Under Travelling Skies

Under Travelling Skies departures from Larkin poems, stories and pictures about Hull and beyond from the Humber Writers

UNDER TRAVELLING SKIES Departures from Larkin edited by Cliff Forshaw

Kingston Press

Published with the assistance of The Larkin25 Words Award and The University of Hull

Under Travelling Skies

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 A Larkin25 Words Award commission.

Individual poems, stories and articles © the authors unless specified.

Images © John Wedgwood Clarke: pages 82, 86, 88, and 111; Cliff Forshaw: cover, all photographs and pages 27, 39, 67, 92, 105; Malcolm Watson: pages 18, 23, 26, 31, 37, 58, 75 and 102.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publishers.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired or otherwise circulated, in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, without the publisher’s prior consent.

The Authors assert the moral right to be identified as the Authors of the work in accordance with the Copyright Design and Patents Act 1988.

ISBN 978-1-902039-19-0 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: kingstonpress@hullcc.gov.uk www.hullcc.co.uk/kingstonpress Printed by Butler, Tanner & Dennis, Frome, Somerset, UK. 2

Under Travelling Skies

Contents 6 Foreword 8 17 19 22 26

30 33 38 42 43

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James Booth Far Away from Everywhere Else: Larkin and Hull Maurice Rutherford Absences Here 2012 Cliff Forshaw Still Here David Wheatley Bridge for the Dying: Dispatches from Larkin’s Hull 1 Carol Rumens Bibliomythos English Bridges The Whitsun Awayday Spurn Head Malcolm Watson Philip and the Monsters Keyingham, Midwinter 1898 Kath McKay Craters, lava plains, mountains and valleys Sarah Stutt Notice to Mariners Scat Singing in Pearson Park Christopher Reid The Clarinet Malcolm Watson Blues at the Black Boy Saint Helen’s Well, Great Hatfield, Holderness Four-Minute Warning: Kilnsea Maurice Rutherford Friday Des Res Kingston Upon Hull 3

Under Travelling Skies 50 Cliff Forshaw Gone 54 Carol Rumens After a Deluge Shades Almost True: A Guided Walk through Larkin’s Cottingham Reinscriptions Coats 61 Kath McKay “Not Much Evidence of the Docks” Coupling Carving it up On the train Reading Philip Larkin 66 Mary Aherne Down in the Dumps 68 Carol Rumens Squibs 71 John Mowat Larkin’ About in Hull His Almost Funny Valentine Snaps Like a Crocodile 76 Mary Aherne A Walk Through Beverley 80 David Wheatley Bridge for the Dying 2 89 Kath McKay The Curtain 93 John Wedgwood Clarke Wander 95 Ray French Elsewhere 103 Cliff Forshaw The Bohemian of Pearson Park Dead Level

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Under Travelling Skies 108 Mary Aherne Quadrille 110 David Wheatley Erosion 111 Contributors’ Notes

Artwork John Wedgwood Clarke 82 Winter Sea, Cornelian Bay. Oil on canvas, 27”x 22”.

86 Freighter (Ravenscar). Oil on canvas, 27”x22”.

88 Fishing Gear, Scarborough Harbour, Squall . Watercolour, 7”x5”.

111 Cornelian Bay (low tide). Oil on canvas. 36” x 24”.

Cliff Forshaw 27 Humber Bridge. Acrylic on canvas, 39” x 12”.

39 Spurn Lightship. Acrylic on canvas, 32” x 40”.

67 Spurn Lightship Variations. Digital image.

92 Another from the Myth Kitty – Larkin Surprised by Aphrodite on the Humber. Acrylic on canvas with gold-coloured wire and shells, 50” x 40”.

105 Sketch for Another from the Myth Kitty – After a Bibulous Lunch, Larkin Stumbles on Some Hippies and Mistakes Them for the Retinue of Dionysus. Acrylic on canvas with wine corks, 50” x 40”.

Malcolm Watson 18 Look downward, Angel, down Cemetery Road. Collage on card, 11½” x 11½”.

23 Cherry Cobb Sands Road, Stone Creek . Acrylic, pen and ink and coloured pencils on paper, 10½” x 14 26 Shelved. Fibrepen and coloured pencils on paper, 11½ x 14½”.

31 Lonelier and lonelier... and then the sea. Collage and gouache on embossed paper, 12” x 12”.

37 Sunk Island Sands. Acrylic on canvas, 39¼” x 31¼.

58 Complimentary/Complementary? Acrylic on Card, 11½” x 11½”.

75 Inside Out. Collage on Card.,11½” x 11½”.

102 Purple Haze. Graphite and gouache on embossed paper, 12” x12”.

All photographs and overall design: Cliff Forshaw 5

Under Travelling Skies

Under Travelling Skies: Departures from Larkin Foreword The Humber Writers are a loose group of poets and fiction writers associated with the University of Hull. Many teach or have taught in the English Department, and Carol Rumens and Christopher Reid have both been Professors of Creative Writing there. Over the years members of the group have collaborated on a number of projects specifically focused on Hull and its neighbouring landand seascapes, often resulting in books and performances for the Humber Mouth Literature Festival: A Case for the Word (2006); 6

Under Travelling Skies Architexts (2007); Drift (2008); Hide (2010); and Postcards from Hull (2011).

Larkin25 was a unique cultural programme, celebrating the life, work and legacy of the poet, novelist, librarian and jazz critic Philip Larkin twenty-five years after his death. The Larkin25 Words Award continues this celebration by supporting the development of literature in Hull and the East Riding and it is a great privilege for our group to have won the first commission for Under Travelling Skies. It has been a pleasure editing this anthology and I would like to thank all the contributors for rising to the challenge. Here we have not only poems and stories but essay and reminiscence; we look at Larkin’s life and times in Hull, but also venture further afield to Larkin’s other haunts in Beverley, in Holderness and along the coast. We look at what those places meant to him and his contemporaries, and what they mean to us – and we hope to you − now.

There are many, apart from the writers here, who have made this project and the accompanying film and exhibitions possible, and I would particularly like to thank Graham Chesters and Rick Welton and The Philip Larkin Society as a whole; John Bernasconi at the University of Hull Art Gallery and Kate Crawford and Emma Dolman at Artlink for organising the exhibitions; Charlie Cordeaux, Jo Hawksworth and Kit Hargreaves at Holme House Media Centre, University of Hull who helped me make the film.

Many thanks also to the University for its continued and generous support to the Humber Writers.

Cliff Forshaw, Hull, May 2012.

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James Booth Far Away from Everywhere Else: Larkin and Hull Some writers celebrate the places where they were born or lived and are embraced by them. They become identified with a city, a region, a tribe, a nation: Hardy with Dorchester and Dorset, Dickens with London and the Thames ports, Dylan Thomas with Swansea and Wales, Heaney with Anahorish and Ireland. Local commercial, political and tourist interests have long been accustomed to brand their locations by appropriating a national or international figure as one of their ‘sons’. The Lake District claims Wordsworth, Stratford-on-Avon claims Shakespeare, Lichfield claims Dr Johnson. Dorcestrians feel an intimate pride that Thomas Hardy is one of their own. In contrast, when the Larkin Society promoted the idea of a statue in Hull station there were 8

Under Travelling Skies loud complaints that the poet was a posh southerner with no roots in the city. He wasn't born here; just listen to his accent. He got a job in Hull purely by accident. He didn’t even like Hull. Even those inhabitants of Hull who are pleased that Larkin lived and worked here for so long, do not feel the tribal intimacy with him which a favoured son usually elicits.

Larkin always denied that he was ‘at home’ anywhere. ‘No, I have never found / The place where I could say / This is my proper ground, / Here I shall stay…’ Rootlessness is intrinsic to his selfimage as a lyric poet. Attempts to claim him on behalf of Hull, or even of England, never quite work. One of his keynote poems, ‘The Importance of Elsewhere’, written just before his move to Hull, concerns his fear of returning from the anonymous freedom of his life in Belfast, where he lived from 1950 until 1955, to the threatening responsibilities of England. He had been ‘Lonely in Ireland, since it was not home’. Nevertheless somehow ‘strangeness made sense’: His existence was ‘underwritten’ by this elsewhere. In Ireland he had permission to be separate, and felt ‘not unworkable’. Back ‘home’ in England, he has no excuse of difference: ‘These are my customs and establishments / It would be much more serious to refuse.’ He will be forced to toe the line.

It is amusing to see how Seamus Heaney misconstrues this poem: ‘during his sojourn in Belfast in the late (sic) fifties, he gave thanks, by implication, for the nurture that he receives by living among his own’. Heaney’s is an organically tribal sensibility, and he imagines that Larkin must be tribal also. But Larkin had nowhere where he felt ‘nurtured’ by being among ‘his own’. Though he hated abroad in one sense, in a wider sense he is perpetually ‘abroad’ in the world.

Nevertheless, anywhere is always somewhere, and ‘elsewhere’ and ‘nowhere’ are lexically rooted in ‘here’. Larkin cannot avoid topography. Indeed his poems contain a select but intense gazetteer of real places. These places are, however, always first and 9

Under Travelling Skies foremost ideograms of inner states of mind, or cultural stereotypes: Coventry where his childhood was unspent, Oxford where he had to account to the Dean for ‘these incidents last night’, Dublin where afternoon mist drifts round race-guides and rosaries, Leeds, home of chain-smoking salesmen, Stoke where Mr Bleaney’s sister has her house. During his early years in Hull, when he was as he put it ‘living the life of Bleaney’, Hull became a symbol of his ‘failure’ in life. His verdict, in a letter to Monica Jones of September 1955, was damning Dearest, Back to this dreary dump, East Riding’s dirty rump, Enough to make one jump Into the Humber – God! What a place to be: How it depresses me; Must I stay on, and see Years without number?

– This verse sprang almost unthought-of from my head as the train ran into Hull just before midday. I’m sure no subsequent verse could keep up the high standard. Pigs & digs rhyme, of course, likewise work & shirk, & Hull & dull, but triple rhymes are difficult.

There is something infectiously euphoric about this jaunty doggerel. Reading between the lines, he was wondering whether he might do worse than spend his life in this place. He already had a ‘subsequent’ version of this glum celebration in his mind. Six years later this poem was to see the light in the form of the sumptuous and magical ‘Here’.

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Under Travelling Skies ‘I don’t really notice where I live’ Larkin said in an interview, ‘as long as a few simple wants are satisfied – peace, quiet, warmth – I don’t mind where I am. As for Hull, I like it because it’s so far away from everywhere else’. He effectively found his proper place when in the autumn of 1956 he rented a third storey flat at 32 Pearson Park from the University. The room was reserved by the University for new members of staff while they looked around for something better. But, once he was installed, Larkin never looked further, and spent the rest of his writing life in transit. This was for him the most creative of situations: high up in a rented attic on the edge of things.

So, when, five years later, in October 1961, he wrote his great poem of place, he called it not ‘Hull’, but ‘Here’. Hull, as it was in the 1950s and 1960s is a recognisable element in the poem: its ships up streets, slave museum, consulates, tattoo shops and grim head-scarved wives. Its inhabitants, a ‘cut-price crowd’, are precisely observed as they push through plate-glass doors to their desires: ‘Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced lollies’.

But it is also aesthetically distanced: a universal ‘pastoral’, if an unorthodox ‘terminate and fishy-smelling’ one. This ‘urban, yet simple’ world has the same idyllic innocence as Theocritus’s or Virgil’s artificial visions of nymphs and shepherds. Though the ostensible medium is social realism, Larkin’s vignette of Hull is also an archetype of the social existence of all readers, wherever our particular ‘here’ may be.

As the poem drives towards its goal the reader becomes aware that this city- and landscape is invironment as much as environment. From beginning to end the poem is a restless quest across country, never stopping for breath until it reaches the sea.

Life, the poet is aware, is an ever-moving point of consciousness; we have nothing else. Wherever we may be in a Larkin poem we are always here. Similarly, as the speaker of an early work euphorically reassures his beloved, ‘always is always now’. The 11

Under Travelling Skies largest vista in his work, the seascape in ‘Absences’ is an ‘attic’ in his head. Even more adverbially and relativistically it is an attic ‘cleared of’ him. The end of ‘Here’ takes us to the same sublime place as ‘Absences’, where bluish neutral distance ends the land suddenly and we find ourselves contemplating ‘unfenced existence: / Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach’.

Are we questing outwards, from the enclosure of a railway carriage, to the roads and shops of the town, to vast empty skyscape? Or are we questing inwards from traffic all night north through the busy social world of the city into solitude and silence?

Either way, time is lost in place. There are no events; only an undated present. The clock has stopped. Larkin was aware in October 1961 that his life had reached its zenith: its central moment of balance. He had entered his fortieth year and things would never be better than this. In the workbook the poem was originally entitled ‘Withdrawing Room’, the archaic form of ‘drawing room’, imaging the ever-moving moment of being here as the most intimate of the rooms into which we withdraw (or which withdraw from us). Stanza is the Italian for ‘room’ (usually in the plural, stanze: a suite of rooms). In this patterned stanza-form Larkin has found a comfortable poetic withdrawing room of his own, to match his literal room in Pearson Park.

As he said, Hull is far away from everywhere else; even further away in his day, when it took four or five hours to reach London by train. Like Belfast, Hull was an elsewhere which made him feel welcome by insisting on difference. Belfast had been a ferry journey away, but Hull was almost equally secluded, at the end of the railway line with only the North Sea beyond. It is: ‘On the way to nowhere, as somebody once put it... Makes it harder for people to get at you... And Hull is an unpretentious place. There’s not so much crap around as there would be in London.’ Even the ‘salt rebuff’ of the Northern Irish accent is replicated in the local Hull dialect which makes ‘phone’ into ‘fern’ and ‘road’ into ‘rerd’. At a 12

Under Travelling Skies Philip Larkin Society dinner held in 2010 to raise money for the erection of Larkin’s statue, Maureen Lipman stood beside a fibreglass toad in the form of Philip Larkin and declared, in her best Hull accent, that this was the first time she had ever shared the stage with a ‘turd’.

