Bridge Over The Aire
The Promise That Cannot Be Kept Margaret Gone
THE PROMISE THAT CANNOT BE KEPT
‘Begin again, begin again!’
That was the refrain in my mind, the remnant of adolescent dream that had ended some period of turmoil I had tried to resolve by reading of all things, Jung, a huge tome the colour of coffee beans with smudged, tiny and almost illegible footnotes about the Collective Unconscious. The text was dreary enough with its ponderous Germanic love of medieval lore and alchemical chicanery and occult dabbling. The prophecies of Nostradamus and the signs of the Zodiac had always bored me but some must have got under my defences for that was when the nightmares began. Forty years later the images are still vivid, livid scars on my psyche, memories of crouching in terror under a bridge with a troop of Roman cavalry approaching, the thunder of horses’ hooves made the rough planking shudder until I woke up, bathed in sweat, my eyes burning and my ear-drums splitting.
It all started when I went to a couple of meetings of the Leeds Theosophical Society held in a gloomy book-lined room somewhere near the top of Cookridge Street. For the most part the members were bewhiskered old men, their wives with scrawny, elongated necks and blotchy skin who had once attended a meeting of Madame Blavatsky’s and were still clutching tattered volumes of Gurdgieff and Ouspensky.
A few nights of the dreams were enough to convince me that whatever sinister force might lurk in these shadows I wanted no part of it and when I returned the Jung to the library the hallucinatory visions stopped abruptly.
After a while I had a dream as visionary and bright as the others had been engulfed in Luciferian darkness. In this dream I stood on the platform of a weighing machine of vast proportions, like the huge scales they used in wool-warehouses, where they would dump great grey bundles of shoddy and and a foreman would read from the juddering arrow an amount in tons and hundred weights for a hunched clerk to jot down in a dog-eared notebook.
The scales I stood on had the power of making me weighless; all I had to do was to put my hands together in the position of prayer, point my forefingers and I could fly in any direction . Immediately I found myself floating effortlessly among shifting wisps of cloud where stars were painted in silver against a black velvet backcloth
‘There is escape in poetry and flight’
The words were emblazoned on a banner waving above my head in a swirling oneiric nightscape. I used them in one of my early poems, sententiously adding ‘whispers the deceiver’ but whether my addition represented a genuine insight or derived from my Methodist mistrust of mysticism I never discovered.
The big name in poetry in Leeds at the time was Geoffrey Hill, so I went to a reading he gave at the new technical college in Woodhouse Lane. The row of seats in the lecture hall were in ascending tiers and on one of the higher levels I felt distinctly vertiginous. Hill was already something of an icon. He read his dark baffling poems in a deep doom-laden voice. He sported a short tuft of a beard with piercing blue eyes. His diction bristled with difficulties of every kind, allusions to obscure East European poets, untranslated Classical quotations and abrasive dialect words like ‘darg’. Worst of all he constantly altered the text of his poems – not for reasons of rhythm or clarity but because of marginal differences of definition in succeeding editions of the OED. All he lacked to complete his bardic garb was a cloak but in its stead he wore carefully pressed Levis and his faculty wife watched him from the front row, a proprietorial gleam in her eye which quite spoilt the Dylan Thomas effect he was aiming at. Hill was completely lacking in humour; when an old lady stopped her knitting to ask why he didn’t write entirely in Latin he rolled his eyes and replied,
“Madame, I can only offer Dr Johnson’s excuse, ‘pure ignorance’.”
A few of the audience tittered but the majority felt uncomfortable and there was a general sense of relief when McCormack stood up and proposed a vote of thanks. Mac wielded a bulging briefcase and twitched his bushy eyebrows as he mumbled incoherently through his tangled growth of beard with an owlish solemnity.
“Engaged as I am with the instruction of the young” he began and went on and on while the rest of us, aware that it was all over, stretched our legs and rasped matches to light untipped cigarettes and stood up, letting the seats slam in a final jarring chorus, drowning Mac’s fulsome encomium.
We made various rebarbative remarks and discussed where to go for a drink and who we should next invite. The most likely candidate was David Holbrook, a disciple of Dr Leavis, and a very minor poet who had gained some notoriety in the field of English teaching. He believed-or pretended to believe-that backward children’s lives could be somehow ‘improved’ or even ‘made whole’ if only they could be stimulated to write directly from the unconscious in a ‘stream of unconsciousness’ technique somewhat in the vein of Virginia Woolf or James Joyce. I had similar views and held them passionately but I suspected Holbrook of being just another band-waggon jumper.
We sat in the ‘Eldon’ and after a lot of argy-bargy agreed to write to Holbrook’s Cambridge college and invite him to come and talk to us. One Saturday afternoon a few weeks later we trooped into the lecture theatre at the old city museum in Park Row. I hadn’t visited the place since I went with Margaret Hopwood when I was twelve and she was ten. In the basement of the museum was a mock-up of a coal mine, complete with rusty rails, a stuffed pit pony and a couple of tubs of coal, some worm-eaten pit props and an assortment of Davy lamps, permanently lit. To make the display more realistic the overhead lighting was dimmed. In the near Stygian gloom that enveloped us Margaret had reached out her hand to touch mine and we bent our heads together and kissed. It was not the rapid kiss of the bin-yards, the fleeting rapture of ‘catch’n’kiss’ but altogether a different kind of kiss we exchanged on that long ago day. The surrounding near darkness somehow intensified each’s awareness of the other’s physical being and of a mutual need for a deeper intimacy. The memory of those feelings stirred in me as I sat waiting for the lecture to begin. I was in such a state of hightened sensitivity that I found Holbrook’s style of oratory sickeningly jarring. I’d read his ‘English for the Rejected’, both crammed with the usual Leavite ardour but Holbrook came across-as had Hoggart on a similar occasion-more as a vote-catching politician than as a literary critic. As far as his being a poet the selection of his poems in the ‘Penguin Modern Poets’ series I found off-putting to say the least, his images expressed in a pseudo-Biblical mode which struck a false note:
For her
I cast seed
Into her mother’s womb
No doubt he had but so had billions of others and he seemed unable to bring to the experience the sense of specialness that is the mark of the poet.
