I came to live in Britain in 1971 after spending my early formative years in the Philippines and Sri Lanka (Ceylon then). My head was full of the American Beat poets I’d discovered in Manila supplanting all the adventure books and British comics that had been my world of reading as a child in Colombo. Liverpool, where I landed, had a mythical attraction for a seventeen-year-old: hometown of the Beatles. Just a flower in your hair away from San Francisco. I’d heard that Allen Ginsberg, the most famous of the Beat poets, had visited Liverpool in the sixties and declared it ‘the centre of consciousness of the human universe’. I put down roots on the other side of the Mersey, in Birkenhead, which boasted its own Beat poet — Adrian Henri.
Romesh Gunesekera, London ©Miriam Berkley
Colombo had made me a reader, keen to escape my surroundings by diving into a page. Manila made me want to scribble by giving me a glimpse of writers proclaiming their crazy art. In Liverpool I tried to combine the two — the pleasures of writing and of reading — to make me the writer that I am. I found kindred spirits. A language that worked for me. A need to balance the past with the present braced for the future. Love. And all the off-shoots of rock’n’roll — including the road down to London where I now live.
Looking back, a poem, seems the right way to pay homage to that centre from where my journey in Britain began.
Anthem of Arrival is that poem.
You turned up ten years late.
The poet who had declared the city
the centre of the universe
had come and gone.
The Fab Four long scooted south.
Down the Mersey,
the beat of the big birds was already
muffled by fog horns, clarion
calls, pillars of the past
crumbling, shipyards closing.
You caught a glimpse of the Birkenhead bard
ducking into Beattie’s
to grab a pair of white sneakers
and a peaked cap,
before a Silly Wizard’s
fiddle wailed, Jethro Tull
hopped on a stage,
leg high, flute wild,
and Queen rocked blind,
dazed by unexpected footlights.
Night and day, you crossed the Mersey
for classes, as you say,
in metropolitan citizenship;
hurried past Penny Lane,
under a diamond sky,
imagining the world was made
out of tangerine sand,
believing the fields of England
were ripe to burst into rebel flower —
a fine match for the gasoline sunsets
lit by the mills and petrochemical
refineries upstream.
Doomsday oak woods,
windswept heather-fringed slate outcrops,
gorse pricked in yellow flames:
all reaching out of a driftwood
British book beckoning
the crazy outriders
of your overheated childhood
in a far, more combustible island.
Tunnels — Kingsway,
Queensway —
became palliatives for you.
On the cusp, you found
Jerusalem in a rhyme
sung by Mister Clown
quaffing Retsina
by a bombed-out church.
Pubs, bookshops, libraries,
formed a cocktail of words,
intoxicants
you thought were yours,
but whose immediate
half-gobbled sounds
were impossible to fathom
without Virgil’s
skint, gassy laugh
and a roll-up at the tavern.
You learnt to get by
with a stoic’s nod,
making do with American
pushbacks — hey man, cool —
a touch of the enigmatic
easily mistaken for Zen
and the art of subdued
self-maintenance
in a tide of Ye wha and Alrite, la.
Despite being forever tainted
by its historic triangular trade,
Liverpool gave you a kind of freedom
coasting from Lark Lane to
Bold Street.
A two-stroke Isetta,
bought for five quid,
a new driver’s license,
a hotchpotch of newbuild motorways,
a kiss on the pierhead that
altered the journey to
the centre of your universe.
Birds at sea, confused
sailors, freeloaders,
muddled fish foundered
gutted by the gulf
between day and night,
black and white. Pairing
poetry to prose,
pencil to paper,
you began to see
the difficulty
of separating
the true from the false.
At the mouth of the Mersey
you heard an echo
of your lost country in pain.
In Bingo-land
the cry remained faint.
You wrote to amplify
what you felt
for what you left behind
as you crossed one river
and discovered another
whose every drop erases
what you had been
before you became
what you are now.
The centre is where you land —
if you stand your ground,
play your hidden ace
and be a shadow striker
even on the eve
of your final encounter.