‘Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel’, written in 1966, five years after ‘Here’, shows Larkin evoking the same poetic territory of Hull and Holderness. But the mood has shifted. He was now well into his forties and the warm social perspectives of his Whitsun Weddings period were being replaced by the mannered inwardness of his late style. This may be the Royal Station Hotel in Hull, but it is also a metaphorical plight, like that of Kafka or Beckett, in which we wait for our trial to begin, or for Godot to arrive. In the deserted hotel lounge, the speaker contemplates the headed paper, ‘made for writing home’, and interjects in lugubrious parenthesis ‘(If home existed)’. At the conclusion of the poem we withdraw inward, as in ‘Here’, in contemplation of the North Sea coast. But the sublime daylight of the earlier poem is replaced by moody crepuscular gloom: ‘Night comes on. / Waves fold behind villages.’

Older and with the shades falling, Larkin took his inspiration from a more ominous Hull location. Seven years later than ‘Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel’, in 1972, as he approached 50, he completed ‘The Building’. The opening catches an exact visual impression of the ‘lucent [honey]comb’ of the yellow-lit Hull Royal Infirmary on the Anlaby Road. But this image of a ‘cliff’ of light, surrounded by ‘close-ribbed’ streets, like ‘a great sigh out of the last century’, is also extravagantly romantic. In one of the most remarkable rhetorical coups of twentieth-century poetry dull reality becomes poetic dream as the death-bound patients are tantalised by the poignantly inaccessible vision of ‘Red brick, lagged pipes, and someone walking [...] / Out to the car park, free’. There, outside the hospital is the gorgeous normality of traffic, children 13

Under Travelling Skies playing, and, in an elegiac metonym of life as glamorous as anything in Yeats: ‘girls with hair-dos’ fetching their ‘separates from the cleaners’. Everyday things take on the glowing, inaccessible loveliness of an image on a Grecian Urn or a mythical Byzantium.

In an acknowledgement of the fact that he had indeed, in his own contradictory and provisional way, found his proper ground in Hull, Larkin did, in one late poem, take upon himself the uncharacteristic role of a local spokesman. ‘Bridge for the Living’ was written to a commission from the Hull construction company, Fenner, for words to a cantata marking the completion of the Humber Bridge. As one might expect, his heart was not fully in the task. He told Anthony Hedges, Reader in Composition at the University, who wrote the music, that he ‘felt more like writing a threnody for the things he loved about the region which the bridge would put an end to.’ Nevertheless the poem is a not unattractive example of the genre of the topographical poem. The words are well suited to a musical setting, and the sections (summer and winter, before the bridge and after), are easily apprehended. The register is a rhetorically heightened pastiche of ‘Here’, with elevated diction: ‘Isolate’, ‘parley’, ‘manifest’, and with fugato chiming effects: ‘Tall church-towers parley airily audible, / Howden and Beverley, Hedon and Patrington.’ The description of the suspended single span of the bridge, ‘The swallow rise and fall of one plain line’, is itself, appropriately, one plain line. The poem’s ending again recalls ‘Here’. But where that poem culminated in a vision of unfenced existence, out of reach, ‘Bridge for the Living’ ends by ‘reaching’ grandiosely ‘for the world’. * * * In his recently published selection of Larkin’s poems Martin Amis contrasts the life of his own father, Kingsley, who he takes to have been a true ‘bohemian’, with that of the ‘nine-to-five librarian’, 14

Under Travelling Skies Larkin, who, in his version: ‘lived for thirty years in a northern city that smelled of fish (Hull – the sister town of Grimsby).’ Here in Hull, Amis believes, Larkin, wifeless and childless, lived out a personal history of sad ‘gauntness’ with ‘no emotions, no vital essences, worth looking back on’. The aridity of his life, Amis tells us, ‘contributed to the early decline of his inspiration.’ He ‘siphoned all his energy, and all his love, out of the life and into the work’; he had ‘no close friends’. Martin’s father, Kingsley Amis, had never visited Hull during the whole 30 years that Larkin lived here. Like father like son.

Those who were closer to Larkin than either Amis do not recognise this version. Larkin was by all accounts an empathetic friend, an entertaining companion, and a passionate and loyal lover. He did not produce a young Kingsley Larkin, which might have softened Martin Amis’s verdict. But no one enjoyed ‘the million-petalled flower of / Being here’ more intensely than he, even in Hull. With his haunting sense of life as an insecure passing moment it was Larkin, not Amis, who was the true bohemian.

Reading the poems tells one as much. His inspiration declined not because of sterile provincial inertia, but because he had been burnt out by the crowded intensity of his imaginative and emotional life.

In 1982, three years before he died, Larkin was induced, a touch reluctantly, to write a one-page foreword to an anthology of local poets, A Rumoured City: New Poets from Hull, edited by his colleague in the Library at the time, the Scottish poet, Douglas Dunn. He had now spent the best part of three decades in Hull and his tone is mellow and retrospective. He revisits the conclusion of ‘Here’ for a final time, this time in a glowing prosepoem: When your train come to rest in Paragon Station against a row of docile buffers, you alight with an endof-the-line sense of freedom. Signs in foreign languages 15

Under Travelling Skies welcome you. Outside is a working city, yet one neither clenched in the blackened grip of the industrial revolution nor hiding behind a cathedral to pretend it is York or Canterbury. Unpretentious, reticent, full of shops and special offers like a television commercial, it might be Australia or America, until you come upon Trinity House or the Dock Offices. For Hull has its own sudden elegancies.

People are slow to leave it, quick to return. And there are others who come, as they think, for a year or two, and stay a lifetime, sensing that they have found a city that is in the world yet sufficiently on the edge of it to have a different resonance. Behind Hull is the plain of Holderness, lonelier and lonelier, and after that the birds and lights of Spurn Head, and then the sea. One can go ten years without seeing these things, yet they are always there, giving Hull the air of having its face half-turned towards distance and silence, and what lies beyond them.

Once again the topographical Hull of social realism is doubled by a more elusive Hull of the mind, on the way to nowhere, far away from everywhere else. The face of this Hull is half-turned, in airy, beautiful phrases, towards distance and silence, and what lies beyond them. And what is that, one might ask. Larkin’s relationship with the city is exactly caught by Martin Jennings’s great statue on Paragon Station. The poet rushes out of the hotel bar, larger than life, off balance but very much alert to the here and now. He holds his manuscript under his arm and casts the dark shadow of his anxieties before him. But there ahead, a few seconds away, forever waiting for him to board, is the train which will take him from this elsewhere to the next. Always is always now.

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Under Travelling Skies

Maurice Rutherford

Absences

My parents, seen through mist that brings them near, blurred grans and aunts who peopled Perth Street West, Chant’s Ave, back when … I brush away the blear: they die again, with siblings, and the best school pal I ever had at Park Street Tech., lost wartime army mates and all the rest including those forgotten, as the wreck of self erodes my brain. Discrepancies — flawed fluency of thought — the loss of rhyme and rea… Where was I? … Ah, yes … absences …

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Here 2012 Were Philip Larkin now alive there’d be, as passengers arrive by train at Hull, no sculpted Bard to greet them in the station yard, no Trail. They might instead explore a sparsely-peopled large cool store; not Toads, but more of cut-price lives, of jobless men from raw estates sustained by part-time-earning wives and hand-outs from their working mates to whom the poet’s of small account nor does his death itself amount to more than’s carved in stone. And yet this voice whose lines they can’t forget remains in town to quicken blood of folk far from Hull’s gull-marked mud who may themselves be on short-time but head for Paragon each year in thrall to what he left in rhyme, and find him, out of reach, still here.

Malcolm Watson: Look downward, Angel, down Cemetery Road 18

Under Travelling Skies

Cliff Forshaw

Still Here

This is the future furthest childhood saw Between long houses, under travelling skies ‘Triple Time’

You’d hardly recognise some parts, though other streets would take you back between the bombers and the planners.

We needed then, of course, a brand new start; those times would soon be history, we thought.

The shining future was already overdue the day you lugged your case of shirts, socks, suits, books, LPs, spare specs, those Soho mags; that struggling with umbrella, flapping mac − all the impedimenta of being you.

We may have lacked the phrase, but, boy, we knew, before your train stopped shy of our docile buffers, we were already ready. It was time to move on, the day you hailed that cab at Paragon.

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Under Travelling Skies That waste ground in the middle distance could, just about, proclaim that brand new start.

The past had gone; the future lay in wait.

And now? The past clings on, and on, and on, down ten-foot and outside large cool store alike.

The past is never over: it isn’t even past.

And when the future finally turned up here, we felt it both too slow yet far too fast.

It wasn’t what we’d seen back then, playing on waste-ground in imagined silver-suits: protein capsules, the four-hour week, jet-packs; the dreams of winged de Loreans, marinas, sex.

Tomorrow’s World so suddenly vacuum-packed; now was full of nothing. So was the past. * He would have known the old dry docks, the frosted extravagance of the Punch and, a street or two behind, the plain Dutch: the miscegenation of honest-to-God austerity with municipal baroque, aldermanic fantasies of marble and mahogany, leather-upholstered, overstuffed portraits.

Nostalgia, that’s Greek for ‘home’ and ‘pain’.

Home is where the hearth was: is always in the past.

What he thought he knew were ships up streets, but his cold northern ships, historic moons, candles, cobbles was one long false start, full of sentimental cruelty, like many a family, or ‘prentice poetry.

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And all the while a part of us still sits in the back seat of a half-timbered Morris Traveller or squeaks the leatherette of a Hillman Imp, is intent on the dials set in the walnut fascia or peers into the future through the broken wipers of a Jowett Javelin up on bricks in the drive − that’s us forever asking ‘Are we there yet?’

Steamy Sunday windows, Bisto, mint from the allotment, dads breezing back from swift halves, the fizz of Cherryade, Family Favourites: Osnabrück, BFPO, Auntie Ethel and Uncle Ted in Alice, Sydney, or Upper Hutt, En Zed. Is this untrumpeted arrival our long-awaited destination?

Are we there yet? Is this, at last, the place we dare call home?

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Under Travelling Skies

David Wheatley

Bridge for the Dying 1

Bubonic Plague The case of former paratrooper Christopher Alder was much in the news when I moved to Hull in 2000. He had died in police custody, and the arresting officers were tried for unlawful killing, allowing him to asphyxiate without coming to his aid; the case ended in an acquittal. There was a racial dimension too, with allegations of monkey noises having been made over Alder as he lay on the floor. Now eleven years later he is in the news again as we learn that the body buried under his name in Western Cemetery, on Chanterlands Avenue, is not his after all but that of a female pensioner. The possibility of an exhumation is complicated by the fact that when the plot was last opened, it was to allow the scattering of his niece’s ashes over ‘his’ coffin. I know the cemetery well, as will anyone who has seen the 1964 Monitor film of Philip Larkin briskly cycling through it. In one overgrown corner is a mass grave for the Irish victims of a Victorian cholera epidemic, in another the elaborately inscribed headstone of Captain Gravill, Captain of the Diana, the ill-fated last whaler to sail out of Hull, wrecked off Greenland in 1866. Not far up the road is Northern Cemetery, in whose children’s section I have spent lugubrious half-hours inspecting the teddy bears and balloons. In fact, the necropolises of Hull are all too well known to me: the Jewish cemeteries on St Ninian’s Walk and beside the Alexandra Hotel, the overgrown and fenced-off plots of Sculcoates, the city-margins reliquaries of Eastern Cemetery and its ‘columbarium’, in which I stumbled on the grave of a bubonic plague victim, died 1916. How does a Hull teenager catch bubonic plague in 1916? A bubo is a swollen gland, but a bubo bubo is an eagle owl, that splendid creature, an example of which used to live 22

Under Travelling Skies up the road from Eastern Cemetery in the village of Paull. I imagine the complex traceries of bone that must make up eagle owl pellets. Let each bone be numbered and identified. Vole, fieldmouse, shrew. Let our remains too be mourned over according to our various rites, in our various graves: inscribed, communal, mistaken, nameless, unknown.

Malcolm Watson: Cherry Cobb Sands Road , Stone Creek

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Under Travelling Skies Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing ‘Perhaps a maritime pastoral /Is the form best suited /To a northern capital’, writes Tom Paulin in ‘Purity’, from his second book The Strange Museum, a collection strongly marked by his time as an undergraduate at the University of Hull. Hull may not be a northern capital, but when attacked in the Blitz it was referred to by the BBC, for security reasons, as ‘a Northern city’. This appears to have sown some confusion in Berlin, where Lord Haw Haw mentioned the bombing of Gilberdyke, a hamlet fifteen miles upstream, under the impression that it was in Hull. Tom Paulin has written a lot about the war, and I think of him when I find the story in Gillett and MacMahon’s History of Hull (OUP, 1980) of ‘one public official, of moderate importance, who had formed a fascist cell’ in the 1930s but withdrew to Northern Ireland when the war broke out. (With his strong views on Larkin, Paulin might be reminded of Larkin’s German-admiring father Sydney, who waited until the day war was declared to take down the Nazi regalia adorning his office at Coventry City Council.) Reaching pensionable age our Northern Irish refugee wrote to Hull City Council demanding his due and was told to return to Hull to collect it, the intention being to arrest and intern him. Before he could do this he was killed in Belfast by a German bomb, a turn of events that may have caused him some mixed feelings in the splitsecond of his death. In more recent times, a Hull Nazi of sorts found himself in trouble with the law for distributing holocaustdenying literature, and skipped bail to the United States, where he unsuccessfully sought asylum before being deported back to prison in the UK. Paulin’s ‘Purity’ ends with a vision of a crowded troopship in the distance, ‘Its anal colours /Almost fresh in the sun’, a ‘pink blur /Of identical features’. Purity of heart is to will one thing, said Kierkegaard. There’s a lot more of it about than he suspected.