In contrast to my green jacket and polo-necked sweater Holbrook wore a neat well-cut suit, a white shirt and what I assumed to be a Downing College tie. The examples of children’s writing he quoted left me cold and there seemed a calculating quality to his personality which repelled me. Unfortunately I’d already written to him on behalf of Leeds Training College’s Literary Society, inviting him to address us on the the following evening. I groaned inwardly at the prospect of hearing a repeat performance but by the following morning I found myself bed-bound with an attack of flu. In retrospect I suspect that my illness was psycho-somatic but my wheezes and sneezes were real anough so I phoned Ali in Bronte and ask her to chair the meeting in my place. Unenthusiastically she agreed, somewhat incredulous of my sudden illness. I was well enough to attend lectures on the following day and Ali gave me a knowing smile when she congratulated me on my rapid recovery.
“Never meet your mentors, they all have feet of clay”, I’d read this somewhere and after my experience with Holbrook I was determined to avoid any encounter with James Kirkup and what I suspected might prove a further disappointment. On one of his rare visits to England Kirkup wrote to me and proposed we meet under the statue of Eros in Picadilly. The day before the meeting was to have taken place Kirkup sent me a telegram cancelling, which I received with great relief. Forty years later I still had not met Kirkup, though we still corresponded but even without an encounter truth will out. When, in 2000 John Waddington Feather brought out a pamphlet collection of my recent work, my first publication for thirty years, all I received from Kirkup was a dismissive postcard, ridiculing my poem ‘Leeds’ on the grounds that, in a dream sequence about the Gare du Nord in Paris, I described a statue that doesn’t exist. The utter triviality and rather spiteful nature of Kirkup’s remarks made me wonder if it was just the narcissism of old age or could he actually be jealous? I never wrote to him again.
My bedroom was an interior-decorator’s nightmare. Two walls were in bright red and two in black with tiny drips of white rather in the manner of the Jackson Pollock painting which adorned the cover of Alvarez’s ‘The New Poetry’, my generation’s bible. The ceiling was in vivid yellow with a pink and white Daygo lampshade suspended in the middle. There were built-in floor to ceiling bookcases with fluorescent tubes at both ends. Apart from a single bed the only other piece of furniture in the room was a polished oak writing bureau which had a lid that let down and three drawers packed with reams of typing paper and hundreds of poem drafts. It was here I did my first writing but more in the way of showing off and not, as it eventually became, a way of trying to stay sane.
Safely tucked away in Japan Kirkup wrote me letters on beautifully scented sheets of washi, often with a few joss sticks. Japanaseri was hardly in fashion in a mill village like Yeadon, even in the sixties. I would perch on the window sill in my bijou bedroom and stare, enraptured, over the rippling waters of the Tarn, round whose sides I would wander in a hunched Yeatsian trance.
It was in this setting I celebrated my twenty-first birthday. On the invitations I’d said to come for seven and just as the clock on the mantel-shelf began its deep-throated chuckle came a tap at the door. It might have been no more than the brush of a passing leaf but I knew that it could only be Trevor.
“I’ve come as the Christmas Fairy”, he whispered as I let him in, fluttering his long eyebrows and flexing his ringed fingers, He wore, as only he dared, a black cloak over ballet tights and a silk shirt in silver with a heart-shaped locket on a thread of gold round his neck.
“I promised I’d be the first to come and the last to leave. Here’s your card-do say it’s your first!”
“Well I’ve had a few from relatives but they don’t count and I haven’t opened any of them anyway!”
The envelope was black and quite the largest I’d ever seen. In the top right-hand corner Trevor had stuck an assortment of children’s post-office stamps in orange, violet, mauve and pink, all bearing the same entrancing legend, ‘by fairymail’. Trevor had sealed the envelope with red wax.
“I can’t resist sealing wax, Barry. I had such a terrible job finding a single stick! And it’s such a terrible job to get it to melt! The only way is to hold it over a candle flame and then off it goes! Drip, drip, drip! The smell’s marvellous-I call it ‘Essence of Christmas’. I just close my eyes and sniff and I can see Santa running his reindeer over the roof tops, Rudolf with his red nose in the lead, silver stars twinkling over pillow-cases packed with presents, yummy chocolate, cream cigars and Rupert Bear annuals everywhere!”
Inside the cards Trevor had written, ‘To my Valentine on his Twenty-First’. There was a huge heart shot through with Cupid’s arrow and Trevor had pressed his carmined lips in a chorus of kisses and he had written in his immaculate copperplate “and plenty more where they came from.”
