Postcards from Hull by Culturenet

Postcards from Hull is an anthology of work by writers and artists who have been inspired to write about the city of Hull: its history, architecture, location, people and special character. The book is a commission for the Humber Mouth Festival 2011 and is accompanied by a set of twelve postcards.

Postcards from Hull

ver My Love m Quarter! It’s ne Geese in theMuseuHull. Like a lonely city dull in mythological slow fly past churns at dusk a barge in aiths float past against the tide. WrEscape on a stray windows in the fog. evrons, as far away cygnet’s trail of che. North Sea breezes... from Hull as possibl e Humber cuts. I’ve the breeze from th the City of Despond. grown quite fond ofcloses I cycle to Victoria When the Museum ee-er. Gazing out to Pier. The foot is frney, a distant swingsea. Cranes, a chim oks. bridge. Sling your ho Yours, as ever –

PostcardsfromHull Mary Aherne Aingeal Clare John Wedgwood Clarke Cliff Forshaw Ray French Janis Goodman Kath McKay Christopher Reid Carol Rumens Maurice Rutherford Malcolm Watson David Wheatley

PostcardsfromHull

edited by Mary Aherne

Foreword Postcards are simple, everyday, ubiquitous rectangles of visual and verbal communication. They cross the globe daily with brief and often poignant messages of love, joy, amusement, disappointment or heartbreak. Even in the twenty-first century of text and twitter we still send them, stick them on fridges, pin them to boards and use them as bookmarks. They can be tasteful or tacky, dull or creative, thoughtprovoking, vulgar or just plain silly. In this collection the writers and artists have tapped into Hull’s very unique mythology and have produced poems, tales and images that reflect the richness of the city’s character. Viewed from a number of unusual angles - the cycle path, the top floor of the University library, the back of the rag and bone man’s cart or from under the Humber bridge – the work in this collection provides the reader with an alternative and fresh take on an old city. A number of images from the anthology have been produced as postcards and it is our hope that these cards will find their way to as many far-flung places as possible around the world. It has been a great pleasure editing this anthology and I wish to thank both Hull City Arts and the University of Hull for their generous support for this project.

Mary Aherne

A Humber Mouth Special Commission 2011. First published in 2011 by Humber Mouth Hull City Arts, Central Library, Albion Street, Hull. This edition copyright ÂŠ Humber Mouth 2011 and the University of Hull. Copyright of individual poems, stories and images resides with the writers, photographers and artists. Humber Mouth 2011 acknowledges the financial assistance of Hull City Council and Arts Council England, Yorkshire. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written consent from the publisher or contributors who hold the copyright. Requests to publish work from this book must be sent to the copyright holders. ISBN: 978-0-9545686-5-8 2

Contents John Wedgwood Clarke...... Imaginary Piano.................................. 4 Victoria Pier......................................... 5 Malcolm Watson................... Leviathon............................................ 7 Arctic Corsair – H320......................... 9 Librarian.............................................. 11 David Wheatley.................... Air Street Fugue.................................. 12 Rag and Bone Man’s Mild................... 16 Ray French............................ Stranded.............................................. 19 Visions of Hull.................................... 21 Kath McKay........................... Tales from the Cycle Path 1................ 22 Tales from the Cycle Path 2................ 24 Maurice Rutherford............ Carnegie Heritage Centre................... 26 Carol Rumens....................... Lumen de Lumine............................... 27 March, Pearson Park........................... 28 Remote Bermudas: Three Fantastical Hull Islands............ 30 Aingeal Clare........................ Old River Hull..................................... 32 Janis Goodman.................... Geese by the River Hull...................... 33 Etching by Janis Goodman and poem by Cliff Forshaw Cliff Forshaw........................ MYTHOLOGICAL HULL Bridge.................................................. Faun..................................................... The Humber in Peacetime.................. Centaurs.............................................. The Humber in Wartime & Mythological Hull...............................