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Under Travelling Skies House Clearance When Philip Larkin died, the house in Newland Park he shared with Monica Jones stayed just as it was in his lifetime. The brave souls (not many) who dropped in on Jones in later life have described the testing mix of odours that hung in the air, and the Miss Havishamesque creature camped amid her nests of empties and curdled Terry and June-era décor. Hundreds of Larkin’s letters lay strewn round the house, many stuffed down the back of a sofa.

A sad end. When Monica died, the house was cleared. The Larkin Society worked the place over, and the resulting harvest of papers went to the Bodleian. A builder was then told to empty the property. Imagine the surprise of the Larkinites when the builder announced he had found a notebook with jottings of unpublished Larkin poems. How could this have happened? Had he removed it during Jones’ lifetime and waited until her death to stage his ‘discovery’? Things got murky, offers were made and rejected. A rare book dealer was involved. The jottings in question were largely drafts of Christmas card greetings, I was told. No matter.

The builder and a rare book dealer met on a railway platform in King’s Cross and the builder returned to Hull a richer man.

However, the time has come to reveal the truth. The notebook was a hoax. I planted it. I needed my gutters fixing and didn’t have the money. Preparations are already in hand for my own demise: an explosive correspondence tucked away in the sideboard, a lost novel under the sink. The house nosily feasts on these hidden treasures. I come in the front door and find it going through my filing cabinet. I let out an indignant roar. The drawer snaps shut and we agree not to speak of this further.

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Under Travelling Skies

Carol Rumens

Bibliomythos

To discover you, of the calm, precise mind, incarnate at the core of my obsession is to face a book that stirs, acquires a backbone, and crawls out of the water, mortal, moral, peppercorn eyes amassing strings of light-cells.

Meanwhile, I’m knocked back to fishy dimness.

I read as peasants read: four thought-racked fingers sweat into linenboard, left thumb defines attention-span and page-depth, right fist grinds the fiery cheek, but the gaze floats from the carrel, searching the city roofs for lambs or samphire.

Hours pass with evolutionary momentum − Then a sudden scuffle of leaves, the whip of an arrow and you, of the calm, precise mind, you, who were god-like, jump out of the undergrowth, pursued by muses − on fawn’s hooves, wearing nothing but your heart.

Malcolm Watson: Shelved 26

Under Travelling Skies

Cliff Forshaw: Humber Bridge

English Bridges clasping the little girl she crouched on the safety-rail a man lost in the custody fight shudders, the crowd below the woman leapt, survived, was jailed for is howling do it do it attempted murder do it chicken do it

27

Under Travelling Skies

The Whitsun Awayday We left at bright mid-day, and again I wondered what violence of the sun could ever bruise the sabulous and sky-denying river.

I thought of all the coffee-machines, drizzling and dripping in the renovated dockside offices, bland talk of brand and target, lingering reek of the whale-shed, corporate stab-wounds − and the main attraction slopped across her sandbanks portside to the Transpennine Express, then retreated to a pinkish stain and sank behind the neat apologetic factories.

Like Ambhas, I had made my bed, too many returning tides had smoothed the wrong conclusion, approaching now under the bridge that slowed ominously starboard. I would live here a little longer, I had always lived here, stumbling behind a heavy-drinking, scornful shade, his large, desolate footprints wandering with the old villages, patterning the night-wolds by gravitational chance.

Was he consoled, too, thinking about the quicker, braver suicides, their loss barely reported, some never missed, the majority kept long enough for the waves to maul them faceless; the solar beast that vainly flared, the roaring water-noise as they fought and dropped past caring?

I’m history. So are you. Flow on, flow nowhere.

(Ambhas : Sanskrit for ‘water’; believed to be the origin of the name ‘Humber.’)

28

Under Travelling Skies

Spurn Head Ambhas is fat and slow and sorrowful Today. She feels she’s always on the wrong side Of the dunes – and this is an accurate perception.

Changes of heart are runnels in the sand, That never go far enough: her aspirations A mile of marsh grass, patchy and withered.

She looks up, lachrymose, and imagines being where The atmosphere is dry and radiant, sparkling With buckthorn-fruit, plastered like orange coral Around ungrateful wrists, and gorse-flowers, plump-lipped In an occupational kiss. She doesn’t envy Their wind-crazed glamour, but their vantage-point.

They see so far. They can always see her darling Gracefully showing off his specialised muscles, Pimping his creamy plumage for anyone, no-one.

She pretends she has never touched him, never licked A salt-grain from his tongue. Nothing will change, When his glittering cross-purposes subsume her In the next longed-for moment, nothing will brim her But her own muddled energy and shadows.

They dawn on her like nausea, and she’s Already breaking up, like a caller’s voice in a tunnel; Already heaving her yellow flesh against the barrier wall.

29

Under Travelling Skies

Malcolm Watson

Philip and the Monsters

He’s come again to the meridian, that’s neither east nor west. To here. To nowhere. Forward to the past, fast-receding like the ebb-tide, through carucates and wapentakes, oxgangs and hides, here to the lovely Queen of Holderness.

Happy as a child let out to splash through puddles and annihilate the mirrored sky. Captain Bligh, he knows, that Captain Bligh, surveyed the sly and ever-shifting shoreline from this spire.

How often has he traced this graceful arrow’s flight into the sky? How many times? How often have these gargoyles glared at him beneath the crockets and the crenellations? Familiar demons. A fiend gripping a sinner. A man holding a pig. A bagpiper and fiddler.

A lion thrusting out his tongue. A soldier slitting a woman’s throat. A grinning monster grasping a girl.

Samson rending the lion’s jaw. He smiles. Rain dripping from their gullets spatters the sodden shoulders of his mac.

Inside, the frowsty smell he loves. Silence. Sudden sunlight slides through transoms and tracery, splashing the walls, illuminating aisles and arches, ogee hoodmoulds, vaulting, blind-arcading, spandrels, paterae, the chancel screen.

Everything in sharp relief. The soldiers on the Easter Sepulchre. The ornamented capitals, no two alike.

He marvels and looks up, and up. And suddenly he spies a hundred faces staring down he’d never seen before.

Imps. Boggarts. Shapeless things. Blemyae. Deformed

30

Under Travelling Skies and leering, gaping mouths and eyes like knives. Oh God, like knives. They slink slowly into darkness as the clouds blanket the sky. He stumbles to the reredos and sees the loving look the Virgin gives her child. His heart catches, knowing that he does not sleep on light and wake to kisses. The earth swallows the sun, turns hot beneath his feet among the shadows of the nave. Back on the lonely road to Hull from Patrington, an empty hearse shoots past at speed. He smiles again, and sits up higher in the saddle in the November rain.

Malcolm Watson: Lonelier and lonelier... and then the sea 31

Under Travelling Skies

Keyingham, Midwinter 1898 The boneyard’s crammed. The ground is gorged. It isn’t meet to stack the dead like cordwood for the winter. These last three years, since 1895, we have convened a score of times and studied maps and deeds and rolls and boundaries. All our requests have come to naught. The last negotiation failed at Cherry Garth; the brewer, fearful that his water would be soured, turned us down. Now the Parish has secured a site on Eastfield Road, a fit and seemly site that will not be water-logged and ought to serve a century. We had no clue, when we appointed Mr Goundrill as gravedigger in November, that before Twelfth Night, his daughter Florrie, seven months, would be the first that he must put in that cold ground.

32

Under Travelling Skies

Kath McKay Craters, lava plains, mountains and valleys ‘Salt and vinegar?’

Vicky, my wife, shovels cod and chips into greaseproof bags.

The acrid smell of malt vinegar catches at our throats.

Three weeks since we started working together and today a customer tells me that a new chip shop has opened round the corner.

The queue shuffles forward. I bang drink cans hard on the counter and fill the fridge.

This new brown-haired Vi, with her roots showing, feels like a stranger, all false smiles and easy phrases.

‘Lovely day.’

‘Nice out.’

I gather up cardboard packaging and squash it into a plastic bin. Then I lift a large pan of peeled potatoes towards the chip cutter. Vicky frowns. She says I’m unfit; that we should move to frozen.

It’s always a miracle how the stubby chips fall out, like larvae hatching. When the bucket is full, I load up the fryers and scrape out the serving hatches. I pause, serving spoon in hand. The view is of boarded up shops, and people hurrying. Everyone’s broke.

Rain oozes down. If this keeps up, people will stay home and eat frozen pizza, drains will fill and burst again, the streets will smell of sewage.

I wriggle out of my white coat, throw on a jacket.

‘Back soon.’

‘Where are you going? What if we get a big queue?’

I shrug, hand on the door.

Then I’m down at the old pier, staring out at rough waves, cold rain on my face. The heave and tug of the water, the pull of 33

Under Travelling Skies the far off sea. My father helped fill in this dock, driving lorry roads of rubble back and forth, arriving home sweaty and dusty, the first work he’d had for years.

‘Filling in, concreting over, that’s what this place is about now,’ he said.

The cobbles are wet with rain.

Back in the shop Vicky has her head in a book.

‘The Golden Fleece,’ she says.

Savagely, I extract a piece of cod, and stomp to the back room where I eat with my fingers.

Vicky hates it when I don’t use a knife and fork: ‘Eat proper.’

The afternoon wears on: we load the dishwasher, arrange sheets of greaseproof paper, stack food cartons, refill the forks container.

‘Are you going tonight?’ she asks.

Me, a grown man. Embarrassing.

When she raises her arms, there’s a loose layer of fat hanging from her upper arm. A wave of love steals over me. She is on my side.

‘Are you?’

‘OK.’ ‘Good.’

And she kisses me full on the lips. I taste salt.

‘Don’t worry. It’ll be fine.’

‘Control to Houston. Hello?’ A customer in a wet mac wipes rain off his glasses, and Vicky, blushing, serves him. I hear my grandfather’s voice: Pollack, Flounder, Shark. Fish is what made this place. We’ll always survive with fish.

‘Pollack, Flounder, Shark,’ I say aloud. The customer scuttles away.

We turn the sign to ‘Closed.’

34

Under Travelling Skies The session is held in a draughty portacabin, with tea from a machine.

Vicky’s still up when I get back, the living room table covered in paper, cuttings, an old notebook.

‘What you doing?’

She pores over squiggles, and reads.

‘250,000 miles from the moon to the earth. There is no wind or weather on the moon. No water. The moon influences fishing.

Fishermen often consult the moon before they decide when to fish. The footprints left by the Apollo crew will remain for millions of years. The moon is 4.4 billion years old. Its surface consists of craters, lava plains, mountains and valleys.’

‘What?’

‘Crater, lava plains, mountains and valleys.’

‘Craters, lava plains, mountains and valleys,’ I repeat. ‘I didn’t know you were interested in the moon.’

There are parts of her I know nothing about.

‘My dad was obsessed. I was conceived the night of the moon landing. It’s in my blood.’

‘Yeah?’

I want to laugh, but her face is dreamy.

‘Every year, on July 20, we’d watch the video. My mum even made fairy cakes with silver baubles on, called them moon cakes.

‘Huh?’ Her family did something together.

‘It was fun. But one year, I fell asleep, and when I woke, Armstrong was still padding across the Sea of Tranquillity, and the real moon was coming in through the window. Everything was silvery, like the moon was in the room.’

I put out my hand. Hers is warm and soft and I want to bury myself in it.

‘And then what?’

35

Under Travelling Skies ‘I decided to become an astronaut.’

Her face stops me laughing.

‘The careers officer said there wasn’t much call for astronauts in Hull.

“You’re good with your hands,” he said. “There’s a free hairdressing taster course at the college. Interested?” And no, he didn’t want to see my moon scrapbook.’

I kiss her head.

‘Anyway, how was your night?’

‘They gave us Garibaldi biscuits, and made us read a poem.’

‘Show us.’

‘That Whitsun, I was late getting away,’ she reads. I repeat the lines after her as we press our thighs together.

The next day she’s on King Midas.

‘Everything he touched turned to gold.’

Scary.

Through September, I go the classes twice a week. My dad used to point out notices: Danger. Do not touch. And recite lists of ports he travelled to: Stavanger, Rotterdam, Helsingfors. He’d buy me comics and borrow books from the library. But nothing stuck. Now it’s like putting on glasses: everything clearer.

Takings are down: each day fewer customers. Then the other shop shuts after the police take the owner away. There are rumours about dealing.

Vi says we’ve got a chance. So we paint one wall of the shop black, and scrawl ‘traditional’ in big letters.

A man in the queue says ‘every good fish needs a poem.’ Pulls a piece of paper from his pocket, and pins it on the wall.

Soon the wall is full of poems. Word spreads, and we’re busy again.

36

Under Travelling Skies One autumn night a meteor shower streaks across the sky. It looks like the interference on old TVs, but Vicky’s zinging. Says just because she can’t be an astronaut doesn’t mean she can’t be interested in space. Goes online, joins a group.

In the morning, we wake early, and bring tea back to bed.

She’s fizzing.

‘Read to me,’ she says. ‘That poem you started with.’

When I get to the bit with the ‘arrow-shower’, we fall into each other.

