VT Coughtrey - Grand Tour, part 4

NOTES	I've no idea why I now decided to make the complicated cross-country journey to Liverpool, or what the journey was like. I think it's quite likely that I just happened to get a lift from Sheffield with someone who happened to be going there. The Book of Taps told me that there was a rehab-type spike near a place called Fazakerly, and that it was to be avoided because the spikemaster was a sadistic bastard. I nevertheless decided to take it in, probably due to tiredness and depression as much as anything else. Having found myself (probably at the end of the lift) in the outer suburbs of the city, I was obliged to walked through mile after mile of an extraodinary alien landscape in which everything smashable and not actually inhabited, such as telephone boxes, had not just been wrecked but reduced to their most basic form - a battered pole here, a crumpled frame there, and so on. All street signs and street furniture whatsoever had suffered the same fate and it seemed to me that a tribe of fearsome monsters from some remote corner of the universe had colonised this region. I later found out that this wasn't so far from the truth, and that I had been very lucky not to have encountered any of them during these wanderings through their territory (I think I must have arrived in the morning following an overnight lift).
	This was at a time when there was beginning to be a lot of talk about Liverpool as just about the most exciting place to be in Britain, what with the Beatles, the Liverpool poets and radical left-wing politics. Throughout my brief stay there it was obvious that if this stimulating new hub of experimentation, philosophy and entertainment existed anywhere outside the minds of a few southern journalists and popular music promoters, it must have been confined to a handful of clubs and pubs in the city centre.
	When I got to Fazakerly I went into a police station and asked for directions to the spike. I groaned when the duty sargeant said it was a few miles yet - out in the country, in fact. "What's the problem?" he asked. "Don't tell me you can't spare the time!" His colleagues thought this was very funny, but even the mildest of little digs can be quite distressing when you are in low spirits, as I was by this stage of my Grand Tour.
Does anyone have any idea what the derelict collection of buildings might have been (it was a vast site)?	I arrived at the spike quite late in the evening. It was a brand-new purpose-built place and looked quite intimidating, like a forced-labour camp. I was astonished when the guard on the gate said that there were no admissions after 6pm. This was the only spike I encountered where you couldn't book in at any time, or at least wait in some sort of shelter until the morning. I wandered off again and eventually found a vast derelict building or rather a large collection of separate derelict buildings on one campus. It had presumably been some sort of hospital or psychiatric institution, in the middle of being either pulled down or refurbished. I stumbled about this concrete wilderness in the dark until I found a floor space sufficiently free of rubble to doss down on. It was an eerie, unnerving night without sleep. Next morning I returned to the spike and booked in.
Does anyone know what the former Fazakerley spike is used for now?	It was a truly dreadful place. The newness and large scale coupled with a spartan absence of furniture and decor, also the strange fact that there were very few inmates, made a chilling impression. Meals consisted either of very watery potato soup, or else bread and cheese. Uncharacteristically of spikes, the portions were very meagre. Another unusual aspect was that you had to work hard for long hours every day, and this work consisted of breaking up large rocks, for no apparent reason, on a great rockpile on the uncultivated land attached to the building. It was exactly the old popular image of Dartmoor prisoners being made to smash rocks all day for no good reason other than punishment. Despite the ravages of months on the road, I was still able to do this, but some of the older dossers were not up to it at all, and got horribly yelled at and generally bullied by the spikemaster's lieutenants.
	The rumours about this spikemaster turned out to be correct. All of this obscure breed of civil servant were a bit pompous, humourless, sadistic and of fairly low intelligence, but this one was all of these things in rather greater measure than I had hitherto encountered. I can't remember at all how I managed to persuade him to let me go after about a week. I can only assume that I succeeded in giving the impression that I wanted to stay. He would, of course, have done the opposite of whatever he thought I wanted. I walked to the centre of Liverpool but soon decided that it wasn't a place where I wanted to hang around, so I started hitching without even trying to crack the NAB.
	I knew that the nearest spike that I hadn't yet visited was 60 or 70 miles away in Bradford, so that's where I headed, getting there quite quickly, I believe. I was astonished to discover that Bradford, even in 1965, seemed to be largely Asian. In fact, the parts I had to walk through to get to the spike were almost exclusively Asian.
	The spike was of the hospital casual ward type, so I was looking forward to something rather more relaxed than Fazakerly. However, the spikemaster, an Asian, was unbelievably self-important and delighted in playing a long drawn-out game with each applicant. He interrogated you thoroughly, repeating the same questions several times, shaking his head at the answers and being deliberately indecisive about whether to admit you or not. If, like me, you assumed that he wasn't intending to admit you and turned to leave, he would call you back saying, "Wait a minute, I never said I wasn't going to let in in!" and would then start the nonsense all over again. Eventually, I told him precisely where to shove his spike and probably kicked something on the way out, because he shouted that he was going to call the police. I was rather hoping that he would, because I was feeling like big trouble by this time, but there was no sign of the police as I stormed off down the street, cursing the air and everyone who breathed it.
The St George's Crypt charity is still in operation and judging by its website is a rather better organised affair these days!	I soon realised that I was walking along the road to Leeds. I kept going and, late at night, having walked the ten or so miles, arrived in that city. From The Book of Taps, I knew that dossers could shelter overnight in the crypt of St George's Church, near the city centre, so I decided to pay it a visit. This was more in the hope of food than shelter. I was let in, but there was no food - it was too late. As I was getting seriously tired these days I decided to stay the night, despite the fact that this simply meant dossing down on the hard floor, jammed in among many dossers, some of whom stank badly. One, in fact, had shat himself, but couldn't be bothered to do anything about it, despite the pleas and threats of his comrades.
	But even while I was contemplating getting up and walking out, a very strange thing happened. A rather suave man of about 40 came in, and looked over the prone, stinking, grunting, snoring, cursing mass disapprovingly until he saw me. He then had a word with the young volunteer in charge. She called me over and said that Mr Windlock (not his real name but a rather smart play on it) wanted to ask me a few questions. It was obvious from her demeanour that he was held in high esteem by the St George's Crypt charity. Sensing that something good might come of this, I got to my feet and went over to him. He asked me fairly standard social worker type things and I no doubt came out with the automatic answers about hoping to settle down, etc. The upshot was that I found myself in his car, being taken to a large house somewhere in the northern suburbs of the city. I couldn't have known it at that moment, but my Grand Tour was over.