DANCING TO NOBODY’S TUNE
PART ONE OF AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Page Two Page One
Excerpts Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 10 Chapter 11
The winter of 1946, when I was four, brought one of the worst snowfalls of the century. Drifts six feet deep were outside our front door but as I was in bed with scarlet fever the only excitement I had was watching the German prisoners-of-war filing along the road in their shapeless uniforms, shouldering shovels with which to clear the snow. Whenever I was ill my mother would light a fire in the tiny bedroom grate. I lay in bed colouring pictures or, bored with my small supply of toys, painstakingly pulled them apart to find out how they worked. I had failed singularly in my efforts to learn to read at school so, finally my mother taught me herself. We .used a series of ‘early readers’ retailing the exploits of Old Lob and his farmyard friends, which I found so fascinating I used them to teach my own children to read thirty years later. With the new skill I acquired I seemed to wake from a long deep sleep.
Within weeks I had progressed to full length books and read children’s fiction with unending passion. ‘William’ and ‘Biggles’ books I consumed by the dozen and made my way to the weekly ‘Champion’ comic, which consisted of full length stories, instead of comic strips. I had missed the best of all school stories; Frank Richards’ Billy Bunter but I made up for this years later when the whole series was reprinted in book form. When Isaiah was nine the Greyfriars Press printed over a hundred volumes of ‘The Magnet’ and I persuaded Leeds City Libraries to buy most of them. Isaiah and I shared the delight of reading these wonderful volumes and there is still a specially made shelf in Leeds Central Library which holds what is left of the large format reprints in green and gold covers.
The area around our house was a curious mixture of the semi-rural and the semi-industrial. There were men who kept pigs in corrugated-iron lean-tos and a family that grew rhubarb in a triangular shaped field with busy roads on all three sides. The rhubarb - known to the local children as tusky was grown both indoors and out. Indoors was a large low shed with no windows where forced rhubarb, a winter crop, grew in the warm fecund darkness. We would go to the teenage girl of the family, who weighed out the stalks on huge scales and my mother made rhubarb pies skimmed with sugar and served with deep-yellow custard. Another family kept a horse but one day it kicked the owner as he bent behind it and he died of his injuries a few days later. The horse was sold or destroyed and the stall where it had munched and neighed stayed permanently and forlornly empty.
On the other side of the main road was a transport cafe. Men with horse-drawn drays left their wagons next to the newer but unreliable lorries, the engines of which had to be started with a handle which fitted into the front. In the sixties the cafe was rebuilt on two storeys as local factories enjoyed a short-lived boom. When I returned recently what appeared to be a final decline had set in. Only the ground floor remains open, the telephone and the space-invaders machine are hung with dusty out of order notices while the owner serves his customers with an air of quiet despair knowing his days are numbered. The few drivers and factory operatives who still come in talk not of greyhounds or rugby league any longer but instead of the price of caravans and changes in the mortgage rate.
A few yards from the cafe lie the banks of the River Aire. When I was a child great barges, tortoise-slow with their loads of coal and coke still passed along and we would watch from the bridge as they went beneath us on their way to the sea-port of Hull. The river-water was a turgid black, heavily polluted by chemical waste from the factories lining the banks. Only rats seemed able to survive and would-be suicides were as likely to die from poisoning as from drowning. Years later I saw in the Tate Gallery and in Leeds Art Gallery paintings of this area by Richard Bevin done in the early years of the century exquisite in their shimmering impasto vision. The time has come for Bevin to be accorded his proper place in the history of British art.
Across the road from our house was a wood yard and coal-merchant’s garage. One night there was a fire and the wood yard burned down. I imagine it must have been like the sack of Troy with its huge surrounding stockade yellow with flame in the shadowed dark. My mother told me that everyone from the streets was out watching as the firemen vainly tried to douse the blaze. But while they watched I slept on undisturbed. In the morning all that remained was some charred wood and burnt stumps of what had once been a twenty foot fence. Eventually workmen cleared away the debris but nothing ever arose out of its ashes.
All day long green corporation buses plied up and down South Accommodation Road, number 63 one way and number 64 the other. If you travelled before seven in the morning you could buy a special cheap ticket for three pence, the workman’s return. Usually I walked into the city centre to save tuppence, it only took fifteen minutes and half way was a small ice cream factory that made ice cream the like of which I have never tasted since. There were always buckets of ice stood about and when they brought you a tuppenny cornet the ice cream was so rich it was almost yellow.
I do not think my life was ever as happy again as in the years from 1942 to 1953. The working class community was warm and supportive and if there ever were any black sheep in the streets then I knew nothing of them. My closest friend was a girl slightly younger than me called Margaret Gardiner. Her father had deserted the family years before and Margaret’s mother, together with her younger brother, lan, had moved in with their grandparents. Mrs. Gardiner was a cheerful blonde who worked all day in a basement underneath a city centre pork butchers, making sandwiches. There was an older sister who worked in a factory and at night, always smartly dressed went out dancing or to the pictures. In spite of their ‘bad luck’ as they called it the whole family was happy and took a benevolent interest in our games.
Margaret was my first love; when she ran down the flagged streets the flip-flap of her sand-shoed feet made my heart beat faster. I learned to invent stories which Margaret and the other children sat on the hot pavement and listened to for hours. When we moved away to a council estate sadly I lost touch with Margaret. She remains for me a perpetual symbol of the working class, resilient, humorous and perpetually kind. She was my first and perhaps my most enduring muse.
One of the most terrifying experiences of my childhood was seeing a film called ‘No room at the Inn.’ It was about children being fostered and subsequently ill-treated by a gin drinking woman who regularly threatened them with incarceration in a rat infested cellar. I do not think in my entire life to date I have ever been so frightened. Presumably the film cathected some deeply repressed infantile anxiety about abandonment by the ‘bad mother’ of unconscious phantasy. The woman in the film was an amalgam of the unacceptable faces of working-class life - chain-smoking, pleasure-obsessed uncaringness. But my fears seemed out of all proportion to the celluloid drama that evoked them. I had never, to my knowledge, seen a rat but in my imagination saw them as creatures possessing immense powers of destruction and malevolent intent.
