Sketches, Dispatches, Hull Tales and Ballads

A Humber Mouth Special Commission 2012. Copyright of individual poems, stories
and images resides with the writers and artists. Humber Mouth 2012 acknowledges the
financial assistance of Hull City Council and Arts Council England, Yorkshire.
British Library Cataloguing in Publications Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British library.
First published 2012
Published by Kingston Press
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ISBN 978-1-902039-22-0
Kingston Press is the publishing imprint of Hull City Council Library Service,
Central Library, Albion Street, Hull, England, HU1 3TF
Telephone: +44 (0) 1482 210000
Fax: +44 (0) 1482 616827
e-mail: [email protected]
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We are pleased to present Sketches, Dispatches, Hull Tales and Ballads, the
latest collaboration from the Humber Writers. Here you have an anthology
of words and images responding, sometimes directly, sometimes more
obliquely, to Dickens, as we celebrate the bicentenary of his birth. The book
is a Humber Mouth Special Commission which echoes and plays variations
on the themes of Hard Times, Great Expectations — the watchwords of this
year’s festival.
The Humber Writers is a group of poets, fiction writers and artists
associated with the University of Hull. Over the years members of the group
have collaborated on a number of projects specifically focusing on Hull and
its neighbouring landscapes, often resulting in books, performances and
film for the Humber Mouth Literature Festival: A Case for the Word (theatre
performance, 2006); Architexts (art book, 2007); Dri (book and film, 2008);
Hide (book, 2010); and Postcards from Hull (book, postcards and art
exhibition, 2011). 2012 has been particularly productive as this book
follows hard on the heels of Under Travelling Skies: Departures from Larkin,
which won the first Larkin25 Words Award, and featured a book, a film and
an exhibition of paintings at Artlink in Princes Avenue, Hull.
Dickens, of course, is most immediately associated with London and so
our ‘departures from Dickens’ often reflect our own city through his themes.
Dickens did visit Hull: several of the pieces here refer to an incident which
involved him buying silk stockings, presumably for the actress Ellen Ternan,
and giving the shop assistant who served him a ticket for one of his readings.
There is some doubt as to when (or even if?) this took place. As editors we
have sought an imaginative response, and have allowed our writers
sufficient leeway with Gradgrind’s facts to make what they will of anecdote,
false report, misremembered date, or for that matter history itself.
It has been a great pleasure editing this anthology and we would like to
thank Hull City Arts who generously supported the project.
Mary Aherne and Cliff Forshaw, Hull, June 2012.
Painting: Nude with Top Hat 1 by Cliff Forshaw
2
Contents
Maurice Rutherford.............. Apology for Absence.............................
Valerie Sanders...................... Dickens and Hull: An Introduction....
Mary Aherne........................... Imp...........................................................
Malcolm Watson.................... Silk Stockings.........................................
Carol Rumens.......................... e Gentleman for Nowhere................
4
5
12
14
16
Aingeal Clare.......................... e Man and the Peregrine and the
Chimney................................................. 30
Cliff Forshaw.......................... A Trinity of Genomic Portraits for
Charles Darwin...................................... 32
David Wheatley...................... Cat Head eatre................................... 38
Wanna Come Back to Mine................. 40
Cliff Forshaw.......................... A Season in Hull.................................... 42
Ingerland................................................. 43
Ray French............................... Insomnia................................................. 48
Cliff Forshaw.......................... Two Ballads from the Bush................... 62
David Wheatley...................... Northern Divers..................................... 71
Guns on the Bus..................................... 72
Carol Rumens.......................... Beware this Boy...................................... 74
Aingeal Clare.......................... from Wide Country and the Road...... 75
Kath McKay............................ Hull and Eastern Counties Herald
March 1869............................................. 83
Aer the Silk Stockings......................... 84
Aer Abigail Finds the Letter............... 89
Malcolm Watson.................... A Christmas Carol................................. 94
David Wheatley...................... Interview with a Binman...................... 95
Visitors’ Centre....................................... 96
Vacuous and Unknown......................... 97
Jane Thomas........................... Charles Dickens and Hull..................... 98
Mary Aherne........................... Hope on the Horizon............................ 104
birds......................................................... 110
Maurice Rutherford.............. Second oughts....................................112
3
Maurice Rutherford
Apology for Absence
Dear Editor,
Moved by, and grateful for
your invitation to present a script –
something of expectations, great or small,
hard times, health, poverty, philanthropy,
of which Hull’s known its share, both good and bad –
I have to say my contribution would
entail recourse to reference books today
and here’s the rub: I’ve given them away.
Cerebral palsy, surely blighting births
when Magwitch stirred the marshland mists, still does,
so, heeding a request to donate books
(whose small print now lay fogged beyond my reach)
chancing a bicentenary salute
to one who wrote life as it was, backlit
with love, and left a legacy of hope,
I bagged my Dickens paperbacks for Scope.
Two feet of empty shelf, some disturbed dust,
Pickwick and Nickleby – both hardback gifts
from absent friends taken before their time –
remain, reminding me of kindnesses
that came my way, like this approach from you
I can’t feel equal to. Forgive me when
with gratitude and, yes, resurgent grief
I must, ungraciously, decline this brief.
ps. May I append the shortest gloss:
no giving’s worth its name where there’s no loss.
4
Valerie Sanders
Dickens and Hull: An Introduction
The Hull people (not generally considered excitable, even on
their own showing), were so enthusiastic that we were
obliged to promise to go back there for Two Readings!
(letter, 15 September 1858)
What did Dickens know – or care – about Hull? As a ‘southerner’,
born in Portsmouth, but popularly regarded by most people as a
Londoner, he might look like the last person to have anything
interesting to say about a provincial town on the Humber estuary.
As the opening quotation shows, however, he came to Hull in
September 1858 on one of his famous public reading tours, and was
an instant success. His letters record that he made ‘more than £50
profit at Hull’ on his first reading, and returned by popular demand
a few weeks later. However strapped for cash people were clearly
willing to turn out twice to hear the nation’s best-loved novelist
perform favourite extracts from his works, as they did on his return
visits in 1859 and 60. He was back again in 1869 for his farewell
reading tour, when he stayed at the Royal Station Hotel, and regaled
an audience at the Assembly Rooms (later the New Theatre) with
another round of his old favourites, including ‘Sikes and Nancy’ and
‘Mrs Gamp.’ We know the people of Hull loved Dickens on tour, but
apart from these performance pieces, what else in his novels suggests
they might have struck a chord with the audience he entertained?
And given today’s ‘hard times’ what can we still find in Dickens to
speak to our own experience of austerity and hardship?
The most obvious link between Dickens and his Hull audience,
both past and present, is their shared familiarity with rivers,
estuaries, bridges, the flat, featureless landscape, and the varieties of
shipping which ploughed up and down their muddy waters. A
Victorian commentator on Hull, the Revd James Sibree, dated his
letters home to his mother as ‘From the fag-end of the earth.’
5
Reaching Barton after an exhausting twenty-six hour journey from
London in 1831, he remembered how the ‘flatness of the country
palled on my spirit’ – and there was still the river crossing to make
by small steamboat, loaded with cattle as well as his fellowpassengers and their luggage.1 Much of this apparently dreary
landscape might have reminded Dickens of the Kent marshes, which
he had known from childhood when his father worked in the Navy
Pay Offices based at Sheerness and Chatham, towns which feature
in several of his novels including e Pickwick Papers and David
Copperfield. At his least charitable, he nicknamed the Kent towns of
his childhood, especially Rochester, ‘Dullborough’ and ‘Mudfog’,
while in Great Expectations (1860-1) his hero Pip overhears a convict
recall the marshes as ‘“A most beastly place. Mudbank, mist, swamp,
and work; work, swamp, mist, and mudbank”’ (Ch. 28). The banks
of the Humber in a dripping November mist might be similarly
described.
The Humber might have reminded Dickens of another, grander
river estuary which became an integral part of his life when he
worked at Warren’s blacking warehouse on Hungerford Steps. The
Thames is a murky and fairly sinister presence in many of his novels,
from Oliver Twist (1838) to Our Mutual Friend (1864-5), which
opens with the image of ‘a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance,
with two figures in it,’ floating between Southwark and London
Bridge on an autumn evening. Given the perpetual brown sludgy
appearance of today’s Humber it is easy to recognize Dickens’s
references to the ‘slime and ooze’ of rivers, though what chiefly
interests him in these watery landscapes is the human traffic. Gaffer
Hexam and his daughter Lizzie are here shown trawling not for fish,
but for dead bodies, and when the river features in Great
Expectations, it is in relation to human cargoes of convicts. Opening
in the Kent marshes, the novel plunges the reader straight into
knowledge of the ‘Hulks’ or holding vessels for prisoners ready to
be shipped off to Australia. ‘By the light of the torches,’ Dickens’s
young autobiographical narrator Pip recalls, when he sees the
6
terrifying convict Magwitch handed over to the authorities, ‘we saw
the black Hulk lying out a little way from the mud of the shore, like
a wicked Noah’s ark’ (Ch.5). When Magwitch risks his life returning
to England over a decade later to visit the boy whose education he
has been secretly subsidising, Pip and his friend Herbert Pocket
concoct an elaborate plan to help him escape before he can be caught
a second time. Their intention is to row him down the Thames to
where he can catch a steamer either for Hamburg or for Rotterdam:
destinations he could also have reached from Hull, whose grim
prison (1865-70) on Hedon Road was built in the same decade as
the publication of Great Expectations. Typically for Dickens, who
rarely allows wrong-doers, however well-meaning, to escape scotfree, Magwitch is rearrested before he can board either of the
European steamers, and dies peacefully in jail, instead of being
hanged as a returned transport.
Even when Dickens opens a novel by describing the London
streets, as in the famous foggy opening chapter of Bleak House
(1853), they seem to blend with the Thames, in one continuous haze
of grey shapes and adjacent counties – the Essex Marshes and the
Kentish heights, ‘fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the
rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and
small boats.’ Why does Dickens so often evoke these misty maritime
scenes at the beginnings of his novels? Does he want to convey the
common mystery of cities and rivers as places of human traffic so
complex and multifaceted, seething below and beyond human vision
that only gradually can he begin to pick out faces and personal
histories from the general blur? In this passage from Bleak House,
he also notices ‘Chance people on the bridges peeping over the
parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they
were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.’
This reminds us that bridges, too, fascinated Dickens, both as
landmarks in themselves, and places where people pause, take stock
of things, and arrange secret assignations, as Nancy does at London
Bridge with Mr Brownlow and Rose Maylie, Oliver’s protectors, in
7
Oliver Twist. Despite its grandeur, the Thames at nearly midnight,
looks as muddy and marshy as the Kent landscape, with its riverside
buildings , the old ‘smoke-stained storehouses on either side,’ rising
‘heavy and dull from the dense mass of roofs and gables,’ the ‘forest
of shipping below bridge’ almost invisible in the darkness (Ch. 46).
London Bridge makes another fleeting appearance in Great
Expectations, as Magwitch is rowed down river, past the kind of
waterfront scenery which clearly fascinated Dickens in novel after
novel. However urgent the pressures of plot, he always takes time to
note the maritime clutter of dockyards, which Pip recalls as ‘rusty
chain-cables, frayed hempen hawsers and bobbing buoys,’ down to
the level of miscellaneous surface rubbish as their boat momentarily
collides with ‘floating broken baskets, scattering floating chips of
wood and shaving, cleaving floating scum of coal’ (Ch.54). There
was clearly little about rivers, or dockyards, which Dickens failed to
observe throughout his life. David Copperfield, on his way to stay
for the first time in Mr Peggotty’s wonderful upturned boat-house
in Yarmouth, notices every scrap of nautical debris which builds his
excitement as they near the beach: the ‘lanes bestrewn with bits of
chips and little hillocks of sand,’ ‘the gas-works, rope-walks, boatbuilders’ yards, shipwrights’ yards, ship-breakers’ yards, caulkers’
yards, riggers’ lofts, smiths’ forges, and a great litter of such places’
(Ch. 3). In rhythmic, lilting lists like this Dickens is half way towards
a poem, sharing his hero’s excitement about everything to do with
the sea and rivers. The strange sound of the technical terms –
‘caulkers’, and ‘rope-walks’ – fascinates him, removed as it is from
the language of everyday life, and redolent of places where men do
real work in tough physical conditions. His late series of essays, e
Uncommercial Traveller (1860-9), takes this further in a chapter on
the bustling life of ‘Down by the Docks’: in this case, the Rochester
waterfront, where he lists in dizzying detail the food, drink, oysters,
fishy, scaly-looking vegetables, public-houses, coffee-shops, drunken
seamen with tattooed arms, sausages and saveloys, hornpipes,
parrots, waxworks, and poetic placards rhyming: ‘Come, cheer up
8
my lads. We’ve the best liquors here, And you’ll find something new
In our wonderful Beer’ (Ch. 22) – poetry of a lesser kind, but still
inspired by a sense of place. Dickens, in a word, for all his
associations with London, was steeped in the liminal, perpetually
unsettled, restless world of river and sea traffic, with all its shoreline
dramas, failed escapes and fatal encounters.
The creative writers who have contributed to this volume have
drawn much of their inspiration from two of the shorter Dickens
texts: Hard Times (1854) and Great Expectations. Significantly
different though they are, they share certain themes which still speak
to today’s readers, not least through their interwoven motifs of money
and poverty, work, aspiration, ambition, and education, which
troubled Dickens throughout his career. A pervasive concern of
Dickens’s writing remains the unbridgeable chasm between rich and
poor, and the ways in which impoverished families scrape together a
basic subsistence. Broken homes and families feature in all his novels,
as do the reconstituted ‘families of choice,’ where people with no
biological connection share lodgings and food, as in David
Copperfield, where Mr Peggotty’s eccentric, but all-inclusive
household numbers – besides his orphaned niece and nephew (Little
Emily and Ham) – the sorrowful Mrs Gummidge, widow of his
partner in a boat. The Peggottys’ ‘ship-looking thing’ (as David calls
their home) is a healthier place to live than the overcrowded city
tenements, like those of Hull when cholera epidemics struck the town
in 1832 and 1849. James Sibree recalls how the streets ‘were ill-paved,
and unfrequently swept’ (p. 10). Unlike the uniform streets of
Dickens’s Coketown in Hard Times (based on the Lancashire mill
town of Preston), the houses of Hull ‘were irregularly built- scarcely
any two alike’ (Sibree, p. 10). Sibree was disappointed by the lack of
grandeur in the public buildings, only Holy Trinity Church, the
Infirmary and Public Rooms standing out from the monotonous
townscape, making them little better than those of Coketown, where
‘the jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been
the jail, the town-hall might have been either, or both, or anything
9
else (Book the First: Chapter 5). The Hull workhouse – that archetypal
Dickensian symbol of social protest – had existed since 1698. Though
Victorian Hull had its fair share of distinguished visitors, including
Queen Victoria, who in 1854 stayed (like Dickens) at the Station
Hotel, and was moved by the sight of hundreds of loyal Sunday
School children assembling to greet her, it was, by all accounts,
essentially an earnest workaday kind of place, sustained economically
by the whaling and fishing industries, and spiritually by more than
its fair share of churches and chapels – not unlike Coketown’s chapels
built by members of eighteen different religious sects.
Though cotton mills briefly existed in Hull2 the Coketown of Hard
Times conveys the sense of a more mechanical and deadening
industrial landscape than Dickens would have found here. Even
Coketown has its off-duty moments, however, in the form of Sleary’s
Horse-Riding, which shares features with the Victorian version of
Hull Fair: an assembly of market stalls, freak-shows, and circus acts
as well as the new steam-driven roundabouts. Displays of
horsemanship, such as those performed by Mr Sleary and his troupe,
are known to have been staged in the Market Place in Hull, where
visitors might also be treated twice-daily to shows of ‘Dancing,
Singing, Tumbling, Learned Ponies, Feats on the Wire.’3 Dickens was
always a great advocate of popular entertainment, epitomised in Mr
Sleary’s famous lisping insistence that ‘“People must be amuthed,
Thquire, thomehow,”’ and ‘“can’t be alwath a working, nor yet they
can’t be alwayth a learning”’ (Book the First: Ch. 6). Hence the
Gradgrind children’s desperation to escape from the ‘mineralogical
cabinets’ of their great square lecturing-castle of a house, and peep
inside the circus tent for a glimpse of ‘but a hoof of the graceful
equestrian Tyrolean flower-act’ (Book the First: Ch. 3). When the
novel ends with another secret mission to ship a criminal abroad
(this time the hapless Tom Gradgrind who has robbed a bank), the
circus people conceal him first in comic livery, and then disguise him
afresh as a carter, so that he can escape without attracting notice.
One of Dickens’s shortest, most succinctly-written novels, Hard
10
Times starkly contrasts the monotonous routines of the factory with
the bizarre unreality of the circus: a wild zone on the edge of the
town where for a brief spell the imagination can be indulged and
the workplace forgotten. The greatest satisfactions, for many
Dickensian characters, come from imaginative reading, such as the
nursery rhymes and fairytales the little Gradgrinds are forbidden to
read, or from the real-life experiences of going to fairs, circuses and
Punch and Judy shows, which feature in so many of Dickens’s novels
– but these are only intervals in a life of work, poverty and
aspiration. Together, Hard Times and Great Expectations create
landscapes of frustration for their leading characters. Monotony and
limited opportunity in each place crush the life out of anyone who
wants more from existence than the rhythms of routine, or an
education that never recognizes the individual potential of every
child. In crazy Miss Havisham, jilted at the altar and determined for
evermore to have her revenge on men, or Stephen Blackpool, the
dogged factory worker saddled with a drunken addict of a wife he
can never divorce, or Louisa Gradgrind, married for convenience to
the bumptious banker, Mr Bounderby, Dickens acknowledges the
hopelessness of the mundane domestic tragedies which afflicted
Victorians of all classes and in all parts of the country. Every life is
important to Dickens, just as each piece of maritime flotsam catches
his eye. The people on the bridge matter, as do those rowing down
the river to another life, and those staying at home to spin cotton,
or carve something wondrous out of whalebone brought home from
the distant seas.
1
James Sibree, Fiy Years’ Recollections of Hull, or Half-a-Century of Public Life and Ministry
(Hull: A Brown & Sons, 1884), p. 8.
2
David and Susan Neave, Hull (Pevsner Architectural Guides) (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2010) , p. 15.
3
See http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/v/victorian-circus/
11
Mary Aherne
Imp
‘I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.’
Michelangelo
The day is fading, dusky shadows
creep between pillars, whisper in the crypt,
caress the chancel’s chiaroscuro.
Tucked away, hidden in half-light
he bides his time, keeps watchful guard
outside the door, hovers out of sight
of pious priests and the shuffling horde
of tourists. They sense a presence in the air
a curse or promise left unsaid.
Someone, something else is there.
An other-worldly presence skulks,
torments this sacred place of prayer.
Crouched beneath the pillar’s bulk,
gurning through cracked, mephitic teeth,
a hacked-out, hunchback takes
you by surprise. Terror tempered with a grin
set free yet harnessed for eternity
its evil mutterings locked in stone.