34 35 36 37 38

Mary Aherne......................... The Deep.............................................. 39 Christopher Reid................. Postcard to Hull.................................. 40 3

Imaginary Piano Someone has drawn an eye on the library window with a pencil rubber, a ghost eye that hovers over a tower block lowered like a chandelier into evening trees. What is the bridge doing over there? I should know, by now, my upstream from down, my left from right, without turning to a childhood piano to find my way. A tiny light goes out in the hospital. One day my son will hear me struggle to say the ways that have led me here, as I once heard my father and knew how far he was from home, his words like a lonely city at dusk where the cars burrow on and never arrive. Top Floor, Brynmor Jones Library John Wedgwood Clarke

Victoria Pier A barge in slow fly past churns against the tide. Low dock buildings blank the lonely. All the more reason for mid-afternoon lovers to look and be seen through. A pillar of chalk unfathoms the mud, paper boats unfold into documents lost in weary dock water â&#x20AC;&#x201C; these I have seen. It is more cove than city, far-sighted to name loss in the offing, talking to itself from great distances. Its gauges tell of a god who rises up cellar steps, still as battery acid, who hatches the fry of desire in her throat, her speech a tidal frenzy. Daily, from factories, chalets and caravans sail between hedges to colonise new plots of earth on loan.

John Wedgwood Clarke

Leviathan Wraiths float past windows in the fog. Inside, recorded whalesong echo-sounds glass cases, navigating dusty cabinets full of flensing knives and blubber spades and hooks and great saws sailors used to stop pack-ice from crushing ships like eggs. Lines of harpoons adorn the walls, alongside marlin spikes, seal picks and narwhal horns for walking sticks. The whalesong swims below the great rough spine of a right whale skeleton, weaves through her ribs and asks you to remember how they caught her calf to lure her to the harpoons’ points, the miles of rope and half a dozen boats that stopped her sounding to the depths. The killing’s done with lance-blades, riven to and fro inside her heart and lungs, until her chimney goes afire and she blows a monstrous mast-high spout of blood. Time cracks and grinds like ice besetting ships for months in Arctic cold. At night, stars blaze like diamonds from the telescope; the moon rises from the baleen trinket box, the roaring sea pours to the floor from drawers, cases and cabinets that bump open the museum door. The whale slips past the forlorn seamen’s mission, the last surviving deep-sea trawler, foghorns on the Humber sands, until its singing echoes in the rusting blubber pots and broken casks on Arctic strands, the Davis Strait and Greenland’s shore to hunt the million ghosts that boom and click and sing no more.

Malcolm Watson

Arctic Corsair – H320 On deck, you will forget the few steps from the High Street To the quiet muddy mooring. Below, you think you can imagine Being tossed from bunk to floor, the pitch and roll an everlasting Waltzer or the biggest rollercoaster at the Fair. But no. You’ll never know Cheerful and dreadful goodbyes to the wife and kids, landlubbers still In Rayner’s or The Halfway House. You will not sling on board a lifebuoy Made of superstitions about Fridays, pigs, your right foot, cats, cutting hair, Redheads, the colour green, whistling and never looking back. You won’t Have seen the wreaths and roses on the tide beside the Bullnose every year. The fishroom echoes with the names of St Romanus and Ross Cleveland, Kingston Peridot.* The radio’s electric crackle clambers down the rungs Of SE Iceland, Faeroes, Fair Isle, Cromarty, Forties, Dogger and the Humber Mouth back to St Andrew’s Dock. These distant water men, these ordinary, Extraordinary men, have seen the shores of Newfoundland and Greenland Rise and fall, the White Sea’s Arctic ice, been rammed by gunboats, ridden Swells of fifty feet. And still they wait for pension pittances, since they Signed on separately each trip. Casual labour. No long-term contracts, see? No proper records. And still the politicians casually protract, prevaricate About these ordinary, extraordinary men who casually froze and casually Bruised and casually broke and casually drowned. Ask the old men. Ask them about the deadly cold, the storms, the laughing in the mess room, Their leaping hearts to lift the leaping silver bounty of the sea. * In January and February 1968, these three Hull deep-sea trawlers sank in atrocious conditions off Iceland with the loss of 58 lives.