On the whole Ellerby Lane School well served the community. The teachers were for the most part working class in their origins; only the headmaster with his white spats, trilby and silver-topped walking cane was unmistakably middle-class. He had a son at Cambridge and this, even in the eyes of the teachers, somehow marked him off as belonging to a different world. He had no sensitivity to his pupils’ needs and appeared to have no awareness of anything except his own burgeoning self-importance. Fortunately his interest in the running of the school was virtually non-existent. He took morning assembly but left the class teachers to create their own syllabus as they went along. There was almost no specialisation - a class teacher would teach almost everything to his or her own class and the system worked well enough. The younger teachers were free to be as modern as they liked and the rest, who could not be changed anyway, were not brow-beaten into pretending to effect changes they had neither understanding of nor believed in.
My first day at school was like all first days alarming. The playground full of screaming rushing children, the single storey red-brick building, the cloak rooms with their rows of numbered iron pegs and my first teacher Mrs. Stern, who seemed vaguely Germanic. I was stubbornly resistant to her methods and learned nothing. She was succeeded by Mrs. Burns, a war widow who tottered round the classroom chewing the dangling stumps of her teeth and who talked to herself all day long, shuffling along in a brown coat which she never took off. Yet somehow we all quite liked her. She let us have long turns in the Wendy house and kept the sums simple. She was followed by Miss Smith, who wore green tweeds and had a bark of a voice. I seemed to spend all the time in her class counting beads on a bead frame. My mother
complained and I was moved to the top infants class with Miss Jones, a very up-to-date teacher who wore a smock and heavy make-up and soon left to teach in Australia.
There is a picture taken of me at this time, taken on a visit to the seaside. I was pretending to swim, standing in shallow water. It is particularly poignant. I looked very trusting and very vulnerable. On the surface I have learned to hide these characteristics but we never change our basic nature. The most education can do is not to injure and in this my primary education succeeded admirably. The best education is one to one, either in person or reading a book. Class teaching is a necessary evil, in my case much ameliorated by eccentrics, which is what I suppose I became myself. I could not imagine working in today’s schools with their ethos of team-teaching, audio-visual aids and management techniques. I read recently that more than forty percent of working teachers have stress levels higher than out-patients from psychiatric clinics, which doesn’t surprise me.
It is difficult enough to interest and control a class of thirty children even given a free hand to teach what the individual teacher has a passionate personal interest in. To have to stick to a rigid syllabus with batteries of official questionnaires to be filled in every day must be utterly soul-destroying. I always taught according to my mood and the weather. If it was raining we studied floods .On sunny days we painted pictures of flowers and if it was stormy we listened to the Pastoral Symphony. In 1964 the Oxford philosopher Alisdair Mclntyre wrote an essay called ‘Against Utilitarianism’ in which he attacked the overwhelming trend to make education practically useful above all else. What little opposition to this - at least in the state system - seems all but to have totally disappeared.
The latest fashion of teaching even the youngest children the elements of business accounting seems to me to be positively obscene. I rarely watch television but recently witnessed with horror as a watered down version of Stanislavsky’s ‘Be a tree’ being mercilessly caricatured. Children, the viewers were told, would much prefer to learn to take a computer apart. Someone of Mclntyre’s intellectual stature should be placed firmly in control of the country’s educational system, which must be freed from the Gradrinds unchallenged ascendancy. The criteria which should to be applied to education should be subject to rigorous philosophical examination. Education is failing more and more because its tasks are being too closely identified with the mores of adult society, above all industry and commerce, in other words with MONEY.
The key to understanding childhood can be found in diverse places – Wordsworth’s ‘The Prelude’ the writings of Winnicott and Lacan, the paintings of Kandinsky to name a few of the more obvious sources. The Gradgrinds must be driven out of the classroom like the moneychangers from the Temple two thousand years ago. Teachers need to get back their idealism. They should read Sybil Marshall’s ‘An Experiment in Education’ and Robert Druce’s ‘The Innocent Eye.’ Above all they should care passionately about children and their trade unions should protect them from direction by central and local government. Music and the arts should be prominent from the earliest age. Practical vocational training should be never more than peripheral and Classics should be available to all.
The aim of education should be to civilize, not to train, to make available to succeeding generations the fruits of the greatest minds of the past. The music of Beethoven, the philosophy of Plato, the paintings of Van Gogh – these can be appreciated by many more than the tiny percentage of the population who now would claim even a passing acquaintance with their achievements.
When I moved from the Infants to the Juniors my first teacher was Miss Gibbons. She had a skeletal body and her manner was stiff and fussy. She was the most boring person I have ever been taught by. Every morning we had to spend an hour learning psalms, followed by an hour of practicing copper - plate handwriting. We had brown-backed primers with sentences about Echo and Narcissus to copy, using steel-nibbed dip pens and watered down ink. The walls were bare except for table charts. From these we chanted for a further hour until the merciful release of the dinner bell. This awful neurotic woman failed to read us one single story in a whole year. She wore the same faded brown dress every day, the edges of which she constantly twitched with her fingers. Like Mrs. Burns she muttered to herself in a low monotone, but we could never quite catch the subject of her ruminations.
It was during that year, 1952 that King George VI died. Announcing the death of a public figure was something - perhaps the only thing – Smigger, our headmaster, did with style. He went from classroom to classroom, standing in front of each class with a suitably solemn air. After the announcement Vernon, the roughest and toughest boy, said in a hoarse whisper, “ ‘E wore a good un, ‘im.” History seems to have endorsed Vernon’s verdict.
Half way through our time with Miss Gibbons we had the relief of a student from the emergency teachers training college. He read us the whole of Kenneth Grahame’s magical ‘The Wind in the Willows’ and brought a real organ pipe to illustrate a music lesson. He looked dishevelled and was always laughing and telling us jokes. He kept a packet of Woodbines on the desk in front of him and once we were settled with our work he would slip one out and disappear with it into the corridor.
