L19

It’s always better for a novel to be set somewhere rather than nowhere, and the more specifically that somewhere is delineated the better.

The Angels of L19 takes place mainly from January to July 1984, and mainly within the titular postcode area in south Liverpool – close to where John Lennon lived with his Aunt Mimi. Like Lennon, my protagonist Robert also lives with his aunt after his mum’s death.

In 1984, the area in question had David Alton as its Liberal MP (the sole non-Labour MP in the city), and included the council wards of Saint Mary’s (Labour) and Grassendale (Conservative) – a fact mentioned in passing in the book because the uncle of one of the secondary characters is a Labour councillor. However, my two protagonists live in Grassendale ward: a relatively prosperous zone of semi-detached houses dating from the 1930s (or perhaps the immediate post-war period), part of a small right-wing island within the larger socialist sea of the city as a whole. But obviously ‘Lower Middle-Class Hero’ doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.

 Geographical limits for The Angels of L19 (map courtesy of openstreetmap.org)

The action of the novel mainly takes place within an area whose north-west corner is the junction of Rose Lane and North Mossley Hill Road, near where one of Robert’s adult friends lives. The north-east corner is somewhat lower down, at what used to be the site of the upper-school building of New Heys Comprehensive School, which Robert and his best friend Tracey both attend. New Heys doesn’t exist any more, but it was a strange hybrid of a school, split over three campuses: one was a prefab excrescence, another occupied what used to be a boy’s secondary modern (my father went there in the 1930s), and the upper school had once been a girl’s grammar.

On the west side of the map, the boundary runs down Mossley Hill Road, along which Robert walks to his friend’s house, past the fields where the Iron Marsh campus of Liverpool John Moores University now has some of its buildings. At the south-west corner, the boundary is formed by the leafy, secluded houses around Cressington railway station, where Kevin, one of Robert and Tracey’s posher church friends, lives; and then farther down, at the south-east corner, by what used to be Alfred Jones Memorial Hospital in Garston, a building now replaced by the South Liverpool NHS Treatment Centre. On the east, the marker is the cenotaph at the end of Long Lane, which is close to the church Robert, Tracey and all of their friends attend.

There are scenes outside this zones (e.g. in the city centre, at church camp in north Wales), but most of the action occurs smack bang in the middle of the map above: on South Mossley Hill Road, where Robert and Tracey live next door to one another.

I lived on this same road with my aunt and uncle from 1981–8, my secondary-school years. The borders of the map are therefore the borders of the area I regularly traversed on foot during this period. I still think this is the best way to know a place. In fact, I’ve never learned to drive. So when I’m not walking, I’m usually confined to train or bus. In Liverpool, I regularly caught the train from Cressington station into the town centre, or the 82 or 80 buses (the route of the latter passed close by my aunt’s house). So that’s also how my protagonists negotiate their environment – by bus or on foot.

1981–8 is the longest continuous period I’ve ever lived in one place. In 1988, I moved back to my dad’s house on the other side of the River Mersey, but I didn’t stay long. From there I went to Kent for a job; then very briefly back to my dad’s before fleeing to a friend’s house in Liverpool; then Glasgow for university; then Cambridge for a PhD; then back to my aunt’s in Liverpool during the summer of 1998 before moving to Swansea for a teaching job; then Cambridge again for a research post; then an inter-continental move to Sydney; then all the way back to Glasgow; then back again to Sydney, and on to Melbourne; back to Glasgow again; then Kent again for a second PhD in creative writing; and finally (so far) back to Glasgow. In total, I’ve lived in approximately thirty-nine different houses, or, more usually, rooms or flats. ‘Approximately’, because I’m not counting places I stayed on the sofa or in a spare room for a week or two between more permanent arrangements. Nor am I counting most of the places I stayed in Venice during the decade (roughly 1995–2005) when I regularly visited that city for periods of a month or two at a time to research its history in the archive.

I couldn’t wait to leave Liverpool in 1988. I felt like I’d outgrown the idea of me that everyone there seemed to have. But in the face of the relentless restlessness and insecurity that my life subsequently became, those seven years in Liverpool – even though I lived in someone else’s house – now seem the closest I have to roots.

I’ve known other cities better: I worked as a security guard and a postman in Glasgow, which took me to lots of different places there; and in Venice, I systematically photographed the whole city for a research project. But I’m not sure I’ve ever identified another territory as ‘mine’ in quite the same way as I did with the area I marked out on foot on the map above.

In The Angels of L19, Robert, who has visions and believes in an eternal Christian cosmology, thinks about his uncle in dismissive terms: ‘Robert’s world reaches up to the heavens and down into hell. Uncle Edward’s goes from the television room to the bedroom.’ But as the map makes clear, the limits of Robert’s movements are scarcely larger – and in any case, he has fundamentally misunderstood the relationship between the transcendent and the immanent. The juxtaposition in the novel’s title is deliberate: Robert’s visionary encounters with spiritual beings and realities do not nullify his connection to a material place. They are only possible because of that connection.