Malcolm Watson

Librarian I met him once, when I had lost my carrel key. Stumbling out of the Queen’s one July afternoon, thinking someone should turn that sunshine down, I pulled some change out of my jeans to see through squinty eyes my key fall in slow motion, bounce off the kerb and tinkle through the grating of the drain. I didn’t tell him how I’d lost it when I saw him in the library. He just said, ‘You should Have taken better care if it. I’ll have to charge you 50p.’ Of course, I’d seen him at the poetry nights with Dunn, O’Brien, Didsbury and so on at the Station or the Bull or Polar Bear, and hovering about at do’s while some big name like Robert Lowell read. He once said of my stuff that ‘Mr Watson is on the right track, and one can only hope that he goes on’. Where to, he didn’t say. As far away from Hull as possible, no doubt. I later read that he had said to Dunn, when he was working as his Deputy, ‘There’s far too much student poetry here. It’s your job to stamp it out.’

Malcolm Watson

Air Street Fugue and it breathes

and it twitches

and lives

an industrial eclogue rancid yet green odour of flowering skullcap the air powder-coated and shot-blasted into textures

of marvel

circulated recirculated sculpting themselves to my lungs here where green-jacketed young offenders

shackled in pondweed clear the drain and a green thought abolishes all that’s mard moorhens nest and the locked-in Alsatian plants the strawberry of its snout under the fence the padlocked cemetery will not have you alive or dead and what of it bury yourself in the air your steps repeat themselves

as you go in your skull

you have been

way before now

there is only left

over this

so much concrete to cover the cracks

when even the tanner’s yard’s turning up green the algae and oxidised pipework festering green of which

I ask you what

does it mean

to love

dereliction

if not

seeding this cherished boredom more of itself and only these few to show for it all the whimper but the sex fiends here beyond

of who users

with ever stale blooms

and vagrants

street lights and CCTV or if not if only escape on a stray cygnetâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s trail of chevrons follow me writ in water then into the briars and asylum gained with barely a splash

David Wheatley

Rag and Bone Manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Mild after Baudelaire Past the blue of the takeaway light grilling flies for tea, where North Sea breezes roll in, rattling the glass, out of some blind alley where the tide of squalor rises daily, comes, nodding his head, obscurely wise, a rag and bone man, punching the walls as he goes, flicking the law the finger on his patch and holding forth to all from his royal coach. Shouting the odds, he puts the world to rights, gunning for wrong â&#x20AC;&#x2122;uns but looking out for mates: huge on the throne and slicing the sky in half, What a top bloke I am, he tells himself. 16

Canny lads, dodging social services, do his bidding, as charming as they’re vicious, and chuck the fridges, tellies, bikes, on back, all Bankside’s indiscriminate bric-a-brac, and so wind home, merry and victorious, hailing their way down back-street terraces. Every last tattoo’s a campaign medal for these veterans of old scrap metal, with yards as rich as Ali Baba’s cave awaiting them and a fry-up on the stove, and then a night on the tear to music pounding, the lasses game, the pub-crawls never-ending. Lubricating this daft life of theirs, singing his exploits through their drunken roars but needing only froth before he’s crowned, flows king mild, a rich brown river current, the balm of idlers, stopping their mardy gobs till chucking out time when they phone for cabs to dump them home to sleep – but who needs sleep when there’s mild to drink, dark and true and deep!

David Wheatley

History On May 5th, 1888 the Wild West Show gave its final performance in England at Hull. The next day the members of the show boarded the Persian Monarch and set sail from Alexandra Dock. She left without a few of the passengers. Three Lakota Indians, including the famous Holy Man Black Elk, missed the boat. They spent several weeks in Hull (at one point all of them were arrested before being released without charge), before signing up for one of the many other Wild West Shows that were so popular at that time.