12
13
Malcolm Watson
Silk Stockings
‘Mr CHARLES DICKENS, the eminent novelist, gives “readings” in Hull.’
Hull and Eastern Counties Herald, March 10th, 1869
And on the previous day, he signs the register
at the Royal Hotel, pleased by his reception, pleased
by the respectful glances of the porters and the waiters
glancing off the mirrors at his side, in front, behind.
The mirrors he can never pass, in which he views himself
as spectacle, his smiles, his scowls, his countenance, his eyes,
his carriage, cast, demeanour, diorama, the second-by-second
reflection of that vaudeville of himself he scrutinizes all his life.
Mirrors that surround him, watching, when he dies.
Later, he takes a glass, a small glass, an abstemious
glass (as is his habit) of brandy and water before
the survey, the very careful survey, of the venue for
the reading at the Assembly Rooms tomorrow night.
Stage and seating, flat-topped desk and crimson cloth,
maroon carpet, maroon screens, gas lamps in shining
tin reflectors lighting up his face amid the shadows.
Acoustics, props, gold watch chain, geranium for
his buttonhole. Nothing less than perfect. Exactly right.
Next day, he searches out a fancy haberdasher, Hull’s
leading silk merchant, and buys six pairs of stockings
for his Nell. He asks the shop lad (who has failed to recognize
this mystery shopper) what does he do in his spare time?
And when he says ‘Why, I read Mr Dickens’, he offers him
a ticket for the evening show. At 8 o’clock, exactly 8 o’clock,
the haberdasher and the folk of Hull witness the miracle
of the master’s metamorphosis, the raising of the spirits
he becomes, the blazing eyes, the terror in the dark, the charge,
14
the shuddering, the rasping then the piping voice,
‘…the pool of gore that quivered and danced in the sunlight
on the ceiling… such flesh and so much blood!!!’
The killer and the killed. Killing himself. The more
himself for being someone else. After the awestruck silence and frightened faces come the roars
and cheers. A single bow before he goes back to his rooms,
his dripping suit thrown off, to walk and walk
and come back down and come back to the world.
He lies prostrate. His voice has gone. His temples ache.
Dreams and visions. His swollen foot and rheumatism,
facial pains and stomach pains torment him. Less than
the memory of ghosts, his father, mother, brothers,
daughter, friends... And Mary. The laudanum to make him sleep
begets more dreams. Of the horse that savaged him, the dog he
had to shoot, of his pet raven, Grip, that died (soon to be auctioned
off with his effects after he dies). He aches for Ellen, feels the stockings
slide between his fingers, cascade away and hiss like water to the ground.
15
Carol Rumens
The Gentleman for Nowhere
As Nella and I walked down the Euston Road (I’d insisted we get off
the tube at Baker Street) King’s Cross Station appeared on the
horizon with more than usual ominousness. The twin engine-sheds,
in my opinion, embodied Victorian railway design at its functional
best. But today they seemed to turn their back on London, and their
glum, slumped look was disheartening. Who’d believe their claim to
be a gateway to an idea as vast as the North?
And was the North vast any more? I worked there now. It was my
first proper job: Assistant Lecturer in Victorian Literature, Faculty
of Arts, Ludology and Social Education, University of Hull.
Hull had been the last resort. I’d wanted to teach Dickens in
Dickens’s city. I got as far as interviews, but my approach to literature
was judged by the metropolitan grant-rakers to be insufficiently
theoretical. At UCL, for instance, I was told by the muslin-bloused
female chairperson that my monograph would have made an
interesting contribution to Dickens studies had it been published in
1912, but for 2012 it was decidedly retro. The panel had laughed
merrily, and so had I. A compliment, then – but not a job-offer.
I’d come home for the holiday, still on probation. Now I was going
back to Yorkshire, having learned from a headed letter from Human
Resources that my contract had been renewed – it seemed,
indefinitely. I shouldn’t have told Nella, but, in a moment of feeble
self-congratulation, I had.
We were still ridiculously early, and it was my fault, so we looked
around that monstrous folly, St Pancras Station. Nella approved the
idea of a cocktail in a glitzy bar, but I dissuaded her. We finally found
an almost-empty bijou Costa looking out over the new concourse
at King’s Cross.
Ever willing to blur the absurdly trivial distinction between
railway-station and airport, Network Rail had labelled this smaller
folly, Departures. I called it the Phantom Limb. Shiny, inessential
16
shops formed a horseshoe shape under a high, branching tree of
slender veins which glowed at various intensities of pinkish-purple.
It had cost five hundred and fifty million pounds to assemble this
Olympic fantasy, this corporate candy-floss-machine, spinning dross
where the British Empire used to spin gold. The Victorian equivalent
would have been the Great Exhibition. At least there was a certain
mad grandeur to complacency and self-congratulation in those days,
Nella hadn’t seen the phantom limb before. While she pretended
to deplore its vulgarity, she loved it. It made her feel skittish. She had
even taken a picture of the sign saying Platform 9¾.
‘You will look at those riverside apartments soon, won’t you?’ she
coaxed as we sipped our Americanos. This was her favourite topic,
her conviction that the riverside was the brightest, trendiest prospect
for young marrieds in Hull, vastly preferable to the sedate Avenues,
which settled older colleagues persistently recommended.
Nella’s idea was fundamentally humane: it was the painless
combination of our alien desires. She simply wanted a notional
urban elegance – and a nice little hall for the pram. Mine, of course,
was the foolish desire, the Dickensian fantasy, as she called it.
But she was a brand manager, after all, and Dickens was inarguably
my brand. To her credit, she understood how much He mattered, as
fellow academics never understood. She knew how helpless I was in
the grip of my mania, how little of the detached scholar informed
my work. My devotion to Dickens was gut-brain stuff, visceral,
based on childhood moral indoctrination, and, later, rivalry,
profound and aching – my nine-year-old yearning first to be Master
David Copperfield, and then to be the writer of David Copperfield.
Nella knew of this last ambition, too – though she no longer took
it seriously.
I said I would look around, and she squeezed my hand.
‘I’m told those riverside apartments reek of whale-oil,’ I added,
mischievously.
I’d been re-reading Mugby Junction, a collection of linked short
stories by Dickens and four other writers. The eponymous hero of
17
the first tale, Barbox Brothers, gets off the train at a stop before his
destination. Wandering round the deserted station, he meets Lamps,
whose job is to clean the many station lights. The little room where
his noble toil is based smells, Dickens says, like the cabin of a whaler.
I’m still investigating whether he refers to whaling anywhere else.
The analogy between Lamps’s oily room and the whaler has been a
comfort to me from the instant I’d thought about applying to Hull.
Nella’s too-small blue eyes had become cold, and I saw the edges
of her smile droop. Then, as the smile-muscles bravely hitched up
that tiny but immense weight of disappointment, I imagined I could
smell air-freshener. The perfume was somehow the colour of the
lights above our heads – a lilac, rose, hyacinth, violet chemical
cloud possessing that spacious, airy pent-house overlooking the
bloodless water.
She kissed me goodbye without a tear, in fact with a joke about
academic wars and brave soldiers. She choreographed our pose to
resemble the giant bronze study of embracing lovers in St Pancras –
she could do these ironical things sometimes, and I appreciated it.
My war – my work – was no threat. She would have her flat, her air
freshener and her faux oil-lamps, and then, in less than a year’s time,
she would have ‘our’ baby, and so complete the process of weaning
me from Dickensian to drab.
With that unhappy thought in mind, I approached the ticket barrier.
I still had twenty minutes till my train. An over-helpful guard,
evidently a graduate of an Olympic Games Customer Service
Initiative, twitched open the disabled access gate.
‘There’s nothing the other side,’ he warned, having glimpsed my
ticket, and showing he was magnanimously prepared to let me exit
in the grand manner with which I’d entered.
I ignored him and went into the grimy, darkened shell that had
been the main concourse. Nothing was what I wanted. I remembered
when enormous docile queues would wind themselves several times
around the hall, inching towards invisibly distant trains to
18
Newcastle, York, Edinburgh and, no doubt, Hull. I’d tack myself onto
a queue with a combination of deep reluctance and deep resignation
that I supposed made me a truly British citizen. My trips in those
days were driven by my pursuit of novelistic material, ‘seeing the
world’ as I thought of it. Later on, I was a bright, over-aged PhD
student at Goldsmith’s, eager to give careful little papers on Dickens
and Premonition, or Dickens and Alcohol, in cities I knew He
had visited.
The last Flying Scotsman had left a decade before I was born, but
there was still a certain atmosphere about the station, a lingering
moodiness of steam. I walked carefully among the shades and
shadows. Underfoot, the brown-grey, semi-shiny stone resembled
skin, strangely dimpled in places, patched here and darned there. A
rich smell of old waiting-rooms drifted over me, of damp, soft
wooden floors, impregnated with dirt. I tasted smoke. And then I
saw Him, at the end of the platform, a darting human genie made
of fire and mist, surrounded by a fiery-misty crowd of fellow-actors,
including pretty teenaged Ellen and her sly mama, their mass of bags
in the care of fiery-misty, cap-doffing porters. He shouted orders
and jokes, he hurried everyone along, he blew kisses to Catherine,
the donkey-wife he was already leaving behind.
My elation died as the Pendolino nosed in. The Pendolino is a
moulded-plastic Disneyland, nursery-school, health-and-safety
train, a pretend airplane-train, a train that can’t sing, even when it
manages to reach forty miles per hour, a train whose wheels never
go der-der-der-dum over the rails, a train which, when it stops
precariously in the middle of a viaduct, has no furious steam to gush
forth, not even any batteries to re-charge with a reassuring, patienthorse whinny: a train gloss-coated and uneventful as a banker’s
conscience. And here it was, trying to look important.
I queued briefly to get into the Quiet Coach. The backs of the seats
had great orange ears sticking out, like some cartoon elephant’s. I
hadn’t made a reservation. Apparently, no-one had. The little
information-screens overhead were innocent of information. I sat
19
down in an aisle seat in the middle of the coach, away from the
ungenerous luggage racks, focus of a panicky scrum at every station,
and away from the horrible unventilated toilets, which tainted the
local environment with stale nappy-smell, and made noises like an
old tea-urn whenever their pumps delivered minutely-measured
two-second squirts of water and hot air.
The airline-style seats were the only thing I liked about the
Pendolino. I thought of them as autism seats – high functioning
autism, of course, for those who could cope with the world provided
they didn’t have to strike up conversations with it. Facing a chairback in such a cramped space was curiously reassuring, provided
the inside seat remained unoccupied.
I switched off my phone, obedient to the Quiet signs on the
windows. No-one joined me. I opened my ragged, much annotated
paperback copy of Mugby Junction, then closed it. I didn’t want to
think about Barbox. When he gets out of the train, he doesn’t know
where he is or where he’ll go. Mugby Junction is his mysterious
portal to transformation. Whereas I know all the stations, cities and
towns en route to Hull: I could get out at any one of them and not
abolish my past or discover my future. Tracy-our-train-manager was
announcing them now, each one, from Milton Keynes to Brough, a
hammer-blow to the imagination.
The train moved off at last, and I craned over to my sliver of
window, ravenously hungry for old brick houses, out-buildings and
redundant iron ladders, pulleys and pipes, desolate ancient wagons
and rusting rails. And I felt a tremendous pang, almost sob-like, and
the repressed thought swelled up chokingly: London, London, I’m
leaving you, I’m leaving Him.
20
No, not so. He had given recitations in Hull. He’d been there three
times, in fact: all in the autumn of 1858. The first occasion was on
September 14th. The next two performances were on consecutive
evenings, the 26th and 27th of October, when he stayed at the Royal
Station Hotel. Both times he had been on tour, and Hull wasn’t much
more than a dot on his itinerary. It seems that he’d travelled down
from Scarborough for the first reading, and had returned to the
Royal Hotel in the seaside town the same night. The next time he
had travelled to Hull from York, and then gone on to Leeds.
His performances had taken place in the Assembly Rooms,
Kingston Square, now, the New Theatre. What consolation there is
in those pale Ionian pillars, like a section from the façade of
Buckingham Palace, still exactly as he’d seen them in 1858! The
theatre’s Victorian interior had been stripped in the 1920s. But you
could still sense an atmosphere, a tingling of the sensations. The
Assembly Hall audience was not inhibited. Among the wealthy and
protected were men and women whose rough, river-side and seagoing trades stained their hands with life and death. They still
shuddered, laughed, wept in the fine traces of Victorian dust.
I knew exactly the kind of figure He made on stage, a thin, intense,
fierce-eyed, elegant figure but a short one in stature, a speciallydesigned low reading-table in front of him. The table was covered
21
with baize: green baize, he favoured at first, but later on he had it
refitted, and the new cloth was a startling blood-red. Behind him
hung a sheet-like screen, intended to help project his voice into the
audience, but which must have had a magic lantern effect, his
movements repeating in a shadow play behind him. This would have
contributed eerily to his more Gothic performances. His lighting
was provided by two 12-feet high gas-pipes. A gas-man and other
roadies came along with the equipment, while he travelled in firstclass Pullman. He was like a celebrity on tour – an analogy I’d tried
to impress on the students, asking them who their favourite popgroups were. Their friendly answers confused me. I didn’t know any
of the names. If their imaginations had been fired by my
comparison, I couldn’t smell the burning.
In the last five years of his life, when the big reading-tours took
place, Dickens hated trains. The Staplehurst accident had nearly
killed him. Some rails across a 42-foot drop had been removed for
maintenance-work, and hadn’t been replaced. The foreman
consulted the wrong time-table. He thought the train from Dover,
Dickens’s train, wasn’t due for another two hours.
Dickens’s coach hung suspended over the River Beult, saved by
the coupling which attached it to the second-class coach behind.
Ellen, Mrs Ternan and he linked hands so that, in Ellen’s words, they
would die friends. Once freed, he went among the wounded and
dying with his brandy-flask and a top-hat filled with river water. He
couldn’t bear to look at some of the injuries.
He was never again sure of the iron monsters he depended on.
He’d take a long gulp from the flask at the start of each trip, but
sooner or later he began to sweat, and to count out the passing
stations. Serialised horror! Sometimes, he jumped out at an earlier
station and tramped the last miles. It was quite likely he’d walked
from an intermediate station the day he went to Hull from
Scarborough – Beverley, perhaps, or Cottingham. I was going to try
it for myself one day.
I trawled around the documents on my laptop, entering the
22
forbidden regions where I still deluded myself I was a novelist. A
man got on at Crewe, irritatingly occupied the aisle seat across from
me and tried to start a conversation. I ignored him. I’d scrolled up
my sketches of Gaby and Angela, the novel’s love interest. They were
flaccid characters, I feared, although drawn from so-called real life.
Gaby was based on Aimee, a student from some local housing estate,
ditzy and tiny in black tights, a flared miniskirt and those useless
little fur-topped boots the Hull girls were wearing. Angela was
Laura, a mature student, keen in a vague, placid sort of way. She was
unhappily married in my story, and my protagonist was going to
have an affair with her, if his author could muster the required
energy. I gave her some perfectly constructed sentences, but the idea
of her didn’t excite me.
I was bored and my calves ached. Blood-clots formed in my veins
like points failures. I got up, stretched and took a walk down the
orange plastic coach. It became steadily dimmer and narrower, lit
only by faintly gleaming wood. I was standing in the corridor
outside the saloon where He and his male companions had a great
table to themselves, lit with pink-shaded oil-lamps. The men were
playing cards. He wasn’t playing: he was in the corner, cushioned,
asleep. He rolled from side to side with the train and I thought I
could hear him groaning.
I gathered my courage, slid open the door, and went in. No-one
noticed. I saw his eyelids were those of an old man, thin and
purplish. I pushed through into his dream.
It was a small miserable room with a table and chairs, a bedcurtain, and a shelf of liquor bottles. Of human occupation I could
see only an arm stretched back, a hand gripping what looked like
the stave from a broken cask, and a woman’s curly hair, like a wig
thrown onto the tiled floor. It was His arm, I knew from the shirtcuff, the sham wedding-ring. I felt a sensation like the beginning of
a big wave or a gust of wind, some natural force, full of exuberance
and heartlessness. It gathered in me with a silent roar, and I felt his
joy as he brought the stave down into the mass of curling hair.
23
The shirt-cuff instantly turned from white to wringing-wet
crimson. I heard a chorus of screams, and saw lolling, bloody heads
and faces, among them the white moulded-looking features which
I knew were those of the woman whose skull had been smashed with
such joy. As this hellish vision faded, I saw the card-players were still
engrossed. The sleeper had opened his eyes, and was staring, in
glassy terror, at the scene I’d just left.
I leaned over and touched His shoulder, noticing the dark cloth
of the sleeve and the whiteness of the shirt-cuff. He felt my touch,
shuddered, looked at me. The train slowed into the shadows of
a station.
‘Get off here,’ I said, ‘I’ll drive you. I’ve a cab waiting. It will take
no more than an hour longer, and you’re not short of time.’
My voice sounded very young and uncertain in pitch. I’d become
a boy of 14 or 15. My hands were sweating.
‘Please, trust me. I’ve read all your dreams. And I’m a writer, too.’
He stared at me with a strange, cold expression.
‘If you can read my dreams, perhaps you ought to be.’
His words thrilled me. I began stuttering but he interrupted.
‘I like killing her. Of course I do. You can surely understand that?’
I whispered yes, and he smiled. His movements were slow and
stiff, but I know he intended to get up and follow me.
My body jerked with a sweet sensation near orgasm. It vanished
quickly and I found I was in my seat, looking up into a lean and wellmade-up young female face.
She was staring back at me. ‘All tickets and rail-passes please,’ she
repeated in a loud Yorkshire voice. ‘Are you intending to go all
the way?’
‘Yes. No. I don’t know,’ I said stupidly.
She waited for me to fumble out my ticket. ‘Change at Bartonbyle-Wold for ᾽Ull,’ she said, handing it back.
‘I thought this was the direct train.’ This was the man sitting across
the aisle from me. He looked about 70, and seemed dressed for a
walking-tour rather than a business appointment, but he sounded
24
highly indignant.
‘There’s been an incident and we’re not going all the way now.
Change for ᾽Ull at Bartonby-le-Wold, and remain on the platform.’
I wiped my palms furtively on my trouser-knees.
‘What sort of an incident?’ I asked, dreading the reply.
‘Protestors or rioters or sommat, chucking girders on t’line. Plain
vandalism, in’t it?’ Tracy-the-train-manager walked away, with a
gleam-catching movement of her pony-tail.
The old fool was excited. ‘Protesting about what?’ he shouted, but
Tracy strode resolutely on.
‘I used to be a protestor! CND. We used to march to Aldermaston,
I remember…’
I put my finger to my lips as another voice, the driver’s, perhaps,
came over the intercom. It was the same announcement, though
garbled and choked by poor amplification.
I’d never heard of Bartonby-le-Wold. It sounded remote in time
and place. How far from Hull it was I didn’t know; but it was far
enough. I’d need to make certain phone calls, tell certain white lies,
but it could be done. My heart raced. I zipped up the laptop, packed
away Mugby and my unread newspapers.
