liverpool and were out of work. They were each about twenty years old. When I approached them, they were discussing the fortunes of a man who rejoiced in the name Funso Banjo. They claimed I knew him, but I said I had never before heard the wonderful name of Funso Banjo.
I asked them whether they thought there would be riots this year in Liverpool Eight.
Peery said, "We already had a riot!"
"April," Oliver said. "Pretty big one, too."
This was news to me. It had not been in any newspapers that I had seen.
They said that there was often trouble but that it was seldom reported by the national newspapers.
"They can't report everything," I said. "How big was the riot?"
They said that hundreds of people had taken part and that three cars had been burned. It had happened after the arrest of a black boy by the police—rumors had spread that the boy had been shot or beaten up by the police. The rumors were not true, but the riot had taken place just the same, and no one was sorry, because (Oliver told me) the police were always stopping black people and searching them.
I said, "Do you think there will be more riots?"