Stranded Tonight, the Battle of the Little Big Horn is being fought again in Hull, inside a big top pitched on Corporation Field. This is the last date of the world-famous Wild West Showâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s tour of Britain. Tomorrow they sail to Europe for a further three months of performances, before returning to America. Black Elk only has a small part in the show. His job is to lie face down in the arena, pretending to be a dead Indian. This is not the most demanding or satisfying role, and while he lies there he thinks back over the last eight months. Until he toured America and Britain with Cody, he could never have imagined such vast cities, so many buildings; the streetlights so bright they blotted out the stars. The more he sees, the more he understands that the future belongs to the white man. In a few minutes Cody will gallop into the arena on his white horse to save Custer. The crowd will cheer and stamp their feet, rise from their seats, throw their hats into the air. It is not enough that the future belongs to the white man, he also wants to own the past. Black Elk fought in the Battle of the Little Big Horn as a young man. He gets to his feet, brushes the dirt from his hands, throws his warbonnet to the ground. He walks out of the arena, past the gaping faces in the front row, pushing past Nate Salsbury, Codyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s manager, who asks what the hell he thinks heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s doing, yelling at him to get back in there and lie down and pretend to be dead, goddamit. As he steps outside, the wind from the Humber cuts him like a sharp blade. He senses something to his right, turns to see the coyote watching him. It is over a year since he last appeared, Black Elk is glad to see he has returned; it must be a sign. When the coyote sets off across the field he understands that he must follow. This is how Black Elk finds himself stranded in Hull in the Spring of 1888.

Ray French

Visions of Hull Black Elk and Rippling Brook create quite a stir when they enter the dining room of the Royal Station Hotel for the interview with Frank. They move with regal grace through the tables, dressed in beaded deerskin jackets and colourful belts, their plaited hair cascading down their backs. At first the interview goes well. Rippling Brook, currently appearing in Mexican Joe’s Wild West Show in Doncaster, translates for Frank. Black Elk talks of his childhood, the history of his people, how much he is enjoying his time in Hull. Children follow him everywhere here, even though he is not their father. He laughs heartily, as does Rippling Brook when he translates. Frank smiles too; despite their legendary stony-faced demeanor, the Indian race apparently enjoy a joke. Then the interview takes a very queer turn. Black Elk closes his eyes, raises his face to the ceiling. He speaks slowly, with great deliberation, in a voice of the utmost gravity. Frank turns anxiously to Rippling Brook. ‘He is recalling a vision,’ he tells him. He seems to think this explains everything. The three of them are now attracting considerable attention from the other diners. ‘He says that his friend the coyote took him up on a cloud high above the world and showed him the future. He saw death raining from the sky over Hull, fire eating the city below. Years passed in the time it takes to put on your moccasins, then he saw the fishermen fight a war for control of the sea with the men who live on ice. But they were defeated, the boats no longer left the docks, and a terrible sadness filled the people. They walked along the empty quays, looked down on the rusting vessels, hung their heads and wept. Years passed in the time it takes to say your name. They built a great palace where the old shipyard used to be, filled it with fish from every country in the world. The people swarmed into this palace. They gazed in wonder, remembering the time of plenty, and were happy once more.’ When Black Elk finishes Frank thanks the two of them, puts away his notebook and says goodbye. He likes them both a great deal, but he’d never heard such rot in all his life. There was no story here. Ray French

