Creatures of the Pool Read Online Free PDF Page A

would have been strewn with the rib cages of ships under construction. The slopes below us would be scattered with the towers of mills and the smoking stumpy conical chimneys of potteries and limekilns. They stood beside rudimentary roads up which horses and carts laboured, together with the occasional carriage and stagecoach to London. Most of the streets were still crammed between or around the first seven thoroughfares that grew up near the Castle, but as the town spread towards Everton and the neighbouring ridge of Edge Hill, the streets multiplied without growing much straighter or wider. The burgeoning streets were pinned by more than a dozen church spires. Towards the edge of the settlement we might see women trudging the ropewalks, which were longer than many of the streets, as they twined hemp to make ropes for ships. I have a sudden image of humanity breeding on the surface of the buried Pool and the drained marshes, increasing faster than the maze of cramped streets ought to be expected to contain—in the last three decades of the nineteenth century the population of Liverpool increasedby two hundred thousand—until whole families were packed into each unsanitary house little better than a prison and eventually into the cellar too. Up here the gentry hunted along the ridge on horseback, which might suggest a more refined form of savagery that presumed to rise above the sort that infested the diseased streets. I’m reminded that the mysterious Joseph Williamson of Edge Hill turned up at his wedding in hunter’s attire and rode off to the hunt as soon as the ceremony was over. I’m distracted, which must be why my brain is seething with the past when it doesn’t need to be. We’ve just parked outside my parents’ house, and I’m disconcerted to find it’s for sale.
    It belonged to my father’s parents. It was where he spent his youth. When they died he persuaded my mother to move into it and sell the Kensington semi where they’d brought me up. They didn’t need the space now that I was at university in Durham and wouldn’t be moving back into our old home. He was able to cycle downtown to the art gallery where he worked until retiring last year, after which he seemed happy just to be close to the heart of the city. My mother found she liked this too, all of which is why I’m thrown by the sale board standing guard in the small neat garden. The house is the end of a terrace of six that survive from a longer Victorian stretch. Lucinda gazes past it at the latest threat of a storm, which darkens the bay as if it’s muddying the water, and says “Aren’t we going in?”
    By now she may think she’s the problem. “Of course we are,” I say and climb out of the Spirita.
    The small two-storey house is painted as red as a university. The front door and windows are bright yellow. Between the gathered orange curtains the windows display enough nets for a fishing expedition. When I open the gate the latch emits a clang that calls my mother to the front door as Lucinda follows me along the short path between rockeries. My mother’s large reddish face framed by cropped greying hair seems to grow even rounder with a smile as she holdsout her arms from the dress I always call her floral wallpaper outfit, if only to myself. Her arms are still plump and surely no more wrinkled than last time I saw them. She keeps up the smile and the gesture when she notices I’m not alone. “Who’s this?” she cries.
    “Who is it?” my father demands.
    “It’s us, Mr Meadows. Deryck,” Lucinda responds, and slips past me on the stone border to take my mother’s hand. “I’m Lucinda.”
    “Well, I’m sure I’m glad to meet you.”
    My mother gives me a blink that hints at reproof, but she’s not the only one who has been kept uninformed. “Since when has the house been for sale?” I want to know.
    My father hurries out of the front room with a haphazard armful of books and magazines and sheets of paper.