Behind us, there is rain.

Malcolm Watson: Sunk Island Sands 37

Under Travelling Skies

Sarah Stutt

Notice to Mariners

Keep your eye on the swans at New Holland.

Wait for them to leave the dock at slack water, for everyone knows the difficulty of mooring, knowing when and where to drop anchor.

Use the backscatter of your own lights to find your way home, at Skitter Haven, South Shoal, Holme Ridge and Killingholme, on to Paull Sand and Pyewipe Outfall.

If you tune to the frequency of love, at the bridge, you might see a mother and son, playing on the walkway, hear the delicate sound of descent and disappearance before they are wrapped in the skin of river, bone by bone.

A pilot steamer is holed, portside in the engine room.

Fog swallows the four long blasts from her steam whistle before she vanishes, followed by a commotion of wild geese, signalling the desire to be gone.

They are burning reed over at Faxfleet when a woman appears from the smoke, holding out her thin hands, all moon-grey silk and bruise-blue eyes. Some say it is the river, rising.

Heaven leaks onto the water at Stony Binks as ships clear the Sunk Dredged Channel at the Sunk Spit Buoy, coursing ahead in the imaginary gap between river and sky.

38

Under Travelling Skies Where do the arguments of the sea end and the sweet nothings of the river begin?

Somewhere between Spurn and Donna Nook, past the catacomb of gull bones at Bull Sand Fort.

Determined not to fall away into the dark, a defiant finger of land fights against erasure.

Muntjac deer bark at the stars as rail lines steer into the fabric of the invisible.

Cliff Forshaw: Spurn Lightship 39

Under Travelling Skies

Scat Singing in Pearson Park It was a day much like this, a day with a rose behind its ear.

You were here, hopelessly drunk on summertime and jazz.

The same, pale-skinned hoods and carrier bag couture but you, you had them tuxedoed, in bowler hats, swinging to an easy riff and scat-singing.

Loose-lipped and just out of time you always played an extra bar, leant on notes until they split adding the after-kiss of a cymbal.

Skinny men with holes for eyes, old folk mesmerised by a staccato bass, drum breaks, a breath from an earlier world.

Children agog, all ears cocked to supple, rocketing phrases, nimble, silky reeds, the simple trick of a suspended beat.

Now slump-shouldered boughs are overwhelmed by moss.

Heavy, brute-faced dogs forage in cans at Albert’s feet.

Strident geese heckle the ducks 40

Under Travelling Skies above the feeble rush of the fountain.

I follow two tramps in tragic, baggy pants, their trolleys filled with nowhere into Beverley Road, the street you called ‘a charming chaos of harmonic innovations’ – shrill, rapid yelps, rips, slurs, distortions, a black van charging with ‘urgent blood’.

Antone’s Guitars, The Gig Shop, Slave to the Beat and the bunting is up for part-exchange cars.

There is Vodka Blue Charge at the Cannon Junction, a shoreline of fag-ends

by The Haworth Arms.

I wait for the bus to a cabaret of sirens, the hoarse vocals of an orange council van, remembering those downward runs, missed cues and you, scooping the air with your trombone.

41

Under Travelling Skies

Christopher Reid

The Clarinet

Lecherous licorice-stick, with equal ease you do sweet, you do salty, you do slow, you do quick.

As soon as lips, tongue and nimble fingers have primed you, you’re off to play among your several registers: from low and guttural, mucky-edged, molasses-black, no-apologies down and dirty, through middle regions of melisma and vibrato, where extravagant soul-vistas may tempt you to linger – but you can’t, because nobody’s allowed to live for ever – to those heights where things are apt to move at a lick, scampering headlong, squealy-slick, towards a conclusion both triumphant and sad.

Then, indefatigable Jim Dandy, Jack the Lad, as if you’d learned nothing, you start up again.

42

Under Travelling Skies

Malcolm Watson

Blues at the Black Boy

Nobody Knows The Way I Feel. I Want You Tonight, Ma Petite Fleur. If I Could Be With You One Hour Tonight, Spreadin’ Joy. Old-Fashioned Love. Careless Love!

What A Dream, Sweetie Dear. Squeeze Me. Slippin’ And Slidin’. Wha’d Ya Do To Me? Happy Go Lucky Blues. Breathless Blues. Pounding Heart Blues.

Oh, Lady, Be Good. You’re The Limit. It’s No Sin. Temptation Rag. I’ve Found A New Baby. Out Of Nowhere.

Deux Femmes Pour Un Homme. Ain’t Misbehavin’. I Know That You Know. As-Tu Le Cafard? La Complainte Des Infidèles.

Just One Of Those Things. Nuages. Blood On The Moon.

Okey Doke. Blame It On The Blues. Saturday Night Blues.

Lonesome Blues, Jackass Blues. Blues, My Naughty Sweetie.

What Is This Thing Called Love? What I Did To Be Black And Blue.* Blues In My Heart. Weary Blues, Old Man Blues. Sobbin’ And Cryin’.

Blues In The Air. Gone Away Blues. I Had It, But It’s All Gone Now. Loveless Love. Save It, Pretty Mama. You’ve Got Me Walkin’ And Talkin’ To Myself. Ce Mossieu Qui Parle. Oh, Didn’t He Ramble. That’s What Love Did To Me. That’s The Blues, Old Man. There’ll Be Some Changes Made… * All titles of Sidney Bechet tracks, except this one by Muggsy Spanier.

43

Under Travelling Skies

Saint Helen’s Well, Great Hatfield, Holderness The church, sacred to the dam of Constantine, has disappeared, leaving a graveyard. Stones and bones. The holy well remains close by, ancient before the emperor and forever young.

Saint Helen in her dotage made the holy pilgrimage to the Holy Land and found Golgotha and the Cross, the Crown of Thorns and three nails from His feet and hands. One she kept, and two she gave her son who wore them on his helm and golden bridle chain.

The church has gone. The holy well remains, forever young, remembering the ancient prayers to pagan gods and nymphs and water sprites. A hawthorn hedge surrounds it still, surrounds the steps and ledge that face the eastern sun.

And people come in May before sunrise to dip a rag into the spring and hang it on the sacred thorns to pray for blessings, favours, health‌ Uath, Celtic tree of Beauty whose blossoms crown the Queen of May, whose flowers draw out thorns and splinters, whose berries (still called cuckoo’s beads and pixie pears) will slow a racing heart.

The lacy blossom ushers luck into the house. The holy plant that made the Crown of Thorns will heal a broken heart, shoo anger, blame and guilt away. The church has gone.

And every May before sunrise, the holy spring is dressed by unseen hands with garlands, sprays of flowers; the dewy thorns adorned with dripping tokens, fluttering rags and ribbons drying in the sun.

44

Under Travelling Skies

Four-Minute Warning: Kilnsea A monstrous Heath-Robinson contraption. A ton of concrete moulded to a concave trumpet on a concrete plinth at Kilnsea. Acoustic mirror at whose focal point there sits a pipe snaking away behind the Brobdingnagian ear towards a troglodytic gnome who strains to hear the thrum of Zeppelin engines far away.

If he’s sure, but only if he’s sure, he has 4 minutes to alert the O/C at the Godwin battery to blast away the vast dirigible and save from being flattened the burgesses of Scarborough. Listening, listening, listening…

The fellow in the headset suffers from anxiety, the fidgets and dyspepsia. He’s replaced.

He ends up in the hospital at Kilnsea housing thousands of the maimed and wounded, lifted from the trains from Hull. The men transfer to cemeteries or to training centres, studying prosthetic manipulation, adaptability, survivability. Lieutenant J.R.R. Tolkein, just recently recovered from trench fever on the Somme, guards the Holderness peninsula from Orcs. The hospital is replaced by a TA base, which is replaced by a holiday camp for children from Hull.

Later, Ground Wireless Mechanic Hughes, E, RAF, spends two years at Patrington Haven Listening Station waiting for the Russian bombers, watching grass grow, curlew, foxes, crow, the rising of a frozen sun, reading Shakespeare, listening to the rain turning land into water, chaos, mud.

Listening for inspiration. Waiting for P. Larkin and D. Dunn 45

Under Travelling Skies at Lockington. The holiday camp is replaced by a park for caravans where people listen to The Navy Lark. The gun emplacements stumble one last time and fall into the sea.

46

Under Travelling Skies

Maurice Rutherford

Friday

‘Fridays were good. West Hull was buzzing then.

They called it “Fish Dock Races” in my day: net braiders with their work piled up on prams steamed line-astern down West Dock Avenue and Subway Street to check in, draw their pay and fresh supplies of cordage for next week; close in their wake, the wives of trawlermen homed on the Dry Side for the weekly sub from poundage that, with luck, their man might earn, then back past R.E. Barchard’s hardwood mill they’d smell the peppery sawdust of an elm becoming trawl bobbins. Those were the days before the war, when Snowy Worthington and Thundercliffe sailed skipper in the fleet that made the Hellyer family their pile,’ the old man reminisced.

‘Good grief, Old Man, your day, before that war! Another five or six we’ve fought since then, none of them won − don’t tell me you won yours; just look around!

Get with it, man, stop dwelling in the past, move with the times, look to the future and…’

The alter ego voice began to fade down to a whisper, thinning to a sigh…

‘Something to help you sleep,’ the doctor’d said.

They’ll find them, still unopened, by his bed.

47

Under Travelling Skies

Des Res Some houses have such ambience, such vibes they make you want to visit them again and then again. Take Auntie Alice’s tucked in behind the road to Cottingham where Larkin’d never notice it, nor Dunn, McGough or Motion, passing by en route to raise a lunchtime glass in the ‘GF’.

A Shangri-la of freedom from our own prim p’s-and-q’s-ified environment.

Here, broken palings in the backyard fence gave open sesame to playing-fields for footie, leapfrog, in a world beyond and scrumping from neighbours at one side our cousins blamed for poisoning their cat.

Miss Peasgood at the other side talked posh.

‘Refained,’ Aunt Alice mocked, because ‘she calls her lodger “paying guest”.’ But Uncle Vince, lapsed Dubliner who swore and made us laugh and had a way with words, put it like this: ‘Refoined they are, for sure − he sleeps backway and coughs his feckin head off in the front.’

48

Under Travelling Skies

Kingston Upon Hull (A Fabled City) On being dubbed a king’s town, long ago, Hull promptly clouded over, and the mood of townsfolk soured to match the louring gloom above their roofs. Rebellion loomed large.

When aldermen implored their King to act he called his Royal Eco Corps to arms − well, light-meters − with which they scanned the sky but couldn’t in the end withhold the truth: the blame lay with the city’s high-flown name, His Nibs’s hubris, aerial display of sixteen letters masking out the sun.

All but a very few must be brought down were life to stay sustainable below.

The King was piqued, but grounded the first twelve.

Town councillors, applauding, rushed outdoors to greet again the ever-shifting sky.

Hull’s commoners rejoiced in so much light but some grew greedy and, demanding more, they felled and trashed the leading letter left.

Enraged, the King swore on their heads a curse, a matching amputation of their speech in perpetuity. And to this day with breathless silence, that accursed first aitch still maims the diction of us plebs from ‘Ull and ‘alf of ‘Essle, ‘Edon, ‘Olderness.

49

Under Travelling Skies

Cliff Forshaw

Gone

Large Cool Store Not ships up streets, nor yet the sort of streets with the sort of shops up them he’d recognise: tobacconist, post office, corner shop, Co-Op nuzzled by pub; even the large cool store has metamorphized into something entirely else.

He could not have imagined what we see reflected in the waters of Prince’s Quay.

The cut-price crowd is in St. Stephen’s now; a serious house on serious earth the Precinct is, with Tesco, Vodafone up at the holy end.

Young men eye trainers, buy shower gel.

Would he be fascinated, excited or appalled (shrink-wrapped mange-tout, sushi, the meals-for-one) by the coldly global abundance measured by the Mall?

Modes for Night Difficult not to be aware when the assistants in the large cool store are, over sheer black blouses, wearing bras of quite edible pink.

Difficult, between the lad-mags, the cleavage on the street, the ads, not to be aware. What he would say, avoiding the chuggers (Cancer. Breasts)?

One more National Awareness Day. 50

Under Travelling Skies The Cut-Price Crowd We talk so much more easily now: share, loudly in the street; the cut-price crowd phoning in reports of last night’s shag or puke, who has an STI, and all the while coordinating between buggy, hand and mouth, phone and fag, something flaky from Gregg’s, a newly-taxed pasty, that awful pie.

Stubbly with Goodness Gone, with the bobby on his beat, serge and jackets, the canvas tote worn soft by hands to something approaching silk, and the twice-a-day delivery: the Postie now on his rounds, in slacker-pious stubble or sanctimonious goatee, in shorts to show the snake tattooed up the heavy calf; atop the Hi-Vis vest the iTuned shaven head, free-hand texting haikus, dropping leaflets, freeshots onto the slurry of takeaway menus on the mat at the crack of three o’clock. *

51

Under Travelling Skies Gone like sociable smoke, or grimly hanging on: pipes, tweedy schoolmasters, thank-you notes, Latin, Loebs, reserve, the grammar of page or stone, Lobb brogues, barathea, school blazers, club ties, cavalry twills, the flat-faced trolley, − though elsewheres re-engage with the tram − cycle clips, clippies on buses, peaked caps, fountain pens, bank tellers, public libraries, the Poly, shops that slice corned beef, a quarter of ham, a penny for the loo, standing for the national anthem. * No fishy-smelling pastoral − the cod is going if not gone: old seamen beached with the Arctic Corsair.