Tales from the Cycle Path 1 In April, as I am about to board the 7.23 a.m. Leeds to Hull train, my fully laden bike rack snaps. At 8.30, in Hull City Centre, I’m balancing the pannier on the handlebars, and walking in search of a bike shop. A man directs me to ‘Bob’s Bikes’ on Beverley Road. As I breathe in lorry fumes, the shop sign beckons. A man (I see him as my saviour) waves me up a ramp, into his cathedral. ‘Bicycle Emergency,’ I call. I wait for the response, the laying on of hands. Make me mobile. Yellow light streams through big windows. Bikes perch on stands. There are hooks and pumps and helmets and that smell of WD40 that catches under your nose. ‘Now then, let’s see what we can do.’ He holds up a piece of metal, says there’s something missing. With dextrous fingers, twists on a plastic tie: ‘That’ll get you to work. But mind you get it fixed properly.’ He’ll only accept £2.00: ‘I’ll put it towards my lad Stuart’s charity ride.’ A map on the wall traces the route: ‘From Mull to Hull.’ ‘We did the Trans Pennine Trail last year. Both ways.’ He’s Mike, the owner, and part of a group that look after the Hull side of the Trail. On Wednesday evenings they run tandem rides for the blind. Thousands of workers used to cycle from the factories each day, he says. ‘They called us Bicycle City. Now young ones aspire to a car, and all that has gone.’ ‘Some in the Avenues look down on us for riding,’ he adds. ‘Think we’re poor.’ He stares into the distance, then perks up. With rising petrol prices, more people are dusting off bikes they’ve had in their garage. ‘They ask us to fix them up. It’s good to see them out on the roads again.’ All over Bicycle City, there are bike shops respoking wheels, mending punctures, oiling chains, adjusting gears, and raising saddles as children grow. These are the real priests of a place, the fixers, the healers. This is the city’s cadence, its beat: the movement through air of a smoothly running wheel. Kath McKay

Tales from the Cycle Path 2 The day I learn my sister is dying, I visit the Museum of Street life Cycle Gallery. My sister’s a midwife, and has brought thousands into the world. ‘The joy of cycling’ poster greets me. A rider whizzes down a hill, wind in their hair. On bikes, parents take their families camping, with trailers housing tents, camping stoves, sleeping bags. Children pose, foot on the pedal of their first tricycle. I have a photo of me, aged three, ready for the off, the world suddenly bigger. I repeat the names on display: Chopper, Moulton, Roadster, Raleigh, Carlton, Sturmey Archer 3 speed, BSA, Hercules, Phillips, Raleigh, BMX. Place foot on pedal. Press down and under, up and round. In WW2 American troops were dropped into combat with quick release folding bikes. In WW1 there were battalions of Cyclist Volunteers. There are photos of Bicycle Polo, a game for ‘those who couldn’t afford the expense of a horse, to enjoy the excitement of the game.’ Now we have paramedics and police on bikes. And last year community midwives from Barts Hospital in London got back in the saddle. I am drawn to a Triplet cycle . I have three sisters. Then there’s the cycle from the Royal Normal College for the Blind, in which only the second rider from the front is sighted. I close my eyes and imagine the sensation of cycling blind. Place foot on pedal. Press down and under, up and round. Repeat. My sister has always been out in front. First to give birth, and marry, emigrate, return, her hands cupped to catch babies, and us. And now she’s pedalling into the dark. In 1968 she became a ten pound Pom and sailed from Southampton to Fremantle. By the time she came back, I was pregnant. At the airport, she put her hands on my belly, and later, showed me how to breastfeed. A gallery attendant tells me he did a module on nineteenth century cycling for his degree, and that ‘A lot of it was about class.’

When the museum closes I cycle to Victoria Pier, and stare at choppy water. She was on the ship for five weeks, round the coast of Africa, past Cape Horn, through the Indian Ocean. She’s been in hospital five weeks. I’m cycling towards a future without her. I’ll be the eldest sister now. Her husband will keep on pedalling to the hospital, until she comes home, and then one day afterwards, he’ll get back on his bike. Riding for the train, on Spring Bank I see a man pushing a bike on which he is balancing a large sofa. We shoulder loads. We put our foot down, and carry on. Kath McKay

Carnegie Heritage Centre Anlaby Road, Hull Carnegie? Yes, I’d know it at a glance, though Mother called it West Park Library. ‘Just ask the lady for a light romance.’ A shrine of silence with that age-old smell, brown leather spines, stern, guardant, bidding ‘Hush’ in golden lettering – The Citadel by A.J. Cronin quickly comes to mind. But quicker still the day when, curious I flicked through Mum’s returning book, to find erotica, a cameo I keep: a builder and his bride, their wedding night – the little struggle, then they fell asleep. Out, Rover, Wizard, Hotspur, sling your hooks! I’ll seek my heritage in Adult Books. Maurice Rutherford

The Night School, Edgar Bundy

Lumen de Lumine The pillar of creamy gold fire is losing height, hollowing out its tallow to resemble a disobedient lily-of-the-field (whoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s making notes on oxygen and light) or a modest brain in melt-down to the atheistic model, consumed by loss of omen and intent.

