Alan Summers

Ferry Across the Mersey

If you are from Liverpool, England, you might be known as Liverpudlians, or Scousers. But I didn’t know the name Scousers derived from the Scandinavian lobscouse stew, popular throughout Northern Europe, and of course the port city of Liverpool! And if someone talks Scouse in this city, it’s more likely to be the accent and dialect, as much as it’s about the food.

frosting from danish to upper lip winter sun

It’s now cold waiting for the ferry, even though I’ve had a bacon butty and a mug of useful coffee from the Fab4 Café at the Gerry Marsden Ferry Terminal ticket complex.

Now, it so happens that Gerry Marsden and the Pacemakers is also a pop group from history. They had famous songs, including a Top Ten hit in the UK and USA music charts during the 1960s; it’s about this river; it filters in and out of the tanned guide’s talk as the ferry sets off.

hunch-weather the ripples coax a primaveral sun

In between the recorded descriptions of our ferry crossing, travelling the River Mersey, an acquaintance of my wife, now my friend too, gives a parallel lifetime of stories in the dialogue that is pure Scouse. 

It’s something special being on this ferry, I’d never taken it before, even back in the 1980s when I lived here, down the road from one of Paul McCartney’s cousins. 

It will be one of those flurries of memory I’ll keep, hold onto, giving me a second chance.

snow showers the kingfisher a little colder

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About the Author

Alan Summers had two long-listed haibun in the Bournemouth Writing Festival Poetry & Flash Fiction 2024 Competition. One became shortlisted, then a winning haibun in the festival anthology Lines in the Sand: An Anthology of Poetry & Flash Fiction, Caught Between the Tides and Terra Firma.

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