I saw myself arriving at the tiny rural station. Instead of staying
on the platform in the jostle of disgruntled passengers, I walked
resolutely away and turned down the little approach-road, hearing
birdsong, staring around me and storing everything I saw, as I had
in the days when I meant to write David Copperfield, in the days
when I went all over the British Isles because I needed material,
needed to see the world.
I smiled to myself. Not the world, but the wold. A peaceful place,
a room in an old pub, the kind Nella would call Dickensian, and
time stretching around me like the unassuming countryside.
It wasn’t too late. Nella planned to fall pregnant soon, but I was
pregnant already. My infant was only a few chapters long, cradled
in a rarely-updated Office Word document, but it was going to live
and grow, now that He trusted me. I could read His dreams. I ought
25
to be a writer, if I could read his dreams.
The train crawled slower and slower until it stopped. Weed-hung
embankments rose on either side. It was impossible to see where we
were. How far was Bartonby, I wondered impatiently. Even the old
man didn’t know. He didn’t believe the announcements, anyway,
they were all idiots on Humber Trains. He was pretty sure Beeching
had shut down Bartonby in the sixties. Perhaps we were waiting for
some ancient stretch of rail to be weeded, oiled and otherwise made
safe, he joked. Oh come on, come on, I thought. My resolve wouldn’t
last for ever.
After an incalculable rest-period, the train decided to crawl
gingerly onwards again and Tracy’s voice came triumphant over
the intercom.
‘Humber Trains are pleased to inform passengers that the
obstruction to the track has now been cleared, and we will NOT
making an unscheduled stop at Bartonby-le-Wold. We will be
arriving at Doncaster in approximately seventeen minutes.
We apologise for the late running of this service and any
inconvenience it may have caused to your onward journey.’
The old fool across the aisle from me applauded in a frenzy of
satirical glee. ‘Any inconvenience, any inconvenience!’ he shouted.
‘Any inconvenience it just may have caused? Any inconvenience it
just may have caused to my onward journey? My onward journey is
an abstraction, it can’t suffer from inconvenience. Whereas I most
definitely can, and do!’
Once again, I hushed him. I listened hard as the message was
repeated. In a moment, my pulse-rate returned to normal, my hope
evaporated.
An hour and a half later, the last false apology had been uttered,
and we were in Paragon Station, Hull. I headed across the forecourt
towards the back entrance of the hotel. It was where I always stayed.
I have never let on to Nella, because we’re supposed to be saving for
the darling riverside flat. I told her I stayed in the university lodgings
in Tunny-Fish Grove.
26
I felt shaky, as if I’d just sat an exam and knew I’d failed. The rather
ethereal bronze of Larkin’s statue met me mid-run; he was, as usual,
late getting away. But getting away he was. His image cheered me
up, a little.
As I walked across the great barn of the hotel bar towards
Reception, I heard my name. I turned, and there, shipwrecked but
surfacing from a deep oxblood sofa, were my student-prototypes of
Gaby and Angela, waving with exaggerated, and, it seemed, ironical
gestures. I raised my hand to them vaguely, and proceeded to the
desk. As I waited to get the clerk’s attention, Aimee came to my side.
‘I wasn’t sure if you saw who it was. You know, us,’ she said, a bit
breathless. ‘You’d be welcome to have a drink with us, Chris, if you’re
not too busy or nothing.’
She grinned at me boldly. Chris. I always insisted my students call
me Dr. Stretton. Her short black ringlets danced. Her eyes were
dilated with alcohol – or perhaps some other vicious substance
popular with her strangely self-abusive generation.
I told her I was going to be busy, and asked if she’d started reading
David Copperfield yet.
She wrinkled her nose. ‘Don’t ask. I’m really trying. Some of it’s
dead wordy.’
‘You’re right. It is. I’ve decided to change the set text to Oliver
Twist.’
She seemed unaffected by my news.
‘Haven’t you ever seen it serialised on TV? Or Oliver – the
musical?’
She shook her head, mystified. I ploughed on.
‘It’s a shorter book, very dramatic. Lots of issues to discuss. You’ll
like it. But of course you do need to persevere with Dickens. He
wrote for readers with a long attention-span. The attention-span is
rather like a muscle. Exercise it and it will get bigger and harder.’
Aimee brought her hand to her mouth. There was a shiny metal
ring on every finger. Bling, I think it’s called. She shook with
suppressed laughter.
27
‘Good evening Dr Stretton, how are you tonight?’ The young clerk
came over at last and handed me my key. He winked at me. ‘The
Charles Dickens Suite, as usual.’
Aimee stopped gasping for breath beside me. She uncovered her
mouth.
‘Is this where Charles Dickens lives?’
‘Dickens died in 1870, Aimee.’
‘I mean, like, in the olden days?’
She had blushed prettily through her make-up. Her bling sparkled.
Her eyes were lustrously wet and wide.
‘No. He stayed at the Royal Station Hotel on a visit. I’ve got his
old room.’
‘You’re kidding! Can I come and see it?’
‘It’s nothing special. But if you’re interested in places associated
with Dickens, I can show you a wonderful spot.’ I took a deep breath
as I risked the name – for all I knew, her family might have raised
sheep or cauliflowers there for generations.
‘Bartonby-le-Werld,’ she echoed, dubiously. ‘Is that in France?’
‘No, but it’s a glorious little place. It was where Dickens’s other
girl-friend lived. Not Ellen Ternan. Another one, originally from
Hull. A girl no-one knows much about – well, except me, and now
you. There’s a lovely Victorian pub there – it’s the pub where they
used to meet. We could have lunch outside, if it’s sunny. It’s not far
– I can drive you. Let’s exchange numbers.’
‘Mint!’ Her eyes shone at me. But the other eyes, behind hers,
seemed to form sharp points of ice. They had a dazzle which hurt
me. He was challenging me. I didn’t know the nature of the
challenge, but I would find out. I stayed calm, kept my voice and
focus steady.
‘I’ll give you a ring early tomorrow, Aimee.’ Briefly, I touched her
hair, feeling the shine and softness and depth, feeling the idea of the
North and its infinite vastness. She was happy with that, and so
was He.
28
Image: Malcolm Watson
29
Aingeal Clare
The Man and the Peregrine and the Chimney
There once was a man who lived in the chimney of a great empty
factory. At night he could be heard singing the melancholy songs of
his youth.
On the very top of the chimney nested a peregrine falcon, in an
acute state of fertility. No-one knew exactly the number of chicks it
had reared, but it was a great many. During the day, the bird could
be seen circling dramatically above the tower; but it was never seen
to hunt, for this was an activity reserved for darkness.
Sleepless children who preferred their windows open at night were
intimate with the man’s songs, as were the streetwalkers of Dagger
Lane and the dockside nightwatchmen. The drunks who made beds
of wire benches knew him, as did the hacks and editors whose
periodicals were soon to go to press, and who had stepped out onto
balconies to light a late night cigarette and think.
In his songs, the man often referenced his friendship with the peregrine.
Hidden somewhere in the vast and unruly and sometimes desolate
landscape of each ballad was the bird’s secret name, and it was a kind of
game to find it. Listeners had discovered the bird tucked inside an old
oak tree, where two lovers now parted had once pleased to meet;
quarrelling with a farmyard cat, while in the barn a duel was being
fought; drifting near the core of some dark cloud, whose rumblings
betokened a ruined harvest; and reflected in a young woman’s iris as
she stands alone at the edge of a lagoon, aware she has been poisoned
by her jealous cousin and will die (these are the songs the man sang).
If the peregrine was not present in name or body, her eggs would
be: in baskets dropped by frail girls or hurled by urchins at funeral
carriages; in tainted omelettes and in foxes’ jaws.
30
‘What if the peregrine’s nest on the factory chimney is just another
hiding place within a bigger song?’ an editor who thought himself
very clever remarked to a hack as they stood smoking on the balcony
after a hard night’s proofreading.
Terrific beauty and depth were in his songs, but the most curious
thing about them were these puzzles all who listened learned to
solve. The quickest solutions were found by children woken from
nightmares, who listened at bedroom windows in stiff poses,
because their concentration was the keenest.
Insomniacs were in love with the man, especially during power cuts.
Then one day, the peregrine left the chimney, never to return. Her
name gradually faded from the man’s songs. It was sadder than all
his saddest songs taken together.
By and by, another name replaced the peregrine’s, around the time
one of her grown chicks took to roosting on the chimney grate.
Many months passed before the first child discovered what this new
name was. The hacks, as usual, were the last to catch on.
The streetwalkers of Dagger Lane were the most moved by this
development, who grieved and rejoiced all at once, almost frenziedly,
reminded of their own lost children, their own lost mothers.
Inside the mouth of the factory still crouched its old organs: giant
mangles, looms, and saws. These were the fossils of industry, the
terrible works. Hunched on the banks of a mud canal, the factory,
though menacing to most, was not without charm to this one art
student whose expensive camera swung always at her hip. But even
she ran away when she saw the machines.
Perhaps the man was a ghost?
31
Cliff Forshaw
A Trinity of Genomic Portraits for Charles Darwin
Marc Quinn’s ‘genomic portrait’ (2001) of Sir John Sulston, a key figure in the
development of the analysis of DNA and the definition of the human genome,
consists of the geneticist’s DNA encased in a frame which mirrors the observer.
Here 23 couplets represent the 23 pairs of human chromosomes.
1. In the Name of the Father
This kind of portrait’s just your name
with DNA in a metal frame.
You look into the glass and see
reflected back, both you and me.
Long molecules of the human race
hold mirrors up to the voyeur’s face.
From Genesis, here’s Revelation:
Creation’s mostly Information.
Magnified, they’re twisted crosses:
X marks the spots of gains and losses.
Each gene projects just what it means
upon the human plasma screens.
State-of-the-art, sharp resolution
in byte-sized, digital Evolution.
Conceptually, now re-creation’s
a pigment of the imagination.
Skin-deep, cosmetic − paint betrays
the made-up thing that it portrays.
The stuff that paints eyes brown or blue’s
no medium for catching you.
The family portrait’s now replaced:
ID’s conceived to be defaced.
Your skin’s tattooed, your hair is dyed,
both painting and the camera lied.
32
Your nose is trimmed, your breasts augmented,
your eyes in contacts look demented.
With sculpted cheeks and capped white teeth,
God only knows what lies beneath.
Not just the skull beneath the skin,
we want to see what’s deep within.
We want to see what’s really dark
− survival earned through each black mark.
Now, paint-by-numbers DNA
with radioactive markers, say,
might, as the Geiger ticked away,
catch your half-life, hint at decay.
This is the sequence marked down through time
− those narcissistic couplets rhyme.
But duplication’s not so great:
the verses limp, the genes mutate.
Like chromosomes, your tiny doubles,
each wriggling pair now looks for trouble.
Each chromosome’s a mirrored X,
which, naturally, goes wrong with sex.
Y is one at such a loss:
three-legged beast, or broken cross?
2. The Son
X kisses X, or does it lie?
Twenty-two times, then maybe Y.
This snapshot of your DNA
can’t really catch you here today.
Genetic stuff is so abundant
that most of it is just redundant.
Point one percent’s what makes you YOU,
suspended here in living glue.
You’re stuck into prehistory
along with the dinosaurs and me.
33
Ninety-nine point nine percent
of your genes are no different
to Hitler’s, Stalin’s or Pol Pot’s:
to draw yourself, just join the dots.
Dot each ‘i’, but write it small,
trace the ego to the Fall.
Most genes within the double helix
are shared with Rover, Mickey, Felix.
But not just cuddly, furry friends:
the snake and fish have shaped our ends.
You share the stuff that sculpts your features
with a billion loathsome creatures:
those genes that make a frog or toad
are scanned to form your own barcode;
the genetic code which seals your fate’s
just digits away from the primates.
You stand upright, although you limp:
you’re 98 % a chimp.
Your kids may lack a shaggy coat,
but if they’re yours they’re still half-goat.
Your sister-in-law, you see her now,
not merely bovine, but truly cow.
A chance mutation makes you strong:
a broken gene that copies wrong.
Relentless pressure’s really grim,
the future of most species dim.
And even those who do survive,
must journey on, no one arrives.
No intervention from the gods
will save an ape or change the odds.
O Tech-Fix desperate Hi-Hope junkies,
no god appears to give a monkey’s.
Genomic portraits intimate
the accident of birth that’s fate
34
while Nazi Nature’s Final Solution
− Oblivion − ’s what drives evolution.
3. And the Wholly Ghost
No god creates a brand new species:
the future teems in bogs and faeces.
No Creator ticks them off his list,
there is no bio-alchemist.
A zillion misses, then a hit:
a chance mutation transforms shit.
The whole thing is a sort of Zen:
can gods exist if there’s no men?
It never stops, nothing remains,
we’re tangled up in endless chains.
All change! All change! No time to think:
Goodbye, you are the weakest link!
Survival of the fittest, sure,
but then the rules tell us much more.
It’s A Knockout! and every round
grinds the weak into the ground.
It’s not so much the fit survive,
but that the weak aren’t left alive.
Then Man stood up and changed the rules:
he used his brain, invented tools.
He learned to cut his hair and talk,
to wash his hands and use a fork.
Top Dog sits down to Nature’s feast,
dog’s off the menu − he’s no beast.
How like a god! So worldly-wise,
his mission’s now to civilize.
But the problem with increased survival
is that his brother’s now his rival.
‘Darwinian’ as a term now means
economics more than genes.
35
36
Painting : e River Hull is Here by Cliff Forshaw
If bees evolved producing honey,
is there a gene for making money?
You’re what you drive and what you wear;
you’re what you buy − Suits you, sir!
Gold Amex cards flashed on a date
proclaim the new eugenic mate.
The peacock with his fine display,
the ostentatious way to pay:
both proclaim a sort of health
− in modern terms, we’re talking wealth.
Old bodies, once fit for only worms
have cloned their youth and banked their sperms:
genetic engineering can
turn frozen-rich to SuperMan.
See Lazarus rise from the body’s tomb:
the lab’s the modern virgin womb.
37
David Wheatley
Cat Head Theatre
On YouTube I watch a short ‘Cat Head Theatre’ clip of Hamlet, in
which an animated feline gives a passable performance as the Prince
of Denmark. Guildenstern and Rosencrantz also feature, alternating
between speaking their lines and chasing flies in the background.
Cats are a large part of my life, and if called on to create a Cat Head
Theatre clip of my own I know all too well both the play and the
felines to which I would turn. The play would be Waiting for Godot
and in the role of Vladimir I would cast Percy, sage and sleek, while
Estragon would be his heavier and earthier helpmeet-brother Sam.
Pozzo would be recreated (from beyond the grave) by our
neighbours’ cat Rimmel, a large-bottomed and often bad-tempered
beast still to be seen on Google Earth, where she perches on a
recycling bin outside our front door. Lucky would be Hobo, a feline
who died at the estimated age of 25 in 2011, but who up to very
shortly before his death was still coming in through the flap to
devour the treats and pouches with which he would be
ceremoniously presented, for how could we refuse him anything,
estimable old gent that he was. There was something of the toilet
brush about his appearance in later life, it must be said, and to touch
his fur was to be left with a peculiar amber-like residue, to be no
more specific than that. The boy can be a cross-dressed Fifi,
Rimmel’s equally fat-arsed replacement. As for Godot, he is Snowy,
otherwise, Mr White, who sits in another neighbour’s window, stalks
the tenfoot, appears suddenly and shockingly on downstairs
windowsills, and on rare and treasured occasions appears in the
kitchen. Being deaf, Mr White inhabits, I imagine, a profoundly
solitary and private universe. He is perhaps the most elusively
beautiful creature on the street. I go to the window and a cat is
strolling among the bins. I go to the garden and another is lolling
on the bench. I leave the house and another is on my step, and yet
another sitting in a bush. Two of the cats I mentioned above are dead
38
but this remains their place much more than mine. Hull will not
have me alive or dead, but Hull is all these cats will ever need. For
which reason it occurs to me there may be a problem with my choice
of Waiting for Godot after all: these cats may appear to be waiting
for something, but there is nothing they lack, nothing that could
make their lives any more sheerly replete than they are.
39
David Wheatley
Wanna Come Back to Mine
A word about phonetics. When Northern speech is rendered
phonetically the word ‘fuck’ is sometimes spelt ‘fook’, which irritates
people who point out that no one says ‘fook’ with an ‘oo’ as in ‘moo’.
This is a misunderstanding. The ‘oo’ is as in ‘look’ rather than the
southern [Λ] sound in ‘luck’. As per the Tony Harrison poem, it’s
‘Them and [uz]’, not them ‘Them and [ΛS].’ And just you try saying
the word ‘Hull’ to an Odeon Cinema telephone booking system with
that northern vowel, by the way. ‘I’m sorry, can you repeat that?’
Northern speech has a knack of not quite lodging in a southern ear.
I cherish the moment in a reality TV show featuring the Duchess of
York when she informed a family of East Hullites that they would
now be eating healthy food, and was this a problem? One man
informed her that he could always eat ‘owt’, which she took to mean
that he might be adjourning to the nearest Michelin starred-diner,
but that wasn’t quite what he meant. Other characteristics of Hull
speech include the shortening of long ‘i’ sounds, so that a glass of
Chardonnay becomes a ‘drah whaht wahn’, the replacement of the
vowel in ‘work’ with an ‘e’ (common to Scouse too), and the ‘goatfronting’, as I’m told it’s called, whereby a long ‘o’ acquires positively
a Scandinavian twang. I’ve thought of doing a Tom Leonard on Hull
speech, and writing a poem full of croggies, nebbies, neshes and
nithereds, but the salty vernacular needs no spray-on dialect words
to earn its keep. God is a shout in the street, Stephen Dedalus said,
and what is this Hull life if not a teenage boy inviting a girl on the
other side of the road back to his place? ‘Wanna come back to mine?’
he shouts. He has beer and an x-box. And there’s more: ‘I ehn’t got
no diseases or owt.’
40
41
Cliff Forshaw
A Season in Hull
Wine-dark sea? Think beer:
let fish-finings load your pint
with light. Is that clear?
*
Hear you play croquet,
John Prescott. Why? You could be
King of the Oche.
*
New kennings for sea:
container-road; salt-sown field;
salted wound; cod-free.
*
From pier you see fishhook haiku; hear muddy tongues:
Estuary Eng. Lish.
*
From sewer-reek, piss,
puke, rise perfumed, air-conned malls.
What fresh Hull is this?
42
Cliff Forshaw
Ingerland
An Angelic Conversation or Psychical Curiosity Transcribed, which the Author
hopes may be of passing interest to Alienists, Etymologists and the Like.
Dr Quodlibet, Renowned Psychopomp, en séance, makes the acquaintance of Divers
Others, from whence we know not (perhaps some Ancient Pagan Realm?) and
transcribes their strange Enochian.
Coming in. Coming in.
See them in their bold effrontery,
these Meteors, Gloworms, Rats of Nilus,
with their lingos, winks and elbow nudgery:
slinking through this city without a skin,
jiving greasy guns. O the blatant cockery
of these Nightshades, Chameleons, and Apparitions.