“What a wonderful card! I’m going to put it right in the middle of the mantel shelf where everyone can see it!”
I’d positioned it exactly where I wanted it when there came an excited tapping at the door and simulatenously the kettle on the hob began to whistle.
“You see to the coffee, Barry, I’ll bet that’s Terri, I’ll let her in.”
Terri was wearing the miniest of mini-skirts-it was so short I asked her why she’d bothered to wear anything at all over her pink frilly knickers but she said the skirt and the blouse matched and you couldn’t wear one without the other. The blouse was, she explained, ‘a semi see-through’.
“What I mean is you can see through it but you can always pretend you can’t.”
“How brave of you not to wear a bra!”, I ecstasised, pulling her to me for my birthday kiss.
“I’ve just been reading a poem by Apollinaire that just suits you:
Two shells
A pink burst
Like two breasts undone
Insolently hold out their tips
“You mean like this?”
With a single deft gesture Terri undid the simple pink bow that fastened her blouse and allowed her breasts to flow outwards and then she supported each breast with a fingertip, pushing the nipples forward.
“One kiss each, you two, only one, mind!”
We dipped our lips and lightly licked the pale pink tips, which suddenly took on a life of their own and stood erect. Just then came another knock and Terri blushed scarlet; all thumbs, she fumbled to re-tie the bow.
“Don’t for Christ’s sake go to the door ’til I’m decent”, she gasped, finally giving up and letting Trevor take over the tying at which he was an expert.
“There you are, as good as new!”
I rushed to let in Alice, who was carrying a large basket covered with a crisply-ironed tea cloth.
“Come on in out of the cold, you look like Little Red Riding Hood on her way to visit her grandma!”
“And I’m Mr Wolf!” Trevor burst in, looking most unwolflike in his black ballet tights and silver silk shirt. Alice couldn’t quite cope with Trevor and Terri. She called them ‘the two terrible T’s’, finding their exuberant and irrepressible sexuality somewhat alarming but secretly I suspected she envied their daring. In their company Alice was always mildly sardonic that being her only defence. Now she looked me straight in the eye.
“Happy Birthday, Barry. I’ve made you a cake the way you wanted, angel cake in three colours with cream and jam filling and soft white icing.”
She pulled back the cloth and there were the words ‘Happy Twenty First!’ in oozy pink, squeezed through a grease-proof nozzle and underlined with three squiggly kisses.
“It’s perfect, just the way I wanted! Let’s put it in the middle of the table.”
“Don’t forget the candles. I put them separate so they wouldn’t get broken.”
Alice flipped open a small box and tipped a heap of pale blue candles onto the table. I counted out twenty one and stuck them into the icing. Trevor and Terri were looking on like a pair of mischievous pixies waiting for a jumping spell to take effect.
“You can play the piano, can’t you Alice?”
“Only enough for school assemblies.”
“Can you manage something from ‘Easter Parade?”
“I’ll have a go.”
Trevor delved into the many times repaired shopping bag he always had with him and pulled out the sheet music for ‘We’re a couple of swells’.
“That’s our party piece”, Terri said, “We’ve been rehearsing it all week.”
Smiling, Alice tried it out a few times.
“I think I can manage it.”
The ‘Terrible Two’ grinned in delight.
“I know your party piece, Alice, it’s Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’, isn’t it? The poem the terrible old lady at the seaside made you spend a week of your holidays learning!”
“I’ll need a drink first.”
“I’ve got just the thing”, Terri burst in, pulling an oddly shaped bottle from her her huge handbag.
“My brother brought it back from France, it’s some sort of liqueur, green something-or-other.”
“Green Chartreuse”, Trevor put in. “Its yummy, totally yummy! Give it here.”
He unscrewed the metal cap, his nostrils quivering as he savoured the aroma.
“Come on, let’s have some before the other come. Drink it straight down, you won’t like the taste.”
He half-filled four glasses.
“Now all together. DOWN THE RED LANE!”
We tilted our glasses and emptied them at a single gulp. Alice shook her head.
“That stuff’s got some kick, you mark my words!”
“You can say that again”, chorused Terri and Trevor with wicked gleams in their eyes.
“I know”, said Trevor, “let’s play ‘I spy’ until everybody comes. I’ll start. I spy with my little eye something beginning with……” Quizically he cast his eye round the room, staring intently at the three of us. “T”, he announced, “something beginning with ‘T’.”
“Table”
“Tea cloth”
“Tuppence”
“I’ll give you a clue. You’ve all got one.”
“Tummy”, said Alice, patting her own thoughfully and simultaneously poking out her tongue at Trevor.
“Alright, Alice, you guessed. Now it’s your turn.”
Trevor sighed and sucked his thumb with an air of mock-mourning. Before Alice could speak there came another knock. I opened the door to find Jeannie, Alice and Chris from college with Audrey just behind them.
“Well, that’s everybody” I announced, turning the heavy old-fashioned key in the lock.
“I’ve brought you a record of Ted Hughes reading his poems, “Jeannie said.
“I know how you hate London, Barry, but there are some advantages to living there, you know! You couldn’t get hold of this record in Leeds.”
“I do know, I’ve tried everywhere.”
“Well all I did was phone my mum in London and she found the record the same day at a shop in Oxford Street and popped it in the post for me.”
“I can’t wait to hear Hughes’s voice.”
“I had a sneak preview, it’s terrific-like thunder and lightning and rushing mountain streams.”