Our next class teacher was Mr Coles, a newly qualified Welshman with a high-domed forehead and huge enthusiasm. We made a large model of a harbour out of coloured cardboard with scale models of cranes. Mr Coles was inordinately proud of the model until I pointed out that it was rather ugly. Suddenly he lost his enthusiasm and told us to dismantle it.
Our last teacher in the Juniors was Howard Franklin, an even-tempered middle-aged balding Jew. He was the first of that race I had known. I have always liked Jews and the feeling seems to have been mutual. From Howard Franklin I learned how to argue persuasively and to listen to the other person’s point of view. He taught us some basic history and geography and infected us with his enthusiasm for science. He made me the class science editor which meant that I had to scour newspapers and magazines for items concerning scientific discoveries which were duly cut out and pasted on cardboard sheets for classroom display. I became fascinated with science but my interest was completely destroyed at Leeds Modern School, where the subject was taught in a deadly routine of pre-arranged experiments and tests.
Mr Franklin’s classroom had a second door which led to an unused playground at the back of the school. On warm days the door would stand open and we could hear the distant murmur of the city at work. I began to write stories of space adventure and the supernatural and brought glowing reports home to my mother. At the end of the year we had a day trip into the country, walking in the tall grass, smelling the pollen and watching the large-eyed cows. I fell into a puddle and had to dry out slowly on the way back, but nothing could spoil such a day of happiness.
In Mr Franklin’s class I fell in love with a girl called Jean Croall, who had blue eyes and long dark hair. She had the vivacity that only the working class seems capable of and which, alas, is so often destroyed by the harsh, relentless conditions our social structure imposes on those at the bottom of the ladder.
We learned the rudiments of Spanish from Charlie Holmes, a shell-shocked veteran whose left arm continually trembled. He seemed alarming at first but he was never boring and he was a gifted amateur artist. He soon lost his temper but never his humanity and generations of past pupils spoke with respect of him. That year I passed my eleven-plus and my family was offered a new council house in the same distant part of Leeds as the grammar school I was allocated to.
When I was nine years old I borrowed a copy of Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’ from the library. The cover was decorated with holly leaves and red berries, the title printed in silver and gold. There was something unforgettably beautiful about the physical shape of the book. I remember looking at the contrasting and complementary green and gold, silver and red, at the wined berries and leaves. I thought that this book was the most beautiful object I had ever seen.
When I grew up I looked at some illustrations that William Morris produced for his Kelmscott Chaucer and felt a shadow of the earlier experience. In a poem I wrote:
A page of the Kelmscott Chaucer
Seen through our cottage window
When the Pennines were blind with snow
Flurrying round the stones
‘The First Month of the Year’
It was as though I had a child held in my hand not a book but the book, the Platonic original form of which all others are but imitation. I had another strange semi-mystical experience which originated in a visit as a child to a variety show at the Leeds Empire. An act was billed as ‘Dr. Marvel and His Wonderful Living Robot.’ The details of the scenario came into my mind with great clarity many years after, not once but many times. In front of an imposing array of machines a white-coated scientist controlled a robot which performed simple tasks with rigid - mechanical movements. At the end of the act the robot, swung an axe, cutting his creator, in two. Was it the illusion of reality or the reality of illusion that stayed with me? Or was the whole act some allegory for humanity turning on its creator, ushering in what Nietzsche called the death of God or an example of what Melanie Klein called ‘splitting mechanism?’
The Leeds abattoir was behind Kirkgate Market and as a child I used to peer through the twenty-foot high iron gates on a Sunday afternoon on the way back from the weekly family visit to grandma and granddad. Hundreds of carcasses hung in the empty hall and surrounding stalls. When I saw paintings by Chaim Soutine I understood his fascination with the blood of butchered beasts and also in the work of Francis Bacon where a carcass is suspended below an open umbrella over a machine-gun nest.
In Granddad Nicky’s terrace house in the Durham mining village of Hunwick, on a bedroom window sill lay a sea-shell which I put to my ear. In the shell was the roaring of the sea, the breaking of waves on a sandy shore. In the Chancellor’s office in the University of Leeds hangs a portrait of the poet James Kirkup in which the poet holds a sea-shell to his ear. In volume thirteen of the collected works of Paul Valéry, ‘Aesthetics’ the poet speaks of the elongated shape of the sea-shell as a symbol for the act of artistic creation.
These are some memories of how the world of art and ideas opened up to me but there was no exposure to any sort of culture during my childhood. The only books available were those I acquired for myself. I was never taken to a theatre or an art gallery. I discovered the ballet when I was in the sixth form, going to the Leeds Grand Theatre to see visiting companies such as the Royal Ballet and the Ballet Rambert. My favourite was ‘Le Spectre de la Rose’ which Nijinsky made famous in Diaghileff’s Company. It was the final appearance of one of the Russian emigré male dancers and the ballet had an immense effect upon me- a pot-pourri of dried rose leaves, pre-revolutionary Russia and fin-de-siècle romanticism. I soon became a balletomane, trecking to performances as far afield as Manchester. The only person I ever found to share my enthusiasm was Janice Goldberg, the delightful daughter of a Jewish jeweller who was a fellow student at LTC. Janice was warm and kind and I would have been happy to marry her. She was deeply committed to her faith, however, and could not contemplate marrying out. Eventually she married a barrister who became a judge.
It was much later, in my thirties, that I became interested in music. While I was helping Brenda to bring up our children her continual playing lp’s of Bach and Beethoven gradually won me over. I still much prefer chamber works to orchestral music. We also became devotees of English and American folk music. Every week we listened to the folk singer Dave Burland, who had a weekly programme on the local commercial station, Radio Aire. Dave searched high and low to find our often very esoteric requests and even sent the children birthday cards! He had made a number of LPs himself but when we requested a track from one of them he would sing the song live and unaccompanied, a deeply moving experience.
