Bureau De Change – What Penny Lane Tells Us About People In Troubled Times
What has really surprised me about the pandemic is how people can react so differently to the same situation. Pondering on this made me think of two walks I once took along Penny Lane, the famous street in South Liverpool made famous by Paul McCartney’s song of 1967.
My first visit to Penny Lane was accidental. In 1991, after travelling from Kent, I’d arrived at Lime Street Station on a warm Monday evening in July. My brother, Julian, met me beside the station newspaper kiosk. I was here for his graduation from Liverpool University. My second brother, Richard, arrived ten minutes later on a train from Leeds. We all went back to the student residence, expecting to be royally entertained. Unfortunately, Julian had been invited to a party, and we hadn’t. So Richard and I, left to our own devices for the evening, decided to go out for a drink. Needing some money, we had to find a cash machine. The nearest one, Julian told us, was at the top of Penny Lane.
Although I knew Penny Lane existed as a real street in Liverpool it still didn’t seem quite right to make some throw-away comment about getting myself over to a cash machine at the end of it.
Leaving the gates of the residence we crossed Greenbank Road and walked past “Penny Lane L8”, painted on a grey stone wall.
“This is sacred ground we’re walking on here,” I said to my brother.
“Uh huh,” was the reply.
The first hundred yards or so of Penny Lane rose between an avenue of trees that shaded the road. On the left was a hospital, a big, anonymous brick building, and on the right a sports ground with the names of various rock bands sprayed on dilapidated gates. Over the rise, we followed an incline down past terraced houses. From somewhere I heard a young girl shouting: “This is Penny Lane!”
[image error]We passed a barber’s shop, and a fish and chip shop, all mentioned in the song. Then before our walk had really started, Penny Lane came to an end at a roundabout. Across the road was a bank with its cash point.
Armed with some money, we then began walking back the way we had come. I noticed the Penny Lane Bistro, which displayed the words of Penny Lane in flowing, golden script above the doors and windows. I paused for a few moments, to read the song’s opening line, about a barber who is showing photographs of all the heads he’s had the pleasure of knowing. The barber has seen many heads, and many more are coming and going outside his shop. The barber seems to live in a varied, changeable sort of world. I read on and came to lines about Penny Lane’s banker, inspired, perhaps by someone who once worked at the bank I had just visited. While the barber’s shop was full of variety, of people coming and going with new hairstyles, the banker lives in a world where nothing ever changes. He wears a suit to work everyday, and a shower of rain won’t make him change his routine. The children laugh at him for not wearing a “mac” on rainy days. In the last verse, this stick-in-the-mud banker is still sitting waiting for a trend, even though there are trends all around him if only he could see them.
Walking on, I thought about lines describing another of Penny Lane’s inhabitants, the fireman. The banker keeps waiting for a trend, but the fireman tries to escape them, running inside to escape the pouring rain. While the banker sits through days where nothing seems to happen, the fireman, in contrast, not only sees trends, but overreacts to them, when it would be much better to remain calm. These two people live on the same street, inhabiting different worlds.
[image error]The shelter in the middle of the roundabout – the bank is just to the rightFinally there’s a pretty nurse sitting in the middle of the roundabout selling poppies from a tray. This was the roundabout I had seen when crossing to the cash point. The fireman seems overwhelmed by the same things that mean nothing to the banker. Meanwhile the nurse continues to sit on the roundabout. She gets on with her charity work. Nurses have no illusions about the reality of life’s ups and downs. They know how real they are. But this nurse does not become overwhelmed like the fireman. She gets on with doing her best to help.
I went back to Penny Lane in November 2009. There had been changes. It was autumn. There was some building work going on. The former cafe in the middle of the roundabout was boarded up. The Penny Lane Bistro no longer had lyrics painted in gold above its doors. I was in my forties not my twenties, and rather than dragging my long suffering brother along Penny Lane, it was now my long suffering wife and daughter. But the things Paul McCartney’s song said about people remained the same. If I went back to Penny Lane in 2021, no doubt there would still be bankers, barbers, firemen and nurses walking its pavements – people who exist on a spectrum between fear and nonchalance. This makes me think that Penny Lane says something universal about the way people react to challenge and change.
