KEY POINTS:
One kilometre apart, two different signs, two different worlds. The board welcoming visitors to Croxteth Hall Country Park is clean, bright, with polished fleurs-de-lis, and underneath it speaks happily of forthcoming events - pond-dipping, something called, intriguingly, mini-beasts, today's annual flower show.
Outside the hall, where the Molyneux family, the earls of Sefton, lived in muted magnificence from the 16th century until the last earl's death in 1972, children play beyond the glorious walled garden.
Liverpool children, on bikes, with razor-cut hairstyles and hooded tops - but hoods down, laughing with each other, laughing at puppies and pooling cash for a Mister Softee icecream.
On the path up to the hall I had, it struck me later, come across three quintessentially British groups: three bobbies, two nurses from a nursery pushing prams, an outing for special needs adults guided by the kind of men who will give up their free time to do volunteer work like this, and whom this city seems to produce in sympathetically high numbers.
Kindness, childcare and the cheerfully old-fashioned presence of Plod. It couldn't really have been further from the image I might have expected, after a day of headlines about poor, gun-ridden Liverpool and feral kids; after a summer of headlines about "Anarchy in the UK".
Five minutes' walk away, ducking through the trees, you come to Fir Tree Rd. On the surface, it's all rather lovely, if you like that manner of suburbia. There are water-features: spouting cherubs. There are very clean cars. Tents, in a couple of gardens, for the children. Terribly well-tended roses, picket fencing and bright blue wheelie-bins and recycling boxes regimented neatly at the end of every driveway.
It was here, in the sprawling empty carpark of the Fir Tree pub, that Rhys Jones was shot, in the back of the neck, by what appears to be another child, after the most innocent childhood day one could imagine. A trip to buy a school tie, for his step up to secondary school, from the busy little Brenda's, nestling between tanning shops and Chinese food emporiums on the long shopping strip of Muirhead Ave.
Then there was a game of football, and a half-mentioned offer of a lift home which Rhys turned down as it was an okay day for a walk, past the bright bins and chortling cherubs - coach Steve Geoghegan is still struggling with what-ifs - and, suddenly, three shots, and too much sudden blood. The media swooped, again, on Liverpool, having half-heard the word Croxteth, and the circumstances of a pub carpark, expecting to find yet another grim tale of run-down Liverpool, dirty mean streets and unhappy kids, and revenge shootings.
They arrived to find something more akin to Basingstoke: happy streets, and school ties, and articulate, dignified, aching parents. How to explain? To begin, you have to start walking, the long half-mile, up Stalisfield and along Utting Avenue, to the heart not of Croxteth Park but Croxteth proper.
Here's the other sign, which you'll see if you turn back briefly and walk from west to east. Welcome to Croxteth. The sign sits at an inauspicious junction. On one side, a frozen-food store and a bookies, both with bars on the windows. On the other, a cemetery. And an undertaker. Dual carriageways stretch straight in all four directions, dull unhappy grass in the middle. On the corner sits a pub - the Western Approaches.
The CCTV monitor behind the bar flickers continually between no fewer than 15 views of the pub and its surrounds.
Talk is, surprisingly for me, not just of Rhys. The television is not tuned to Sky or BBC News 24 for every last update; it's tuned to the racing, and that's mainly what the talk is about. There is not one person, of course, who does not know of the shooting; but there is more head-shaking than outright anger. Something like this was always going to happen, seems the consensus. Poor little effing lad. Effing innocent. But you live here, you drink here, you see it. The little effers on their bikes. Doing drugs. It's a shithole. What can you do?
The reaction is markedly different from one of my other trips to Liverpool, in the aftermath of the murder of the toddler James Bulger by two 10-year-olds in 1993. Then, every television was tuned to the news. There seemed, almost, a kind of collective guilt: what have we managed to do to our city, that children can do this?
I had expected to find similar hand-wringing, anger and recriminations, the same almost overblown sentiments and teddy-bears. In 2007, the car-park tributes are limited and far from gaudy.