Carol Rumens 27

March, Pearson Park Victoria, so young, so white, so modern for 1854, seems reassured: the people in the People’s Park deserve her, and, revels quarantined by calico and carriage-drive, have earned their prophylactic – beef, beer and Madame Genevieve’s rope-trick. ‘The foot is free-er, and the spirits more buoyant when treading the turf than the harsh gravel’ said Zachariah Pearson, speculator, bankrupt shipper and philanthropist, who squared things with his conscience, on reflection, bath-chaired beside the unattractive lake. In early spring the trees’ wrung hands implore winter to stop it; the forsythia’s tiny oilskins drip, and the bedding-plants are sat in rows in railed-off, graveyard rectangles, dim-eyed as board-school children. If they blossom – a primula here, a dwarf iris there – the only colour’s royal, unreal purple. Two teenagers beside the listed fountain play some new kind of netless badminton. The bright white fan-tail of their shuttle-cock takes off, lands, takes off, its flight-path slow as slo-mo through the February-ish air.

Carol Rumens

Remote Bermudas: Three Fantastical Hull Islands Greengingerland Crouched at a table you’re too big for, you look up from your colouring, beckon me over. You’re working on a map and I propose that bright green-orange shape is a spice island in the Humber not quite, but not un-, familiar. We sit and draw together. Whether I’m your child, or you are mine, the lesson keeps us calm. We voyage kindergartened, happy as coloured pencils to have found, pace the rage of the prelates, an archipelago of tender states.

Keats’s Reach Your name flowed here eventually; it was seen in the meadow-blue shore-water, the broad spine, the quinqueremes of shades and shadows. Many have rushed to autograph this river: the simplest took themselves for messages, bottled their tongues, and threw. Some watched the little death-sacks kick against impure translucence: a taut, miraculous, floating air-pocket or two would linger like the notion of safe passage, and sink without a “pop.” Barbarians taught us the steadfast stars are gas-bags, dead or dying. 30

The Campus of Time-Enough The world and time were green, and up to us – literature students, who’d hung on and on beyond the age of literature and students. The broad-leaved foliation of the fittest draped the roof-beams, and from what remained of the roofs, rolled weedy gardens, un-mowable. The lecture halls were host to mites and stalagmites. Ideas were moss in board-rooms without windows, let alone Windows. Still in our early teens, it seemed we were wrinkled as tortoises, so shy and slow, we’d never kissed. We’d never said hello. Carol Rumens

Old River Hull Behind the Northern Extraction Plant, the oil works, the cold stores and the fishery, the river has broken its contract with barges and ledgers. It creeps like a rumour between the men who used to work here, who slouch now over pints of mild while their grandchildren play chicken near roads, immune to comfort. Cranes, a chimney, a distant swing bridge, all the buckled furniture of trade has been set out in the sun to be towed away. No one will take it. Along these mudbanks, an old man takes a shortcut from the Neptune to his bungalow and disturbs a fox fight in a glue factory outhouse. The city has been hollowed out, inverted: this is its fossil heart.

Aingeal Clare

Geese by the River Hull by Janis Goodman

Geese in the Museum Quarter Never seen them here, these geese, nor heard the slap of their cold feet on this quayside beside the superannuated hulk of the Arctic Corsair. I swear, I’d remember if I’d seen them here. September, I’ve heard them honk, looked up to see them print the sky with loss. Or used to. No need for them to leave us now, if they, like so much else, were never really here.

