Deborah Mulhearn's introduction

Leaving is the fifth and final volume of the Mersey Minis series. The five volumes, Landing, Living, Longing, Loving and Leaving, together present an 800th anniversary anthology of writing about Liverpool from its muddy beginnings to its future dreams.
Leaving could have been filled with accounts of dock departures – millions sailed from Liverpool to a new life – but for the sake of variety I’ve broadened the theme to all modes of departure, with the Liverpool of imagination and memory as well as literal leavings included. As the Liverpool-born jazz singer George Melly put it, ‘The departure for the Sea of Dreams is from the Liverpool pierhead.’
From Pullitzer prize-winning authors to poor emigrants passing through Liverpool – and in some cases staying – these extracts are vivid and moving accounts of loss and exuberant reinvention.
Poorer travellers’ experiences contrast sharply with the comforts of the well heeled, the privations of the boarding house against the luxuries of the Adelphi. Some get glimpses into this gilded world, like the acerbic lady’s maid unimpressed by the hotel’s French menu.
Others left by road and rail. A famous poet takes the coach called the ‘Lousy Liverpool’ and is bitten by fleas and pickpockets; an early rail traveller is traumatised when an oncoming train rushes past (at 35 mph) on the adjacent track.
People are leaving home, leaving childhood, leaving for the suburbs, leaving the known, leaving life. A young boy, now a celebrated horror writer, sees ‘bird man’ Leo Valentin plummet to his death at Speke Airport in 1956. A freed slave is afraid to leave his ship.
Liverpool may have been merely a staging post for many, their last glimpse of England or Europe, but it’s a place imprinted on the minds and memories of millions.