The Archive on the Dock Road
I grew up in a city that never stopped telling itself stories. Most of them weren’t written down. They were told in pubs, on picket lines, at kitchen tables — a grandfather’s version of a strike, a mother’s version of the same lock-out, never quite agreeing, both of them true. I left Liverpool in 1980 and came back twenty-six years later to find the docks changed almost beyond recognition, but the stories still going, still being argued over, still nobody’s job to keep.
That’s the gap Melly Strikes Back tries to stand in. It’s set in the Liverpool of 1970, in a dockers’ strike, seen through a sixteen-year-old girl who starts writing everything down because nobody else is going to. I didn’t have to invent the world she lives in — I spent years inside union rooms with NUPE, doing the unglamorous work of organising, and later doing the same kind of work abroad, in Zimbabwe, alongside people fighting for the same basic thing: a say in their own working life. Solidarity isn’t an abstraction to me. It’s a memory of specific rooms and specific arguments. That’s what I want the fiction to carry.
A key part of developing that world was my mother, Anne Ryan, and the almost two years I spent listening to her and interpreting her stories into the novel. She sadly passed away this March. I’m so glad I had the chance to draw on her as my own living archive.
I think working-class fiction, and historical fiction grounded in a real place, gets treated as a nice-to-have in British publishing rather than as a serious inheritance worth investing in. Liverpool’s twentieth century — the docks, the strikes, the slum clearances, the long argument between labour and capital that ran through whole families — is as rich a seam as anything in the historical fiction shelves, and most of it has never been written as a novel at all. It sits in newspaper archives, union records, and the memories of people who are, every year, fewer in number. Byrne and Walsh, my crime series, is the same commitment carried into the present day: contemporary Liverpool, institutional failure, the lives people actually lead rather than the ones that make tidy drama. Different decades, same conviction — that this city’s ordinary lives are the story, not the backdrop to one.
I should be straightforward about my own situation, because it’s part of the argument. I started writing novels at seventy-one, on a basic state pension, which means the things a working novelist usually takes for granted — a few days in an archive, a paid manuscript mentor, the cost of putting on a public event — are simply not there unless someone helps make them possible. That’s not a complaint. It’s the actual, practical shape of what stands between the version of Melly Maguire’s world I can write from memory and instinct, and the version I could write with the Museum of Liverpool’s dock records in front of me, or an afternoon spent listening properly to someone who was actually on that picket line in 1972.
That’s what a grant buys, in plain terms. It buys time in the archive rather than time worrying about the archive. It buys a working relationship with a more experienced novelist who can tell me where the draft is going soft. And it buys the public side of the work that I think matters just as much as the writing itself — sitting down with readers, with retired dockers, with people who still carry this history, and making sure what I write gets handed back to the city it came from, not just sold to it. Writing on the Wall and the writers’ groups I sit in at Bootle Library are where a lot of that handing-back already happens, in a small way. I’d like to do it properly.
None of this is a special case. It’s what serious historical and social-realist fiction has always needed — research, mentorship, and a public it can be tested against — and what a working-class writer, of any age, is least likely to be able to fund out of his own pocket. I’m applying for support to do it properly. If you work in archives, oral history, or literary mentoring in this city, or you just think this history is worth the work, I’d like to hear from you.