Literature and home

I love reading a book set in the place in which I live.  Coming across familiar buildings, landmarks and street names as I turn the pages of a novel arouses a pride in me that where I live is worthy of literary treatment.  The delight is increased when the geographical references are unexpected.  Discovering a passage in Maggie O’Farrell’s The hand that first held mine (2010), in which the couple at the centre of the present-day narrative take their newborn baby to see a doctor in Dartmouth Park, the area of North London in which I was then living, made me enjoy the book even more. 

So, when last summer I left London and moved to Liverpool, I was keen to find literary references to my new home city.

One of the great 19^th century male literary characters – Heathcliff from Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1847) – is connected to Liverpool.  Mr Earnshaw, the father of Hindley and Catherine, goes to Liverpool one day (for unspecified reasons) and returns with ‘a dirty, ragged, black-haired child’ whom he says he saw ‘starving, and houseless, and as good as dumb in the streets of Liverpool’.  Over the years many theories about Heathcliff have circulated, one of the most popular being that he was one of the Irish immigrants who arrived in Liverpool as a result of the Irish famine.

The presentation of Liverpool as a welcoming place for people from other countries appears in Thomas Hardy’s Desperate Remedies (1871), as it is the city in which the villainous Aeneas Manston meets his wife, Eunice.  Eunice is an American actress, and Liverpool may well have been her entry point to England.  Her fondness for the city is communicated in letters to Manston after he has abandoned her in London: ‘Why didn’t you leave me in Liverpool? … London always has seemed so much more foreign to me than Liverpool.’ 

But neither of these novels is set in Liverpool, with the references to the city being simply reported by characters; the reader is never taken there by the author.

Keen to find a book actually set in Liverpool, I turned to the novelist Beryl Bainbridge (1932-2010) who was born in Liverpool and brought up in nearby Formby.  Bainbridge’s novels are categorised as psychological fiction: peopled by working class characters who lead modest unassuming lives, her novels frequently feature shocking unexpected events and an element of the macabre.

The Dressmaker, published in 1973, perfectly encapsulates these typical characteristics.  Set in wartime Liverpool, the novel centres around 17 year-old Rita who lives with her aunts, Nellie – the dressmaker of the title – and Margo, a factory worker.  The three women lead a drab and depressing existence, haunted by poverty and repression.  When Rita meets an American GI, Ira, at a party, she is caught up in a whirl of romantic hopes and delusions.  Nellie and Margo are more perceptive, however, and detect Ira’s lack of genuine interest in Rita.  When Margo, a widow, resentful that she had previously been pressured by Nellie and her brother, Jack, into rejecting a man who had been courting her, welcomes Ira’s advances, Nellie responds with unexpected and fatal consequences.

Bainbridge pays detailed attention to the Liverpool setting in The Dressmaker.  Rita and her aunts live in Anfield, the area in North Liverpool which nowadays is known primarily for being the home of Liverpool FC (though it was originally the home ground of Everton FC, who decamped to Goodison Park in 1891).  In the novel Anfield is depicted as a run-down residential area with a close-knit community where everyone knows everyone’s business.  Prior to the events of the novel, it is reported that Nellie’s brother, Jack, tries to persuade her to go and live with him and his five year old daughter, Rita, in Allerton – a more affluent and desirable area in South Liverpool – when his wife dies.  Nellie refuses to leave the family home, however, arguing that ‘Mother would never have approved’.  So Rita ends up living with her aunt instead.

Bainbridge creates a vivid sense of the geographical reality of her setting through references to real street names – Priory Road, Bingley Road, Breck Road – and to well-known Liverpool landmarks; Lime Street Station, the Empire Theatre, the Cunard Building and Sefton Park.

Food also plays a fairly significant role in the novel, much of it being typical wartime food, the result of rations and food shortages: there are spam fritters, fried fish, pork and dripping. An exception is made early on in the novel at the party at the house of Valerie Mander, Rita’s friend, where ‘the display of food on the table was quite pre-war in style: a whole ham lying in a bed of brown jelly; a bowl of real butter, like a slab of dripping, white as milk; on a dinner plate, piled high, a pyramid of oranges’.

What the novel lacks, however, is a dish that really sums up Liverpool, in the way that the street names and descriptions do.  So, instead of making a dish from a novel, I thought I’d make one that should be in a novel (and isn’t).  And that dish is scouse – the classic Liverpudlian dish.  Described as the ‘national dish’ of Liverpool and Merseyside, scouse is adapted from the ‘Lobskause’ eaten by Norwegian sailors who came to the city, and it gives the inhabitants of Liverpool their well-known nickname.  When researching recipes, I discovered versions using lamb, some using beef, and some using both – so use which meat you like.  There’s even a vegetarian variant – blind scouse – which I’m yet to make, but look forward to trying.  It’s one of those wonderful one-pot dishes – protein, veg and carb all cooked together – which is wonderfully warming in the current cold weather we’re experiencing, and is adaptable and open to tweaking to the cook’s own tastes and preferences.

SCOUSE

Ingredients (serves 4):
500g lamb neck fillet cut into large chunks
1 tablespoon plain flour, seasoned with salt and pepper
olive oil
1 large onion, peeled and diced
4 carrots, peeled and cut into large chunks
350g turnip, cut into large chunks
250ml bitter ale
250ml chicken stock
1 bay leaf
2 sprigs of thyme
2 beef stock cubes, crumbled
500g potatoes cut into large chunks

Method:
Toss the lamb pieces in the seasoned flour. Heat 1 tbsp olive oil in a large saucepan over a high heat and brown the lamb chunks.
Remove the browned lamb from the saucepan, and turn down the heat to medium, adding another tablespoon of oil.  Add the onion, carrot and turnips, with a pinch of salt and cook until softened and lightly coloured.
Return the lamb to the saucepan with the ale, stock and herbs.  Add the crumbled beef stock cubes and season well.
Bring to the boil, then reduce to a simmer and add the potatoes, not stirring then in but allowing them to sit on top of the stew.  Place the lid on the saucepan and cook for 2 hours until the meat is tender and the vegetables are soft.
Traditionally served with pickled red cabbage or cooked beetroot.