When I was at training college I started to go to galleries and acquired some knowledge of painting and sculpture. It was not until I moved to London that I could visit galleries regularly but I already had some knowledge of the main movements of modern art. The pure abstractions of Ben Nicholson, especially ‘White Relief’ in the Tate are amongst my favourites, but in painting I considered the greatest talent was in the States, Jackson Pullock, Barnett Newman and especially Mark Rothko’s Buddhist meditations with their merging plaques of colour. When I was in Paris I was impressed by the way teachers took children as young as six to the major galleries. Art education is sadly neglected in this country which is perhaps why our public architecture is so uniformly hideous.
Wherever I live I fill every available wall space with reproductions, Van Gogh, Breueghel, Renoir, Monet and as many of the moderns as I can get hold of. Painting and sculpture add an extra dimension to life - colour, shape and form enhance our perception of the visual world around us and the process is two-way. Physical nature flows back into the art of Ivon Hitchen and Barbara Hepworth and then enlivened by their vision comes back to us in their works. There are on the wall as I write two original lithographs, ‘Bird Through the Wall’ by Alan Davies a startling college of nature and Buddhist metaphysics and ‘Flame on the Rocks’ by Graham Sutherland, a dreamscape of the creation of the world.
Religion played no part of my life as a child. The Roman Catholic children went to Mass regularly and had holy pictures on their walls but for the rest of us our lives were very secular. The Church of England has virtually no appeal to the working class because it is so strongly associated with the middle class, indeed my grammar school history master described the Anglican Church as The Tory Party at prayer. Roman Catholicism has strong roots in the working class but only where at some point there were immigrants from Ireland in the family. Methodism still existed but was at its last gasp. Joyce Summersgill took me to some services which were well-meaning but dull beyond belief. Briefly I attended the Band of Hope, a non-conformist sect devoted to tee-totalism which managed to attract some following among working-class children with and occasional free trips to the country-side. On one of these trips a large supply of ice-cream was brought to be sold to the children but as no-one had any money with which to but it the whole supply was handed out gratis. This spontaneous gesture of generosity I never forgot and it has become a central part of my philosophy ever since- the good things in life should be free and it is the function of socialism to make come true.
When we left the streets it was a Saturday. We did not have very much to take and we were soon installed in our new house. It was one of thousands built for Leeds City Council by the construction firm of Airey. They were made of pre-cast concrete strips joined horizontally to make the walls.
The downstairs floors were concrete which made the house difficult to heat. There was coke stove in the kitchen and a coal fire in the lounge. For the rest of the house you had to make do with expensive electric fires. The walls were bare new plaster, the garden an expanse of mud, clay and builder’s waste. The back garden consisted of a small flat square and a hill at forty-five degrees. Water drained continually down the hill and made a stagnant pool underneath the kitchen window. Fortunately we were on the edge of a very large estate which ended a few houses on from us. At that point some thirties semis led to Horsforth Station. By train we were fifteen minutes from the centre of Leeds, by bus it took double that time. The tenants had come from all over Leeds, some from back to backs in the process of demolition, some from other council estates. Our next door neighbours were an old couple who had brought up nine children. They were all married with families of their own and the council had given the couple this small new house in which to end their days. Often their children and grandchildren would visit them and the house would overflow.
My father made a valiant attempt to sort out the garden but he was not much of a gardener and it was not much of a garden. Eventually the council brought several loads of soil to dump on top of the clay but nothing could be done about the forty five degree slope. We laid a small lawn at the front with flowers at the side. I remember the fragrance of night scented stock on summer evenings. My father’s only previous attempt at gardening was when we lived at Bridgwater Place. At the end of the war the council offered allotments on what had previously been waste land down the Black Road. For several months if the weather was dry he would trail with fork and spade and turn over the heavy sods in an attempt to grow vegetables. Others did the same, but few with any success. The scheme was flawed because the only water to the site has provided by a stream which meandered amongst the allotments. First one, then another would dam the stream to divert the water to his own plot. There were terrible rows, sometimes men rolling up their sleeves and threatening violence. No-one else from the streets took a plot, wisely I think.
On the new estate our immediate neighbours on the other side was a sad family. The mother spent long periods in a psychiatric hospital, though for what reason I never found out. The father looked after the small boy with the help of various relatives. After some years the mother appeared to recover and the family was re-established.
At the same time my own mother developed a chronic allergy to dust or perhaps pollen, I don’t think it was ever established which. She sneezed continually and eventually had to be put on tranquillisers. The move put me nearer to LMS, one bus ride instead of two. My father caught the train to work but still managed to come home for dinner.
At the top of the Black Road was East Leeds Cricket Club which amazingly it is still there fifty years later. Auntie Nellie and Uncle Arthur were avid supporters, the former serving refreshments, the latter a committee man. When home matches were played I went to help, very self-importantly standing behind a counter selling pop at tuppence a bottle to a steady stream of customers.
My father’s work at the P&G once occasioned a day trip to the head office in London and he was allowed to take me with him, all expenses paid. While he spent the day being introduced to the intricies of a new book-keeping system a semi-retired part-time clerk was given the job of showing me round the capital. He had lived in London all his life and quickly took me to Madame Tussauds which I found fascinating. Buck House (boring beyond belief) and Trafalgar Square (much over-rated). The old man had known Lawrence of Arabia as ‘Aircraftsman Shaw’ in the RAF. What nobody says about Lawrence, he told me, was how easy he was to get on with, ‘just an ordinary bloke.’
He was a gentle, thin, quiet old man, rather like my much loved chemistry teacher, Mr Bispham, who in turn put me in mind of Robert Donat in ‘Good-bye Mr Chips.’ He gave me a beautiful and memorable day out but there was the sad moment I never forgot. Waiting for a tube on a crowded platform I noticed a city gent in pin-stripes and wearing a bowler hat, sitting on a bench his head sunk in his hands. When the tube came and everyone got on he was left sitting there, utterly alone. In the North someone would have had a word with him, asked what the matter was. But not in London, not even fifty years ago in 1950. The image remained and to me was a perpetual symbol of the uncaring quality of life in London.