Cliff Forshaw

MYTHOLOGICAL HULL – Poems and Paintings

Bridge ‘Is a bridge made of iron or desire?’ Vicente Aleixandre. Deepwater. Twenty-two miles Spurn Point to Hull. Maybe thirty upstream to where Ouse meets Trent, and freshwater slicks a fifth of England’s soil to mud and riverrun. Here, the Hull, Ancholme, Derwent lose themselves. And the Humber, heavy with plunder, bears all their tributes to salt, gravity, sediment. Tidal, turbid: health rude as any fat brown god fed on eroding clay, plate-scrapings, Holderness. Here, inter-tidal, mud flats and sand-bars form dunes, lagoons, salt marsh, samphire beds. Upstream, away from that salt, reed beds thrive, fringe estuary with hidey holes in the tide’s back-wash. Listen! Wind catches that high-strung lyre. Curlews and avocets, harpies and griffins slip under the wire. Cliff Forshaw

Faun Alarmed. His iPhone’s ring-tone’s more mash up thrash-metal meets fire-siren moan than Debussy after Mallarmé: l’après-midi d’un faune. Snorts awake under the amphibrach of the bridge, stares the estuary out, wonders ‘What if…?’; cracks the Tennant’s, sparks the day’s first spliff. Above, cars busying into or out of Hull. Soon be dark enough to caper out, on the pull.

Cliff Forshaw

The Humber in Peacetime

Centaurs in Love on the Banks of the Humber

The Centaurs Meet Under the Statue of King Billy to Discuss War

The Humber in Wartime

Mythological Hull It was never dull in mythological Hull, but no one was ever who they seemed. That bloke in the pub, was he half-man, or just half-mad? And your dad, but of course, that stallion was half-horse, and was his other half mare, mer- or just barmaid.? We were half-fish: tadpole, toad (we put the crap in crapaud), shape-shifting higher and higher up our wish-lists. Listening to each poetâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s shaggy tale we did the maths, remained one hundred and ten percent non-gullible, all of us full, full to the gills with cock and bull. Cliff Forshaw

Looming Deep in ocean reverie and gazing out to sea, a leviathan of steel and glass picassoes from a jut of land and thrusts its snout into an infinite gull-scattered sky. Shadows of a legendary past – shipyards, blockhouses, a floating isolation ward – writhe, entombed beneath its sequinned bulk. Fêted, famous for its millennial style, it dwarfs statues and domes, the clustering cranes and spires with its sky-piercing profile. Edgy, cool: the jagged pile shows up for miles. Yet deep within the belly of the beast a thousand Jonahs shuffle back in time, get to grips with hands-on audiovisual displays and feast their eyes on deadly sharks while damselfish slip through jungled weed, and skeletal dinosaurs sleep fossilized in walls. Here is reef existence. Who knows what lies beyond the tanks and pools, the echoey halls and brine-steeped tunnels? The creature shimmers feigned indifference but who knows what it feels, this seeming cold fish, down deep? Mary Aherne

Postcard to Hull Wryly remembering our misconceived, two-year fling, which ended, I trust you’ll agree, less in grief or acrimony than with a resigned ‘Ah, well…’, I’m using this space to tell you you’re much on my mind still. I bear you no ill-will. Why should I? You were kind enough, in a manner that could be gruff – though no personal slight was meant, so I’ve nothing to resent. Nor would I presume to dispraise your brusque weather, your sullen ways, your flatness, your terraced sprawl – so glumly non-vertical – that both prompts and repels pity, your pining for the heart of the city that the Luftwaffe bombed and burned,

Spurn Lightship, Cliff Forshaw

your air of having been spurned by not just the likes of me but the twenty-first century. In fact, I commend and bless all such dourness and doggedness, and dare even hope I may have picked up some of those traits for my own use. So thank you, my dear, for our brief and botched affair. At least you’re now no more what you were, to my shame, before: just a place that fate had shoved to the margins and nobody loved, a mere cartographical blip on the Humber’s long upper lip, or a name that cropped up in bad news; and, while I may never choose to live there, I’ve grown quite fond of the City of Despond.