I felt sorry for the place, too, because of the timing: after a slow-building summer of headlines, about youth crime, about resoundingly innocent victims, about the impossibility of controlling guns or men under 18 in inner cities: it seemed that it was to be Liverpool, again, which had to outdo them all in horror. In truth, the city seems both more resigned and grown-up. They had, indeed, these drinkers in the Western, Wayne Rooney's old local, seen something coming: not this exactly, but something not dissimilar.
One taxi driver, nipping in at the end of his shift for a cheeky pint, tells me about the flower shop the day before. He doesn't, when talking even tangentially about gangs, want to give his name: nobody, as the police have found over the past couple of days, when they might have expected an absolute flood of outraged local information, wants to put themselves at risk. The second biggest housing estate in Europe, Croxteth might be - and my, don't you feel it after six hours' circling walk without coming to the periphery - but it's still a roughly contained estate, and everyone knows where you live, and drink.
He'd been dropping off his sister, the man says, in Bobby's on the Strand to get some flowers to lay in the carpark for Rhys. His family knew him, his nephew played in the same team, and there are just the same sentiments I've heard all day - marvellous little lad, and if there was anyone in Liverpool less likely to be involved in gangs you'd be pushed to find them.
His sister came out of the flower shop in tears. At the same time, in the same shop, another girl had been buying roses, and was asked if they were for Rhys. "Nah, nah, it's for him," she replied, pointing to her T-shirt. "RIP Smigger," it said.
"Smigger", 19-year-old Liam Smith, was shot in the head one year ago last Friday outside Altcourse prison, where he had been visiting a friend, a fellow member of the local Norris Green Strand gang. There had been 17 shooting incidents between the gangs since 2004.
On the precise anniversary of his death, three members of the rival Croxteth Crew gang were convicted of his shotgun murder. My taxi driver's sister was thanked, afterwards, by the florist for holding in her anger: anger at someone celebrating, with roses, the life of a gang member, the day the rest of the city, the Good City Liverpool, was thinking only of the results of gang violence.
But gang talk, in the Western Approaches, doesn't last long. There are looks. Looks from youngsters, drinking but not drunk. My companions grow generally more silent, but talk turns to the etiquette of hoods.
"It gets complicated, for the young ones,' says one. "My son, for instance, he doesn't want anything to do with them, the gangs, the hoodies.
"But if he goes down the shops, he wears one. The way he figures it, if you wear a hoodie with it up over your face, they can't recognise you, and you can't get into any trouble.
"If they see your face, then you could have a problem: either you're not a member, and they want to recruit you, or they know you've said no, and they want to have a go at you. So he puts the hood on, puts his head down, walks through the shops like a f****** monk."
At Broadway, just along the road in Norris Green, I see a lad being arrested. This is getting to be a seriously nasty part of town: a mile's walk from Rhys' home, five minutes on a BMX. There are many children, whom I am inclined to think of less and less as children, on bikes, on the pavement, wheeling in circles with impunity, frightening people with small children, bugging the hell out of visiting journalists.
Shops lie closed. The ones that lie open all have sales, or offers, and women stand debating the deals outside the chemist and the butcher.
Broadway is not lovely. The walk from Broadway to Croxteth is not particularly lovely, but not awful: there are attempts, at every third house along the way, to spark it up with individual pride. It takes the locals to help me find horrid.
A car screeches to a halt, and reverses, as I'm standing with a notebook on Parkstile Lane, outside Croxteth Community Comprehensive High School, jotting down the motto: "Results ... Respect ... Responsibility".
"You with the press, mate?" shouts the driver, buzzing down the passenger window, in which a friend sits quietly, calming a tiny baby girl. I tell him yes, and he unleashes a torrent of swearing which makes me want to reach forward and cover the baby's ears - abuse not at me, but at where he lives.
"Shithole, Croxteth. Tell them that. Absolute shithole. The gangs ... no, I don't know what to do. No one knows what to do. Go round the corner into Moss Way, have a look, how can someone shop there? Bloody gangs. I blame the effing parents."
