This is my copy of the ‘The Mersey Sound’, it’s an anthology of poems by the Liverpool poets Roger McGough, Brian Patten and Adrian Henri, first published in 1967. It is quite well known as poetry anthologies go, critically acclaimed and that sort of thing, but I didn’t know that back in 1984 or 85 when I got my copy, I was just a teenager at a Comprehensive who knew nothing about critical acclaim or the ground this anthology was breaking. It captured my interest because as a kid brought up in nonconformist churches here was a secular kind of nonconformism. Standing there, in an appalling black acrylic blazer, fraying grey at the edges, and apparently designed to stifle any individuality, and to make me sweat on hot days, here was something that spoke of an irreverent, funny, touching, freedom from conformity. It was like opening the windows of the classroom and letting the breeze gently blow away the standard text books, the standard curriculum, the standard teachers, the depressingly standard modernist architecture of the classroom and school – not so much Brutalist as Boringist.
I had come across poetry in lessons before, but a sure way to take the joy out of something is to make it worthy, that includes both poetry and religion.
I am no longer a nonconformist, I am a Minister of the Established Church, I now wear a black cassock, fraying grey at the edges, and apparently designed to stifle any individuality, and to make me sweat on hot days. ‘The Mersey Sound’ Anthology has become establishment too, it is no doubt worthily taught in schools by people like me who remember it from their youth. Mind you, the Church of England, while dressed up as the Establishment, is having to learn how to be nonconformist in our increasingly secular age.
I appear to have joined the conformists just as they are becoming nonconformist.
I don’t remember how I came by my copy of ‘The Mersey Sound’, on the inside cover there is a mark which suggests it once belonged to Lutterworth School so the possibility that it was obtained dishonestly cannot be ruled out.
As a Minister of the Established Church I cannot condone such petty larceny, but as a teenage boy facing a world which seemed to require me to stuff my individuality into one of several standard boxes…maybe I can.
Comments