North West Reads Book 18: The Outsiders by James Corbett

During the summer of 1981 the city of Liverpool was in the news for all the wrong reasons. Beset by years of industrial decline, unemployment and poverty the city had been in decline for a number of years. By 1981 this and the blatantly racist policing of Liverpool’s black community centred in the Liverpool 8 area, Toxteth, exploded into violence with weeks of rioting and destruction.

The rest of the country looked on horrified, but there were onlookers within Merseyside itself. From the outer areas the rioting seemed distant and detached from the populations who resided there. This was the experience of friends Paul and Christopher and their families, living in the more affluent suburbs of the city. Both were in their second year of Sixth Form, doing A Levels and looking to go to University; in Paul’s case he was aiming high for a place at Cambridge. His father worked as a tax inspector, his mother and housewife. Life in the suburbs was secure, respectable but rather dull and Paul is itching to leave. Paul is fascinated by the dark side of the twentieth century, it’s wars, upheavals and horrors and is looking to find a career in future danger zones, but his class background with a family and community with no experience of such work leaves him at a loss at how to gain entry to this world. For the time being these ambitions remain unarticulated while he concentrates on gaining his university place.

He and Christopher have been mates since they were children, but now that they were entering young adulthood some of the character traits that Paul may not have noticed, or seemed less prominent, in Christopher were now beginning to give Paul pause for thought about their friendship. Paul has begun to notice a cocky, arrogant side to Christopher’s character lying behind a nonchalant front that projects an air of mystery, a ‘you don’t really know me’ façade. Christopher had ‘pulled’ Julia, the daughter of a local poet, Nadezhda Semilinski. Nadezhda was Jewish and had survived Mauthausen concentration camp, coming to Britain as a refugee after the end of the war. To Christopher, and Paul as well, Nadezhda and her daughters, Julia and Sarah, seem so different and exotic in comparison to what they know, their community (and quite a lot of the population of Liverpool itself) being of Irish, Scottish or Welsh heritage. Poets, artists and writers only existed on the pages of upmarket newspapers, books and magazines. Christopher’s attitude towards his girlfriend is far from reverential, it’s at times quite crude and Paul wonders what Julia sees in him. Paul is intrigued and fascinated by Julia’s confidence and ease with the cultural world, very different from the football and beer culture of his background. She is a foundation year Art student; her sister is a musician. Paul seizes an invitation to an exhibition and then to Julia’s home keen to see and experience her different way of life.

It is at a concert of Echo and the Bunnymen at Mountford Hall that Paul meets Sarah for, he realises, the second time. He had seen her at Moorfields train station and had mistaken her for Julia. Paul is enraptured by her. Paul’s mother had not wanted him to go to the concert for fear of the riots. After the concert the group of friends, unable to find a taxi that will take them near the area where the riots were occurring, walk part of the way which takes them past the top of Upper Parliament Street near the epicentre of the troubles. What they witness is akin to a war zone: tense, desolate, strewn with broken glass and debris and burnt-out cars. They come across a young black boy with a head injury. He refuses help and leaves the area rapidly when he heard police sirens. Julia is disgusted and angry at a police officer using racist language and is laughed at by the officer when she threatens to report him. They continue through the battle-scarred streets and out of the area and make their way home.

Paul goes the Picton Library on William Brown Street ostensibly to do some preparatory reading for university but also to try and find out more about Nadezhda Semilinski. He is successful and locates a cuttings file about her. She did not like being asked about the war and the concentration camps and walked out on one journalist, but later she relented and provided more information on her life and background. Her move to England in 1946 was sponsored by the Anglo-Jewish League, then studied at the LSE, got a job and entered the bohemian world of 50s and 60s London. It was marriage that brought her to Liverpool where she wrote and published her poems which were a critical success. The librarian tells him there is another folder on its way. Having now read her poems he is ready to meet the author.

Nadezhda’s home was a large Victorian House that bore all the hallmarks of the bohemian artist. Today it may be referred to as ‘shabby chic’. The guests to the party were also an eclectic mix of people. Julia and Sarah had mentioned ‘the history boy’ to their mother and she enjoys talking to Paul about her poetry and politics. Nadzehda had taken part in many political protests and campaigns, a legacy of the horror and injustice she experienced during the war, and she knew all about the racist policing in Liverpool during the previous decade. Did she miss Vienna, the city of her birth, enquires Paul? Maybe she will talk about her past at a later time, but not now.