He lights up, hands a lit one to the baby minder and screeches off with a waved "See-ya". I walk round the corner. It's not pretty. There is a long, long stretch of closed, barred, shuttered, shops: the minicab office and the Moss Way Oriental Supper Bar are all that are open. Dark green ugly metal and grey bars cover a third of a mile. There is much graffiti. Here, apparently, is where the bike gangs gather. Nearby, round the corners and into the cul-de-sacs there is, definitely, grimness: but happy, trying houses as well. One sullen group of boys, in a garden, staring; but one happy pair, playing football, laughing.
It can be too easy to blame the design of estates for the behaviour of residents. Certainly, here in Croxteth proper, surely the concentration of shops in one ugly row always would have meant the concentration of what once were called disaffected youth - before the guns came along and moved us up several scary jumps. And the rat-runs of paths snaking in and out of the splendid nearby Croxteth Park estate, where Rhys was killed, undoubtedly let the perpetrator escape: but they were designed surely for happy chats and cycling, not to help gunmen escape unseen.
Yes, there are grim bits. Yes, there are long unlit roads; and, yes, nasty boarded shops that hardly make you feel life's worth living. But live people do; and stay safe, and grow up, and keep themselves on the right side of the law, and paint their houses, and buy school ties, and do homework.
The differences are not just between the council wastelands Croxteth/Norris Green and the private primnesses of Croxteth Park - they are between neighbouring houses, between neighbouring individuals. Bizarrely, my potty-mouthed friend in the car was summing up what many, many around here told me: "I blame the parents."
There wasn't, honestly, much ranting against the police for not doing their job; although most women around Broadway were delighted to see so many of them, for once, on foot.
Few had moans about the education system; schools are liked. Generally, if there was any blame, it was simply directed at those who lived the same lives, in the same sprawling scheme, with the same money worries, but had brought up their children to be less than angelic. The word "scum" was used more than once.
Which is what must make it so difficult for those attempting politics or analysis; particularly gesture politics. There was talk, much, of more laws, which simply mystified the drinkers in the Bridge View. There is a strong argument, surely, for fewer laws. Firearm bans have perhaps contributed to teenage crime - because older gang leaders will now get a mandatory five years for illegal possession of a firearm, they let the 13 and 14-year-old "footsoldiers" carry them instead, with consequences we witnessed last week.
The drug laws - the continuing confusion over but continuing technical illegality of cannabis - are what drive the teen gang gun trade: dope is the drug of choice here. For all the signs in pretty, careful Croxteth Park - Neighbourhood Watch. Do not park. Absolutely no ball games (which seems particularly mean). CCTV in operation. No bins. No access - not one of them stopped a teen psychopath riding past them all with a gun readied for a child.
There are, of course, no quick fixes, no fast answers - which will frustrate the devil out of those who want them. And the call for quick answers will surely increase, after a summer of, actually, unrelated events which have led the media to hand-wring over a broken, anarchic Britain. But feral children were being written about by Dickens, and depicted by Hogarth. Gun crime in Liverpool was being written about more than 10 years ago.
As a strangely pretty sunset washes over the strangely ugly Western Approaches bar, a small bus grunts past, on its way to Penny Lane; and I think, of course, of the song, and of Liverpool's bright ability to make the best out of the least promising. That slightly facile thought fades a little the next morning, with news of another shooting, in exactly that street.
But Liverpool isn't, despite some attempts to link the shootings, getting all soul-searching today about its image. It seems mature enough to be able to tell the difference between the two deaths, and not get frenzied about the end of the world.
That there is, indeed, something wrong, perhaps something newly wrong, with aspects of society is in little doubt. It will be a debate that lasts many years. The people here, blame, basically, bad parents.
Liverpool has absolutely no clue what you do about that: how do you change society retrospectively? It isn't, rightly, asking for quick fixes, because it knows there are few.
I suspect gesture politics will be seen through rather quickly in Croxteth, as it recovers from the past 10 days, which it will; and perhaps seen as such more widely.
Perhaps, oddly enough, the rest of Britain will for once take its lead from Liverpool.
- Observer