Hoodie-boyos, chaveris, adipose hussies with their open purses,
the Scally jazzing with Blunt and Redtop
till beer o’ clock and time to slop
stilton tattoos along brass-top or naugahyde;
his proud shout drilling the barkeep’s dischuffed dial,
unenrapt without pourboire or promises thereof;
then on, with Latvio-Lithuo-Sengali-Ivrorian cab-driver
(PhD in Astromomy, Agronomy, Homiletics or Dark Matter).
Drop him the change from one lonely deepsea diver,
then on, always on,
to badly-packed kebabs or bacon banjos.
Takeaway. Takeaway. Graze on the hoof.
43
Another blunt, a toot, another blow on the bugle:
hoovering the kermit for the last of the Devil’s dandruff
− confuzzled in the karzy, gone completely hatstand.
Carking it on the big white telephone to God,
in technicolour prayer. Thou art translated
to some new Beast. Behold the Bog Ostrich!
Here come the Silicon Valley girls, well not quite:
their figures lardily imprecise, but they got chips all right
and corned-beef legs. And beer tits! beer tits!
Muffintops, piercings, builder’s crack:
cankles and arsewag and the requisite
cantilevered quondam of cleavage.
O beerbosomed Blowsies, all Brastraps, and Chipsauce;
O Denizens of the Deep-Fry, all Moon-Face and Bling
─ I am torn by the Manichean Schism of thy Thong Cheeks.
O Chlamydia, banged up with Arsehats, and Losers;
O Minger sat on your Bahookie down the Boozer;
O lardy lardy ladies growing into the Sofa,
With skanky Ankle-Biters, sugar high,
remote lost down your Backside,
Up there the Gob, ‘cos she’s worth it, the skinny Ho
All Vogue on the outside and vague on the in.
O Rhadamanth! O Callipygous!
Wrap, Surf ‘n’ Turf, Taco, Panini.
Supersize that with fries on the side.
O Aphrodite! O lewd Britannia!
Her Lips are glossed, her Breasts are pert:
Britannia Spice rips off her Skirt.
See Toad-Skin, Warts, Buboes, Scales;
Foul Underparts, a slimy Tail.
44
Ingerland: Foreskin of a Friday night.
DJ, eyes worn by distance, smoke,
eavesdrops the future down the bone,
thumbs the next track into the stripper’s zip,
wastes imported vinyl on the drongos of this Dead Zone.
Thud and blunder from the back-room.
Click of a black rolls the last pony into the pocket.
You trouser what you can of the chink,
stand your wingman a chaser, and one for the bludger,
stuff a brown lizzie in the burly-gurlie’s biscuit.
Out into the bladdered, the Filth with their hoolivan,
faces like bulldogs licking piss off a nettle.
Everyone, everywhere’s angstin or bustin for knuckle.
And it’s a jive life. Jive life. Jive life.
‘Mondays we wuz bug hunting
down near the cemetery,
buzzing the bonies, no need
of chivvin the pigeons,
but a little dip and dab.
Was near a deadlurk, when…’
You hear the little twoats dunting the street,
rotwiled by schnauzers nicknocked Asbo and Kewl,
wonder, in a vaguely Mallarméan way,
how to purify the dialect of this tribe.
But we’re rolling out and heading up,
counting zero-sum and mission creep;
taking a reality check and going forward,
One Hundred and Twenty Percent Iconic.
How quick your rug-rat’s become a little twagger,
got a Desmond from the Academy of Cant.
45
The whore wore a perfume called Slut,
a short skirt with a meaningful slit:
knackered and knickerless; Aviation Blonde
by the look of her black box.
The mad joker’s eyes, quick sticks
from jack and danny to her rack.
Body off Baywatch, face off Crimewatch.
The rest were all rammy, radged real bad.
You’d of ralphed or prayed to an Old Testament God,
to jimmy you out, drop you back on your tod
in the pustular choky of your cold-water sock.
Fading…. Fading….
Over and out.
Over and out.
Transcript ends.
46
Painting: e River Hull Flows Elsewhere by Cliff Forshaw
Outside in Sticksville, garyboys burn rubber,
gunning kevved-up GTs, ferking twocked Zondas.
You go down Manors icky with gum and spilt claret,
rug like a pub floor that sticks to the sole.
Past face-aches, blue-rinsers, tranked Neds and jellied Nellies,
the liggers, lounge-lizards, the prannets with previous;
over the vom, coffin-dodgers, pavement pizzas,
past Halal taxi, Polski Smak (Scag? S&M? Happy-slappers?).
Through carparks, ruinous estates, urinous underpasses
carpeted by bozos, piss-pants and crusty-white rastas.
It’s all argument, argot and grot; booze, palaver and pants.
Give me your piss-poor, your pilchards, your pillocks.
47
Ray French
Insomnia
The weather turned the instant Gerald left the restaurant, hail
spraying Newland Avenue like buckshot, thundering on car roofs
and rattling shop windows. He hunched over, scuttled to the waiting
cab, wincing as the icy pellets raked his face and hands. His laptop
bag slipped from his shoulder as he struggled to open the door, when
he ducked down to retrieve it he cracked his head on the handle.
‘Balls!’
‘Gerald Lauder?’
Gerald looked up, saw a tall, powerful-looking man with piercing
blue eyes, the faintest hint of a smile on his lips. He wore a black
denim jacket over a tightly fitting red tee-shirt, a discreet gold chain
circled his neck; he didn’t appear to notice the hail lashing his face.
Under his penetrating stare Gerald felt acutely conscious of his
flabby torso and thinning hair.
‘I’m Mick Hanson, your driver tonight. Here, let me take those
for you.’
Before he could respond, Mick grabbed his laptop bag and the
backpack hanging awkwardly from Gerald’s other shoulder, placed
a large hand on his back and guided him gently inside the cab. He
stood outside, holding the bags until Gerald located the seat belt and
strapped himself in, then passed them to him.
‘Thank you so much,’ said Gerald, though Mick’s actions had in
truth felt like an elaborate parody of customer service that he’d found
a little unsettling. Mick winked as if he was in on the joke, shut the
door firmly with a flick of his hand and got back in the driving seat.
Gerald told him the name of his hotel and they set off.
‘You been giving a talk at the University?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘I thought so. That restaurant is usually where they take the speakers
afterwards – I drove another speaker to the same hotel last week.’
He was much more talkative than the cab driver who’d taken
48
Gerald from his hotel to the University earlier in the day. He had
asked where Gerald wanted to go, then told him how much it cost
when they’d arrived, a total of nine words escaping his lips
throughout the entire journey. Gerald’s talk had gone well, he’d
knocked back three glasses of red wine in the restaurant and was
feeling quite chatty himself.
‘You’re very observant.’
‘You get bored. There’s not much to this job, so you remember
anything different, it helps pass the time. This woman I drove to the
hotel, she’d given a talk on the police strike of 1919. Now that I
remembered – I never knew the police went on strike, did you?’
Gerald admitted he did. Mick smiled ruefully.
‘That’s why I’m driving a cab and you’re giving talks at the
University.’
He waved away Gerald’s feeble effort to object.
‘I don’t plan to do it forever, it’s just a means to an end. As a great
man once said, all things must pass.’
‘Was that The Dalai Lama?’
‘No, George Harrison.’
Despite his rugged appearance Mick obviously had an enquiring
mind. Gerald would enjoy telling Alison about the rough diamond
he’d unearthed in Hull when he got back to London tomorrow. He
glanced out of the window. The narrow road, speed humps and rows
of small, unappealing shops reminded him of Plaistow or Bow; the
people had the same pinched, hungry look.
‘What do you make of Hull?’
Gerald knew he needed to tread carefully here.
‘Well, I’ve hardly had a chance to see it properly, so I can’t
really say.’
He explained how he’d gone straight from his hotel to the
University, then to the seminar room where he’d set up his
Powerpoint display.
‘I do plan to have a look around tomorrow, before I catch my train.
Is there anywhere you’d recommend?’
49
‘No.’
‘Oh, I see...’
‘It’s a shithole. If I were you I’d head straight for the station after
your breakfast and get the first train back down south. You do live
down south, I take it?’
‘Yes.’
‘London?’
Gerald nodded.
‘Thought so. Do you know that old folk song, ‘The Dalesman’s
Litany’?’
‘No, can’t say I do. I’m not really a fan of folk music.’
‘I hate the stuff – how many verses about the clog workers’ strike
of 1782 can a man listen to? Anyhow, the first line goes like this: “Oh
Lord deliver us from Hell and Hull and Halifax.” Never a truer word.
I don’t know who’s done the most damage to this place, the Luftwaffe
or the bloody council.’
Gerald struggled to think of a suitable reply. They stopped for some
traffic lights. The hail had had been replaced by driving rain; a
bedraggled middle-aged couple clung to a tattered umbrella as they
crossed the road in front of them.
‘So, what was your talk called?’
Gerald hesitated, he doubted that Mick would find the subject as
interesting as the police strike.
‘The Long Dark Night Of The Soul.’
There was the slightest flicker of irritation on Mick’s face.
‘What’s that about?’
‘Writers and insomnia.’
‘Insomnia?’
The change in Mick was instant and startling.
‘Insomnia,’ he repeated, eyeballing Gerald in the mirror.
‘Yes, that’s right. Um, the lights have changed.’
The car behind started beeping. Mick took his hands from the
wheel, slowly turned round and stared at Gerald. He seemed to be
in a state of shock.
50
‘You study insomnia.’
Gerald nodded. The driver behind overtook them with a squeal
of tires, giving Gerald the finger as he passed.
‘Writers who suffer from insomnia, to be precise.’
‘Do you believe in fate, Gerald?’
‘No, not really.’
Mick nodded to himself, as if Gerald had unwittingly confirmed
something, then turned back round and drove on, though more
slowly than before. He searched out Gerald’s eyes in the mirror.
‘I believe in fate. I have felt its workings.’
Gerald looked away, he was finding Mick’s stare a little
disconcerting.
‘Tell me, have many writers suffered from insomnia?’
‘Yes, quite few.’
‘Which ones?’
Gerald, who was never comfortable with discussions about fate,
god or the meaning of life, eagerly seized the opportunity to
introduce some solid facts into the conversation. He leant back,
assumed a scholarly tone.
‘William Wordsworth, Shelley, Sylvia Plath – now she wrote a
poem called ‘Insomniac’, where she describes sleep as a kind of
death-wish, the only possible cure for the white disease of daylight
and consciousness.’
‘The white disease of daylight,’ Mick savoured the words like a man
discovering fine wine for the first time in his life. ‘I interrupted you
– go on.’
‘That’s quite all right. Then there was Franz Kafka,’ Gerald laughed,
‘Naturally, I mean you can’t really imagine Kafka as an eight hour a
night man, can you?’
Mick looked at him blankly. Gerald cleared his throat.
‘Then there was Thomas de Quincey, Charlotte and Emily Brontë.’
‘The two Yorkshire lasses?’
‘Yes, that’s rather a tragic story, actually.’
‘Go on.’
51
Image: Malcolm Watson
52
Rarely had Gerald encountered such rapt attention when talking
about his research. Mick was now driving at twenty miles an hour.
‘According to their biographer, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte and
Emily used to walk in circles around the dining room table until
eventually they were tired enough to sleep. After Emily died,
Charlotte walked alone around the table on her own, hour after
hour, night after night.’
A terrible sadness appeared in Mick’s eyes.
‘The poor bloody cow. Any others?’
‘Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Margaret
Drabble… but the most famous insomniac of them all, the veritable
poet laureate of sleepnessness, was Charles Dickens.’
There was a strangled cry, then Mick slapped the steering wheel.
He shook his head, began laughing.
‘What is it? What have I said?’
He looked at Gerald triumphantly.
‘And you’re the man who doesn’t believe in fate.’
‘You’ve lost me.’
‘Charles Dickens has been my constant companion every single
night for the last ten years.’
‘Ah, you’re a Dickens fan.’
‘Fan doesn’t begin to describe it. If it wasn’t for him I’d have gone
stark, staring mad.’
Gerald, startled by this outburst, laughed nervously.
‘I see.’
‘No, you don’t. You’ve no idea. How can I make you understand?’
Mick looked round in desperation. ‘Hang on, here we go, just the
thing.’
He indicated, came to a halt opposite a grocery shop called Polski
Sklep.
‘See that?’
‘What exactly am I supposed to be looking at?’
Mick pointed at the shop, ‘In there.’
Gerald gazed at the shop’s stark interior, the harsh lighting, white
53
tiles and neatly stacked piles of drab-looking produce.
‘I haven’t had more than two hours sleep at a time for twelve years.
at’s what your head feels like – the inside of that Polish shop. Go
on, look again, imagine feeling like you’re trapped in there at three
in the morning.’
Gerald felt he had to say something.
‘Now I know that some people feel that the Poles are taking British
jobs, but – ’
‘No! You’re not listening to me, Gerald. I’ve got nothing against
the Poles. They had it tough, but they never gave up, they’re fighters,
I respect that. What I’m saying is that’s what it feels like when you
can’t sleep. It’s as if you’re locked in an empty building in the middle
of the night, all the lights blazing, no one there.’ He paused, then
muttered, ‘The white disease of daylight.’
The haunted look on his face reminded Gerald of a Gulag survivor,
someone from whom every last scrap of hope had been brutally
extinguished by years of unrelenting misery. Very difficult, looking
at that face, not to imagine some traumatic event triggering the
condition. In fact Gerald could well imagine Mick having served in
the armed forces, doing a tour of duty in Afghanistan or Iraq. But
insomnia could also be triggered by stress, psychiatric or physical
problems, or substance abuse – less dramatic alternatives, but more
likely, statistically.
‘So Dickens suffered from the same thing as me. You don’t know
what that means to me, Gerald. From now on I’ll feel like he’s
actually there with me when I’m reading his books. Does that sound
mad?’
‘No Mick, it doesn’t.’ Gerald felt a wave of compassion for the man.
In all those years of giving papers and presentations to other
academics he had never once produced such a profound effect on
any of his listeners. It was invigorating. He was reaching out beyond
academia, having an impact on the local community.
‘In fact C.S. Lewis put it very well when he said “We read to know
that we are not alone.”’
54
Mick looked delighted.
‘That’s the most beautiful thing anyone’s said to me for a long time.
That is…’ He shook his head, unable to continue. Gerald felt quite
humbled. The rain was no more than a fine drizzle by now, and he
was in no rush to return to his hotel room.
‘Tell me, what did Dickens do when he couldn’t sleep?’
‘He would walk the streets in search of inspiration. I suspect he
was unable to ever stop his brain working. But he made good use of
his insomnia, for example he absolutely dreaded having to write a
particular scene in Bleak House.’
‘Which one?’
‘Do you remember Jo, the poor urchin who sweeps a path so
people can cross the filthy street?’
‘Yeah,’ said Mick, his voice hoarse with emotion, ‘The poor little
sod.’
Gerald noticed a hoodie scuttling round a corner, clutching a
plastic bag tightly to his chest; there appeared to be something
moving inside.
‘Dickens hated the thought of killing him off, but he knew it had
to be done. So he lay in bed wide awake till five in the morning, in
a state of great agitation, then rose and wrote the scene in a burst of
pent-up energy. And of course his inability to sleep resulted in one
of his most interesting books – e Uncommercial Traveller.’
‘I don’t know that one. I thought I’d read everything by Dickens.’
‘It’s a collection of sketches that grew out of his long walks through
London at night. That went so well, he took to travelling all over the
country and recording what he saw.’
Mick took out a pen, and Gerald watched him painstakingly write
e Uncommercial Traveller on a blank receipt in a childish scrawl.
‘Dickens was so desperate to get a good night’s sleep he carried a
pocket compass to make sure that his bed faced due north – he
believed he would sleep soundly that way.’
‘Did it work?’
‘Of course not – the Victorians had all kinds of supposed cures for
55
every malady. He also tried mesmerism.’ He noticed Mick’s puzzled
expression, ‘A kind of precursor to hypnotism.’
‘But that didn’t work either.’
‘No.’
Mick mulled this over.
‘I can understand him, though. When you’re desperate, you’re
ready to try anything. I know, I speak from experience.’
They sat without speaking for a while, listening to the rain
pattering on the roof, the soft rumble of the engine, the intermittent
drag and scrape of the windscreen wipers.
‘Tell me Mick, how did you get into Dickens?’
‘Someone said why don’t you try reading, that might help get you
through the night. But I’d never been a great reader. I didn’t know
where to start. So I walked into a bookshop and asked which authors
wrote the longest novels.’
A cab drove past on the other side of the road – the driver
obviously knew Mick, tried to attract his attention by waving, but
he failed to notice.
‘That’s how I got into James Michener. I read them all – Hawaii,
Caribbean, Chesapeake, Alaska, Iberia, Centennial, e Source. His
books are at least 600 pages, some of them are nearly a 1,000 - those
ones would last me a month. Oh yes, I was quite happy with
Michener.’
He gave Gerald a meaningful look.
‘But then fate intervened.’
That again.
‘One night ten years ago someone left a copy of Great Expectations
in the back of the cab. I’d just finished my latest James Michener,
and I had nothing to read. I wasn’t impressed when I saw it lying
there on the seat, it was only 400 pages. But like I said, I had nothing
else to read, so I gave it a go. That was it, I never looked back. I read
every one of Dickens’s books after that, one after the other, and when
I’d read them all I went back to the beginning and read them all
again. And that’s how it’s been for the last ten years, I start at the
56
beginning of the shelf – I’ve got all my Dickens books on one shelf
– and read my way through them all, and then, by the time I’ve
reached the end, I’m ready to start all over again. Why read anyone
else? All human life is there. The man is a genius, an absolute genius.
If you offered me a James Michener now, I’d laugh in your face.’
‘You’ve read nobody but Charles Dickens for the last ten years?’
‘Correct.’
They felt silent again. A white van shot past, sending up a stream
of spray. Mick looked at the shop again.
‘It’s always like that when I drive past at night, the lights are
switched off in every other shop but that one is lit up like No Man’s
Land.’
Gerald was determined not to see this as symbolic.
‘Did you know that Mr Dickens gave a couple of readings here in
Hull, Gerald?’
‘Yes, at the Assembly Rooms I believe.’
Mick nodded to himself, ‘You know your stuff, don’t you? It’s called
Hull New Theatre now. Have you seen the blue plaque?’
‘No, I was hoping to go have a look tomorrow, before I catch my
train.’
‘Would you like to go now?’
Gerald wavered.
‘It’s only five minutes away. I wouldn’t charge you – it’d be a
pleasure.’
Gerald thought of the alternative – go back to his hotel, make
himself a cup of tea, watch Newsnight. Why not, what harm could
it do?
Hull New Theatre was near the end of a street of elegant Georgian
houses. Gerald never suspected such a charming area existed so
close to the centre, given the hideous buildings confronting him as
he left the station. Mick parked the car, then opened the glove
compartment, took something out; it was only as they crossed the
street that Gerald noticed Mick was clutching a book.
57
The entrance was an attempt to echo a Greek temple, its white
front dominated by four huge pillars; Gerald pursed his lips at the
clumsy municipal pastiche. Forthcoming attractions included High
School Musical, Calendar Girls, Horrible Histories and Grease.
‘Lovely building, isn’t it?’ said Mick, ‘One of the few touches of
class in this place.’