When I put the record on the turntable of my Dansette the whole house reverberated.
“Yes, it is marvellous, I agree but a lot of it is his wonderful reading voice and his northern accent-you know what I mean- ‘couples laughing in the lanes,……’Now if you look at French poetry, at Claudel and Reverdy, you’ll find the reverberations are even more powerful. Listen to a few lines from Claudel’s ‘Cantique du Rhone’.
Salut, Rhone, buveur de la terre et aspirateur de cette rose
Immense autour de toi et le trait irresistible du sang
Animateur qui donne a tout son sens !
And in English,
‘Hail, Rhone, drinker of earth and breather of this vast rose
around you and the irresistible dart of vivifying blood that
gives you everything its meaning!’
By this time we were all squeezed into my bedroom, perched on the windowsill or splayed over the silk maroon of the bedspread. Ali sniffed.
“What’s that strange smell?”
“Joss sticks, all the way from James Kirkup in Japan. It’s like Whistler all over again-the way he discovered Hiroshige and Hokusai.”
“What on earth do you mean?”
“The Japanese used their prints as wrapping paper for ceramics they were exporting to America at the end of the nineteenth century. Painters like Whistler and the French Impressionists got hold of them and they had a huge influence on the development of western art.”
“And now you’re being influenced by, by……”
Ali raised her exquisite eyebrows.
“By their aura, my dear, by their aura”, I countered, “By the images they convey-all these Buddhist temples and great brass gongs. It’s all serendipity.”
“What’s ‘serendipity’ when it’s at home?” butted in Trevor.
“Finding good luck by chance. It comes from the Sinhalese, the title of a prince in medieval Ceylon.”
“You mean like the song, ‘This is my lucky day’?” Trevor warbled enthusiastically and we all laughed.
“Are you really writing a novel, Barry?” Jeannie asked, lighting a Gauloise from the stub of the last.
“Not so much a novel as an anti-novel in Robbe-Grillet’s sense. Things rather than people are the focus! Its exsitenz sang pur, German phenomenology via Merleau-Ponty. I want to be the first to produce an anti-novel in English. This is the opening.
Ssss gas jets flame in bronze ash. Emanations of lukewarm coffee over polished wood. Aaagh! What adours, grains and patterns in whirls and whorls. Zig-zag zig-zag neon tubes flicker. Window bouquets of ice flowers freezing finger tips. Frisson of sensation. Static hum. I no more the subject. End as you begin.
The order of the sentence isn’t fixed. The reader can change them at will and the same goes for the sentences and the pages.”
“Why don’t you just write a conventional novel?” Alice interjected.
“I did, er at least I managed about five chapters. There was no point in going on as it was certain to have been banned under the ‘Obscene Publications Act’”.
“How do you know it would?”
“Well Lawrence’s Lady C’s still banned and mine much, much worse!”
“Just what was your novel about?”
“It was about a priest who was sexually obsessed with nine year old boys. It’s quite explicit in the descriptions of the sex, rather like Genet but the trouble is that I write in English. If you’re French you can put in whatever you want, they believe that art’s sacred!”
“Well couldn’t you write in French?”
“I did consider it, I even had a go at translating what I’d already written into French but it was no good, you have to be born to the language to be able to write in it, there has to be that sense of being ‘felt in the blood’, what Lorca called ‘duende!”
Forever they are there, my early beloveds, lacking only a Manet to capture on canvas their tremulous languers.
MARGARET GONE
It had been all right with Audrey at the pictures but I’d ended up making a mess of it, not knowing what to do. Elizabeth, the friend who worked for the GPO and the one who introduced us, was very strict with her boyfriend about how far he could go, so I thought Audrey would be the same but she wasn’t, just the opposite in fact, and this was where I went wrong.
I put my arm around her and started snogging but she wanted more and faster, there and then in the one and sixes and I suppose I was too self–conscious with everybody round us but Audrey must have been used to it and she knew the ropes. The others were only interested in getting what was going and couldn’t care less what anybody else was up to. Finally Audrey pushed my hand down inside the top of her dress and that was the point I froze at.
If I’d not moved away from the streets and Margaret and Nancy I’d have known what to do straight off. Keep on till they make it clear, not a fraction of an inch more. Get everything going, the girl wants it just as much as you do or she wouldn’t be there in the first place. But I lost it all when mam took us to the council house in Cookridge with its slats of prefabricated pebbledash and everybody busy in their gardens, sticking seeds of night – scented stock into the thin layer of soil spread over the builders’ waste.
Our house was right at the edge of the estate, just another fifty yards of empty space before ‘the private schools’ in Far Headingley. That word ‘private’ was the key to the magic kingdom and mam went all gooey eyed when it came up in conversation. She was desperate to get on speaking terms with the women from the semis. The way she went on you’d think they were the aristocracy and I suppose to her they were. All I knew was that we didn’t have neighbours like Auntie Nellie anymore, people who left their door open so you could walk in anytime without knocking and there was always a pot of tea on the go and you could sit down and have a natter and listen to the chiming of the clock on the mantleshelf that had been twenty minutes fast since the year dot.