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There was a farewell to the streets: just before we left came bonfire night, a twilight in early winter with a cold and star-stacked sky. A hideous master at Leeds Modern School had given the whole class a huge imposition to stop us enjoying ourselves but in his hurried sadism he forgot that he did not teach us on the following day. The stars burned like the last lights of Valhalla and perhaps it was a pagan joy we were celebrating, a primal scream of innocent rapture in a Blakean forest of symmetry. Bonfire - the bone fires were originally an exorcism of the ghosts of the recent dead – the one night when the living and the dead walked hand in hand. Margaret Gardiner was there, clutching a huge pile of twigs in her beautiful small hands, her dress thin and feet bare in black sand-shoes, even in November. Her young brother, lan, wore his usual crumpled hand-me-down suit, his eyes wide in wonder at the rockets in the shooting sky. Trevor, the orphan Catholic wore his usual shapeless raincoat and had to escape as quickly as possible from the bent stick of a grandmother who was supposed to look after him and split his name, ‘Tre-Vor’, in quest for her eternal Woodbines.
There was Billy and Geraldine, the twins whose maiden aunts with their house which dripped bloody plaster saints and holy texts about the bleeding heart of Jesus. They told stories of hell and purgatory with its fires and torments. There were the two Hobson boys, the younger of which, Colin was to become a carpenter and explore the Antarctic with Sir John Hunt. Nora, the new girl in Margaret’s street who liked to be kissed, was there too. On the hall as stood the huge mound of broken wood, three legged chairs, orange boxes with garish purple labels and old stained slit mattresses oozing flock.
We watched the spurting flames and made silver circles of sparklers in a hissing sizzling tumescence. We struck phosphorescent matches and watched fire balls lunge from Vesuvius fountains and fly at the bare legs of screaming girls. I sat on a worn couch and read a pile of early Superman comics, worth a fortune today but then fit only for the fire. When the flames died down we roasted potatoes in the embers and ate them in the crackling midnight. In the morning it was burnt and gone and with it the first twelve years of my life, the nearest to heaven on earth I ever reached.
We moved to the council house the following week with its grey slabs of concrete and functional kitchen. Neighbours were just the people who happened to live next door. My new school complemented the new house, utilitarian and drab, urging the values of competition against co-operation. Leeds Modern School was built in the twenties, hideously square in red brick with a twin school for girls next door. The headmaster in my time was R.F. Holland M.A.(Cantab) an sanctimonious middle class bully, an ex-Guards major whose main task appeared to be destruction of whatever working class culture his pupils retained. I shall never forget one of his senior masters screaming at a group of miscreants, ‘You are behaving like a lot of damned trade unionists.’ The prefectorial system left the masters free to concentrate on their duties or to be idle as they chose and left the younger boys at the mercy of ritual bullying by prefects, the worst of whom eventually became a local careers officer but whose own career abruptly ended when he was charged with the sexual abuse of one of his youthful clients.
Most of the boys found the school a frightening ordeal from which there was no escape. One boy suffered so much that his parents removed him on their GP’s advice at the end of year one. I envied him. The school seemed to brim with aggression, shouting and yelling masters and prefects, macho sport, knowledge a bitter pill to be swallowed in large doses. Rote learning was the order of the day in almost every subject. The arts were relegated to the margin and to the least able of the staff. In English texts seemed chosen for their insipidity. In spite of this gradually I made my way to the top of the B stream where I remained until I joined the sixth form.
I had two excellent and humane teachers of Freud made a Franco ….of me for life. in the subject, who gave me a deep love of French language and literature. Like most of my generations I can read it better than speak it but I think it more useful to be able, however haltingly, to read Bonnefoy in the original than to be fluent at a bank counter, after all they usually speak English anyway! I was also good at Latin but the teacher was the most worst bully in the school so I dropped the subject as soon as possible. At maths and science I was uniformly hopeless. I was top in English and edited the appalling school magazine, ‘The Owlet.’ I was in a group of nine boys chosen as an experiment to learn Greek. We all failed and the experiment was never repeated but what I learned I have always found of great value. As Thomas Love Peacock wrote, ‘It’s all Greek to me, but then I understand Greek.’
Education has come so much to mean mechanical examination success that it seems almost forgotten that the mark of an educated human being is to be civilized. I sometimes wonder what happened to my contemporaries at LMS. Bank and office clerks, I suppose, was the destiny of most. The few who went to university no doubt became teachers themselves, one of the brightest, the son of a tram driver read history at Oxford to read History. In my last teaching job he had preceded me in a one term temporary post at an appalling inner city comprehensive. No one ever seemed to go into medicine, nursing or the law. Recently I came across the statutes of LMS original foundation: ‘the school aims at producing youths well qualified to enter commerce.’
All my days were the same, perfumed with fear, the description I wrote of the leather satchel in a poem which summed up those dreadful years. I was woken by my mother at seven, my stomach churning with fear. The world was tainted and contaminated with my anxiety. It spilled over into the walls and out into the streets, over the covers of books and the pages until every last block letter was like a poisonous insect crawling before me, perhaps if the fear had got worse I could have gone mad like the hero of Kafka’s Metamorphosis and woke up to believe I had become an insect.
The journey by bus and tram was like the descent into Hades. I bought ‘The Daily Sketch’ to read in the journey or I tried to read a classic, Sienkiewicz’s ‘Quo Vadis’ took me a term to finish while Dostoevsky’s ‘The Idiot’ took two. The tram shook over the steel rails and jolted up the long hill of Headingly, then West Park to Lawnswood where it juddered to a halt and we were heaped out. Green railings, prefects at the gates checking caps, footballs thwacking, whistles blowing. Corridors of noise, the register, assembly, sports results, hymns. Latin with Satan with his cut vocables ‘No, boy, no. Are you all idiots?’ Physics, maths, hopeless all hopeless, for five years. Then I read Shelley’s ‘To a Skylark’ and learned all twenty five verses by heart. Some reality at last. Mad Shelley, so wonderful sane. Floors of polished parquet, the wholly unnecessary strictness of everything. One young sensitive teacher liked by all was killed in a climbing accident. Now I wonder if the school’s corporate death wish destroyed him?