As the party winds down in the early hours Paul and Julia take a walk to the local park. They observe a bankrupt city, its building and places run down and not maintained. Sarah confesses that she is not sure whether fear or look forward to the future and expresses her sense of being an outsider, of living in this city but not fully belonging being Jewish and having an Austrian mother and German father. Her father had left and returned to Germany, remarrying some years later. Nadzehda had been devastated by this. Paul senses there is something more going on with the family history. He is still shy of showing how he feels about Sarah, lacking the experience to express himself.

The second folder of cuttings at the library proves to be a shocking revelation to Paul. Salacious stories about her in the Redtop tabloids, drugs and an allegation of an affair with a young student splashed across the pages. The young man in question, Sean Kendall, had his allegations investigated by his school, and they concluded that there was no evidence for any impropriety between him and Nadezhda; however mud sticks to her and her reputation was tarnished. Nadezhda retreated from public life, no longer taking part in demonstrations and political campaigns. Paul is not sure what to believe and tentative enquiries to Sarah and Nadezhda’s friends produce no answers, but his fascination with her only deepens as does his attraction towards her younger daughter.

Love does finally blossom between Paul and Sarah, and he spends more time with her. The strain in his friendship between him and Christopher increases over the summer; Paul comes to realise that Christopher can be a bad influence over him. They spend time in the city with Sarah taking her camera and photographing the decay and deprivation around them. She feels the city will never recover and Paul is forced to agree. They know their futures will take them away from a Liverpool where jobs and work had become a thing of the past. Sarah leaves for Germany to visit her father and Paul and his friends await their A Level results.

Nadezhda invites them all a results day party at her house. It’s good news for Paul but a disaster for Christopher. He drowns his sorrows in a bottle of whiskey and angrily tells Paul where to go. This party would prove to be a pivotal moment for Paul which would set the direction of his life with years of confusion and guilt. An unexpected death and a gift would part him from Sarah and set him on the path to a career in journalism as foreign correspondent reporting on the world’s trouble spots. Paul was following his ambition to bear witness to tragedy and injustice. He hoped this would help him understand the world but unfortunately it just made it more confusing. On returns home he follows tragedies and injustices involving his home city, one of which brings his attention to his former friend Christopher and his ugly and self-serving career progressing via the police and then, later on, to New Labour as a special advisor. Liverpool and its citizens are outsiders in Thatcher’s Britain but defiant in the face of slurs thrown at them at this time.

Throughout this time Paul’s desire to know the real story of Nadezhda’s past, before she came to Britain, remains on a backburner. Thatcher and Major’s time pass and New Labour comes to power. ‘Cool Britannia’ arrives as does the last great days of Fleet Street. Paul is a respected correspondent who has the freedom to choose the subjects that interest him, including Nadezhda Semilinski. A memorial service for one of her friends brings Paul into contact with Sean Kendall. No longer a troubled young man he had become an academic and was also intrigued by Nadezhda’s story and wanted to tell it as well. He felt guilty that he had not been able to apologise for the damaging newspaper headlines and wanted to atone for this by bringing the truth to light. Paul wished for the same, to bring out the truth of the events of that last party at her house. He had never stopped loving Sarah and hoped that he would be able to find her and tell her the truth, refuting the lies and distortions that had torn them apart.

Most of the characters of this novel, including the city of Liverpool itself, are outsiders in some respect. Paul’s family is relatively affluent compared to many of his fellow citizens which sets him apart from them. He realises at one point that he regards the people who have rioted as akin for foreign bandits, not the citizens of the same city he comes from. At University he faces cliquey, snobbish groups of public schoolboys who regard him as an educated thug. Liverpool’s pariah status during the 80s and early 90s sets it apart from much of the rest of the country and Paul reports on the lives of people in the world’s conflict zones, those who have fallen foul of political change and are persecuted for it. Nadezhda had experienced being an outsider all her life and her daughters sense their difference from other residents of Liverpool.

Being an outsider adds to the general problems and struggles all people experience in life, but being an outsider can make you more aware of injustice. The discomfort and uncertainty of being and outsider can lead to greater awareness and empathy to others in the same position. In contrast to this Christopher may have found success gaining positions of power and influence in the police and politics, but Paul is disgusted at him and his work that featured cover ups, obfuscations and spin doctoring. Christopher became an ‘insider’, part of the powerful Establishment. His successful, but self-serving, career had left him morally bankrupt. Paul’s work reveals the lives of those for whom there are no easy answers and are marred by the complexities that arise from wars and conflict zones where being in the wrong place, talking to the wrong person or falling in love can lead to your death or exile. As Paul finally returns to Nadezhda and what happened to her during the war he finds that, in this respect, little had changed. Now finally, after all these years, there is one person who he needs to find and tell this story to and to resolve the hurts and traumas of the past.