One of the women mam met in the papershop was very big at the Baptist Church in Horsforth, which was few minutes up the hill from the railway bridge at the end of the street . This woman’s husband was a Sherlock Holmes lookalike with a funny cape and a dearstalker hat hat and Meerschaum pipe. He taught in a private school in Headingley and was qualified ‘for the ministry’, whatever that meant, and he was a lay preacher. Once mam found all this out she was never away from Horsforth Baptist church and she usually managed to get in the same pew as Mrs. Aldridge, that was the woman’s name, and she’d get herself invited back to the house for coffee and even took me there with her once but only once.
The Aldridges had a four- bedroom semi up past the King’s Arm’s. There was a music room with a bust of Beethoven on a plinth and mam thought she was in heaven when she sat there thought she didn’t know Beethoven from be-bop. She just sat and drank her coffee while this old bat went on about her hubby going back into the ministry and moving down south to Bournemouth or Bognor-regis. George V said “Buggar Bognor” on his deathbed and it must have been the only time in History an English king said something funny and certainly the only time they ever said anything I agreed with.
2
As if all this wasn’t bad enough I’d had seven years at Leeds Modern School and it must have been seven years bad luck for breaking a mirror and the mirror was the only one in my mind that showed Margaret and the streets. The grammer school was a disaster from the beginning. I hated the blazer with it’s black and red stripes and the knee-length grey woollen socks with elastic bands to keep them up that were always too tight and left a mark round my legs or too loose and let the socks slip down over my ankles. There were the black shoes that pinched my toes and had to be polished every night and the white woodwork apron and the football boots that had to have the dried mud scraped off and the surface waxed and the long white laces with their unfathomable knots. There was the green rugby jersey and the thick green and white house socks and the pairs of sports shirts and the PT shoes to be blancoed. There was the compulsory cap and the leather satchel perfumed with fear.
What was worst was the contempt for the working class that seeped down from the hierarchy, the unsubtle venom that spewed out all the time, “Your values are nothing, your family and friends are nothing. We have the power, your aspirations are worthless. Ours is the glory and if you do exactly as we say we will drip a tiny drop of it into your outstretched palm.”
The headmaster was Francis Holland MA (Cantab). He was an ex-major in the guards and he saw the school as a vast parade ground, the boys a stream of raw recruits to be shaped to his middle-class mould. It was rugby union that was played, not working-class rugby league. Reasons were never given but they were implicit in everything, “Our ways are the right ways, they are the ways of the middle class, they lead to acceptance in the world, they lead to power and they may even lead to glory if you’re good enough at aping them. Your ways are the dirty and despicable ways of the working class but by the time you leave here you’ll have forgotten your bad old ways and taken on new ones. Once you saw as children, now you will see as the born-again middle-class and you will know how to keep the workers in their place.”
Before the war Leeds Modern had been some sort of fee-paying commercial school with a bit of a subsidy from the city council and it was strange how something of the commercial ethos remained, hidden under the wax of the floorboards and the peeling paint of the radiators and the white tiles of the cloakrooms. Three quarters of the boys left at sixteen to work in offices for the rest of their lives. This was never mentioned, nor were they. They were just B stream, C stream and D stream. Only being in the A stream mattered. The A stream boys were treated like valuable race horses, constantly in training for the big race. They always seemed to have fathers who were accountants or bank clerks and they lived in Headingley and they were the chosen ones who would be pushed at super speed through the system, finishing the O level course in four years instead of five so they could have three years instead of two to prepare for the Oxbridge stakes.
When I was sixteen there seemed to be some awakening of opposition, both from boys and even from some of the younger masters. We witnessed an extraordinary scene in the chemistry lab when Mountjoy, the pince-nez’d head-of-department, had a furious argument with Dr. Simonds, a young master with the ink on his Ph.D hardly dry. They were disputing a point of scientific procedure and neither would give way. At last Mountjoy sniffed, gathered the voluminous folds of his gown behind him, and swept out. Dr. Simonds muttered at his departing bulk, “He’s wrong, all the text books say so, it’s a matter of fact, not opinion.”
Latin had always been taught but reserved for the A stream as a vital component of Oxbridge entry and there was only one master to teach it, Harold Seaton, known as Satan for his acid sarcasm and his sudden outbreaks of rage when not even the brightest boy was safe from his screams and slaps. When it was decided that a second classics master was needed Latin was opened up to the B stream and I coped with it so well that I was moved to the A stream but for Latin only. Then when Greek was introduced for a two year experimental period I was one of the nine who opted for it and we stumbled through Homer and Thucydides and even some bits of Plato. It must have stuck because when McIllvanney casually dropped into ’The Kiln’, I knew it was the infinitive if the verb ‘to know’. Peacock wrote somewhere “It’s all Greek to me but then I know Greek” and certainly the bit I know always stands me in good stead.
Satan was madder than a hatter. He’s been a submarine commander in the war and all that pressure diving and all those marine missions must have sent him quietly off his head. When I was in the sixth form he abruptly married an Irish physiotherapist thirty years his junior. Years later I saw him holding the hands of a toddler in Central Lending and I walked past him without speaking.
Holland, the head, had a great gabbing gob with staring eyes and an exopthalmic goitre. He wore a washed-out mac because he was putting his son through law school to make him a barrister and thus twenty-two carrot upper-class gold. That was what it was all about, Leeds Modern School, class, how much you lacked it and how much of their kind they were going to cram down your throat. But I always knew there was a working class ethic and it was bred in my bones from my beginning and somehow they knew it too and that is why the school establishment always excluded me.
