On plate glass



Every six weeks or so it is my duty and delight to take Holy Communion to Liz, a once stalwart member of our congregation now no longer able to make it to church. She lives in the part of Liverpool to which I would bring anyone sceptical of this great city’s charms. These people, I am reliably informed, still exist and are, in a show of pity by the state, allowed onto trains unsupervised (or, at least, they were…). Should such a person arrive at Lime Street station, I would whisk them, instantly, a few stops down one of the Merseyrail lines to where Liz, every six weeks or so, kindly invites me in and we share her memories and her tea and his body and blood.

To reach this sanctuary, one has to walk down a street lined with vast piles of mortar and brick, gothic and classical testaments to the far reach of Liverpool shipping in the age of Victoria. Indeed these sallied ranks of mansions and villas lead, eventually, to the Mersey, the very vein of money, blood and mud that made such dwellings possible. There is a polite decay to them now- their residents cast their attentions not towards far off ventures but to the end of their drives- contemplating their hedges and Range Rovers, both immaculate. All this is far enough from the pantomime city of the loather’s imagination but, the thing that would, I think, shake this imagined critic from his anti-Liverpudlian complacency would not be the structures themselves- for a walk around Kew or Morningside or Clifton would provide bricks and mortar arranged in the same forms and would doubtless be easier for our cynic to reach from his modest, though highly thought of, homestead– but the thick, clear plate glass round which those sturdier elements dance to form windows into those worlds described above.

There is something inexpressibly pleasing about a plate glass window- perhaps it is the arrogance inherent to an object which seeks to broach the gulf between conditions outside and in (which is, after all, the reason why we have houses in the first place) that is, in the manner of all guilty pleasures, appealing. Indeed, it is a long standing fascination of mine: I recall the room in which we ate our meals at school, situated in a house of the same era and with the same great sheets of alchemised sand letting in light from the same sun. There was, in one of these windows, a small pock mark- a relic, it was said, of a time long past when discipline at the school was so lax that it inspired the film If. One day, in a scene that must have been a cross between a Wilde play and a Tarantino film, a boy- maybe as a bet or perhaps as a cry for help having become tired of the constant teenage sparring which I look back on with such rose tinted joy- came into lunch with a pellet gun and fired it. Such was the thickness of the glass that the emission from this unfortunate lapse in normal conduct, that the pellet caused only a dimple. As I would pass it, I’d run my finger across it, relishing its imperfection.

But back to persuading our cautious friend (I hope he has revealed himself to be merely cautious rather than caustic, and I hope we are at least on the way to becoming friends): the particular appeal of this Liverpudlian glass is how it transfigures the light that dances off the surface of the Mersey on a clear and bright day, or how, as storm clouds gather over the same water’s billows, it provides the residents of that pleasing stretch of riverbank, with Turner paintings in their own sitting rooms. In short, these great glass windows bring to worlds set within the firmest of perimeters, a flash of the outside and the infinite, the beautiful and the light. And if our friend cannot see the goodness and the glory in that, then I fear there is little more we can do for him.

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