Chipfat still thickening the air. * And all the while, recently more-noticed, moving out from lock-ups, ten-foots, holding up the buses and artics on the densely-parked sclerotic residential avenues, the clip-clop of hooves, the whip-flick from the cart that heralds the return of rag-and-bone. * “Only Connect!” you echoed EM Forster at a boxing match.

No connection that the train is stuck just outside Brough: the coppers can’t catch the copper thieves.

We’re all late getting away, again.

52

Under Travelling Skies Up there, in his Brynmor Jones box of light, the library now has its ‘Social Learning Zones’ where students chat and text and graze on crisps and isotonic drinks; desks, mouths, ears complicated by gel pens, highlighters, iPods, iPads, iPhones: all the hi-tech stuff that, if not named for fruit, comes in homely tablets, notebooks, sticks. * The future isn’t what it used to be, and now neither is the past.

Home is back there somewhere; we stay lost.

Now rolls out ever-newer versions, relentlessly releases novel unpleasantnesses.

The Doodlebugs have gone, what bugs us now is not the V1 but broken Windows, Reality v.2.

Webbed life slips through the holey Net, they think they surf, but they don’t get wet.

The World that was the Word made Flesh has dripped right through the cyber mesh.

And we must friend one another or… friend one another and…

53

Under Travelling Skies

Carol Rumens

After a Deluge

(in the campanological pattern, Plain Hunt)

The city’s drainage ran by tidal authority, as if rivers took notice of essential services.

That supreme authority, the weather, ran all-night services, served harsh notice on wifely authority.

Dinner services and sofas ran; cookers gave notice.

The emergency services’ fluorescent authority asked who ran the show, put up a notice.

Impressed by the train services, at first we didn’t notice any lapse of authority.

The flood-waters ran small, an in memoriam notice fluttered damply. Desire services belief. If our ark ran aground without our authority 54

Under Travelling Skies we were the last to notice.

Our conversation ran on weather patterns, church services and the British Airports Authority.

Slowly the sweet inks, rain-like, ran amok. Rare books gave notice, bowed to the flood’s authority: We dispensed with their services.

55

Under Travelling Skies

Shades There is a hell with not a single soul, Local or tourist, nosing through its murk: This is the myth that ‘hell is other people’ – The writer’s myth. The loneliness we make Encircles us; we sink in the defeat, Displacing muddy towers we call our work.

But you, disgruntled shade, I hoped to meet In some bleak bay, threading the needle’s eye Of scholarship with posthumous lantern-light.

I would have known you if you’d drifted by, And, seeing as I’m not entirely dead, I would have drawn my sigh across your sigh, And breathed some heavier warmth. Montale said In his long conversation with the past, ‘It’s possible, you know, to love a shade.’

I’m not saying you would have paused, or noticed – Even when, in some trickery of desire, Your smile was by a stranger’s smile replaced.

What use are smiles? Hell is a private fire – Unlike the world, peopled and merely warm – And coveting faint shades, a poor career Although we burn so hard we give them form.

56

Under Travelling Skies

Almost True: A Guided Walk through Larkin’s Cottingham They gathered in the rainy village, muses And friends who had outlived you, ‘getting on,’ As they’d have said, no longer latest faces.

Kind arm and walking-stick Led them, as they led us, to church or green, Yet time’s tough skin proved curiously elastic.

Recovering the shapes you’d first assigned them, They blushed in your short-sighted, dreamy gaze.

One read out ‘Afternoons’, one, ‘Wedding Wind’.

An unambiguous friend Stepped forward and displayed a shapeless tee-shirt On whose blue front she’d printed all of ‘Days’.

They talked us through their stories, casual, clear, Amused if they recalled some minor fault, And it was only gradually that I Who’d wished, but never felt The slightest breath or tremor of you, though I’d walked your vanished footprints for a year, Became aware of something, an attention, Aloof, but faintly warming. The shy fury Of rain drummed our umbrellas. We were shown The playground, small and glum – Location, ‘so Maeve said’, of ‘Afternoons,’ And birds seemed to make merry with the query:

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What will survive? The work of course, we cried, The work. But every instinct understood How tenderly, to those with whom you’d shared Mere life, you would have turned, And vanished through the dusk of memory, leaving The experts to debate the barely heard.

Malcolm Watson: Complimentary/Complementary?

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Re-inscriptions ‘Philip Larkin, Writer’ is the inscription Philip Larkin chose as his epitaph

Small grave-stone, small As the white space A poem might grace, Three words in all: Two dates that span The life, distilled From gazing child To faded man, And two young trees.

May they become A complex rhythm Of light, release The breath of wrought Organic song To prove time wrong, Philip Larkin, poet.

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Coats Chanterlands Avenue Crematorium

Once I mistook a mourner for a stone.

Her short dark coat contained a self so still I thought her face a flower, a tied-on balloon.

People are mostly taller than their small Secular polished slabs, but often they Bend down to rearrange the gnomes or pull A weed, and I expect they nearly pray.

And so it happens: people seem the size Of gravestones, and it’s hard to turn away Because I trust and do not trust my eyes When stones begin to stumble and turn right Towards the crematorium. I surmise, In fact, all stones are coat-clad bodies, white Or black, convivial or fighting shy, Superior with button-holes or bright Tinsel trim. Their limbs, tucked in, keep dry, They hood their little skulls against the cold, And hunch beside the beds in which they’ll lie, At dusk, leaving the coats they never fold, Draped on the head-boards, ready to put on Next time they’re summoned to identify A mourner by her new cold coat of stone.

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Under Travelling Skies

Kath McKay

‘Not much evidence of the docks’

Take a figure of eight. Wind back round yourself.

Like a Moebius strip.

Pilot’s Way. Isis Court. Ocean Boulevard.

Plimsoll Way. Harbour Way. Helm Drive.

The Haven. The Citadel: the strongest fort in Britain, never taken.

Below the Citadel, foundations.

The Winding Shed. Close your eyes.

Haul up the pulley. Tick tock. The engine thrums.

Ropes get purchase on a ship. Ease it into dock.

On the foreshore a man saws branches off an ash tree, chops them into logs. With his son, wheelbarrows home.

A terrier yaps and snaps. Joggers in bright colours ballet through.

Mast Drive, Sailor’s Wharf, Spinnaker Close. A bench at Pettingell’s View. You’d see the ferry to New Holland.

Corinthian Way. A lone lad in a hoody at the bus stop.

Marine Drive. Navigation Way. Galleon Court.

Houses with room for the kids. Who’d go back to the hot breath of cattle? Toxic sludge from the Timber Ponds, sterilised and built on. We loop back on ourselves: Tobacco Dock; Coal Dock; Flapgate; Half-tide Basin. Fever Hospital; Coal Crane. Tick-tock.

No trains stop at Victoria Dock. Even the supermarket’s Spar.

Water percolates.

The pavement ends. Unfenced gravel and mud, unevenness.

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Under Travelling Skies Wrecked jetties by Alexandra Dock, a warehouse falling into the sea. Pride of Rotterdam in the distance. Sandpipers picking at snails and worms. Danger signs. Blue lights, klaxons.

A metal bridge rises, releases a barge to chug ash up the estuary.

Slow time. That fat sun over the Humber. That wind looping back on itself.

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Coupling Five men in orange jumpsuits stare at the undercarriage of the Manchester train.

One man in orange jumps down, pulls a big hook towards the train behind.

Shrugs, back on the platform. The driver starts the engine.

The front train shudders and shakes. Two men in orange take out flasks.

One man flashes his torch on the tracks. The engine frets.

Five minutes. Ten. Twenty. Connections will be missed in Manchester. Planes will not be caught.

Families on the other side of the world will wait.

The yellow button flashes. ‘Transpennine Express apologises for the delay,’ says the guard , twice. ‘This was due to a problem with coupling at Hull.

Once again, due to…’ The man with the bald head and sit up and beg bike titters. Past Manor Quay, St Andrew’s Quay, Hessle Road.

Maersk lorries race us from the docks. Those docile sheep up the embankment at Brough.

Elsewhere.

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Carving it up ‘Well, Siemans is the new big employer you know, after BAE lost 900 jobs… our firm needs to move ahead without frightening the horses…network evaluation engagement. Not into delivery. Much more rapid feedback loop. Very JRF…Third Way solution…

Partnership with local enterprise. So exciting!

Rather primitive. I had to get two trains. And change. Totally backward. But so friendly . Proximity. The big manor.

The immediate neighbourhood - very interesting.

Totally behind the plans. Rather more tricky, the relationship with Hull.’

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On the train to Hull reading Philip Larkin and everything is luminous. The man in the spring raincoat who always goes the toilet just after Selby, wears his face as if something, like anything, might happen today.

The man in the brown trenchcoat stands at the door, fingers on the button, looking at his watch. The Humber swirls off to Barrow and New Holland. Spouses kiss their partners goodbye, bikes spill into the corridor, as if coupling.

Two lads bang on about Final Frontier, Level 1, 2 and 3: ‘If you tackle the first one.’

The woman who gets on at Howden sits with her legs apart, reading a Metro: ‘Staffie cross toddler savage.’ And then the harp strings of the bridge lift our hearts. Now we’re by the lucent comb of the Infirmary. Staff smoke behind bins.

We see into sample rooms. Today some will climb the highest floors. Streetlamps go off, lights are dimmed on bikes and cars. The sun comes up. The in-box, meetings, lunch. An evening drink with friends. Domes and spires.

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Mary Aherne

Down in the Dumps

Long before Roy Plomley interviewed you for Desert Island Discs you had already settled for the life of castaway, eking out your days in that space where nothing prevents nothing from taking place.

How you wallowed in the sweet torture of denial, of life lived on the edge, yielding to the exquisite pull of solitude. Not for you the gaudy abundance of golden daffodils or showers of eglantine, but empty attics, random windows, dilapidation. England’s most public hermit, settling for obscurity and life-with-a-Hull-in-it, you sent yourself to Coventry and the tortured child inside imagined perhaps you merited little better; you’d got your just deserts.

Ever the perverse and irresolute lover, you declared Hull (the city you loved to hate) a frightful dump and, though nice and flat for cycling, your chosen cul-de-sac was conveniently ignorable. Apart from the odd lyrical aside and much-quoted bursts of petty snobbery and spite, you turned your back on her, punished her with your indifference, and all too often looked over her shoulder to prettier views: wide wheatfields, white-flowered lanes, the sprayhaired sea. Finding pleasure in her scarred beauty, the war-blitzed wastelands and catastrophic rubble, you savoured the tang of loss, drew loneliness like a pall over her dilapidated streets.

Your desert island discs reveal a paradoxical love of Church music and, ever the romantic agnostic, you’ll seek comfort in Spem in alium for Sundays and the ‘Coventry Carol’ for Christmas. How those silvery voices will tear your heart apart and keep you teetering on the tightrope you condemn yourself to walk between suffering and oblivion. Add to that the bitter-sweet nostalgia of Elgar’s Symphony Number 1 to which you can lie back, and think of England. As a life without jazz would have been hell you chose, not Sydney Bechet or Oliver’s ‘Riverside Blues’, but ‘Dallas Blues’ with Satchmo’s dark gravel scuffling round thoughts of loathing and escape. Then, Billie Holliday reminding you and all of us of 66

Under Travelling Skies the foolishness of so many things: bicycle clips, shoeless corridors, high windows, Queen Anne lace? Sing it for us all, Billie. How the ghost of you clings.

Your favourite number scarcely takes us by surprise: Bessie Smith belting out the track of your years – ‘I’m Down in the Dumps’ – but with such ballsy vitality you can’t imagine anything will ever get her down. Here is angled beauty, the bright-tongued bird, the mighty Aphrodite rising, just for you, above the crashing of the foam.

And will your desert island bring you bliss? I doubt it. I suspect you’ll soon begin to miss the black-stockinged nurses you half-despised yet still desired, the loaf-haired secretaries, and even those sad, unspeakable wives forever pushed to the margins of their narrow lives.

I picture you strolling the length of a deserted beach, your flannel trousers billowing in the breeze, a knotted handkerchief about your head, whistling Dixie, still contemplating a nowhere place beyond the reach of time and decay, your chosen luxury – a typewriter – lodged like some ancient fossil in the sands, and sheaves of paper scattering like gulls to the winds.

Cliff Forshaw: Spurn Lightship Variations 67

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Carol Rumens Freshness

Squibs

For Philip Larkin

Afresh, afresh, afresh – The leafy sheaves of a word Brushed me again as I walked The semi-circle of road To search for your house, half-blind, Old-eyed, not likely to See anything very clearly Or anything very new, But hopeful I mightn’t be cursed, Or sicken at the string Of snob-gob you’d have spat At this teaching-them-poetry thing.

Love-hating our money-life, Is the poet’s workable fiction: It means there’s a story to wake to And walk to, a narrative friction.

At first I was haunted, enchanted.

I believed I saw what you’d seen.

Now there’s no shadow of wonder: Your green is not my green.

And if I’m to see it at all, I must ‘forget what read.’

There are no windows here.

Look − even the leaves are dead.

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Under Travelling Skies Post-Freud It fucks you up, your DNA, Whatever Dad and Mummy do: The wiring was all wrong, so they Bequeath you some bad wiring, too.

Your wife has dumped you, life is grey, Your six-year-old is getting pissed.

Man hands on bills to man. So pay A Cognitive Behaviorist. * From My First Poems by Philip Arthur Larkin, aged 10 Kippers I like the taste of kippers Although they’re bony and dry I can smell the herring-freckled sea And the whalers heaving by.

Other Likes I like my room when the morning’s sunny I like the pink ears of my Bunny I like white bread with Daddy’s jam But (sorry Mummy) not with Spam.