After seven years I went as unobtrusively as I had come. Leaving was just picking up my final report and not going back. McNeil’s porpoise finger dropped the sheet on my desk. English, French, History, all satisfactory and his general comment, “Shows good all round intelligence and considerable creative ability. Should go far.”
“But not here,” he told me so himself, “not here.”
”It’s a small and rather mean world, this school. There’s another world out there…..” He waved his arm at the distant horizon.
“There are people outside you’ll get along with and you’ll learn from them and you may have something to give them in return, perhaps the poems you’ve started to write may come to something, you never know.”
McNeil was the only one who understood me. We spent hours after school, standing by the main gate, talking and talking. He led me through the rudiments of philosophy and when Holland asked me what I wanted to study at university that was the subject I mentioned and he exploded.
“Its not a qualification for anything, just a waste of time with nothing at the end. What earthly use is a philosophy degree? Go away and come back when you’ve thought of something more practical.”
I never went back so I never applied anywhere to do anything.
McNeil had a First in History from Cambridge, where his tutor had been the world famous Historian, G.M. Trevelyan. I read all about him in the ‘Encyclopedia Brittanica’ in the school library, how he believed in the poetic qualities of history and in the importance of philosophy. McNeil passed on to me as much as he could, “Never suck up to anyone and never betray your principles”. That was what he had learned from Trevelyan and that was what he taught me.
There were only two other masters I got on with and both taught French. One was Lyly, who had been repeatedly turned down for promotion and was looking for something in teacher training to take him up to retirement and the other was Martin, straight from university and full of Sartre and Baudelaire. Both seemed to sense they had something special to pass onto me that I’d find invaluable later. Perhaps my translations of poetry were more inspired than the average. There was a sonnet by Malarmé that went in the school magazine. I thought Mallarmé glorious in his Romantic abandon, I imagined him reciting his poem, stood on the quay at Marseilles as Gaugin sailed off to Tahiti and his voluptuous vahine.
7
One morning Bayles stormed into the staff-room waving ‘The Yorkshire Post’ in a state bordering on mania.
“Pull down the ‘Black Prince’ in City Square! How dare they even think such thoughts, let alone have the temerity to air them in the council chamber. They’re no better than Bolsheviks, the lot of them. Every time we came home on leave there he was outside the station, waving his sword in welcome, and now they want to take him down and dump him in a corner of the corporation dust-yard. Over my dead body!”
For an hour the hall echoed to the staccatto hammer of his typewriter, until finally he emerged, holding a large white envelope high in the air like a banner.
“Barry, I want you to take this to the ‘Evening Post’ office. Just tell Mr Lawson you’re doing an errand for me.”
“Aye, Aye,” Lawson said, “they’ve really got ‘im going and I can’t say I’m not with him all the way on this one and if anyone can stop the buggers it’ll be ‘im.”
I carefully stowed the envelope in my inside pocket and walked out, passed through the yard and walked through Jews’ Park and so onto North Street with its tearing trams and jerking drays of Tetley’s bitter in hooped barrels, the hunched drivers wearing waterproof capes with long whips fountaining from their scabbards. I caught a tram into town and dropped the letter off at the ‘Evening Post’ office in Bond Street. The presses for the first edition were already rolling and as I stood watching I could feel the pavement tremble as they thrummed and thundered.
When I bought the paper on the way home that night the whole centre-page spread was given over to the ‘Black Prince’ controversy with Bayles letter at the top in black type, “An Old Soldier Writes’ and the paper was clearly behind him and no doubt most of its readers would follow. The outcome was that the Council dropped the whole idea and said that ‘It had only been a possibility’ and there was a victory dinner at the Hotel Metropole and Bayles was invited along with his arch-enemy Councillor Sproat.
8
During the Christmas holidays I went into Leeds to buy a pair of gloves in the January sales. I’d already been to Central Lending to collect a book of Kirkup’s and I was passing Marshall and Snelgrove’s where there was a queue outside, waiting for the doors to open and the sales to start.
“Barry, Barry, I don’t believe it, after all this time!”
I hadn’t seen Trevor for eight years but the minute I saw him I knew I wanted to fuck him all the way from his Pre-Raphelite kiss curls to the twin peaks of his bum. He had deep, passionate almond eyes and he was wearing a sweater his mam had knitted him with Rudolf the red-nosed Reindeer on the border. He was wearing mittens and jumping up and down to keep warm.
“After all these years! Here I am stuck in this queue, freezin’ mi bum off and then there you are! If my sister hadn’t begged me to get her some nylons in the sale, then I looked and I still can’t believe it.”
He hugged me there and then and kept his arm round me all the way through the struggling swell till we got to the nylon counter. The girl who was serving looked bored even before the sale had really started.
“What size do you want?”
“Um, I can’t remember. Maureen’s a nine and Joan’s a ten.”
He waved his mittened hands in the air, as though trying to conjure his absent sister’s stocking size.
“She’s got long legs and a little bum, I think she’s an eight and a half.”
The assistant reddened and slapped six cellophane packs on the scratched glass counter.
“What colour?”
“Oooh Barry, you help me choose. Lemon Dawn, Peach, Saffron Flower, Skin Tint and Weeping Blossom. I love that one, I always think that trees have feelings as much as we do!”
“Why don’t you get one of each?”
“O, alright.”
“That’ll be four and six.”
“Bugger, I’m a tanner short. Barry, can you lend it me?”
