The distinguished writer returned to the great city, seeking again the magic which had guided him from short pants to a mortarboard and gown. David Charters reports

THE scholarly chap, whose scalp gleams to the brush of the breeze, has marvelled at much in his quest to unearth the cultural spirit of his native Liverpool – perhaps it was heard in the slap of cement on the stones rising into great monuments, or in the scraping of a finely-tuned viola in a hall for the penguin-suited.

Maybe it lay in the whiff of cigarette smoke clinging with unshakeable faith, like Irish peat, to the shabby jacket of a Christian Brother, offering schoolboys the choice of six strokes of the strap with their trousers (kecks) up or four with them down.

Images and sounds, those awakened ghosts of time; the sad, the happy and the ridiculous, were all around him.

How can one seaport attract so much love and derision in its ceaseless roll of jokes, the soft and hard; anecdotes, stories, songs, high and low art – in its self-mockery and mockery of others and in its infinite pride?

“Don’t look up, Mabel, that fellah with the big er – well, you know – is still standing there, naked as a plucked chicken, on his perch outside the shop. No wonder they call him Dickie Lewis.”

There’s culture of a sort. For a statue, he’s also got a lot of spirit, not to mention that . . .

But there was also the sandwich-slicer, who told our man that she had never tasted avocado, though she imagined it would be “very nice”.

Then she started to prepare his sandwich of avocado, chicken and bacon. Would he prefer butter or olive oil on it, she wanted to know. Of course, the little boys of his childhood would not have been troubled by such a question. To them, a butty was forever a butty.

But when people get airs and graces, there’s no stopping ’em.

Ah, life can be so difficult when, after so many years and changes, you peer through the mirror of memory at the old haunts – with literary quotations roaming around your mind and all instincts primed to find again those qualities, that spirit, which made you love this strange, crazy place so much to begin with.

Hush now, is that a horn warning of fog on the river, or just another trick of the memory? When he had lain in bed at night in the family home in Crosby, a little north of Liverpool, they had called the horn the Bootle Cow because of its “melancholy booming”.

However, the coughing chimneys, which thickened the fog then, don’t smoke any more. Most of the factories, which helped them, are gone, too.

And people are saying that the book you write about these experiences of rediscovery should be ready for 2008, Liverpool’s year as the European Capital of Culture. But you know yourself that the city’s culture had never hung on a slogan, or needed a special year. It was always there.

Where?

That question has produced a wonderful evocation of his city from Nicholas (Nick) Murray, poet, BA graduate in English from Liverpool University, formerly holder of a Royal Literary Fund Fellowship at the University of London, biographer, and old boy of St Mary’s College, Crosby.

He has called it So Spirited a Town: Visions and Versions of Liverpool. The front cover shows Dickie in all his glory on the bow of a boat high on a wall of Lewis’s department store, at the confluence of Ranelagh and Renshaw Streets. But our photographer, Andrew Teebay, decided to feature one of Dickie’s more teasing poses.

This statue was referred to as “exceedingly bare” in Pete McGovern’s multi-versed anthem, In My Liverpool home.

It arrived in 1954, sculpted by Jacob Epstein to adorn the rebuilt store rebuilt after war bomb damage. He called it The Spirit of Liverpool Resurgent.

Indeed, there was something of a resurgence in Liverpool during the 1950s and ’60s, which would culminate in the success of the football teams, the comedians and The Beatles, but it was different in style from the earlier surges. These had seen Liverpool adorned with magnificent Georgian houses and then the Victorian grandeur of St George’s Hall, the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool Museum, the railway station and later buildings – the cathedrals and the Philharmonic Hall.

The new resurgence, often called a renaissance, has led to skyscrapers, commercial developments and lots of shops.

Nick, 55, feels that this can only be regarded as culture in the broad sweep. In rather disparaging terms, he writes of the contribution to a local government journal made by Cllr Warren Bradley, leader of Liverpool City Council.

Bradley had eulogised about the “phenomenal renaissance” and “one of the biggest urban transformations ever seen in this country”.