A popular geography master became seriously ill from a wound sustained in Burma. We collected for an inscribed silver cigarette case and sent a deputation to the hospital to present it. Even though we were not shown much compassion, we were beginning to express it. We also began to show our outrage at the way we had been treated. On the last day of the summer term when I was in the upper sixth the car belonging to a bullying chemistry master was lifted, carried and dumped on the holy of holies the schools front lawn. Its passing was accompanied by a jeering crowd of two hundred. The staff were at an end of term meeting, the prefects had made themselves invisible. At the beginning of afternoon school the head went into a screaming purple-faced rage. But it was the rage of a man who knows he has lost, ‘the end of the beginning if not beginning of the end’ as Churchill put it.
When I went to the sixth form I acquired certain objects that expressed my personality: a desk, a typewriter, a briefcase and a portable radio. Most important was the design of my own room: one wall was given over almost entirely to built in book-cases lit by a strip light at either end. My parents allowed me to choose the decorative scheme myself and to the bewilderment of the decorator I chose black paper with white and gold splashes on two walls and red on the rest. The ceiling was painted in yellow. Surprisingly the design worked well and remained for many years after I had left home. Writing became a reflex action - essays, poems, letters, reviews, whatever. A part of me wishes I had become a professional writer, the kind who spends his life writing in a variety of genres but always writing with a lengthening list of titles to his credit.
I like reading as well as writing, and walking and listening to music and looking at paintings but there is still the basic need to survive and the largest cheque I ever received was for five pounds from ‘Peace News’ for an article about teaching English and the same sum for a poem in the Penguin Anthology ‘Children of Albion.’ What I admire about professional writers - and perhaps what I slightly envy about them is that the only people they are beholden to is their audience, to amuse, enthrall, irritate or whatever.
The problems of basic survival, at least in the West, were solved by the early years of the present century. There is a limit to the amount of videos one person can watch, the amount of exotic foods he can consume, the amount of clothes he can wear. I have always considered the amount of money spent on cars a huge waste of resources. If a fraction of this money went to improve the public transport system we would have less congestion, fewer accidents and much less pollution. We could also have a public transport system that actually worked and was effectively integrated. A few days of trying to get round London should convince anyone of the truth of this.
At the end of my seven years at LMS I remembered one teacher with special love, J.M.McNeil, the head of history. He had a fine mind, an Oxford first and most of all he openly loathed the head. He taught history always with an eye to contemporary scene and his anti-establishment stance appealled to my adolescent revolutionary fervour. I was certainly no historian but he taught me how to write to the point. McNeil was a man of deep and wide culture and immense humanity. He spent many hours talking to me to cheer me out of my despondency. One evening I stood with him outside the school for two hours, while I unburdened myself of my misery. He told me how much happier I would be in the world beyond the school and how right he was to prove.
I left LMS in July 1960, losing my leaving report on the way home. Anxiously I retrieved it but I needn’t have bothered, it was never any use. At this time I joined the youth club attached to St. Michael’s Church in Headingly. I found the Anglican service in the middle class community insufferably boring although I quite enjoyed the youth club meetings, especially the organised hikes into the Yorkshire dales. Because it was a mixed youth club the atmosphere was far better than LMS. I had never thought of myself as particularly popular, but to my surprise I was elected club leader just as I left.
It was at this time my parents’ circumstances were much improved by a legacy of twelve thousand pounds from my grandfather. This coincided with my father being made redundant, as the insurance company he worked for closed its Leeds branch. After some hesitation my father bought a run-down grocery shop in Yeadon, near the Leeds-Bradford airport. My parents soon built up trade and I was quite happy to work in the shop during the holidays as I could read and write in the intervals between customers. My parents were by now in their fifties and both had bouts of ill health which meant periods in hospital. I never found shop work tedious and I was happy to chat to the customers. This was in the days before supermarkets and there was sufficient business for three shops, selling more or less the same things, to exist side by side.
The prospect of university came briefly and faded. Even had I obtained a place, the West Riding County Council gave grants only to students with better grades than mine. This narrow-minded policy was changed the following year. I thought briefly of going into business with a friend, Stephen McGraw, who had been a neighbour on the council estate, but eventually applied for a one year post as an unqualified teacher at an inner city primary school.
The headmaster was Bill Buckle, a well-known figure in the teachers’ trade union movement and a frequent contributor to the letters column of the Yorkshire Evening Post. In this way he reminded me of the headmaster of Stephen Daedalus in Joyce’s ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,’ a book which I have read and re-read. Joyce was always for me an artist above from all others for single-mindedness zeal.The school where I was teaching was situated in what had once been a prosperous Jewish area of Leeds but gradually the merchants moved out and the poor moved in. Several families would live in one large crumbling house where once imposing flights of steps to the front door would sag in bizarrely. Rusted iron railings lay flat among crops of weeds and emaciated children’s faces peered from behind grimy panes.
Working class had, gone to the estates on the outskirts of the city. Those who were left were often, undiagnosed mental health cases, alcoholics or criminals, the most awkward of which, clad in filthy rags, would occasionally stagger into the school, shouting imprecations at everyone until the police arrived to eject him. There were barely a hundred on the school roll so classes were very small. I never lacked confidence in teaching and my job helping out class teachers or taking over when someone was away ill was never a task I found difficult. Several of the staff were Jewish, a race I have always had a strong affection for. I earned £ 7.10.0. a week for my labours, considerably less than the school caretaker. I saved up and after a few months bought a motor scooter which rarely managed to start and on the occasions when it did frequently tipped me into the road. Finally I took the wretched machine to a garage and gratefully accepted the few pounds they offered. This was my first and only venture into vehicle ownership.
Buckle offered me two afternoons a week off to study for A level re-sits but I declined. I started to road philosophy and wrote maudlin love poetry to nobody. At the end of the year I felt relieved but still without any idea of what I wanted to do with my life. Buckle suggested I went to Leeds Training College. I agreed because I could think of nothing else to do. He rang the college and arranged an interview for the following day.