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Under Travelling Skies Punishment Trip trap trop Teacher’s in a strop Trop trap trip I’m giving her the pip Trip trop trap She’s giving me a slap.

My bum-cheeks are all fiery And she is near expiry.

Leading Larkin scholar James Bootheroid writes: ‘These are truly marvellous poems to have issued from the pen of a ten-year-old. They show a rich sense of rhythm and an unusually advanced vocabulary (herring-freckled, expiry – marvellous!).

‘Kippers’ is surely evidence that the young Larkin had already been romantically excited by the notion of Hull, perhaps after reading a copy of his father’s National Geographic Magazine. The references to both kippers and Spam suggest that this work has Potential Impact as a social document, recording the deprivations suffered by modest middle-class families in the nineteen-thirties. From the perspective of gender theory, it is typical of Larkin’s subversive intelligence that, in ‘Other Likes,’ he equates his father with the soft, red feminine substance jam.

‘Eat your hearts out, Rumens, Wheatley, Forshaw. Could you have written like this at ten?? Could you write like this now???’

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John Mowat

Larkin’ About in Hull

This was 1970. Nottingham was Lawrence and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Brighton was Greene and Edinburgh RLS and Scott. Hull was nothing. In my final year at Bangor I had written an article on Larkin for a short-lived poetry magazine but did anyone then associate him with a particular place?

Today there is a Larkin trail to follow through Hull. Toads made of heavy-duty plastic stand outside shops. Not long before he died Larkin wondered if choirs of schoolchildren might one day sing his best-known poem, (‘They may not mean to…’) but while Marvell languished on the banks of the Humber did he ever mention Hull?

With my Bangor degree and some finishing off from King’s College, Cambridge, I went off for an interview at Hull University and passed a shop called The Working Man’s Fruitier and an ad on a wall for Fry’s Five Boys Chocolate. This was a dismal, forgotten city. I wouldn’t stay long. Then the expansion that floated me into my job teaching American literature contracted and I was there in Hull for thirty years.

Anyone with a passion for novels and films lives everywhere but in one place. Both interests combined in an option of mine that was Hull’s first in transformational studies though derided at the time as ‘Mickey Mouse’. Because he based his films on some wonderful novels I taught ‘The Films of John Huston’. I taught short stories and students could offer one of their own as an essay.

That was Hull’s first creative writing course. I made a go of Hull and the University rented my wife and I a flat in a large Victorian house on the edge of Pearson Park where the hopeless turn ‘over their failures / By some bed of lobelias.’ Philip Larkin had the flat above us.

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Under Travelling Skies I met my future wife, Kris, outside Kenneth Mackenzie’s study and 32 Pearson Park was an improvement on places we had lived in as students. From his high windows Larkin must have looked through the damp treetops to an ink-filled serpentine but it was on a sunny Saturday morning we invited him down for a coffee. ‘He was shy,’ I wrote in my diary, ‘and reluctant to talk about his poetry but said the “hired box” of “Mr Bleaney” was in Cottingham and that “Professor Lal” is not A. Alvarez as his Italian translator thinks but is an invention to rhyme with “pal”.’

We had two kittens stalking each other and tussling. Molly, the smaller kitten, worshipped the larger white one, Candy. We now know Larkin enjoyed pornography but he never commented on the cats’ names though they fascinated him and he drew air through his lips to make a squeezing sound that was meant to attract them – and he was, after all, the poet of ‘At Grass’ (old race horses) and ‘Wires’ (old and young cattle), just as he was of ‘For Sidney Bechet’ and ‘Reference Back’. I expect I boasted of having heard Kid Ory live in Bristol’s Colston Hall and Zoot Sims in Leeds. Larkin said we should have a record session some time but when we met on the stairs he never repeated the offer.

Once, coming up those stairs, we encountered Larkin with an amazing woman. She wore a cape and on her head a black hat with a wide, flat brim of the kind worn by Fernandel in the ‘Don Camillo’ series. Larkin’s companion had an unusually strong and commanding face. Later we realised this must have been Monica Jones.

Neville Smith who wrote the script of Gumshoe (1971) remembers a rainy evening at a bus stop and edging closer to Larkin who had an umbrella. Eventually Larkin told him, ‘Young man, you are not going to share my umbrella,’ and I’m afraid ‘No Trespassers’ characterised my further encounters with Larkin.

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Under Travelling Skies A brick shed at the back of 32 Pearson Park housed nothing but an old bicycle (‘Church Going’?). I could see it through a cobwebbed window. I had a bicycle myself I used every day and was obliged to carry the thing down the stairs in the morning and up again to the first floor flat at night. Bicycles and ironing boards are among mankind’s most awkward inventions. I left a note for Larkin: could we share the shed? The Buildings Office replied: the shed was exclusively for Mr Larkin.

It was the same again when I applied to Larkin for his signature on The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse that he had edited. I explained we were giving the copy to friends as a wedding present and that it would mean much more to them if he signed it. Larkin turned me down: signed copies of his books were turning up in ‘rare and second-hand’ bookshops and he scented a racket. I sighed and accepted the rebuff with good grace and went away but here the story changes and does more credit to Larkin.

Larkin phoned me later that day and asked if he might come across from the Brynmor Jones to my study as he realised recipients of a wedding present were unlikely to sell it on. He signed the book and we talked a little more – I wish I remembered what – and I saw him again one more time.

My wife and I had left 32 Pearson Park because I was now tutor to a large student house in Marlborough Avenue. Larkin and I encountered each other in Prince’s Avenue. Larkin had a deep, plummy voice. Local legend had it that in his most sepulchral tone he terrified a sales girl in the Cottingham Road off-licence, the nearest one to the university, by flourishing a bottle of cheap wine (why cheap when he was wealthy enough to buy the best?), demanding, ‘Will this make me pissed before I puke?’ He now enquired after the students in my charge, in a similarly imposing voice by saying, ‘I suppose the students are all smoking (pause for emphasis) pot?’ I told him he was quite right.

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Under Travelling Skies Larkin died in 1985 and was buried in the Cottingham cemetery, not far from people of whom he might have disapproved – gipsies, the kind of people who ‘live up lanes /With fires in a bucket,’ who ‘swagger the nut-strewn roads’ Larkin chose not to follow. A colleague who, I’m sure, found Larkin’s work parochial and inferior to Americans like Gary Snyder and Edward Dorn now makes a defence of Larkin from every charge the basis of his career and quarrels publicly with another friend over the originality of his interpretations.

So there you have it. I was one of the many mice (teaching an appropriate option) in the wainscots of a great man’s life and these scraps are very brief footnotes to it. *

His Almost Funny Valentine When L.P. Pettifer, alive, pursued Bridget O’Dwyer, the secretary, she wouldn’t, Or not for years, and interposed her God Between herself, his portly, pin-striped, lewd Poetic need. No prude, she said, but prudent (But thinking of Father McFee). ‘Oh soddery sod!’

He said, sad-stepping, moonlit, for a pee.

They danced – Shaw’s clarinet, ‘Begin the Beguine’ – And downtown at the White Hart laughed and talked, Cried, broke it off and next month met for tea.

When Pettifer, honoured, died, what was between Them – plans abandoned, anguish, joy long baulked – Is Bridget’s glory, former secret shame, Is Sunday serialised story, queenly fame.

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Snaps like a Crocodile I met the Winifred of Larkin’s ‘Lines’ Whose innocence is pressed into her album.

He asks if she would miss the photo where She’s bathing, nymph in a pool, the slender straps!

She tells me she’s got many other snaps – Her family, a newborn son and heir.

While gently hinting at lonesome Larkin’s ‘bunkum!’

I think of what that bathing suit confines (And, latent there, what Larkin’s life declines).

Malcolm Watson: Inside Out 75

Under Travelling Skies

Mary Aherne

A Walk Through Beverley

The mother-church huddles down, warms the old bones of a distant saint and broods unruffled amid the rush and bustle, the hum of trade and traffic, the hammer-beat of bells, the spit of deals and bargains driven hard as east coast rain. Slightly outmoded though well heeled, this jewel of a town rose like a swampy Aphrodite and flourished on the earthly foam of brass, class, music, markets, miracles. Narrow twisting streets break free from the stony weight of buttress and scurry on past leaning red-brick rows and warped Georgian sashes. A veil of mist shrouds the dawn; a cobbled lane shivers in clammy shades of grey, its crumbling stone worn thin with the shuffle of black friars who hauled pestilential loads to a gaping pit, the final station. How well the plague-struck endure and sleep on through eternity beneath the soothing rumble of the trains that carry workers to their jobs in town, day-trippers to the coast.

At its even darker heart the streets march to the beat of Scandinavian plunder: Highgate, Eastgate, Minster Moorgate. Toll Gavel hammered travelling salesmen, forced them to pay their dues, while busy burgesses free from tolls for ‘pontage’, ‘passage’ and ‘stallage’ grew smug and sleek as beavers. A pair of wily serpents looped round Jumpers’ pillars like stitches on a knitting needle waiting to be cast off, 76

Under Travelling Skies or cast out by the good and holy fathers.

Their craftiness fits with the cobbled market town’s hand-pulled, family-run, home-spun philosophy.

Temptation’s not their game, they won’t deceive you; they mean well and tell a tale of Aesculapius’ powers.

Trip along rocky paving stones where tasteful teashops, a little ragged at the edges, sag against each other, clatter with the chink of silver spoon on china and welcome matrons, bursting from their tweeds, like buttoned back upholstery.

Bosomy matrons whip up a froth of scandal, nibble on hot-buttered gossip, spread rumours like jam between the warmed cheeks of a scone. Sipping on Yorkshire Gold they flutter and simper with doily etiquette. Dawdle and drag awhile, tap your foot to the busker’s jangle, belting out his verse and chorus - Plenty more where that came from – he flogs it by the metre.

Toss a coin into the open mouth of the guitar case, its faded red baize like a tired yawn after long weeks on the road.

On Saturdays, cars give way to rows of steadfast market stalls where jumbled gaudy mounds defy the laws of Tesco, twenty-first century cool, and gravity.

Carrots sprouting hair, parsnips flaunting wrinkles, brassicas curling lips at sell-by dates, artless onions shedding skins and look szarlotka and ciabatta too, though this is no mercado, marché or souk. It doesn’t smell of bay or 77

Under Travelling Skies bergamot; it’s more the dinky doughnut, laced with last night’s bitter kind of aroma with overtones of slurry from pig farms on the Wolds.

Meet the meat man in his pantechnicon.

Savour his tasty repartee as he names cuts of beef and lamb you never knew existed.

Can you resist a tasty bit of clod, chuck, hind shin, skirt or brisket? Probably.

Try a shank or scrag-end for the missus.

Sharp exit at the Market Cross which (erected 1714, and God knows why, lavishly displaying the shields of monarch, borough and the honourable families Warton and Hotham who chipped in what they could), plays host to brass bands and visiting Morris men.

Now skip across the market’s egg-smooth cobbles to a crusty couple scrapping on Old Waste amongst the refuse trucks and wheelie bins while carrion crows peck at the remnants of a chicken tikka takeaway. What’s that?

A legendary rabbit running late and tumbling down a manhole, his saucy grin carved from ear to ear. If we hurry we can catch up with him in St Mary’s, perched on a pillar, with his pack on his back, ready to hit the road.

Pilgrim rabbit, are you the stonemason’s joke, symbol of good-natured medieval piety or the stuff that Alice’s dreams were made of?

In the stone-damp hush, the imps and saints and minstrels keep him company beneath the vestry’s star-studded, midnight sky.

Impossible to date the chart and therefore name the planets − too much poetic licence used.

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Step out into chestnut-dappled sunshine onto North Bar Within where tourist coaches disgorge their well-travelled passengers eager for real ale, the loos or perhaps a little history.

It’s Elwell’s Edwardian Beverley they’re after: maids in basement kitchens, horse-drawn carriages, butlers sampling claret in panelled rooms.

They bustle around the Coronation Gardens, blousy with roses, displaced headstones like wallflowers lined up in the sun. Through the North Bar, early doors, red-faced, race-goers slurp pints of bitter at the Rose and Crown and study form while crimson devils scowl at their depravity.

The town wears the Westwood like an emerald shawl.

Depastured on the First Day of May the cows are free to roam. They graze monotonously, their swollen udders brushing against tall grass and blazing buttercups. Oblivious to traffic they drift onto the road and pause, dementia-ridden seniors, mid-stride in moist-eyed forgetfulness.

The tannoy’s nasal rasp relays the progress of the 2.15. It should have been a carefree six-furlong dash but the going’s soft and the final uphill struggle sees the flick of whip on rump. Trainers wink and nod beneath the battered brims of trilbies, hedge their bets. Confettied slips toss and scatter in the breeze and rise sky-high like the minster’s hopeful spires reaching for an eternal blue.

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David Wheatley

Bridge for the Dying 2

Alan’s Bike The Streetlife Museum in the old town must be the only museum I’ve visited that discourages visitors from looking at its exhibits.

Upstairs in the bicycle gallery we find on a permanent loop a black and white film about cycling round Europe, a document of such stunning non-descriptness, one can only presume, that the caption urges you not to watch it through but to ration your consumption to small doses, five-minute bursts every first and third Monday of the month perhaps. Meanwhile, downstairs in the small vintage cinema there is a packed programme of public information films to sit through. I walk in on some post-war tram conductors interrupting their journey to help elderly travellers cross the road on alighting, before cutting to them knocking off work for a wellearned game of pool and a half of mild. The next film up is titled Alan’s Bike, and is voiced by a bicycle obsessive who discovers the wheel-less torso of Alan’s bike in a ditch, from which he retrieves it as one might a wounded badger, with sorrowing care and incomprehension. How odd, he observes, before back-tracking to the story of young Alan’s passion for the velocipede, his ordering of the bike from a local craftsman, his loving attention to his newly purchased steed, and rigorous training schedule. Behold Alan, perfect marriage of man and machine! And off he goes, after ten minutes of this, pedalling away to the edge of the known world as the credits roll. Except we haven’t been told why his bicycle ended up in a ditch. So what the hell happened? Was it just girls and puberty? But how would that explain it being in the ditch? Alan, are you all right? Are you still out there? Alan?