Mick led him to the left hand side of the building where the plaque
was located, just beyond one of the pompous pillars. The blue paint
was peeling away in a number of places, but with a little
perseverance it was possible to make out the inscription.
In this building in 1859 and 1860 the novelist Charles Dickens gave
selected readings from many of his works.
‘It’s an absolute disgrace. I don’t know how many times I’ve written
to the council. Can you imagine a blue plaque in London being left
to rot like this?’
Mick muttered something, then collected himself and handed
Gerald a copy of Great Expectations.
‘Would you read a couple of pages in honour of the great man?’
Gerald looked at the dog-eared paperback being thrust at him,
then back up at Mick.
‘Please – it would mean a lot to me.’
Gerald took the book, glanced around self-consciously – there was
no one else in sight. When he glanced back at Mick his eyes were
closed, his arms were tightly folded across his chest. Despite his
shaven head and rugged features, Gerald was reminded of a small
boy on his best behaviour, waiting patiently for teacher to read the
story.
Gerald began at the beginning.
‘“My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name
Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer
or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be
called Pip”.’
Mick proved to be a very appreciative listener, completely absorbed
in the story, smiling, nodding to himself or frowning in
58
concentration at regular intervals. When Gerald finished the
chapter, Mick opened his eyes and smiled.
‘Beautifully read. Beautiful.’
Gerald returned the book, and they walked back to the cab without
a word.
As Gerald strapped himself in, he said, ‘Well thank you ever so
much for this, Mick. It’s been fascinating. I’d like to go back to my
hotel now, please.’
There was a hint of coldness in Mick’s eyes as he swivelled round.
‘It’s not even ten o’clock.’
‘It’s been a long day, I was up before six finishing off my Powerpoint
display and what with the travelling, giving the presentation, then
the meal afterwards... I’m rather tired, and could really do with an
early night.’
‘Rather tired.’
Gerald recoiled – Mick’s anger felt like the sudden blast of heat
when an oven was opened.
‘I’m sorry to hear that you’re rather tired, Gerald, I really am.’
Gerald said nothing, but was careful to maintain eye contact and
show no sign of nerves. Eventually Mick looked away and sighed
dramatically.
‘Come on then, I’ll take you back.’
They drove in silence to the end of the street, then Mick stopped
the car.
‘I thought we’d made a connection.’
The anger had subsided, there was a look of betrayal in his eyes
now. To his surprise, Gerald felt more uncomfortable dealing with
this than his previous outburst.
‘I’ve enjoyed talking to you very much, but I really am tired.’
‘I’ll bet you sleep well, don’t you?’
Gerald chose his words carefully.
‘I often find it difficult to sleep when I’m stressed about something
at work, or if I’ve had an argument.’
‘But once you do nod off, how many hours do you sleep then?’
59
Gerald considered lying, then dismissed the idea as ridiculous,
after all, what did he have to hide?
‘Six or seven.’
Mick smiled to himself.
‘That’s the difference between me and you, isn’t it? I’m the poor
bugger who has to live with not being able to sleep, but you just
study it.’
‘I never claimed that my work was autobiographical.’
Gerald couldn’t fathom the look he gave him then, but before he
could say anything else Mick turned left, and put his foot down.
‘You know something, I used to watch my wife when she was
asleep beside me, peer at her eyelids fluttering, gently rest my head
on her heart and listen to the lovely steady rhythm of her breathing.’
They raced past a row of darkened shops; some lads swore at Mick
when he failed to stop for them at a crossing; they turned left again,
tyres squealing.
‘Would you mind slowing down?’
‘I’d wonder if she was dreaming, try to picture what comforting
story she was caught up in. Then I’d go back to staring at the ceiling
and try to imagine what I would dream about, if I fell asleep. But I
never did.’
Gerald looked around nervously; they appeared to be heading out
of the centre.
‘You know something? I grew to hate my wife. I couldn’t stand the
sight of her. It drove me crazy, knowing she was off in some other,
better place, and I was left behind. I live alone now, it’s best that way.’
The rain was lashing down, Gerald didn’t know Hull, didn’t
recognize any of these places. Then they were on a flyover, to the
left a monumentally ugly Premier Inn erupted from somewhere
below, like a malignant growth.
‘Mick, Mick. I want you to turn round and take me to my hotel.’
When he didn’t reply, Gerald took out his mobile.
‘Right, I’m going to – ’
Gerald felt a sharp tug as Mick grabbed the mobile from his hand
60
and chucked it onto the passenger seat. There was a loud thunk as
the doors locked.
‘For Christ’s sake, what are you doing?’
‘I’m helping you with your research, Gerald. I told you I believed
in fate. It was no accident that someone left a copy of Great
Expectations on the seat, and it’s no accident that you got into my
cab tonight. Now you’ll find out what it’s like to crave sleep the way
other people crave sex or drugs. We’re going to experience the long
dark night of the soul together, you and me. Then you can write
something autobiographical for a change.’
He lobbed the copy of Great Expectations into Gerald’s lap.
‘You whetted my appetite back there, Gerald. You read so
beautifully. Let’s carry on, shall we? Chapter two next, where we
meet Pip’s sister.’
Gerald stared at the book in his lap, then looked up just in time to
see a sign for the ferry terminals flash past. They must have been
doing sixty.
Mick’s voice had an edge to it when he spoke again.
‘I’m waiting, Gerald. An expert like you will know how a lack of
sleep can make the mildest man extremely short-tempered. How it
can cause violent mood swings, make people do impulsive things.
Gerald, are you listening?’
Gerald looked into the pair of piercing blue eyes staring at him in
the mirror. He tried to speak, but his throat was parched, his mouth
clamped shut, and the opening words of ‘The Dalesman’s Litany’
were going round and round in his head.
61
Cliff Forshaw
Two Ballads from the Bush
Lament for Trucanini, Queen of Van Dieman’s Land Aboriginals
Last full-blood Tasmanian Aborigine (1812? – 1876)
Trucanini, Truganner, I’m not sure what to call you,
your name has grown vague and lost as Trowenna.
Trucanini, Truganner, last full-blood born here,
raped by whitefella convicts, sterile with gonorrhoea.
Trucanini, Truganner, still hanging round their woodsmoke,
you sell yourself to sealers for a handful of tea or sugar.
Trucanini, Truganner, they murdered your mother;
come again, a little later, killed your new step-mother.
Trucanini, Truganner, whitemen murdered your intended,
convict mutineers stole your blood-sister Moorina.
Trucanini, Truganner, there’ll soon be no one left now,
so many sold to slavers just like your tribal sisters.
Comes another whiteman: comes George Augustus Robinson,
together with Wooraddy, loyal guide and his Good Friday.
This whitefella Robinson’s a missionary like no other:
cockney builder become explorer, e Great Conciliator.
Trucanini, Truganner, help-meet and translator:
interpret, make word-lists, catalogue their customs.
Trucanini, Truganner − tiny, tiny, tiny −
married Wooraddy, also full-blood out of Bruny.
62
Trucanini, Truganner, with Robinson you both wander,
so long since you left your home on Bruny Island.
You go gathering them in now, most-trusted Trucanini.
Orphan-mother to the whitefella’s blackface piccaninny.
Interpreter, translator, Truganner, Trucanini;
in your story I hear echoes of Pocahontas, La Malinche.
Traduttori sono traditori: I heard an Italian say in Sydney.
And, for a long time, I thought, Trucanini, Truganner,
how lives fork when we live in a stranger’s tongue.
My Lord’s a Cockney Shepherd
who’s bringing in His Flock
and we’re singing Ba Ba Black Sheep
as we huddle in His Fold.
Some say I’m rounding up the black sheep,
like the shepherd’s faithful dog,
but there’s nothing le but pasture,
and my forest’s turned to logs.
Now there’s a bounty on the Tiger,
there’s a fence across the land,
and they’re grazing fluffy white sheep
while the Shepherd sings the hymns.
He leads us to the Promised Land
where we will all be safe,
and our Pen is Flinders Island,
though there’s not many still alive.
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But the Master’s gone and le us,
least what was le of that last Fold.
Shipped us back from Flinders Island
to slums and rum in Oyster Cove.
Trucanini, Truganner, now you’re dying on your own,
the doctors pick your bones like ghostly thylacines.
Trucanini, Truganner, your flesh and blood all gone,
your people dead as Dodos and they’ve stolen what remains,
Trucanini, Truganner, you’re in the National Picture on the wall;
but, though your bones are raked in a big glass case,
you saved No One after all.
The last four Tasmanian Aborigines: Trucanini seated right with William Lanne centre.
64
The Ballad of Trucanini’s Husband William Lanne
Or, ‘e Blackfella’s Skeleton’
Now there’s a funny kind of Ballad,
Penned by your Boneyard Bards,
Of what happened down in Hobart
When the surgeons came to town.
e coroner’s paper’s white as bone
And the ink’s as black as skin
And the seal upon the parchment’s
Red as blood but not so thin.
Trucanini’s final husband,
A bloke called Billy Lanne,
Died in 1869,
The last full-blood Tassie man.
If this was Terra Nullius,
Then William was No-One.
No Diggers could ever count or name
All the species that are gone.
Old Darwin, when he studied
Where Nature had gone wrong,
Found dead-ends merely croaked
And sang no great swan-song.
But the Dinosaurs have left
Fossilised Rosetta Stones,
So the doctors licked their chops
At the thought of Billy’s bones.
65
Well, one night old Saw-Bones Crowther
Sneaked on tip-toes to the Morgue;
The Lamplight glints on his case of Knives
Beside that laid-out Corpse.
Now the Surgeon’s filthy Cuffs
Are rolled Back for Steel & Skill:
His Scalpel skims the Cadaver’s Scalp,
Peels back that Sad Black Skin.
Now William’s Face falls like a Mask
− Crestfallen, sloughed-off Skin −
As Crowther teases out the Skull
And slips a White Bloke’s in.
Now a new Head fills that Death Mask,
Sewn into the Blackfella’s grin;
The Bastard wraps the Brain-Pain up
In a Piece of old Sealskin.
He’ll send it off to London
To the Royal bloody Surgeons there,
So he tip-toes from the Morgue,
Sniffs Reward in the Dawn-Fresh Air.
Skullduggery’s soon discovered
(reports our Hobart hack):
Examining Our Cadaver’s head,
‘The Face turned round,’ the M.O. said
and this new Saw-Bones ‘saw Bones
were sticking out the Back.’
66
So, to stop the pommie Surgeons
Getting their bloody filthy hands
On the rest of that last Tasmanian
they chopped off its feet,
and they chopped off its hands,
and they threw them away.
The cadaver was buried,
But secretly next night
Royal Society gentlemen
Dug it up by their lamplight.
Time waits for no Tasmanian:
The quick must be quick with the dead.
They dissected William’s skeleton
(sans feet, sans hands, sans head).
Did grave doctors cast their lots
To perform their funeral rites?
They cut away black flesh that rots,
Redeemed the white bone into light.
Meanwhile, bobbing off to London,
Seal-skin begins to stink.
Sailors got shot of it overboard,
Flung Billy’s skull in the drink.
It’s a very sorry end,
To what became of William Lanne:
The butchers lost his feet and hands,
His head went bobbing far from land
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– Do you think one day they’ll find those bones?
Will his skull wash up on Tassie’s sands?
Can he be buried whole again?
… Yeah, yeah,
but from Darwin down to Melbourne,
the learned doctors said:
‘Let the weak fall by the wayside,
for the strong live off the dead.
To stay alive is to survive
against the bleakest odds.
Embrace your Fate. Know your Place.
Accept the Will of God.
His cards were always marked,
just like the thylacine’s:
inevitable extinction’s
written into defunct genes.’
Course, it’s a sad, sad end, this dead dead-end,
but, when all is said and done,
can’t stand in the way of Progress
– Thank Christ they’re bleedin’ gawn.
We gave them a good shake,
but they just could not wake,
the Dreamtime had crusted their eyes.
So we left them for dead,
and strode on ahead,
and were blessed with this golden sunrise.
68
Our shadows are shortening behind us.
Our dead are all dead and all gone.
They couldn’t come with us, they couldn’t adapt,
their bones lie bleached by the sun.
It’s dawn in the Lucky Country
and it’s time, it’s time to move on.
Let the women and the crocs shed tears,
these fellas had been just hanging on
these last four thousand years.
Long time dreamed of falling,
Down through seaweed, silver shoal.
Up above the light was fading,
Waves tumbled, roiled and boiled.
Night presses down so heavy.
Down here’s just salty sea-bed.
Empty sockets see nothing, nothing.
I need eyes like I need holes in my head.
Teeth shiver-shiver my jaw.
No flesh le to pad them all in.
e world has ripped up all its Laws,
Le us dismembered,
dismembered and bearing white grins.
69
Trucanini (around 1868)
William Lanne, ‘King Billy’ (around 1868)
Note:
Trucanini, the last of the full-blood Tasmanian Aborigines, was born on Bruny
Island around 1812. After many of her family and tribe were killed or sold into
slavery she joined builder-turned-evangelist George Augustus Robinson and his
guide the Aboriginal chief Woorady on his journeys of exploration and
‘conciliation.’ During the early 1830s Robinson made contact with every remaining
group of Tasmanian natives and carried out rudimentary anthropological inquiries
into their customs and rituals, as well as compiling basic vocabularies of their
languages. After the failure of the Black Line (1829) to pen the Aborigines in the
Tasman Peninsula, in 1834 Robinson led the remaining natives to Flinders Island
in the Bass Strait, where he attempted to Christianize them. The ‘National Picture’
showing Robinson and Trucanini ‘bringing in’ the remaining Aborigines is
Benjamin Duttereau’s The Conciliation (c.1835). By 1845 there were 150 Aborigines
left. Robinson had left Flinders to return to the mainland in 1839; his successors
treated the remaining aborigines in their concentration camp appallingly. In 1846
the survivors were settled at Oyster Cove on the d’Entrecasteaux Channel near
Hobart where their keepers provided them with insanitary huts and rum. By 1855
there were only sixteen left, including Trucanini. The last man, William Lanne,
died in 1869. Trucanini died in 1876.
70
David Wheatley
Northern Divers
The northern diver, or great northern loon, is a singularly graceful
and beautiful bird. It is a rare visitor to these parts though the only
time I’ve seen it has been in Shetland, where it goes by the name ‘da
raingös’, as confirmed to me by an old gravedigger on Hugh
MacDiarmid’s island of Whalsay. There is a lock-up shed on the
eastern bank of the river Hull, however, emblazoned with the name
Northern Divers and a black and white avian logo over its doors. I
was reminded of this when forced to drop into a Royal Mail sorting
office for an errant package. I say ‘forced’, as the postal service now
goes to any lengths rather than deliver my post in the morning. As
mortgage junk mail flops through my letter box at three in the
afternoon, it strikes me I have the perfect solution. Make the post
later and later, until it arrives in the middle of the night and then
finally... at eight the next morning. I’ll happily lose a day, in other
words, if they can just do this in return. Down by the sorting office,
the Northern Divers building is looking fairly derelict. Is it still in
use? A quick internet search later proves that it is, and what’s this
on the company’s photo gallery? A picture of the work force, pants
dropped and mooning the camera. That was unexpected. The walk
from the sorting office back to my car brings me past the
harbourmaster’s office, inside which a silver-haired gent appears
hard at work, organising swing bridge openings and estuary
dredgings. I think of Frank O’Hara’s ‘To the Harbourmaster’: ‘To
/you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage /of my will.’ No man
can do more. We sail for Shetland tomorrow.
71
David Wheatley
Guns on the Bus
Any man beyond the age of 26 who finds himself on a bus can count
himself a failure, said Margaret Thatcher. That 26 is oddly specific,
I always thought. Nevertheless, bus journeys are not always pleasant
experiences. That house over there, bloke upstairs on bus tells other
bloke: that’s where I go when I need a gun. I don’t know that I believe
him, and suspect his performance has something to do with the
captive audience that we his fellow passengers provide. A student of
mine who worked in a bookie’s told me of a man coming in to rob
him with what he claimed was a gun under a tea towel. Some
grabbing later by a have-a-go hero revealed the weapon to be a
banana. I have also heard tell of a bank robber on the Holderness
Road who made good his escape by bicycle, perhaps having blown
his entire budget on the hold-up weapon. Still, gun crime is rare in
Hull, certainly compared with places at the other end of the M62,
but the guns are out there somewhere, in a bottom drawer or under
a brick in a back garden... I know a bloke who knows a bloke. These
things can be arranged. You didn’t hear it from me, that’s all. And
this bloke you...? Consider it done.
72
73
Carol Rumens
Beware this Boy
(A Christmas Carol)
There were two, a boy and a girl.
He tried to say they were fine children
but the words choked. A lie of such magnitude.
is boy is Ignorance. is girl is Want.
He woke up, startled. The room was itself, bright;
the time on his wrist as it should be.
Boxing-Day trade outside. Girls and boys
in their smart affordable brands,
shopping, texting, playing; time
on their side. Beware them both and all
of their degree but most of all beware
this boy. He shook off the lie. They were fine children.
74
Aingeal Clare
from Wide Country and the Road
The sun was late over the hill the morning Adam left the village. Its
light was slow to declare a horizon of stony fields, their scurf of halfreaped beetroot and the hedgerows that scarred them. Adam was
glad he couldn’t see them – they sickened him – but in other ways
he was very far from glad. He knew the dawn was only now coming,
but for three desperate hours he’d been crouching inside a mediumsized clock, waiting for the rag-and-bone man’s sultry holler. His
discomfort filled his head.
When the voice came though, Adam forgot his twisted bones and
remembered his excitement and his fear:
‘Rah-boh!’ the man called.
‘Hoy-hoy-hoy!’ he called.
‘Wood-tin-scrap-rah-boh!’ called the rag-and-bone man.
Through the clock’s tiny keyhole, Adam could see the villagers
purging their rooms of fresh junk: out came a housewife with a
warped whisk, out came a man with a split vice, a man with a bandy
tongs, out running came a girl with a dead vole. Boggle Dyke took
everything, he didn’t discriminate; he took onto his cart the waste
of all west Splawshire.
When the cart pulled up by Adam’s clock, Boggle’s boy jumped
off to lug it up. He tried to pick it up and dropped it. ‘That’s heavy
as a tupped sow, that is, Bog,’ said the boy. ‘Give us hand.’ Gruffly
Boggle slid off his pony and helped haul it up. The creases on his
face were like tree bark cut across with scissors. They were made by
salt country winds.
‘Nice bit a furnisher, this,’ he remarked.
‘Aye, but it’s heavy as a tupped sow, it is,’ said the boy again.
‘Nowt wrong with it on the outside,’ said Boggle, scratching his
chin. ‘Not like these to chuck us out a thing like this.’
‘A thing of quality, Bog.’
‘Aye.’ Boggle stared at the clock and thought about commerce,
75
accounts, merchantmen, and ledgers of fruitful exchange. He
thought about his own trading life, the rag-and-bone songs his
father’s fathers sang, the gypsies who took his scrap metal and the
country’s dust track maze that he knew blind.