The afternoon of my interview was hot and clear, in late August. The campus was almost deserted. A groundsman mowed, birds circled in the cloud-riven sky, an occasional delivery van chuntered to the back of a hall of residence as I climbed the wide stone steps to the gothic facade of the main building of the City of Leeds Training College. I waited for a few minutes and then was shown into the Principal’s enormous room. Dr. Roy Rich had been the youngest professor in England when he was elected to the Chair of Education at Hull University at the age of thirty-one. Teacher training methods in the nineteenth century, the subject of his research, was not something that interested me - nor anyone else I suspect - but Roy Rich’s personality was entirely at odds with the dry subject matter of his classic study, still in print, some seventy years after its first publication. Rich had a deep resonant voice and a warm presence. He asked what I was reading so we discussed Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’. He did not discuss education, which was eminently sensible for what nineteen year old can know anything of the matter, save for his own experience, good or bad?
I was accepted, my main subject being English with subsidiary History and Religious Knowledge. I was sent a reading list for the various subjects for which I had enrolled. Most students were not local and they were given priority for places in the halls of residence and so I remained at home, travelling ten miles or so by bus every day including Saturdays, as there were Saturday morning lectures. We were divided into main subject groups of about a dozen. About three quarters of my group were female and I soon made friends with the three girls who would be closest to me at LTC. Alson Shuttleworth and Jeannie Parker were absolute darlings, listening to my poetry and encouraging me to write in every way. Tragically the third girl, Chris Birch, was killed in a car accident along with three other students, half way through the course. I think I was in love with all of them equally, which is why I never developed a relationship with any one of them. At the end of the course Jeannie departed to London and I lost all contact with her. Alison is married to a farmer in Morecambe and is deputy head of a primary school.
What particularly delighted me about LTC was that apart from attendance at lectures and a certain amount of written work, students were by and large left alone to make the most of their three years. Some did only the minimum and occasionally a really weak student was quietly asked to leave. The majority worked reasonably hard and at the end of the course returned to where they had come from. For me LTC meant three years in which to read whatever I cared to, learn to write literary criticism with some skill and much enthusiasm and, most important to gain some sense of myself as a person.
Because I had chosen English as my main subject each term I had to write a series of essays on literary figures of my own choice - Jane Austen, Lawrence, Auden were some I remember researching with enthusiasm. I read omnivorously and began hesitantly to write Audenesque verse which was accepted by a number of little magazines. My greatest success was having a poem accepted by return of post and with enthusiasm for ‘The Poetry Review’ the organ of the Poetry Society. I also began to correspond with the then highly successful poet, travel-writer and autobiographer, James Kirkup. I supplemented my course by attending classes at Leeds University run by the then Gregory Fellow in poetry, Jon Silkin, followed by the sour, dour Scots poet Bill Price Turner and finally Peter Redgrove. I shall never forget the evening I went to Guiseley Town Hall to hear him give a reading to the local literary society. It was a cold wet winter night and I found the miniscule town hall with great difficulty. The hall was packed and Redgrove has already begun his talk. I pushed my way through the throng of wet raincoats and clouds of cigarette smoke. On the dais Redgrove had survived the chairman’s opening remarks and was in full flow.
‘A tree in a storm is like a brain in a brain storm,’ were the first words I heard. His voice was powerful with an actor’s measured delivery, the pitch rising and falling like waves battering a passive shore. His poetry was full of images of raw energy at work in nature, rocks, water-wheels, rainbows and volcanic eruptions against a background of meditations on flowers and quotations from Wittgenstein. He was the perfect catalyst to my nascent creative self. He invited me to join the circle of artists, writers and sculptors which met in The Eldon, the university pub. The writer and critic Douglas Jefferson, an expert on Henry James was also an habitúe but though he was on nodding terms with Redgrove he had his own cronies. I bought all Redgrove’s books and went to his weekly creative writing class. Two other members of the class, Jon Glover and Jeffrey Wainright, have subsequently became reasonably well-known writers and broadcasters. I hated both on sight and the feelings were mutual.
Redgrove was Gregory Fellow for three years. He was followed by the deaf poet David Wright, who belonged to an older and more cosmopolitan group than Redgrove. He had known Dylan Thomas and belonged to the circle of George Barker and David Gascoygne, whose publisher had been David Archer’s Parton Press. Just before meeting Wright I wrote a review of an anthology of contemporary verse he had edited for Penguin. The book was full of the work of his friends and I wrote a blistering review that was published in ‘Peace News.’ Fortunately the review escaped Wright’s notice. As a person he was kindness itself but his ideas about poetry seemed very dull. He knew hundreds of anecdotes about the private lives of poets with which he regaled the student literati of Leeds University.
At the end of my first year at LTC Roy Rich retired as principal. His place was taken by the headmaster of a local grammar school, put in place by the local education authority which wanted to control the college and whose wishes in that direction Dr Rich had thwarted for over thirty years. The new man was wholly unsuitable. He had no experience of tertiary education and was entirely uncultured. He continually made faux pas, struggling hopelessly to master his new environment. He was unpopular with everyone, his dour manner and red face reminding me of the farmer in T.E. Hulme’s imagist poem. Fortunately Dr. Rich’s traditions were deeply embedded in the colleges structures but his replacement’s lack of vision began to erode the liberal humanism for which the college had been so renowned. At the same time the numbers of students expanded rapidly, new buildings were hastily erected to accommodate the influx and certainly, in this instance, Kingsley Amis’ stricture that more means worse true.
Each term we spent a couple of weeks on school practice. I always found these periods intensely boring and longed to get back to college. We were always welcomed in staffrooms as the teachers looked forward to the free periods our presence ensured. I regarded school practice as a small price to pay for the freedom available to me throughout the rest of the course. When on school practice I was usually supervised by one of my own tutors but in one school it happened that my fellow-students were from the maths department and consequently it was a maths lecturer who acted as practice tutor. The man concerned knew next to nothing about the latest methods of creative English teaching and seemed to find my lessons somewhat unusual in that I used no textbooks but instead talked to the children about their own lives and then asked them to write a poem on something that interested them. Wisely the tutor commented that I had an interesting approach, and left it at that!