I found my purse and dug out two threepenny bits. The girl dropped them in the drawer and slammed shut the till. Trevor pushed the brimming brown paper packet into his shoulder bag and fluttered his long eyelashes as he pulled on his mittens.
“O dear, somebody did get out of bed on the wrong side this morning didn’t they?”
He swivelled on his svelte hips and flounced off, leaving me to follow. In his wake I watched people watching Trevor, inclining their heads compulsively to catch every sway and tilt as he passed. I caught up with him at the jewellery counter, bent over the black velvet trays of costume jewels with their tiny tied on price tags. He was holding up a pair of earrings, exquisite in their diamante glow, highlighted by the blooming brilliance of the shop’s strip lighting.
“Would you like me to buy them for you?” I offered, remembering his penchant as a child for dressing up in his mother’s clothes.
“You really would, you were always generous and you’ve not changed a bit. They’re not dear and they’d go perfectly with my Sunday sweater and my silk scarf! I’ll be a total smash at the ‘Hope and Anchor’. It’s so right that name! I always hope for an anchor and I so love sailors! D’you know that Noel Coward song about the sailor boy that had gone and left him?
“Matelot, Matelot, where have you gone?”
he crooned, but only so I could hear and his voice was as beautiful as ever and how I wished I had never left the streets and Trevor and Margaret.
“Come on, Barry, cheer up. I want to look at the lipstick.”
He picked up a tester called ‘Coral Isle Adventure’, pursed his lips in front of the tilting mirror on the counter and expertly applied the pink stick.
“Does it suit me?”
Before I had time to answer we were overtaken and almost overturned by an oversized lady in a large hat replete and resplendent with plastic flowers.
“Get out, get out you…..you…” her wrath seemed to have exceeded her vocabulary.
“Boy, girl...what are you?” She choked and tried to launch herself at Trevor and only the press of shoppers stopped her.
“Come on, the air in here’s getting overheated” Trevor giggled and we slipped out by a side entrance in Duncan Street.
“Barry, do tell me, am I a boy or not! Do I buy Durex or Tampax?” and we both laughed until our sides ached.
11
After she went Trevor set to and finished the washing up while I did the drying. When it was done he stacked the plates in the wall cupboard and turned to face me with one hand on his hip, the other pressed against the wall.
“And now, Barry, I’m taking you out for a drink at the ‘Hope’ and I’m not taking ‘no’ for an answer.”
I put on my navy duffel coat. There was enough room in the side pockets for a full sized poetry hardback and I had Kirkup’s ‘A Spring Journey’ with me. Trevor pulled it out and started leafing though it.
“Is this the kind of stuff you like?”
“I don’t like it, I adore it! Kirkup’s the first really important poet we’ve had since Dylan Thomas. He lived in Leeds when he was the first Gregory Fellow in poetry at the University. He even wrote some poems about Leeds. Listen; this is a poem he wrote about Kirkgate market:
‘A cocksure boy in the gloom of the gilded market bends
With blunt fingers a bow of death and flowers work with him
They fashion a grave of grass with dead bracken and fine ferns.’
I’m sure it must have been someone like you he was writing about, especially this verse later on,
‘And here a grieving flower god with a lyre in his arms
Fumbles mute strings in the rough-gentle machine of his fingers,
His eyes wet violets, and in his mouth a last carnation.’
He’s got you exactly, don’t you think?”
Trevor looked pleased but a bit doubtful.
“I don’t really think I’m anything special.”
“Well I do. Now come on and let’s go for that drink.”
I put on my new navy duffel coat and Trevor was wearing his old donkey jacket. We set off down Accommodation Road. The shops had a neglected look about them and some were empty with forlorn, ‘To Rent’ boards flapping in the wind. Spilled pools of petrol on the forecourt of the filling station still glimmered with rainbows but the whole area was filled with an aura of delapidation. From the corner by Cross Green we stood and looked over the street I had lived in so long and so happily. There was the odd light here and there but as we got nearer we could see that most of the houses were boarded up, ready for the demolition men.
“Come on,” Trevor said, “let’s go and have a look round.”
It was as though the street had been a battleground. There were broken bricks lying across the cobbles, smashed windows and rubbish strewn over the pavements that Mam and Auntie Nellie and the other neighbours had swept, scrubbed and washed down every week. The last time I’d stood there I’d been with Margaret on Bonfire night and I told her we were in the fortress of the working class and that the massed forces of all the rest could never beat us, but then we were betrayed from within by the promise of the hideous new housing estates and high-rise flats, cars and TV’s and never having it so good with everything on the never never. “This is the age of aftershave,” I said to Trevor, “Mam always has to be trendy so she gave me a bottle the first Christmas it came out. I dabbed some on once but it made my skin sting so I never bothered again. That little white bottle with the ship with the red flag’s stuck gathering dust on my bedroom windowsill.”
“I like real perfume,” Trevor giggled, “Smell!” He moved closer lifting his face to mine so I could catch the heady aroma of ‘Bluegrass’.
“I dab a bit on my throat when Doreen’s not looking!”
Suddenly he kissed me, full on the lips, as we stood in the shadows of the ‘Bridgefield’ and the only witness was the spluttering gas lamp, which gave no more out than an occasional flicker.
“Haven’t you ever kissed a boy before?”
“I never met a boy before that I wanted to kiss.”
“Do you like me?”