Christopher Reid

Biographies Mary Aherne is a PhD student at the University of Hull. She has edited and contributed to a number of anthologies – For the First Time, A Box full of After, Pulse, Hide - and has twice been shortlisted for the Hookline Novel Competition. As writer in residence at Burton Constable Hall she is writing a collection of poems inspired by the Hall and its inhabitants, past and present. Aingeal Clare has written for The Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books and other journals. She is currently completing a PhD at the University of York. John Wedgwood Clarke is UK and Ireland poetry editor for Arc Publications. He is also director of the Beverley Literature Festival and Bridlington Poetry Festival and teaches poetry on the part-time creative writing degree course at the University of Hull. In 2010, he was short-listed for the Manchester Poetry Prize and commended in the National Poetry Competition. Cliff Forshaw’s publications include Trans, and three recent chapbooks: A Ned Kelly Hymnal; Wake; and Tiger. He lives in Hull where he paints and teaches at the University. Cliff’s website is: http://www.cliff-forshaw.co.uk/ Ray French is the author of two novels, All This 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 The Red Jag & other stories and a co-author of Four Fathers. He teaches creative writing at the Universities of Hull and Leeds. Janis Goodman has worked as a printmaker in Leeds for over twenty years. Her work is exhibited in a wide range of galleries in Yorkshire. Her etchings feature in Roofs and Branches which was produced by The Gallery in Masham.

Kath McKay has recent poetry in Smiths Knoll magazine, and short fiction in Migration Stories, Crocus Books, Manchester. She has published one poetry collection and one novel. She has also published short stories and poetry in magazines and anthologies. She teaches creative writing at the University of Hull. Christopher Reid was for two years Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Hull. His Selected Poems will be published later in 2011. Carol Rumens has published fifteen full-length collections of poetry, the most recent of which is De Chiricoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Threads. Her awards include the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize (with Thomas McCarthy), a Cholmondeley Award and the Prudence Farmer Prize. She has published short stories, a novel, Plato Park and a collection of poetry lectures, Self into Song. With Ian Gregson she has edited Old City, New Rumours, an anthology of poetry by writers with Hull connections. Maurice Rutherford, born in Hull in 1922, spent his working life as a technical writer in the ship-repairing industry on both banks of the Humber. His collections of poetry are: Slipping the Tugs; This Day Dawning; Love is a Four-Letter World; a pamphlet After the Parade. And Saturday was Christmas: New and Selected Poems was published in 2011 by Shoestring Press. 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. In recent years, he has won prizes in many competitions, including commendations in the National Poetry Competition in 2006 and 2008. Malcolm won the First Prize in the Basil Bunting Poetry Awards 2010, and First Prize in the Stafford Poetry Competition 2011. David Wheatley is the author of four collections of poetry with Gallery Press, Thirst (1997), Misery Hill (2000), Mocker (2006), and A Nest on the Waves (2010). He recently edited Samuel Beckettâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Selected Poems 1930-1989 for Faber and Faber. He teaches at the University of Hull. 43

Acknowledgements Artwork Thanks to the Ferens Art Gallery: Hull Museums, for permission to reproduce The Night School (1892), oil on canvas by Edgar Bundy. John Wedgwood Clarke........ Imaginary Piano Victoria Pier Malcolm Watson.................... The Maritime Museum Arctic Corsair â&#x20AC;&#x201C; H320 Librarian Janis Goodman ..................... Geese by the River Hull Maurice Rutherford .............. Carnegie Heritage Centre Cliff Forshaw ......................... Humber Bridge Faun The Humber in Peacetime Centaurs in Love on the Banks of the Humber The Centaurs Meet under the Statue of King Billy to discuss War The Humber in Wartime Spurn Lightship Postage Stamp Photography Cliff Forshaw.......................... Cover & pages 2, 15, 23, 25, 26, 39 David Wheatley......................Page 16

Postcards from Hull

PostcardsfromHull Mary Aherne Aingeal Clare John Wedgwood Clarke Cliff Forshaw Ray French Janis Goodman Kath McKay Christopher Reid Carol Rumens Maurice Rutherford Malcolm Watson David Wheatley