MENLOVE AVENUE: VARSITY DAYS
Exiting Liverpool, on a whim, eastwards,
parallel to the river and then across
the Mersey Gateway Bridge – not as usual
through the Kingsway Tunnel – I took a wrong turn.
I found myself in Mossley Hill driving past
my old hall of residence. Another
wrong turn took me down Menlove Avenue.
A tour bus idled outside 121.
‘Though I know we’ve seen this place before,
someone keeps on moving the door’. Passing
the Jewish cemetery on Hillfoot Road
and a sign for John Lennon Airport
told me I was on the right road for home.
As I drove onto the Gateway Bridge I thought
of what I had learned in Academe’s Groves:
that Aristotle knew how many teeth
a horse has, and Bertolt Brecht was a fan
of Rudyard Kipling. Beneath me the river
was bright, and stretched like a silver lining.
I remembered, one damp November night,
walking from my lodgings near the Art School
down to Victoria Street’s sorting office
to catch the last post to faraway you
with my regular letter of love and longing.
Near Mathew Street, three working class teenage girls –
thirteen, fourteen, still in their school coats – sang
‘The world is treating me bad, misery…
I’ll remember all the little things we’ve done…’
I wondered then when and how I would use
such a piece of theatre.
Jeff Teasdale
July 27, 2024Very evocative of student life in Liverpool, David – and mine in Newcastle by another river, flowing east into a grey North Sea. Gaggles of Geordie teenage girls giggling in Whitley Bay’s Spanish City (I had seaside digs for the first year, just down the road from this stucco mock-Moorish funfair). They used to dance to one of the arcades’ juke boxes, and always moaned when we put Eric Burdon on: ’Girl, we gotta get outa this place…’ and they often did on a Friday after school, hitching to London in their mini-skirts at the Gateshead A1 roundabout. Us lads on the same trip never had a chance of a lift until they had all been picked up… ‘Bright lights; big city, gone to my baby’s head…’ them to some disco, us to the Marquee and Ronnie Scott’s’… We always came back, while some of them stayed there (like Eric).
And, like you David, catching the last post with a letter home to Cheshire written on dull Basildon Bond, or a page torn from my sketchbook… hers in response, always on her very un-ingerlish pink or yellow paper.
Many thanks for stirring the pot of memory again…