I did my final school practice in a grammar school where all the staff were graduates and morning coffee was served in china cups. The school was so geared to examinations that there were few classes I was allowed to teach so I spent a lot of time in the staff room reading up on modern art in which I had recently become interested. I found the intricacies of Bauhaus design infinitely more fascinating than teaching sentence analysis.
My practice tutor, A.E.Elms, was the very liberal Head of Religious Studies whose enthusiasm for the new theology eventually led me to read Rahner and Tillich and stimulated my interest in philosophical theology. I marvel at my good fortune in having such stimulating teachers at such a formative period in my life. Friends who were at other training colleges were not so fortunate and I do not think LTC was typical. It was at this period that I read Flew and Mclntyre’s ‘New Essays in Philosophical Theology’, which included an essay by Professor John Wisdom in which he posited the idea of God as an invisible gardiner. Some of us see His work while others note only His absence. This beautiful idea has haunted me ever since I first read it more than thirty years ago.
Another of my passionate preoccupations was the Thirties group of writers that gathered round W.H.Auden. I read everything that had been written about them. Then I started to write pastiches of their work, imagining myself a latter day Auden commenting on the mores of the age. I read, wrote and talked incessantly. I attended every poetry reading, play, ballet and concert I could. Eventually I persuaded the best small press of the period, Alan Tarling’s ‘Poet and Printer’ to bring out my work. The first pamphlet collection ‘The Quarrel with Ourselves,’ deriving its title from a line of Yeats, ‘It is out of the quarrel with ourselves that we make poetry.’ The collection was favourably reviewed in ‘The New Statesman’ by John Carey and my career as a poet had got off to a good start.
I was not at this time a committed Christian but I had a very definite sense of the power of the numinous us. My beliefs such as they were came from my imaginative sense of ‘being-in-the-world’, to use Heidegger’s phrase. Neither of my parents had any kind of religious beliefs although my father’s family were vaguely Anglican and my mother had been brought up a strict Methodist.
When I was still a young child Joyce Summersgill had taken me to Bourne Methodist Chapel’s Sunday school, a large Victorian building, poorly maintained and sparsely attended. We were split into small groups and listened to stories from the New Testament. We sang that beautiful children’s hymn ‘Jesus bids me shine with a pure clear light’ and if Methodism has an essence then for me that would constitute it. I remember the high vaulted ceilings of the room we met in, motes of light shining as from heaven itself mingling with the innocent songs of children accompanied by a out of tune piano.
On Sundays I wore a maroon blazer with silver buttons, of which I was inordinately proud. When I was a student I wore a maroon corduroy jacket which was a source of great irritation to the rugby hearts of the college.
One enthusiasm I had as a student I am not proud of, though in the circumstances it was understandable. For a time I came under the spell of the writings of G.H.Bantock, then Professor of Education at Leicester University. Bantock was a follower of the literary critic F.R.Leavis and a friend of Eliot. Bantock wrote with great acerbity about the mindlessness of much that passed for progressivism in education. He saw some of the roots of modern educational methods in the work of the Romantic poets who, he claimed, did not know enough. Reading his ‘Freedom and Authority in Education’ after a gap of three decades I realize that Professor Bantock did not know enough either and that his illusion was that he had no illusions and that is the worst illusion of all.
Bantock was a rationalist and a materialist who cloaked a rigid authoritarian stance by high-flown appeals to the cultural traditions praised by his erstwhile mentors, Leavis and Eliot. I met Bantock once and found him insensitive and smug, certainly not the sensitive idealist he liked to present himself as in his books. One of his principal targets was Susan Isaacs, the author of a standard training college textbook, ‘Junior School Community.’ Although Isaacs earned her living as an educationalist she was a psycho-analyst and a leading co-worker of Melanie Klein. Her seminal work on unconscious phantasy is one of the high-points of the British School of Analysis whose work is documented in Phyllis Grosskurth’s biography of Klein. Bantock, for all his mordant philosophising, entirely lacked the capacity for original thought at an abstract level which characterises Isaacs.
Another figure in the educational world I admired at the time was David Holbrook, a follower of Leavis but one who genuinely saw a way forward through creative work for less able pupils in the secondary modern school. Holbrook was honest enough to admit that he would not like to have done this kind of work full time. He was also a worthy if not very talented poet. Holbrook believed passionately in the therapeutic value of literature and creative writing. In his twenties and thirties he wrote on a wide range of literary and educational topics. For many years I lost track of his activities but recently, I came across a review of his latest book in ‘The International Review of Psycho-analysis.’ Even that journal, which specializes in the cross-currents between psycho-analysis and culture, found his work hard going. It was no less than a note-by-note analysis of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, written in the style of phenomenology and avowedly based on the tenets of existential psychoanalysis. In some strange way Holbrooks change of interests in some way paralleled my own.
The poets of the post-war generation I most admired were George Barker and W.S.Graham. The Scottish poet had a spiritual toughness and his epic ‘The Night Fishing’ and his poems about growing up in working class Scotland will last forever:
Younger in the towered
Tenements of night he heard
The shipyards with nightshifts
Of lathes turning their shafts
Letter II
Now pay her no attention
I am the big bowbender
These words shall lie the way I want
Or shell blacklead the fender
‘The Ballad of Baldy Bane’
My own image of the North is quite similar to Hughes. The loneliness of the Yorkshire Dales and the sense they engender of both an immanent and a transcendent God. The streets of York with their overflowing secondhand bookshops in the shadow of the Minster, the memories of the streets of my childhood, long-gone under the wheels of bulldozers and the hammers of the demolition gangs accompanying them. But most of all these is the silence. In the south there is always noise even through the night the roar of traffic never ceases. In the north the prevailing silence is almost physical a sculpture of air and cloud.
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