‘Heavy as a tupped sow though,’ repeated the boy. He was green
to the rag-and-bone life, but it had quickly tapped in him a gift for
reckoning the weight of things just by looking at them. He felt this
clock an insult to that gift. ‘Wonder what’s wrong with it?’
Boggle roused himself from his trance. ‘Something wrong with its
air on the inside, perhaps,’ he conjectured. ‘Or full of forks, is it?’
‘I’ll check, Bog,’ said the boy, and he went to work on the keyhole.
Adam’s heart tumbled like a beetroot kicked from a bucket.
‘Not now,’ said Boggle. ‘Let’s get away with it before they change
their minds.’
Adam waited, trembling. He heard the pony stumble into a trot,
and felt his bruises blacken with the jolt, and knew he was safe.
In the house above, though, in the house with a pale empty space
where a grandmother clock used to stand, a finger twitched an
upstairs curtain, and an eye darkened behind a greasy lens.
*
The village Adam was leaving was Little Rottencoast, the strangest
village in Splawshire. It is all gone now, but Adam was the first to
go. Its ruins are difficult to find; a ghost train from town might take
you there but runs only in the harshest winters to clear ice,
untimetabled and nocturnal. Osteoporitic cottages still stand
stooped along the three interlocked streets, and the white rock on
the scrubby green is still the sharp white jutting rock they called
‘The Tooth’. No human shadow is ever cast now on the green, though
some old pennies in the pond were cast by human hands. And there
are other signs: the hostelry’s cracked lettering tells us it was The
Jawbone. Underneath the bar is a ledger with the family names –
Crake, Horelip, Unfriend – and all around the green slouch the
76
headstones of drowned ducks.
We know of Neg Stuckey, Adam’s mother, from records he left at
the county hospital. Adam had lived with her and helped her with
the pigs. ‘We bided in a house of wood and tin,’ he told one of our
interviewers, ‘set up on stilts to keep it out the marsh that always
was wet from the trickling tarn upfield.’ The pigs were kept under
the house on a mess-pot diet. Twice a year they saw the world, he
said: ‘In November they saw it, to eat the dregs of the beetroot
harvest, and in August they saw it, to clear briars from the boscage.’
Local men hired Neg Stuckey’s pigs for these purposes, and beetroot
was their currency. When she saw them tramping brawnily down
the footpath, sacks of beetroot slung over their shoulders, Neg would
shout for Adam, who would run out to meet them calling, ‘Eh-up,
drakes!’ and ‘Ho, there!’ Happy, then, was he, among the men of the
village, asking them about the harvest and telling them about the
pigs. He would escort the men upstairs into the house with their
heavy sacks, and, leaving them to do the business with his mother,
would duck under the house to harness the pigs. ‘Dangerous work
it is,’ he told us. ‘Been as pigs has teeth full sharp, and strength, and
the fierce temper in their bags.’ As he dodged them and harnessed
them, he would mark odd joggling sounds coming from the house
over his head; but he ‘nay mind’, he said, for he knew that soon his
belly would be full of ‘beetroot pie and pigs’ cheese and steaming
soft-boiled leeks.’
Because the villagers never mixed with townsfolk except to
barter over beetroot and whatnot, their gene-pool was somewhat
abridged. ‘Everyone was cousins,’ explained Adam, ‘and if they
wasn’t cousins they was uncles.’ Then he sat chewing on his tongue
for a while, ruminating. ‘And if they wasn’t cousins or uncles they
was townsfolk.’ The result was a self-replenishing stock of blackhaired, freckled children whose soft, painful teeth fell out when they
reached nine years old, never to return. At school they learned three
subjects: Farming, Doctoring, and New Testament Greek. ‘And come
summer,’ said Adam, ‘when school was done, we clomb the Tooth
77
on the green, and drew letters on it, and sang with the fieldfares out
in the boscage, and cut up dead shrews and bred woodlice. We made
bombs out of stickweed and swam in the tarn. We raced goats.’ It
sounds, doesn’t it, splendid?
But it was all about to change for Adam, who in some future
dawn was quaking in his neighbour’s stopped clock. It started with
a routine council meeting. Ambrose Quipp was the biggest man in
the village, which was like being the mayor, and he belonged to his
wife. She had decided that she did not want the same toothless life
as the villagers lived to blight her eldest, newly toothless daughter.
Tamsin Quipp would have teeth.
‘But how can it be done?’ asked Filchard Gallboy, Council
Speaker. All turned towards Mr. Nimble, the schoolmaster and
village engineer.
‘With some not inconsiderable intricacy and convolution,’ he said.
‘But can it be done at all?’ cut in another, the forceful tusky
Eustace Stout.
‘If we were to contrive,’ said Nimble, ‘some wire contraption of
enough dexterity and stealth –’
‘With cuts of flint!’ shouted a clever woman.
‘So as to be fit rigidly about the upper gum, with each
protuberance aligned with the gingival sulcus so that in time –’
But Ambrose stepped forward and laid a loaded fist upon the
table. ‘That does not sound like teeth to me,’ he said darkly. ‘It sounds
like what I trap rabbits with.’
‘I’ll take three!’ sang Eustace Stout, ‘To put around my good wife’s
cabbage patch!’
‘Wire and flint will make no joke of my daughter,’ warned
Ambrose, who could be a petulant and fearsome and far from
complicated man where his reputation lay at stake.
Mr. Nimble, who was used to this, checked his watch. ‘I’m afraid
our wires are crossed, Mr Quipp. Flint is no good. Your daughter
wants teeth, and its teeth she will have, which she will borrow from
the toothiest villagers here.’
78
At this remark confusion touched the audience. ‘We none of us
have teeth to give, Mr Nimble!’ shouted the only woman.
Nimble sighed the impatient, lonely sigh of one always too far
ahead of his company. ‘At Mrs. Stuckey’s,’ he said, ‘there are some
very toothsome pigs.’
Ambrose, who had thought of thumping his fist onto the table,
instead used it to swing himself over and make straight for Nimble,
whose eyes were suddenly bulging and whose neck and face had
turned quickly red and blotchy like the feathers of a horny Chinese
cockerel. Ambrose lifted Nimble by his collar, which ripped at once
because a schoolmaster’s salary cannot always account for the forms
of his vanity. Nimble was left sprawled bonily on the floor like a
buckled chair, while Ambrose stared mystified at the strip of fabric
he was clutching near his face.
Now Filchard Gallboy was beside him, advising him to calm
down and consider. ‘Of course, Tamsin won’t be the experiment,’
he said. ‘We could try it first on someone else’s child –’
‘A boy,’ suggested the woman.
‘A boy,’ Filchard agreed.
Ambrose, jagged-breathed, considered and digested. ‘Whose
boy?’ he said at last, swabbing his brow with Nimble’s collar.
‘What about Stuckey’s boy?’ ventured a voice from the back. ‘He’s
half pig already, son of hers.’
Someone laughed and a few applauded, and within a very short
time it was settled. Two of the beetrootmen agreed to take the news
to Neg Stuckey, with a sack of beetroot to soften her. Satisfied,
Ambrose thrust his pipe in his mean, wickedly folded mouth, and left.
*
Too many delicious things to choose from: beetroot pie, or pigs’
cheese, or steaming soft-boiled leeks? Apple pie or goats’ cheese or
spitting fat-fried eggs? Adam had not tasted any of it for such a very
long time, not since he broke his last tooth on soup when he was
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nine years, two months, and a day. He was delighted with his newly
pronged jaw and his old, rich, varied diet. He wanted to try
everything, wanted to think that no morsel now was beyond his
range. Granted, he had acquired a strange taste for beetroot scurf
and briars from the boscage, but he was not concerned. The
operation had been painful, and eating too had been a crucifixion
for a while. He had cried, in pleasure and agony, before bowls of
sickly semolina and mugs of hot tea; but he nay mind, he said, for
the salt in his tears came from sausage and bacon, and other things
that taste as good as that. When he had raced his last goat of the
summer, though, and bred the last of his woodlouse dynasty, his real
problems began. ‘Some might say,’ he said, ‘my history began.’
School began. In poor New Testament Greek the other children
swore at him freely. They jeered at him and stole his books, and
would-not-play with him. He was an outcast. They said he was a
rodent, a bloody gnawer. Soon he was just a boy alone in a
graveyard, picking at turf with cuts of flint, and daring the dead to
rise out of their boredom and drag his willing body to a harsh New
Testament hell. While he dug the graveyard turf alone, and
whispered dares to the dead through the cracks in the earth that he
made, other children’s voices menaced from the playground’s
toothless, lisping warzone.
Very soon Adam started suffering from too much grasp. He
grasped that his status in the village was the lowest, and that his
mother’s was the lowest next to him. He grasped that to his friends
he was a joke, and to his elders an experiment. He grasped that he
was both fatherless and all-too-many-fathered, and started looking
for his own face in the faces of the beetrootmen (whose visits were
now less and less frequent). He was no longer met by his cousin on
the way to school.
‘They’d all just come out from getting their syringes,’ he said. ‘I’d
scunged in the back way, not wanting to know them,’ he said, ‘just
wanting to get on with the lessons and get out.’
We asked him to explain ‘syringes’.
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‘They all lived on syringes,’ he said. ‘They had in them milk,
grain, meat, fruit, and alcohol. I think they was made by townsfolk,’
he said.
We asked him to clarify ‘scunging’.
‘I scunged in the back way,’ he explained, ‘So as not to have to
take abuse from them away from teacher.’ This was when we realised
that Adam, after eighty years of suffering and triumph, still had not
guessed Mr. Nimble’s terrible role in his story.
‘But they was already finished their syringes,’ he continued. ‘They
came out onto the playground asking to smell my lips, and I said no.
They smelt them anyway. They said, is that eggs you’ve been eating?
I told them yes. Then Quipp’s girl said, “You scungey, egg-eating,
pig-tooth-boy.” She hit me and they laughed.’
‘They laughed out loud.’
‘They laughed out loud at me.’
Adam’s first interview with us dealt only with his early childhood:
his time in Little Rottencoast and his sudden, weird, and dangerous
departure. It ended gnomically with four short words: ‘The pigs,
they bite’. Details we had to glean for ourselves, in later interviews
with surviving villagers and one disgraced dental engineer. It seems
that in self-defence he had taken to biting flesh, and in fear and
anger had gorily bitten the shoulder of one Tamsin Quipp, who told
her father. Later that day, after a short, fist-thumping council, a
dental engineer was summoned from town, and Adam’s wayward
jaw was wired shut.
Which was when he fled. Inside his clock, knotted, foetal Adam
was roughly sleeping; then, more roughly, he was awake. He guessed
that he had reached the town of Belton Splaw. Through his keyhole,
he saw thick white smoke curling from a large stone house, like a
stretch of cotton combed out of a rock. He saw gangs of darkskinned foreigners marching into the country carrying sacks of
shovels, fruit punnets and finger bandages. He felt himself being
lowered from the cart, and heard familiar voices over his head.
‘Heavy as a tupped sow, is this,’ came one.
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‘Will you shut up at last,’ came another. ‘It is enough that I’ve been
hearing it all the way from village. You get off with you for once.
Come back on Thursday and till then keep away from Lass.’
‘But Bog, she—’
‘What did I say?’
‘—’
‘What’s that?’
‘Bog.’
Now it was dark inside his clock. Adam had been laid keyholedown on someone’s bit of grass. Two sets of footsteps went away,
then slowly one set came deliberately back. Something started to
drag him, in slow heaves, away from the pony and towards
another place.
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Kath McKay
Hull and Eastern Counties Herald March 1869
4th
8th
9th
10th
12th
13th
15th
16th
22nd
26th
27th
29th
30th
31st
Eighty sixth annual meeting at the Hull General Infirmary.
The Hull election petition withdrawn.
Trial of the Beverley election petition commenced. – The case
terminated on the 11th when the members, Sir H EDWARDS
and Capt. KENNARD, were unseated.
Mr CHARLES DICKENS, the eminent novelist, gave
‘readings’ in Hull
Fire on board Messrs RAWSON and ROBINSON's steamer
Czar, in the Railway Dock. – A man named THWAITES
charged with selling horse flesh for beef in Hull.
A labourer named McGUINNESS killed on the North Eastern
line, opposite Neptune Street.
Mr PETTINGELL's plan for a new market submitted to the
Property committee. – Shock of an earthquake felt in Hull.
Opening of the Fishermen’s Institute
CHARLES BROWN, third hand on board the smack Excel,
drowned at sea.
Conference of Yorkshire Sunday school teachers at Hull.
Destructive fire at Messrs NEAL and WOKES' saw yard. –
Annual horse show at Roos.
Deputation waited on the Property committee with reference
to the proposed swimming bath on the Spring Bank
Grand bazaar at the Public Rooms in aid of the Spring Bank
Sailors' Orphan Home.
St Stephen's Working Men’s Industrial Exhibition opened. –
Accident at the Park Street railway crossing. A porter named
WALDRON much hurt.
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Kath McKay
After the Silk Stockings
As the young draper wrapped up the six pairs of silk stockings in
brown paper, and tied the parcel with string, Dickens questioned
him.
‘And what it is it you like to do in your spare time?’
Most people liked to talk about themselves. You only needed
an opening.
‘Why sir, I like dramatic performances at the theatre very much
myself. And the musicals.’
The young man blushed, as if he had given too much away.
Dickens was aware of his curiosity when the older man held the
stockings up to the light, examining their mesh, and talking about
the different grades of silk. What would an old man want with such
things, he would be thinking. Was he not long past passion? But the
young man was polite and attentive, without that obsequiousness
which sometimes afflicted those of the serving classes in the more
exclusive London stores.
‘I would have liked to have obtained tickets to see Mr Dickens. I
have heard such good things of him. But alas, all the tickets had been
sold.’
‘And what are your favourites, may I ask?’
‘I love Mr Pickwick, for his bonhomie. My favourite is the trial
scene. And I do believe that Mr Dickens was to read from it. I also
very much admire his portrayal of villains such as Sikes. And Mrs
Gamp, why I have come across such characters myself in my work.
Mr Dickens has a most acute insight into people. Still, it cannot be
helped. Will that be all sir? I hope everything is to your satisfaction.’
‘Indeed. Thank you, my young man, most helpful. And you may
find a use for these, I trust. Good day.’
He tipped his hat, and marched smartly out of the wood-panelled
shop. The young man fingered the ticket in his hand. ‘Admit the bearer.
Farewell Reading, Mr Charles Dickens. Assembly Rooms, Hull.’
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After Dickens left the silk merchants on Whitefriargate, clutching
the parcel he would give to Nelly, he realised that for a few pleasant
minutes, he had forgotten about the thing that was eating at his
heart: the death of his good friend Tennent. He shivered. And with
Tennent only eight years older than him. Such a sad journey he
would have to make to London, cutting short his Hull readings. He
was enjoying his time here. They were a fine people, with cultured
and fashionable strata of society of whom those who did not venture
out of London would be unaware.
And the people on the street were open and direct. One of the
more pleasant aspects of giving readings was the way ordinary
working people would come up and shake your hand, say they
admired your work and knew it well. Only this morning, a railway
labourer with a terrible turn in his eye, but such a pleasant and
equable manner as to make you do him the honour of forgetting his
affliction, stopped him in the street and praised the writing in Oliver
Twist, and hoped that ‘you would be reading from that directly.’
‘Indeed I am,’ he answered. Dickens breathed in. A tang of sewers
and fish, and rabbit and beef, the smell of sweat. A most agreeable
afternoon was in store. How he loved to perform. How he would die
without it. In his ribs, somewhere under his heart, sat the ache. The
agent had already arranged the cancellation of the Friday evening
reading, and that Dickens should read in York instead and take the
overnight train to London for the funeral. An advert was to be put
in the paper; people would receive their money back. No doubt there
would be disappointment. He tested his foot on the cobbles. Still it
hurt. His foot might never be right again. He dismissed the thought.
The readings would set him up.
‘I am two people,’ he had told Dostoevsky once, and there was still
truth in the statement. The stage revivified him. Without the stage
he would wither and die. He did not want to inform his doctor of
his latest symptoms, for his doctor would forbid the readings and
prescribe enforced rest. If he lay down he would be maddened with
frustration. Far better to keep on while upright. There were things
85
inside him he did not want to think about. James was dead.
Yet another dear friend was dead. The shades were piling up. Every
season a funeral. He could not talk to Nelly about it. She would enjoy
these fine silk stockings.
Boots and the Holly Tree, Sikes and Nancy, and Mrs Gamp: he
would keep the same order. Billed as a farewell performance, truly
it would be. He doubted whether he would be in Hull again. He
could manage without the book for Sikes, so many times had he
performed. And each time it felt as if it might be his last. Each time
a draught of liquor was needed to perk him up, to revive him after
the ordeal of performance. Sometimes he had such a fatigue about
him, everything ached. And he would include the food scene from
Oliver Twist, especially for the draper. He’d surprise him. Give a good
show. And Mrs Gamp – yes, he’d end on her. People loved her, she
made them laugh. Good to end on laughter. Tennent was dead. Mrs
Gamp, she saw people entering the world, she saw them exiting. A
pain on his left side made him start. She, sizing him up now, would
not think he would make such a fine corpse.
And so, walking down Whitefriargate, in pale sunshine with a
fresh breeze off the river, Dickens was preoccupied. When he saw
the line of White Friars walking along in front of him, he was not
even surprised. Their long white robes, their bare feet, and the rope
round their waists: it all seemed familiar and expected. A bell tolled.
When he looked again, they were gone.
A breeze passed by, and a man bumped into him.
‘Eee, look quick, old gentleman,’ said a rough-faced man, as he
skipped off down an alley, surprisingly agile for one so heavy.
Dickens was not however surprised to find his pocket book gone,
along with the letter he was writing to dear Tennent’s wife, Letitia.
No matter. He would see her soon enough. And the money was
only money.
In his rooms, he turned the telegram over and over again in his
hands. Sorry. Regret to inform…Tennent was dead.
That night, after the last train left, and the last hansom cab started
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out, he fancied he was at the end of the world. This coast was prone
to flooding. What if the waters rose and he were never to leave?
He slept.
***
The thief uses the contents of Dickens’s pocket book to buy his sick
wife some rabbit. He sits with her. The child whimpers, and he
promises that he will take her down to the quay to gather fish the
fishermen throw away.
The vicar attends the dying woman. Being a canny man, he notices
the letter lying on the side. A letter is unusual in such a house, where
there is nothing that is not strictly functional, and when he sees the
signature of the inimitable Charles Dickens, the vicar has to force
himself to concentrate.
‘Kingdom of Heaven…Everlasting Life,’ he mumbles. They would
have been better off spending their money on a doctor. But the poor
are ignorant and superstitious, and he has to live.
When the woman dies, and he faces the sad eyes of her pale child,
it is an easy thing to sweep up the letter into his bag. What would her
father want with it? He puts away his bible and snaps his bag shut.
‘There, there dear. She has gone to a better place.’
Pockets his fee, hands a small coin to the child.
At home, he places the letter inside his copy of Oliver Twist. Too
much a radical for him, Dickens. Of course the vicar had gone to
the reading in the Music Hall. He’d enjoyed the drama of the Sikes
and Nancy piece. But equality and justice for the poor? Ridiculous.