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Under Travelling Skies Against Blessings Peter Reading has died. In an obituary for him Tim Dee notes how this most ornithological of poets often ‘did little other than record a sighting, the scene surrounding, the prevailing weather and the ensuing celebratory drinks’, the effect of which hands-off approach ‘is to preserve the primacy of the encounter and to return the bird intact and unassimilated to its own world’. Giving him a celebratory posthumous re-Reading, I am reminded of his intense dislike of artistic strategies that would prostitute the natural world to some merely human purpose. Did he not, as Hugo Williams described several years ago, turn up in a radio studio to take part in a programme on Ted Hughes only to lie on a desk yelling the word ‘anthropomorphism’ with some force. While there’s always fun to be had from cooking the critical goose of bird-appropriating bards, I can’t help worrying that my preference for the position outlined by Tim Dee is, in its way, no less an exercise in the commodification of the natural world. It just happens that the commodity to which I reduce it is its unassimilated autonomy, which I then hawk from reading to reading in my feathered little ditties. And what, indeed, could be more demoralizing than a record of my birdy epiphanies followed by a self-administered pat on the head for what a fine fellow they’ve helped me become. Because, indeed, there are lots of birds around the place in Hull, and what else is a man to do in the face of so much avian splendour. I read a story in The Irish Times about a ninety percent collapse in the numbers of Irish curlews and drive down the road to Paull Sands to look at some of the Humber estuary population, busy among the dunlins, plovers and godwits. I am passing through an industrial estate when I notice a cormorant perched on a lamp post. I am walking near South Cave full of rage at the local squirearchy dispatching pheasants in the distance when two red kites float past in the gathering mist of a December 81

Under Travelling Skies evening. I have more or less given up on ever seeing a bittern across the bridge in Far Ings when one flaps up out of the reeds and disappears behind the hide. Quick then, preserve the primacy of the experience: return the bird intact whence it came, or we might end up with yet more bloody bird poems on our hands! Or am I to be reduced, already, to the sorry state of counting my blessings? Let us pray not. Back into the reeds, the water, the darkness go the birds; I confine myself to noting these occasions and speak their all-too-human names: numenius arquata, phalacrocorax carbo, milvus milvus, botaurus stellaris.

John Wedgwood Clarke: Winter Sea, Cornelian Bay

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Under Travelling Skies Bridge for the Dying Always it is by bridges that we die. Has anyone ever taken a moment, before hurling him or herself off the Humber Bridge, to recast the last line of the poem Larkin wrote for its opening in 1981? I come across a simple shrine on Hessle Foreshore, inscribed ‘We miss you Jeff’, and wonder whether Jeff is one of the 200 suicides who’ve gone over the side in its thirty-year history. I find a single shoe and wonder to whom it might belong if not another jumper. A woman travels from Stockport to Hull to jump, with her 12-year old son, who suffers from Fragile X, or MartinBell Syndrome. Not Martin Bell the poet, I presume. What might she have said to the taxi driver who took her there? ‘The pub by the bridge’, ‘the bridge’, ‘half way across the bridge...’? How would she have answered if he made small talk? Would she have tipped him, bid him a cheery ta-ra, so as not to arouse suspicion? Another mother and child jump, survive, and are pulled from the water.

Someone else chooses to leap not into the water but onto the A63.

That would be messy. And while I’m on the subject of suicides, the jumper’s last act, it has been noticed, is frequently to remove his or her glasses. Why? Obviously, they might get damaged on impact, but why the concern for the glasses? A local businessman walks across the river for charity, having carefully studied the charts of the sand banks under the surface of this strong brown god of a river. Sometimes these sand banks build up into islands such as Read’s Island slightly further down from the bridge, opposite the hamlet of South Ferriby and its gigantic cement works. How distant North Lincoln must have seemed before the bridge, when revellers would take the ferry by the Minerva Pub on a Sunday and qualify for a drink as bona-fide travellers. I think of the minor Romantic poet and hymn-writer Henry Kirke White, who writes in his diary of taking the Winteringham Packet through these waters ‘surrounded by a drove of 14 pigs, who raise the most 83

Under Travelling Skies hideous roar every time the boat rolls’. In South Ferriby itself I encounter a charming Russian blue cat named Babushka and ask the bar man at the Hope and Anchor whether it’s true that deer live on the island. Not that he’s ever seen, he answers, while clearly visible in the window behind his head a dozen white-rumped deer canter towards the island’s southern tip. But always in the background thrums the pulse of the traffic over the bridge.

‘Reaching that we may give /The best of what we are and hold as true’? The jumpers’ hands too must reach, in their brief, spectacular fall. That they may give what exactly? Whatever it might be, we will not number among the recipients. ‘Deeper than deep in joys without number’, as another Hull poet, Stevie Smith, wrote, ‘The river Humber /turns to deeper slumber.’

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Under Travelling Skies Losels and Loblolly Men Yield as I do to no one in my zeal to separate the speakers of Larkin’s poems from the bespectacled, balding bloke once resident in these parts, there is still a vulgar pleasure to be had from pinning his work on a definable speaker, if only for the purposes of indignant banter with its author’s shade. Reading a feature on unemployment in Hull, I am reminded of the lines in his ‘Toads’ where, having surveyed the poor, their children and ‘unspeakable’ wives, the poem declares ‘and yet /No one actually starves’. Yes they bloody well do starve, it strikes me, reading about an 18 yearold ‘who has been unemployed since he left school and whose parents have never worked’ being talked through an induction programme by a man who announces that he wants to ‘share [the teenager’s] brilliance with the rest of society’, a compliment only marginally undercut by his suggested root causes of unemployment in these parts: drug use, alcoholism, disability and illiteracy. Rather than, for instance, the economy or ‘the cast of crooks and tarts’ who run it. Good to get that learned, as Larkin might say. These are shocking times: last year there were 58 job-seekers for every available job, I read. A quarter of benefits claimants in Hull have the literacy and numeracy skills of nine year-olds, chips in another welfare-to-work philanthropist, a-quiver with concern about literacy rates yet capable of keeping a straight face while he uses the word ‘proactive’. One work agency, A4E, has recently been in the news for using non-existent jobs to pay itself handsome sums of government money while simultaneously stripping the unfortunate jobless of their benefits. I am reminded of another agency, now departed, that rejoiced in the name ‘InAction’, its job presumably to go around the place stirring up apathy. But getting back to Larkin and his prole-baiting: confronted with the unpublished doggerel quatrains beginning ‘I want to see them starving, /the so-called working class’, John Osborne suggests they 85

Under Travelling Skies would make an excellent socialist satire if retitled ‘The Ballad of the Fascist Bastard’ or ‘Colonel Blimp’s Epitaph’. And try as I might, I too am unable to muster overmuch indignation on that score, or at the thought of an art with the effrontery not to consider my finer feelings. Larkin did not believe it was the task of literature to make us better people, and never pretended otherwise.

Where his riper unpublished poems are concerned, I suspect the Larkin-haters were secretly glad to have them, if only for the pleasure of pinning their elusive prey down to a fixed, and conveniently objectionable, position. Were I a losel or a loblolly man, rather than a lisping lecturer, I know which I’d prefer, in a straight choice between ‘Toads’, or even ‘I want to see them starving’, and droning inanities about ‘sharing my brilliance with the rest of society’ from hucksters rounding up semi-slave labour for the nearest multinational. Though there’s always that job as a ‘horizontal borer’, which I see the job centre is advertising, instead.

To all of which I suggest the appropriate Larkinesque response is a monosyllabic ‘Bum’, hereby shared ‘with the rest of society’.

John Wedgwood Clarke: Freighter (Ravenscar) 86

Under Travelling Skies Extinction’s Alp I want to go to hospital, screams a demented woman several rooms down from me on the ninth floor of Hull Royal Infirmary. I want to go to bed, groans the elderly man opposite me from his bed. Tom Paulin once described Hazlitt’s prose as ‘taut and flaccid’, and there is something simultaneously loose and pinched about my room-mate’s exposed chest, Zurbaran’s St Jeromemeets-late-period Iggy Pop. I have been sequestered on presenting in the maxillo-facial unit (Max Fax to its friends) for an abscess on my jaw, courtesy of a recently removed wisdom tooth. In Larkin’s ‘Ambulances’, any street corner becomes the entrance to the pit of doom, via the speeding vehicles’ deathly portals. Here in hospital, by contrast, power resides with the lift. Though I’m free to move around and do as I wish, the distance down to the breezy café by A&E, there to contemplate a melancholy cheese roll or a community art installation, is well beyond my willpower. Asked once too often for my name and date of birth, I reply with ‘My name is still David Wheatley and I was still born on 16 August 1970’, before realizing how that might sound. An all too appropriate mistake, under the circumstances. For company, when not scanning posters warning me of the dangers of ‘anal fishers’, I have, as it happens, Archie Burnett’s new edition of Larkin, which identifies his ‘Building’ not with the hospital I’m currently occupying but the now-demolished Kingston General, whose Victorian pile can hardly have made much of a ‘clean-sliced cliff’.

Regardless of location, the mountaineers crouched below ‘extinction’s Alp’ maintain their skyward trudge with the same weary resolve on show in Larkin’s poem. Whether talking about their illness or not, whether in blind screaming panic, devouring a monster bag of Doritos or entering a state of auto-embalmment (my room-mate has gone mercifully quiet), my fellow passengers in this frail travelling coincidence are unified only by illness and 87

Under Travelling Skies death. A conversation about liver cancer is a conversation about death, but so is a conversation about what’s on the telly later and whether there will be ice-cream with dinner. But worse again, it strikes me, is not how much more panicked or urgent conversations in hospital are here than down the bookie’s or at the Morrison’s salad counter, but how greyly and utterly the same they are. The film of death-awareness spreads dully over every other conceivable activity: putting the bins out (you will die), feeding the cats (if not now soon), posting a letter (of something painful and lingering). Having covered the whole of existence, though, it collapses in on itself and effectively vanishes again, and all of a sudden my hospital stay takes on the inoffensiveness of anything else I might be doing instead: shopping for mushrooms (who wants to live forever), catching the no. 13 bus (I probably won’t feel a thing anyway), queuing outside the post office in the rain (goodbye cruel world).

John Wedgwood Clarke: Fishing Gear, Scarborough Harbour,

Squall 88

Under Travelling Skies

Kath McKay

The Curtain

‘Your grandmother would like to come through, Kayleigh love.’

At the end of the table Kayleigh’s belly rises and falls.

I am thinking about Arnold Lott, down at City Hall.

American, loud: women swooning at his feet. He has them eating out of his hand.

Kayleigh sighs.Thirty years younger than the others, she expects miracles. She should be with her own age group, not listening to jokes about stress and incontinence.

Everyone here looks as though they have been punched.

Surinder, whose smile never reaches her eyes; Eve, who only lights up when she talks of her ‘angel’ of a husband; Martin, who overdoes the cologne in case the smell of the bin lorry lingers.

Has told us what people discard: dead cats, crutches, money, photographs, full urns. Wants to know where his dead wife has gone.

‘Wonderful weather they’re having in The Meadows,’ I ad lib.

‘Not like Hull. Always sunny, no wind. And flowers.’

‘What flowers?’

‘Roses and lavender. Scented.’

Kayleigh sniffs, suspicious. The smell of lavender wafts through.

‘Your grandmother says be careful of that Sally.’

Kayleigh’s already told me her story. A good memory is the first thing you need. I do that Sudoku every night, and mental arithmetic. And my own accounts.

‘Your grandmother’s fading. I’ll try someone else. Are you there, Gurvinder?’

I say the signs aren’t ‘auspicious’, and close the circle. I’m hungry. That Arnold Lott. Just because he’s got PowerPoint. I’m offering a service. And I charge less than him. I saw people counting out pennies for a ticket. Not right.

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Under Travelling Skies The following week, after the reading, I serve tea in china cups, with biscuits half-coated in dark chocolate.

Kayleigh lingers. She’s due at work.

‘Your new manager, remember?’

The blustery type that splashes a lot in the swimming pool, yet hardly moves, she’s said.

‘He’ll report you.’

She edges out. Stands at the door ‘I see her, you know.’

‘I know you do, pet.’

‘In the Meadows. Poppies and marigolds, and a scent of lavender.’

‘That’s nice.’

A new ache starts in my knees.

The next reading is on a humid Wednesday afternoon. Lawns cry out for rain, and people are tetchy and short-tempered after sweatfilled nights. My container plants wilt in the yard. I feel shrunken and withered.

Kayleigh’s first in.

‘I saw an American medium on TV last night.’

‘Yeah?’

‘He got done for tax evasion.’

‘Oh.’ ‘Seven years. Utah. Isn’t that where they shoot them? Can I put these somewhere? They were by your gate.’

Lavender stalks. Those bloody bin men.

I know it’s over with Kayleigh. It won’t be long before the others go.

I dim the lights.

My voice falters.

‘Can’t you see your grandmother?’

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Under Travelling Skies Kayleigh’s in no mood to play today. There are no meadows.

Her grandmother is a handful of ashes in the crematorium garden.

But she’s a kind girl.

‘I think so.’