“I always liked you. You were the only boy I ever did like. All the others were too physical; football and getting the girls to go into the long grass or they wouldn’t go out with them. I always knew you were different, the way you could sing and tap-dance. The way you looked and the way you wore you clothes, everything.”
“You mean the way I dressed up in my mam’s clothes when she was out!”
“I suppose so, though I just thought you were playing a dressing up game.”
“I suppose I was in a way and I’m still playing it. You know they always called me ‘Laddie-lass’ behind my back?”
“I think they would have called me the same if I wasn’t always with Margaret. Did it bother you?”
“A bit at first, then I got used to it and then I couldn’t care less. In the end I met other boys like me and I felt quite proud.”
“What do you mean ‘others’?”
“That’s where I’m taking you tonight, we’re going to the ‘Hope and Anchor’. But before we go anywhere we’ll walk round your streets. If we don’t look round now this time next week they’ll be nothing to see except piles of bricks being pushed round by bulldozers and loaded onto lorries.”
What had once been Auntie Nellie’s house, half way down to the front street, had every window broken. A can had been tipped over and a thick stream had half-run, half-set on a jagged course over the steps. Auntie Nellie always made a point of scrubbing her steps and outlining the edges with a soft yellow donkey stone. The beautiful brass doorknob, in which as a child I had mirrored my face, had lost all its gloss and showed the green stain of verdigris. The gas lamp on the corner by the bin-yard had two of its panes broken and in the wind the mantle flickered wildly and cast eerie shadows. On the neck of the lamp someone had hung an old tyre and as we went through the yard we had to step over rubbish from tipped up bins.
One house in Bridgewater Terrace showed a glow from the inside but the curtains were tightly drawn and smoke drooled from the chimney like spittle from the mouth of an old man. Margaret’s house in Falmouth Place had had the front door torn from its hinges and the downstairs window was like a set of shark’s teeth with ragged shards of broken glass. I tried to go inside but a mattress with broken furniture piled on top stopped me.
Trevor put his arm round my shoulder as I stood with tears streaming down my face in front of the door of the house of the girl whose being was fused with mine and would be always, to the grave and to the very gates of paradise.
“Never mind Barry love, but you did have to come and have a last look so you could get it all out. The last time we were here it was when the three of us were going carol singing. My mam gave us a bottle of dandy to share and you and Margaret a mince pie each to eat on your way home. It was the best Christmas I ever had. I wonder where Margaret went. Once neither of you was around anymore I just couldn’t face going carol singing, it made me realise how much I missed you. I can’t forget her. I just can’t get her out of my mind. She was going to be there all my life. We’d made plans about what we’d do when we grew up, about everything.”
“I know, but sometimes things don’t go the way we plan. That’s life, its bloody hard to accept but it is in the Bible, you know, the bit about taking the rough with the smooth, ‘Thy will be done’. We might not understand at the time but one day we will.”
We mooched to the end of the street and crossed the frosted cobbles of the goods-yard forecourt onto the suspension bridge and stood looking at the black waters of the river. The steps at the sides were green in summer but bare in winter and never had they seemed bleaker than that night. From further along the tow path there seemed to come the voices of children, but I couldn’t make out if they were real or ghosts crying out from my past.
Trevor held my hand as we walked down South Accom. The pressure was warm and strong and we walked hand in hand until we reached the sodium glare of Hunslet road where lorries hurtled night and day towards the foundations of the motorway, concrete ramparts reinforced with enough steel cables to strangle the whole of the working class.
12
The ‘Hope & Anchor’ was a very strange pub, the windows entirely covered with thick pink gloss . When I pressed my palms against the swing doors so great was the mass of bodies on the other side that they wouldn’t give more than an inch.
“Let me have a go!” Trevor said, and expertly squeezed a passage for us through the bulk of bodies. I followed him into a back room where every table was full and even the space between overflowed. We managed to find a wall to lean against, struggling to breathe in the dense smoke-laden air. The juke box was blaring ‘Who’s Sorry Now?’ in Connie Francis’ slippery glissando. I asked Trevor what he wanted to drink.
“No, Barry, it’s my treat and I’m paying. Lager n’ lime’s the ‘in thing’, is that what you want?”
“Suits me fine!”
“Don’t talk to any strange men!”
Trevor raised his eyebrows and put one hand in front and one behind like the prow and rudder of a boat to steer himself across the sea of bodies. Most of the habitués were male but there were a few girls sitting at the tables and one man in drag with heavy mascara and a blonde wig. When Trevor had gone he sidled up to me.
“Are you new here, love?” he asked, a cigarette in a long plastic holder extended until it was almost in my eyes.
“Yes, I’ve never been here before. I’m with my friend, he’s just gone to get our drinks.”
“You mean Trevor’s your friend?”
“We’ve known each other for years.”
“Well you are the lucky one! Everybody’s tried and got absolutely nowhere! He’s so good-looking. Well there’s no accounting for taste,” he huffed, “I’ll be off and leave you to it.”
Just then Trevor came back with the drinks.
“Off you go, Mark, let’s be having some peace!” But he was giggling as he spoke and Mark merely raised a sequinned eyebrow in mock chagrin.
“I’m devastated but as they say, ‘two’s company’ so I’ll be on my way. I do think I’ve got somebody interested but then he might just be short-sighted or downright cruel, you know playing me along and then doing a moonlight!”