And was Dickens not above making a great deal of money himself?
Had he not separated from his wife? And wasn’t he keeping a young
mistress? Who was he to lecture them on morality?
All the fashionable people of Hull had attended, showing off their
jewellery and clothes. A good place to be seen. Still, the man was
entertaining. Yet he had not looked well. The vicar had seen that
look before, of a man who has seen death coming. He’d be surprised
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if Dickens lasted out the year. All this running about and travelling
up and down the country didn’t mean death came less quick.
Image: Malcolm Watson
A few days after Dickens left Hull for the last time, for he is to die of
a stroke the following year, a small earthquake is felt in the town.
Nothing spectacular – plates rattle on dressers, boats are tossed at
sea, people drown – the usual story. Tremors are felt near the river,
and the letter falls from the vicar’s book, is blown out into the street,
and scooped up by a trader as a bookmark. And so the letter begins
its journey.
Kath McKay
After Abigail Finds the Letter
I look over Grand-dad’s shoulder and read:
Complete works of Charles Dickens
Great storeys such as Great expectations, Dambey and son,
the old Curiosity shop
Green faux leather bound, embosed spine.
Listed as used But Never Read or Opened
‘Look at that,’ says grand-dad. ‘A travesty.’
‘What’s a travesty?’ I ask him, but he shuts the lap-top and says
it’s terrible that some people never read.
‘We read, grand-dad, don’t we?’
‘Yes, love.’
He makes me Marmite on toast and we get our books out.
Next time I go to his flat there is a new bookshelf taking up the
whole of one wall in the living room.
‘Now I can dip into them whenever I want to.’ He smiles. My
grand-dad taught my mum to read, and she taught me. She says
there’s nothing better than lying on the sofa with your shoes off and
a good book.
My grand-dad says you can learn so much from Dickens, that
Dickens could see into people’s souls. My favourite is Oliver Twist,
my mum likes Great Expectations, and Grand-dad loves Nicholas
Nickleby.
He’s made me a bookshelf, and he buys me a book on birthdays
and Christmas. When he was young he was in a Readers’ Society
and he’d get books through the post, and he’s got all these old
Penguins, in dark blue and orange and pink. Says he believes in
education and that books open doors.
He used to get books from the local library, but then it closed.
Now sometimes he can’t make it to the big one in town.
It was me who found the letter, tucked at the back of Great
Expectations.
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When I show him his eyes go all shiny. He says it’s a sign: Dickens
speaking to us over the centuries. When he comes back from the
new History Centre that’s shaped like a whalebone, he says he’s
checked Dickens’s signature, and it’s GENUINE. He gets the letter
out and touches it. I touch it as well. He says it’s like touching history,
that of course he’ll donate it to a library, but that he just wants to
enjoy it for a little while. He puts it in a plastic folder so as not to let
the light get at it. Says we should keep it a secret, as otherwise we
might get robbed. It’s OK if we keep it for a bit, he says, as we respect
it, and because we’re a Dickens family.
And we are. Mam works at Pickwick Papers on Beverley Road.
And I’m going to do a Dickens project for school. Mr Able told us
to pick an historical figure, and see if they have any relevance today.
We are to use our imagination and creativity. When I pick Dickens
he says ‘Excellent. Perfect.’ Mr Able is always saying ‘perfect.’
‘He’s an optimist,’ says Mam. I want to be an optimist when I grow
up. Mr Able says of course Dickens was an optimist. He keeps
telling us that he believes in us, and that he knows we’re as good as
anybody else. I know already, my mum says I can do anything. I can
be an architect, or a geologist or a forensic scientist, or a swimmer
or a runner.
Mam says if you look at the world in a different way, you can see
it through Dickens’s eyes. So that’s my project. Observation is
important. Mr Able says Dickens would ‘heartily agree.’ When people
start talking about Dickens they use words like ‘heartily’ and ‘alas.’
So when Mam says I can help her in the shop on a Training Day,
Mr Able agrees that it will be an ‘ideal opportunity’ for observation.
For my project I’ve already downloaded interesting pieces from the
newspaper:
Hull Daily Mail May 2012
12 May HULL FOODBANK OPENS On the day when a local MP
says that the levels of food poverty in the area are almost
Dickensian, a food bank has opened in Hull. Demand for
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emergency food packages has increased tenfold in the city over
the past six months.
13 May Beverley soup kitchen will feed anyone in need of a
free meal.
24 May Comet Staff leave Hull Call Centre as consultation ends.
240 made redundant.
In the shop, I note down things. Doritos, big packet £1.29. Tinned
tomatoes, own brand 29p. Fresh orange juice £1.00. Milk 62p. When
customers come in I imagine what Dickens would have called them.
There is a man in a dark green suit, and a long thin face like a horse,
and he leans forward as if he is in a great hurry, and talks very fast. I
call him Mr Brake. Mam says he’s not well, and that we should be kind
to him, but she makes sure I am standing by her when he comes in.
Mr Able says I have to ask questions, and has helped me think of
some, so I ask Mam about the ‘parallels between Dickens’s society
and now’.
‘There’s child slavery in other countries, and poverty here. People
on the breadline.’
I ask what the breadline is and she looks sad, like Grand-dad does
sometimes, and then she starts talking about the Lottery. If you win
the Lottery you can become a millionaire. If I was a millionaire I
would give money to all the children.
In the morning most people buy a paper or cigarettes. Or
scratchcards or a Lottery ticket. Mam knows everyone. That’s
because she’s always smiling and happy and people like her. She says
‘Hiya Jeff,’ and ‘That’s 55p.’ She says hello to Lillian, who’s sad
because her brother died.
‘Come and have a chat with me,’ Mam says.
When Lillian hears of my project she says ‘It was the best of times;
it was the worst of times.’ I know this is from A Tale of Two Cities
because I have seen the film. Lillian likes Dickens as well.
I write a list of what is outside:
A kebab shop
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Scaffolding
Dirty windows.
Two men drinking Extra-Strong Lager.
The shop is very interesting, with all the different people. Mam
says there are Polish, and Iraqi, and Lithuanians and Afghan people.
Some people cough and look sad, some people are smiley. Some
people take ages to decide. Bert, who Mam says is a kind man, comes
in for the paper, and gives me 50p, says get myself some sweets. I
tell him I’ll buy a notebook thank you very much, that sweets are
not good for my teeth and that Mam only lets me have them at the
weekend, and he laughs. Mam says Bert used to work on the docks,
shifting great weights like bananas. I am glad Bert shifted bananas.
I like bananas. In Dickens’s time they didn’t have bananas. I am
writing down all the flavours of the juices, and what is in the Coca
Cola fridge. Some of the juices are turquoise, like that stuff that
Steve, my step-dad, uses for painting. Sanjeev comes in from the café
and starts shouting about the fridge. Says just because it has the Coca
Cola logo on it doesn’t mean it belongs to Coca Cola, and that people
can’t put anything else in the fridge.
He starts talking about the Lottery and how the government is
stealing from poor people and Mam says ‘Shush. The customers
have got to have hope.’
‘It’s a trick,’ he says and stomps away. Sanjeev is funny.
Then there’s two lads in the shop, and they’re pushing sweets off
the counter, and shouting at my mum, and I hear the till bang shut.
My mum’s voice gets high.
‘No, I am not serving you cigs. You’re only fourteen.’
‘You bitch.’
I write this down.
‘And what are you looking at, you stupid cow?’
The two boys, with snarly teeth, are looking at me.
Mam shushes me behind the counter. I know she’s nearly crying
because I can see her bottom lip moving. But she does that thing
where she looks taller and stares at them.
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‘There’s the door,’ she says, in a firm voice like my teacher. She
looks over as if someone else might come through.
And Bert does: ‘Forgot my milk,’ he says, and walks over to
the counter.
‘That right, love?’ He counts out change.
Bert’s really old, Mam said once, but he’s always looked the same,
and he must be strong.
The boys are near the back shelf now, and they have a bottle of
vodka each. They’re going towards the cigarettes, towards Mam.
They look through Bert like they can’t see him, and pull down
beer cans.
Bert turns his neck to the ceiling.
‘Good job you’ve got the new camera in.’
‘They say it can even make out the colour of your eyes.’
The boys stop filling their pockets and look up. Their mouths
open, and they run at the door, throwing a bottle at Mam. She ducks
and it hits the floor and breaks. Vodka spreads over the floor towards
the lemonade.
Bert helps clean it up. When he leaves, he doesn’t look old.
Mam’s shaking, so Steve picks us up. I write it all down. What an
exciting day. Later, Mam says we should feel sorry for those kids
who are rude to people and treat others badly.
‘Maybe they haven’t got anyone who loves them,’ she says,
cuddling me.
‘I am the resurrection and the life,’ I hear on TV as I am falling
asleep.
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Malcolm Watson
A Christmas Carol
On Christmas Eve on icy Goddard Avenue,
plumb centre on the stencil of the defecating mutt
above the yellow legend Pick It Up there sits
a frozen turd that’s been bisected by a tyre.
Sheets of crumbling plasterboard and twisted MDF
and battered window frames in PVC minus their panes
of glass all lean against a blackened skip, empty
except for soggy ash. A sign that says No Fires!
Five playing-cards stuck to the path showing
a busted flush – the six, eight, ten and jack of clubs
and queen of hearts – under a sheet of fractured ice
beneath a pair of trainers hanging from the wires.
And just before the Post Office, a plastic wand
from someone’s pregnancy-testing kit showing two
fine strips of bright cyanic blue. Oh, I send you every blessing,
wish you all joy, and hope to God your wishes all come true.
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David Wheatley
Interview with a Binman
Would you say rubbish
has always been important
to you? Thinking back
to the rubbish you grew up
with, what first gave you the bug?
What qualities do
you look for in a rubbish
collection? Do you
work best in groups or alone?
Geoff Nobbs – genius or madman?
How do you keep your
rubbish fresh? Are you worried
it might run out? Do
you find it hard to let go
of? So what’s next for rubbish?
Tell me about some
of the rubbish you’re working
on now. When can we
expect to see this latest
rubbish of yours in the shops?
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David Wheatley
Visitors’ Centre
I am passing HMP Hull when I see a sign for ‘Visitors’ Centre’ and
go in. As quickly emerges, there is no exhibition area, interactive
display or café. I’ve misconstrued. Not that my idea of a visitors’
centre would be such a bad thing, as I explain, showing myself out.
A student of mine has worked in the prison, and I ask him whether
he has ever seen any violence or other dodgy dealings inside. He
drops some hints about complicity and how it gets passed on: if you
as a trainee witness an older officer doing something dodgy with a
con, do you report him or say nothing? That wouldn’t be for me to
say. There is a bar beside the prison called The Sportsman, which
features as a watering hole for prison officers in Robert Edric’s Hullbased thrillers. Surely this would cause tension with prisoners’
family members, who would also drink there, I thought. My friend
Mike confirms this, but tells me people have been known to get one
over on prison officers by reporting them for drink driving when
they leave the pub in an overly refreshed condition. The Sportsman
is a music venue, and among the bands playing there are The
Penetrators, two of whose members are siblings of Hull musician
Trevor Bolder, bassist in David Bowie’s Spiders from Mars alongside
his fellow Hull guitar legend Mick Ronson. On his Wikipedia page,
I learn that while on tour with the ‘Cybernauts’ Trevor Bolder
painted his face blue but then discovered the paint was semipermanent and would not come off. ‘Bolder had to sell his car to
raise the money needed for a specialist skin peeling process at a
Swiss clinic. To this day he still has traces of blue paint behind his
left ear.’
96
David Wheatley
Vacuous and Unknown
I used to be Irish. No, I take that back, but as my connection to the land
of my birth frays, if not entirely severs, I wonder how much longer I am
expected to keep up my routine of slouching round the world with my
performative gesture, my brogue, and my faggot of useless memories, to
paraphrase Louis MacNeice. I’d rather just keep it bottled up. Someone
complains in the pub about the government contributing to the Irish
bail-out, then begs my pardon, to which I say – fine by me, complain
away. I have to pay for it too, after all. When my Irishness does erupt, it
can take unexpected forms. Waiting to attend a gig here by my fellow
Brayman Dara Ó Briain one evening I saw him prowling the streets and
found myself saluting him with a hearty ‘Go n-eirí an bóthar leat
anocht, a Dhara!’, to which he replied ‘Go raibh míle maith agat’ (‘good
luck’, and ‘thanks very much’). Like the old man in Synge’s e Aran
Islands who told the author that there were few rich men in the wide
world not studying the Gaelic, Dara will have left, I hope, with a
newfound conviction that Irish is the Hullish vernacular of choice. One
of Dara’s routines is about national stereotypes, and involves inventing
characteristics for nations of which we know nothing. What about
Vanuatu, he asks, what are Vanuatans? Vacuous and unknown, comes
the reply, from an anonymous Vanuatu-hating audience member. Ah, to
be not just ‘Irish’ or ‘White Other’ (as they say on equal opportunities
monitoring forms), but ‘Unknown’. The great Darach Ó Catháin spent
many years down the road in the more conspicuously Irish Leeds (where
he was known as ‘Dudley Kane’), but to judge from a radio documentary
about him failed to integrate. Great artist that he was (the best sean-nós
singer of all, in Seán Ó Riada’s judgement), he chose not to break cover,
remaining camouflaged in the belly of the British beast. Unknown Irishspeakers of Hull, rally to the cause: join me not in exiles’ solidarity but
in shared and glorious obscurity. And when Irish ceases to be obscure
enough, let us move on to even more richly inscrutable tongues:
Quechua, Choctaw, Volapük. Dyuspagrasunki, yakoke, dan olik!
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Jane Thomas
Charles Dickens and Hull
Charles Dickens began his provincial reading tours in 1858 and first
visited Hull on 14 September of that year. His reception was so
enthusiastic that he was forced to promise to return, which he did
in 1869 less than a year before he died. His first reading was at the
Assembly Rooms in Jarratt Street, now the New Theatre.1 The Hull
News, 18 September, 1858 carried an appreciative report of the event:
The visit of this well-known and popular fictionist
attracted to the Music Hall, on Tuesday Evening, such a
numerous and fashionable audience as we have seldom
witnessed. Every part of the hall was well filled long before
8 o’clock, and for some time after Mr Dickens had
commenced his reading, the pushing and drumming
occasionally heard amongst those who were on the wrong
side of the door proved how many were excluded, and how
keenly they felt their disappointment. If an enthusiastic
greeting from such an audience, and an eager, unflagging
attention from first to last, may be accepted as evidence,
Mr Dickens’ admirers in Hull are by no means few or
indifferent. His CHRISTMAS CAROL was selected for the
evening’s entertainment, and was read throughout with a
voice and pronunciation so clear and distinct that every
word must have been perfectly audible to the most distant
corner of the crowded room. It was impossible to overlook
either the author’s complete acquaintance with the
characters he depicted, or the dramatic skill and success
with which he introduced them to his audience. Both the
story and the reading proved his indisputable claim to the
title which his works have long since earned him – the
genial, hearty world-famed master of smiles and tears.
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Tickets could be bought from Mr Robert Bowser, Manager of the
Assembly Rooms, and from Mr J W Leng of Saville Street, who
displayed a plan of the reserved seats. They were priced thus:
Reserved Seats
Second Seats
Orchestra (or Platform)
: 5s
: 4s
: 1s
The average weekly wage paid to an ordinary agricultural labourer
at this time was 11s 8 1/2d. Dickens always stipulated that a certain
number of cheaper-priced seats should be made available and was
keen to make his readings as inclusive as possible.
Dickens was delighted with his reception in Hull and described
the occasion, with characteristic hyperbole, in a letter to one of his
daughters:
The Hull people (not generally considered excitable, even
on their own showing) were so enthusiastic that we were
obliged to promise to go back there for Two Readings!
I have positively resolved not to lengthen out the time of
my tour, so we are arranging to drop some small places and
substitute Hull again and York again.
Arthur (Smith) told you, I suppose, that he had his shirt
front and waistcoat torn off last night; he was perfectly
enraptured in consequence. Our men got so knocked about
that we gave them five shillings apiece on the spot.
John passed several minutes upside down against the wall
with his head among the people’s boots; he came out of the
difficulty in an exceedingly tousled condition and with his
face much flushed.
For all this and their being packed, as you may conceive
they would be packed, they settled down the instant I went
in and never wavered in the closest attention for an instant.
It was a very high room and required a great effort.
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The Hull and Yorkshire Times reports that it was nearly eleven years
before Dickens visited Hull again, on his final provincial reading
tour in 1869. Arrangements were made for two readings on 10th
and 12th of March, 1869, with a visit to York scheduled in between
on 11th March. The advertisement read:
MUSIC HALL, JARRATT ST
Messrs Chappell and Co beg to
announce that they have made
arrangements with
MR CHARLES DICKENS
for
TWO FAREWELL READINGS
The only readings Mr Dickens
will ever give in Hull
On Wednesday evening, March 10,
1869,
when he will read his
‘BOOTS AT THE HOLLY
TREE INN’,
Sikes and Nancy (from ‘OLIVER TWIST’), and Mrs Gamp
On Friday evening March 12,
1869,
‘DR MARIGOLD’
and Mr Bob Sawyer’s Party
(from ‘PICKWICK’)
The second reading was cancelled however as Dickens was called to
attend the London funeral of a friend.
The paper reports that the readings were disappointing this time
around. Bookings were not up to expectations and the response was
less enthusiastic than it had been in 1858. It would appear that the
fault lay partly with Dickens’ agent who not only raised the ticket
prices to 7s, 4s and 1s, but may well have made a mistake in thinking
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that Hull could support two nights of Dickens. Tickets were available
from Messrs Gough and Davy, then located in Saville Street. A story
quoted in the Hull and Yorkshire Times for 8 March, 1941 describes
an interesting interchange between Dickens and a draper’s assistant
in Whitefriargate. The story is vouched for by a Mr W. G. B. Page,
an historian and librarian at the Reckitt Free Library, East Hull at
the time and is quoted in Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens: A Life.2
Whilst in Hull, Dickens reputedly called at the shop of a Mr Henry
Dixon, draper and hosier, at 28 Whitefriargate and asked to be
shown some ladies stockings which may have been intended for the
young actress Ellen Ternan, for whom Dickens had left his wife in
1858 and whose birthday he had celebrated in London a few days
before arriving in Hull. He was attended by an assistant – Edward
S Long – an old friend of Mr Page and, while Dickens was choosing,
the following conversation took place:
Dickens: ‘What do you do with yourself, young man, of an
evening?’
Long: ‘Well, I sometimes go to the theatre if there is a good
Shakespearean play on, or dramatic reading same as tonight; but it is by subscription, so I shall not be able to go.’
Dickens: ‘Why, have you read any of Dickens’ books?’
Long: ‘Oh yes, I have read most of Dickens’ books, and can
find many characters to fit them.’
Dickens then asked Edward Long which of his books he liked the best.
Long named several and was asked if he would like to go to the reading.
Dickens took out a visiting card and wrote on it ‘Please admit bearer’.
Needless to say, Edward Long was amazed when he turned over the card
and discovered the identity of his customer. When he went to his seat
at the reading he found that it was on the platform close to the desk
from which Dickens delivered his readings. Throughout the evening
the novelist turned to see how Edward Long was enjoying himself and,
apparently, deliberately chose passages from Long’s favourite books.
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The readings were timed to begin at 8.00pm and finish by 10.00pm
and the audience were ‘earnestly requested to be seated ten minutes
before the commencement of the readings’. The Hull Packet (now
the Hull Daily Mail) reported that despite the high admission there
was ‘a large and fashionable attendance’ and referred to the general
success of the entertainment:
How deep and intense is the impression these readings
make was evidenced by the breathless and almost painful
interest manifested. The story of ‘Boots at the Holly Tree
Inn’ and the sayings of the well-known Mrs Gamp deeply
interested and highly amused the audience. But the masterpower of Mr Dickens was manifested in his reading of the
selection from ‘Oliver Twist’ containing Fagin’s
communications to Bill Sykes of Nancy’s delinquencies and
the description of the murder scene.
It is ironic that the death of his friend prevented Dickens from
fulfilling his second engagement because at that time he himself had
just over twelve months left to live. The provincial reading tours led
to a complete physical breakdown from which he never fully
recovered. He died on 9 June, 1870 having been booked to read at
the Royal Institution, Albion Street, under the auspices of the Hull
Literary and Philosophical Society in the same month.3 Much
against his expressed intention, Dickens was forced, once again, to
disappoint his enthusiastic Hull admirers.
1
The foundation stone for the Assembly Rooms in Jarratt Street, Kingston Square was laid in
1830. It was known variously as the ‘Public Rooms’, the ‘Music Hall’ and the ‘Assembly Rooms’.
In 1891 it was gutted by fire and didn’t re-open until 1893. In 1897 the first motion pictures to
be seen in Hull were shown here and in 1919 the building was taken over by Morton’s Pictures
Ltd as a cinema, which proved to be an unsuccessful venture and by 1922 the Assembly Rooms
were used for dancing and social events, before becoming the property of the theatre syndicate.
Sometime before 1937 the front of the building was remodelled. The Georgian pediment was
removed and several additions were made including a canopy. By 1939 it was known as the
New Theatre, which was itself remodelled and modernised in 1985. Dickens’s reading is
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commemorated with a blue plaque. 2 Claire Tomalin (2012), Charles Dickens, A Life (London:
Penguin, Viking), pp.377. Tomalin places this incident in March 1869 during Dickens’ second
visit to Hull. Long’s failure to secure tickets seems odd given that this second reading was less
popular than the one in 1858. Perhaps Dickens was indulging in the old theatre trick of
‘papering’ ie giving out free tickets to ensure a decent audience.
3
The Royal Institution building in Albion Street is still standing, though in a somewhat
dilapidated condition
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Mary Aherne
Hope on the Horizon
My father’s family name being Wojciechanski, and my Christian
name Beatrycze, the people here could make of both names nothing
longer or more explicit than Bea. So, I called myself Bea, and came
to be called Bea.
When I first came here I had little or no English, and no money to
pay for lessons, so I set about collecting words from signs in shop
windows, advertisements on buses and labels on tins and packets of
food. I even collected words from the inscriptions on the gravestones
in the Western Cemetery through which I walked each day on my
way to work. I wrote the words down in my little notebook, looked
them up in the battered dictionary my father had given me when I
left Poland and repeated them over and over until I could remember
them. Some were easy and didn’t cause too much bother like beans,
bread, milk. The inscriptions on the gravestones opened a new world
to me and phrases like dearly departed; gone, but not forgotten, and
shed not for her the bitter tear, added a melancholy tone to my
acquisition of the language.
Collecting the words was absorbing, entertaining even; for a long
time I was as happy as a child collecting seashells on the shore.
Conversation was more difficult and didn’t always elicit the response
I anticipated. I decided to try out my skills with the woman at the
check-out in the Co-op where I bought my bread and milk. ‘I am
from Poland,’ I said to her with a bright smile, but she only shrugged
her shoulders and narrowed her eyes in suspicion. I tried speaking
with my supervisor. ‘You like work?’ I asked her. ‘Is mint, yes?’ It
was a word I’d picked up from the next door neighbour’s kid who
said it when I gave him a football I’d found in the park. My
supervisor pouted her lips, gave a little snort and then said it wasn’t
exactly the word she’d use to describe a cleaning job with the council
but hey ho. Then she carried on muttering in a disgruntled way but
it was impossible to understand what she was saying so I just smiled
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and nodded. Her words, I thought, were not so much like the glossy
shells my sister and I collected on the beach; they were more like
stones rattling about in an old tin bucket.
One conversation I learned to master early on was the one about
the weather. Everybody here is obsessed with the weather and
though it’s mostly grey and rainy (and not at all interesting) it seems
to dominate most conversations, providing everyone with the
opportunity to complain. When the sun eventually burns through
the grey veils of cloud they grumble that it’s too hot. Nodding sagely,
shaking heads in desperation, rubbing their hands together, you can
tell they enjoy this topic of conversation perhaps because it is safe:
it is one thing on which everyone can agree. I had expected a lot of
fog in England but I only saw it once on a snowy night in December.
It curled in from the river, crept through the streets and cast an
enchanted air about this melancholy northern town. ‘A right peasouper,’ Danny the security man said, with obvious relish.
I mostly worked nights after the performance when everyone had
gone home but I also did a couple of hours on Saturday afternoons
after the matinee. I had to clear the aisles and between the rows of
seats, and of course clean the toilets too. It wasn’t a particularly
fulfilling job but it was the only way I could earn a living here until
I could improve my English. They call the theatre the Hull New
Theatre even though the building is quite old and was built as the
Assembly Rooms in 1830 – I know this from the sign outside the
building. Viewed from the park the theatre looks like a Greek
temple, its walls and pillars white and smooth as icing; inside it is
all plush red velvet like a great cavernous womb. Sometimes I felt
quite proud to work there but would have preferred to sing on stage
rather than scrub its stinking lavatories.
Another plaque on the wall outside says that Charles Dickens gave
some readings here, but I was upset to see that the plaque was in
very bad condition, all peeling and rusting, so bad you could hardly
make out the words – because I know that Dickens was a very
important novelist and I had even read some of his books back home
105
in Poland in my father’s bookshop. But lots of things were broken
in this city – abandoned warehouses crumbling by the river and so
many houses near where I lived were empty and boarded up. They
said it was part of the new regeneration – that’s a word you saw quite
a lot on banners and hoardings next to the buildings they were
knocking down – and maybe that was true but I’ve seen a lot of poor
people on the streets and in the parks, and some of them are still
living in those boarded up houses.
When I cleaned the theatre I started from the top of the balcony
and worked my way down towards the stage. It was always dirtier
after matinees and musicals, maybe because more kids came and
audiences were bigger for those kinds of shows. On such occasions
the theatre held the warmth and breath of bodies crammed together
so that when I came to work the air was a fetid mix of sweat,
perfume and the fustiness of rain-damp overcoats. People scattered
popcorn, drinks cans and ice-cream cartons under the seats. Their
mess and carelessness disgusted me but I had to remind myself that
their untidiness created work for people like me so I gritted my teeth
and got on with the job.
What surprised me was the huge number of personal belongings
that the audiences left behind. They forgot bags and umbrellas,
dropped coins onto the floor, left spectacles, pens and lipstick by
washbasins in the toilets. I always read the writing on these objects
and mouthed the words to myself as I swept away the debris.
Elizabeth II, Specsaver, uni-ball, wonderlash. The variety of carrier
bags amazed me too. England seemed to be a nation not so much
of shopkeepers but of carrier bags – Tesco, Sainsbury, medium pink
bag, large brown bag, old bag, and, my favourite, bag for life.
Hope on the horizon was a phrase I picked up from Danny who
liked to read out the headlines to me from the newspaper. These
were the words of a politician who believed that Hull would be
saved by foreign companies building factories here. They needed
foreign companies to save them? I was shocked and if that was the
case then what was to become of me, my job at the theatre and all
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the hopes I had for my future? I imagined hope as a tiny boat
bobbing on the horizon trying desperately to find its way through
the treacherous murky currents of the Humber. I don’t know if the
people were particularly convinced by the politician’s words but we
all needed reassurance and I too wanted to believe that there was
hope on the horizon.
One night, after I’d filled five big black sacks with rubbish and had
just about finished tidying up I spotted a book under a seat at the
end of Row B. I imagined a student stowing it away carefully at the
start of the performance and then absentmindedly walking away
without it. Or perhaps some old biddy – a term I learnt from Danny
when a coach-load of them arrived from Grimsby to see Ladies’
Night – who, in the crush to leave the theatre at the end of the
performance, had forgotten all about it. The book was very beautiful,
bound in soft dark green leather with gold lettering and intricate
designs on the spine, the edges of each page brushed with gilt. I ran
my fingers over the cover, flicked through the silken pages and,
breathing in their musty smell, I was instantly transported back to
my father’s old bookshop where I had spent so many happy
childhood days.
Behind me the entrance door creaked open and when I turned
round with a start I saw Danny bumbling down the red-carpeted
steps towards me. In my confusion I slipped the book back into a
spare carrier bag, just to keep it safe. I’m not the kind of person who
keeps the things they find. Why would I do that? And besides, I
knew if I wanted to do well here I’d have to be careful. I wanted to
say something to Danny but my throat was dry, my tongue as stiff
as cardboard. I fussed about with the black sacks and felt the colour
rising to my cheeks.
‘Hello. Very nice weather we have. Not-bad-for-the-time-of-year,’
I recited mechanically feeling like an idiot.
‘What’s up wi’ you lass? You look like you seen a ghost.’ Danny’s
voice is rough but his eyes are gentle and his smile is broad.
‘No-rest-for-the-wicked,’ I say, repeating a phrase my supervisor
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loved to use but the mangled words slithered like slugs from my
mouth.
‘You don’t sound too well, lass. If I were you I’d be gettin’ off home
now. You’ve done enough work for tonight,’ he smiled kindly.
I wanted to show him the treasure I’d found. I wanted to tell him
about Kraków and my father’s second hand bookshop in Stare
Miasto. About the hours I’d spent as a child curled up on the window
seat on the top floor reading book after book. To tell him that I
hadn’t really wanted to come here but I needed the work, how much
it broke my father’s heart the day I left. I wanted to ask him if he got
lonely at night sitting in his cubby hole, waiting for night to pass,
hoping that nothing terrible would happen.
‘Yes. You get home and have a nice cup of tea, lass. I’ll lock
up here.’
Tea. The great British panacea.
I rack my brains for something friendly to say but the words slip
from my grasp like water through my fingers. So I just smile and
nod and hope I’ll be able to hold back my tears until I get home to
my tiny bedsit on Chanterlands Avenue. I offer him the box of
Maltesers I’d found on Seat 22, Row M and he takes it with a smile
then scoops up the black plastic sacks for me and strides away up
the theatre steps whistling a tune from Footloose, the show that was
on that night. While he takes the rubbish to the bins I change out of
my overalls and pull on my coat and outdoor shoes. By the time I
get back to the foyer he’s at his post, checking screens, tapping a pen
on his desk.
‘You still here?’ he asks cheerfully.
Once again my tongue is tied so I just take the book from the bag
and show it to him.
‘What’s this then?’ He takes the book from me, riffles through the
pages. ‘Great Expectations,’ he reads, ‘by our very own Charles
Dickens. Dream on, pet. Dream on,’ he says, but he continues
flicking through the pages, reading some of the passages to himself,
smiling at the illustrations, just as my father might have done. I long
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to talk to him about my father in his bookshop, how he used to read
Dickens to me at bedtime, how much I miss my home but going
back now would amount to failure.
Danny shuts the book with a snap.
‘Lost property,’ he says the words slowly as though speaking to a child
or an idiot. ‘Take it to Marjorie and she’ll put it with lost property.’
I nod and turn away but I know I don’t want to let go of the
precious book just yet. I will keep it for tonight then hand it in to
Marjorie tomorrow where it will take its place alongside all the other
unclaimed objects – amongst the forgotten umbrellas, the mislaid
scarves, the forlorn spectacles and mismatched gloves.
Crossing the little park in Kingston Square I am startled by a
fearful man in coarse clothes, with broken shoes and an old rag tied
about his head. I almost cry out but then realise it is just the sad
homeless man who sleeps there most nights under the canopy of
trees. He comes close enough for me to smell his dog-breath and see
the wild look in his eye.
‘Lend me some money, can you?’ he barks.
Clutching the book tightly to my chest I fumble in my pocket and
draw out some coins. ‘Here,’ I say, stretching my palm towards him.
His grimy hand snatches the money from mine.
‘I’ll pay you back,’ he says shuffling back to his bench. ‘You’ll see.
I’ll pay you back.’
His words echo round the square behind me as I hurry on my
way down Albion Street. But I’m thinking, as Danny might say, in
your dreams, kid. In your dreams.
109
Mary Aherne
birds
she is on the bench
again outside the punch
in the grey hungover
haze of monday morning
hooked claws tear
ragged crusts
from a crumpled bag
to thrust into her own
slack lips and suckle
or toss like maundy
coins to a cockered flock
chirring and shitting
at her unwashed feet
like courtiers nodding
and bowing they pay
homage to their queen
rise and flutter, fall
off her shopping trolley
her thoughts are far
away have migrated
somewhere south
forgotten to return
and then suddenly
old half-remembered
hurts rise to the surface
peck at her ravaged cheeks
emerge to ruffle feathers
she howls her pain
fukken … fukken…
the words soar
110
and shriek like hungry gulls
shattering the surface
of a drifting town shuffling
about its business
circle overhead
then float discarded
into darkened corners
settle and nestle
like torn-out feathers
rotten leaves
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Maurice Rutherford
Second Thoughts
Perhaps there is a positive response
I could have made: think of how Dickens walked
the paths of London and its waterfront
compiling his cartography of lanes
and lives in poverty, the griefs and joys
of folk whose patois separated them
from others of their ilk six streets away;
their trades or occupations and the smells
that advertised which workplace turned out what.
So when in 1858 he came
to read in Hull, would he not also walk
our wharfs and alleyways? Why, yes, of course!
Say that we’ve now reached 1938,
Charles Dickens comes again, he takes my arm
as we retrace his steps round Sammy’s Point
then leave the Humber bank, to explore north
along the river Hull that ‘halves the town,’
he notes, ‘to separate these warring smells.’
Sickly molasses, petrochemicals,
guano, malt and hops, hides, nauseous fats
defining east and, to the west, ripe fruit
and cattle markets’ muck combining with
cowled smokehouses’ and fishmeal’s pungencies.
From Beverley we see a trawler launch
112
‘High Hopes!’ downstream to berth in Princes Dock
for fitting-out across from Lipman’s shop
where Wilberforce stands tall. And here we part,
he to his audience, I to 2012
where streets, docks, tailor’s shops and monuments –
fresh breezes too – stamp Hull as greatly changed.
What hasn’t changed, and doubtless never will,
is our delight in eponyms: Heep, Scrooge;
how mums on rainy days still take a Gamp.
It was my pleasure, Sir, this day with you,
enriching as the truths faced in your works,
books kept with love, and loved ones shared through Scope.
Painting: Nude with Top Hat 2 by Cliff Forshaw
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Contributors
Mary Aherne is completing a PhD at the University of Hull. She has edited and
contributed to a number of anthologies including For the First Time, A Box Full of
Aer, Pulse, Hide and Postcards from Hull. She is currently working on a collection
of poems and short stories inspired by her time spent as writer-in-residence at
Burton Constable Hall.
Aingeal Clare has written for e Guardian, e Times Literary Supplement,
London Review of Books, and other journals. She recently completed a PhD at the
University of York.
Cliff Forshaw’s publications include Trans (2005), A Ned Kelly Hymnal (2009),
Wake (2010) and Tiger (2011); Vandemonian, is due from Arc in September 2012. He
has held residencies in Romania, Tasmania and California, twice been a Hawthornden
Writing Fellow, and won the Welsh Academi John Tripp Award. His paintings and
drawings have appeared in exhibitions in the UK and USA. He teaches at Hull.
Ray French is the author of two novels, All is Is Mine and Going Under. They
have been translated into four European languages and Going Under has been
optioned as a film in France and adapted for German radio. He is also the author
of e Red Jag & other stories and a co-author of Four Fathers. He teaches Creative
Writing at the Universities of Hull and Leeds.
Kath McKay writes short fiction, poetry, reviews and articles. She has published
one novel, one poetry collection, and poetry and stories in magazines and
anthologies. She contributed to Hide and Postcards from Hull. She teaches at the
University of Hull.
Carol Rumens has published a number of collections of poetry, including Blind
Spots (Seren, 2008) and De Chirico’s reads (Seren, 2010). Her awards include the
Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize (with Thomas McCarthy). Holding Pattern (Blackstaff, 1998),
was short-listed for the Belfast City Arts Award. She has published translations, short
stories, a novel (Plato Park, Chatto, 1988) and a trio of poetry lectures, Self into Song
(Bloodaxe Books/Newcastle University, 2007). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of
Literature.
114
Maurice Rutherford, born in 1922 in Hull, spent his working life in the shiprepairing industry on both banks of the Humber. And Saturday is Christmas: New
and Selected Poems was published in 2011 by Shoestring Press. A pamphlet, A Flip
Side to Philip Larkin, is due from Shoestring in September 2012.
Valerie Sanders is Professor of English at the University of Hull, a specialist in
Victorian literature, and author of e Tragi-Comedy of Victorian Fatherhood
(Cambridge UP, 2009).
Jane Thomas is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Hull. She
specialises in the work of Thomas Hardy, late Victorian literature and the visual
arts. Her interest in Dickens in Hull was sparked during a five year period working
as the Director of Community Education for Hull Truck and Spring Street Theatre
during the 1980s. She is the author of two monographs on Thomas Hardy.
Malcolm Watson is an artist living in Hull. He was encouraged to continue writing
poetry by Philip Larkin while reading for his first degree in English at the University
of Hull. He has been widely anthologized and has won prizes in many competitions,
including in the National Poetry Competitions of 2006 and 2008. He won first prize
in the Basil Bunting Awards 2010, first prize in the Stafford Poetry competition 2011
and first prize in the Cardiff International Poetry Competition 2011. In 2012,
Malcom won first prize in the Larkin and East Riding Poetry Competition.
David Wheatley is the author of four collections of poetry with Gallery Press:
irst (1997), Misery Hill (2000), Mocker (2006), and A Nest on the Waves (2010).
He has been awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and the Vincent Buckley
Poetry Prize, and has edited the work of James Clarence Mangan for Gallery Press,
and Samuel Beckett’s Selected Poems for Faber. His work features in e Penguin
Book of Irish Poetry, and he reviews widely, for e Guardian and other journals.
115
Acknowledgements
All photographs are by Cliff Forshaw.
Earlier versions of Cliff Forshaw's ‘Bush Ballads’ appeared online in
EnterText 7.2 ‘Human Rights, Human Wrongs’ (Brunel University, 2007)
http://people.brunel.ac.uk/~acsrrrm/entertext/issues.htm
Designed by Graham Scott at Human Design, Hull.
Printed by Wyke Printers, Hull.
116