Afterwards, over tea, rain falls in a heavy sideways slant that will fill up gutters and turn lawns green. Kayleigh begins telling us about a holiday in Tenerife, shortly after her father’s death. We refill our teacups.

‘Some German surfers said there were dolphins out at sea, and I stood on the beach with my mum watching, after everyone else had gone home. I felt sorry for her. She looked so old; I could see wrinkles underneath her makeup.’

Surinder puts a hand over her mouth.

‘So we stared at the sea. My mum didn’t have her glasses on, but I told her they were playing in the water, darting up and diving.

She was smiling, the first time since my dad died. I said there were eight of them, that I could see them splashing as they leapt up in the air.’

We hold our cups to our lips.

‘I couldn’t see anything. Nothing.’

She puts on her backpack, and stands up, a giant amongst us oldies. Pain corkscrews down my spine.

‘Bye.’ Strides down the path, as if she’s cast off a heavy raincoat.

And walks towards the bridge. She’ll walk and walk, over the sandbanks and mud, and on to Barton, and on. Past all that wire tensing and relaxing to keep the bridge in place, all that wire taking whatever the weather throws at it, staying strong yet flexible.

She raises her hand in the air and waves back.

I wave her on.

91

Under Travelling Skies After everyone leaves, I rise to draw the curtains. And out on the estuary, see a pod of dolphins diving and leaping up in the air, nuzzling into each other. They jump high in the sky and corkscrew down. I leave the curtains open and wait for the darkness to come through.

Cliff Forshaw: Another from the Myth Kitty − Larkin surprised by

Aphrodite on the Humber

92

Under Travelling Skies

John Wedgwood Clarke

Wander

1. South Cave We shed them one by one, by shattered field and barley seas, until the way is open for echoes of us made strange by wind, deserted barn, the shifting trade of shadows on the Humbri, Humbre, Humber, our mouths to springs that speak in tongues of thirst.

2. Goodmanham From dark to dark the bird flies through the fire-lit hall, flies through the axe that strikes the shrine, through burning that grows once more in stone and coloured light, through rain as it amazes chalk and flowers in this latest cup of breath: Goodmanham.

3. Millington The straight line breaks into the mutterings of a track, the body’s unfolding way from dale to dale.

Our muscles burn in its common knowledge, our breath its song above springs as they pour villa into village, marsh marigolds into God’s chrysalis.

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Under Travelling Skies

4. Huggate We have rippled the earth with our desire to be here not there. We have driven the dale’s wedge of hush home between us. But you move, as we moved, in the ghost of water: a hare rips away from the dead, thuds down the dyke and out into everywhere the grasses foam.

5. Settrington Beacon Find the barn’s astounding echo, the space between your hand and shadow, beacon and leaf, this sprung wood and the axis of that spire.

And in this place you’ve made, this hidden dale, let nine chalk springs compose their Whitestone harmony.

6. East Heslerton Brow Hazel Tun, Heslerton – the old sounds shift as they settle new mouths along spring line, marsh edge, road.

Parisi, Roman, Saxon, you – who is from here, who takes the path from spring to shrine, from car to here, voices flittering on the breeze?

94

Under Travelling Skies

Ray French

Elsewhere

Somewhere in South Yorkshire Dylan began moaning and folded over in the back seat.

‘Stop the car,’ yelled Lennon. The chauffeur glanced nervously over his shoulder.

‘I’ve got a van right behind me - there are some services coming up.’

Lennon rolled down the window, hoisted Dylan up by the collar and forced his head out the limo. They heard an anguished bark, then Bob hurled a stream of puke into the rainy night. When he’d finished Lennon dragged him back inside, leaving the window open to help disperse the dense cloud of pot.

‘Well done Bob,’ said Lennon, ‘you’ll feel much better for that me old son.’

Dylan slowly listed to port and slid into the corner. On the other side sat Donn Pennebraker, who was making a film about Dylan’s tour of England called ‘Something Is Happening.’ He chopped the air with his hand and Robert Van Dyke, watching from the passenger seat, lowered his microphone. The chauffeur indicated and began slowing down to take the slip road into the services. Donn switched off his camera and laid it on his lap; Lennon leant closer and asked him, ‘Did you manage to get that?

Or shall we ask Bob to do it again?’

The toilets were on the bridge over the M1; Lennon and the chauffeur hauled Dylan up the long flight of steps, the two filmmakers following a few paces behind, their heads down, muttering.

The strange trio in front attracted curious stares from the passers-by. The chauffeur in a smart grey suit, his peaked cap gradually being dislodged by Dylan’s arm. Bob’s blue navy jacket buttoned up to the neck, blank white face framed by Rorschach 95

Under Travelling Skies inkblot hair, his Wayfarer sunglasses slowly slipping down his nose. Lennon, looking cool and commanding in his black jacket, black button down shirt and black jeans, was giving a running commentary for the startled businessmen and gawping suburban couples.

‘Good evening ladies and gents, please don’t be alarmed, my name is Doctor Joan Lemon, and this is my patient, Mr Boob Doldrum, the much-loved strolling minstrel. He turned electric to keep up with the times, but got very upset when those nasty folkniks started booing him. He’s a sensitive soul, and he’s currently on medication to help him deal with not being adored anymore. Unfortunately it’s made him a bit drowsy and he needs a lie down now. Make way, make way, thanking you in advance for your co-operation, that’s right sir, there’s nothing to worry about, move along now madam, everything’s under control.’

It was so easy to slip into being the John Lennon of A Hard Day’s Night, the nation’s favourite cynic. When they reached the Gents, Lennon offloaded Dylan onto the chauffeur.

‘Right mate, he’s all yours. Chuck some cold water on his mush and tell him we’ll be waiting for him in the caff.’

The café stretched the length of the bridge. A row of booths ran down both sides, the orange banquette seating and yellow formica tables flanked by ceiling-high windows allowing diners to gaze down at the traffic zipping past below. While Van Dyke and Donn went to the counter, Lennon slid into an empty booth close to the door.

It was nearly eight, an hour earlier and the place would have been packed, but now there were hardly more than a couple of dozen customers scattered around the tables. Was there anything more forlorn, thought Lennon, than a slowly emptying motorway service café on a rainy weekday night? The rain clattered against the window, below him speeding lorries sent up sheets of spray. In the booth opposite was a sad-looking bald guy in black square 96

Under Travelling Skies frame glasses, reading a book. They were the kind of hideous glasses Mimi bought him when he was a kid, which he’d stuff into his pocket as soon as he was out the door, so the other kids wouldn’t call him a drip. For the next decade the world had been a blur, but it was worth it. Jesus, thank god for contact lenses.

There was something familiar-looking about the guy, but he didn’t look up so Lennon couldn’t get a clear view of his face. He glanced at the other customers and the staff staring at him as if he’d teleported down from another planet, then turned his attention back to the guy opposite. It was funny but lately, whenever he walked into a room, his eyes would glide over all the excited faces and look-at-me jokers and instead seek out the one still, silent presence.

Where might they have met? He was dressed like a total square in his beige jacket, pin striped shirt and blue tie, a light grey mac draped over the back of the seat. He looked like a bank manager, or maybe a lawyer – Brian had a whole team of legal advisers to help him run the Fab Four Empire. Was that where he’d seen him, in Brian’s office? Sometimes, when he was bored, Lennon used to sit with Brian in his office, watching presentations for proposed new Beatles products.

My company manufactures a Paul McCartney doll. You shake its head like this and its big gooey eyes open wide. You press this button and it says ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ Press here and it wets itself, then you take its trousers down and change its nappy. We envisage a retail price of two pounds and ten shillings. This is our John Lennon doll. You press the button and it yells ‘Help! Get me out of here!’

But when the guy looked up from his book and took a sip of tea, Lennon realised he was no lawyer.

Every few weeks he would scour different bookshops in London, buying enough books to fill several carrier bags. He’d grab anything that took his fancy: Oscar Wilde; Tolstoy; Osbert Sitwell’s autobiography; Forty-One Years In India, by Field Marshal 97

Under Travelling Skies Lord Roberts. Cyn’s face would drop when he came through the door, knowing it meant she wouldn’t get a word out of him for the rest of the day. Sometimes he thought the happiest he’d ever been in his whole life was back in Woolton, lying on his bed reading Just William, the smell of Mimi’s home-made steak pie wafting up from the kitchen.

The Pride Of Miss Jean Brodie; Curiosities of Natural History, by Francis T Buckland; a biography of Hildegard of Bingen; Nabokov; Blake; Byron; Wordsworth. And, last week, The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin. A couple of days later he’d read an article about him titled ‘The Poet With The Growing Reputation Who Shuns The Metropolitan Scene.’ It was accompanied by a photo of Larkin, looking as though he was about to tell the photographer to bloody well get a move on. That’s where he’d seen him before.

Lennon hadn’t read that much modern poetry, so he wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Larkin wrote about the kind of things and the sort of people you didn’t normally find in poems, using everyday language to tackle big themes. Most poetry, even the best stuff, still contained a fair amount of bullshit as far as Lennon was concerned; but there was none in Larkin’s.

Now there he was, just a few feet away. Lennon felt kind of sad for him – Jesus, look at him, this was a guy the sixties had passed by. By the time everything finally opened up, he was too set in his ways to grab a piece of the action, his chance gone. Maybe he’d go over, tell him how much he’d enjoyed his poetry. Why not?

There was a whiff of Chanel No 5, and Lennon looked up to see a girl stood in front of him: she was what - eighteen, nineteen?

Long auburn hair and big green eyes, a low cut white knitted top; purple min-skirt. She was clutching a napkin and a biro.

‘Can I have your autograph?’

98

Under Travelling Skies He had met her so many times before. She had posters of The Beatles on the wall of her bedroom, lay on her bed at night listening to their singles, dreaming they were singing about her.

It’s you, girl, you.

She still lived at home in a terraced street in Doncaster, with her mum, Betty and dad, Wilf, but was saving up so she could move out and get a bedsit on the other side of town and join the swinging sixties. When he handed back the napkin she stepped closer, so that they were nearly touching. She gave him the look.

‘You’ve always been my favourite.’

No, not always. At first she fancied sweet, simpering doe-eyed Paul, they all did. She imagined the two of them kissing and holding hands, pictured everyone looking on in envy as they walked down the street together; dreamed of Paul charming Wilf and Betty when she brought him home. Surly Lennon, with his big nose and fat face wouldn’t go down quite so well with mum and dad. Oh yes, she longed to hold hands and go steady with Paul, but it was Lennon she wanted to fuck.

Why not, thought Lennon? He was bored with this whole stupid road trip, playing second fiddle to old Bob. He could feel Larkin watching them, but when he looked his way he was bent over his book again. The girl was saying something. He looked up, her lips were parted slightly and she pressed her leg, warm and soft, firmly into his. She was still so young, nothing bad had happened to her yet, all her dreams still intact.

‘Not tonight, Josephine.’

Her face dropped; she laughed nervously to hide the hurt and fled. Later she would take a biro to her Beatles poster and scribble over his face till the glossy paper stretched and tore. She’d cut him out of her scrapbook, and slag him off to all her friends.

The two yanks came back from the counter with a tray - black coffee for Lennon, pie and chips for Van Dyke, fish and chips for Donn.

99

Under Travelling Skies ‘Hey John, what’s this weird looking green stuff next to the fish?’

‘It’s mushy peas, Donn. It’s a northern delicacy.’

‘That right?’

He regarded the mound dubiously. Lennon spooned sugar into his coffee.

‘So tell me Donn, what exactly are you trying to do with this film?’

Donn smiled, he’d been waiting for Lennon to ask.

‘I’ve got this thesis, okay, that if Lord Byron was alive today he’d be a pop star. He’d be seducing thousands of women with his verse, except he’d be playing guitar and be backed by musicians.

Basically I see Bob as a Byronesque pop figure who’s inventing a whole new mood in music He’s using the romance that image carries – the beautiful words, the vulnerable look, the freedom of the great artist – and once he’s made it big, he looks down at everybody gazing up at him and says ‘Fuck you!’

‘And they look back at him and say fuck you too, Bob, and start booing.’

Donn’s smile vanished; he flinched under Lennon’s intimidating stare.

He wished he knew how to stop being like this. He didn’t enjoy it, and it didn’t make him feel any better. But no-one had the nerve to take on John Lennon.

When Eric Burdon and Alan Price invited Lennon to come up north to see Bob and hang out, it sounded like a great idea. But the last few days had sickened him. Dylan was getting the kind of treatment that used to be reserved for The Beatles: crazed teenagers waiting for him at Heathrow; the press following him everywhere; screaming girls throwing themselves at his limo; kids mobbing his hotel for a glimpse of the Latest Big Thing. Bob was finding that he couldn’t stomach it any more than Lennon could.

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Under Travelling Skies Donn didn’t have a clue there was another poet sitting opposite. But while Dylan looked like a romantic poet on acid, Larkin resembled the manager of the local branch of Barclays.

How would he have made a film about Larkin? No screaming fans, no spewing in limos, no seducing thousands of women with his verse, just a bald guy sitting at his desk, writing in a notebook.

He’d have to call it ‘Nothing Much Is Happening.’

Larkin took a last gulp of tea and pushed the cup and saucer away, put the book inside an attaché case and snapped it shut. He began sliding himself out of the banquette, but he was long limbed, a stiff, awkward mover, and the effort made him look irritable. When he stood up Lennon saw just how tall he was, over six foot – that didn’t fit the image of a romantic poet either. He could see that being so tall embarrassed him, attracting unwanted attention. But then he knew from the poem, ‘The Importance Of Elsewhere’, that this was a guy who didn’t feel comfortable anywhere.

When he’d read it Lennon felt he’d discovered something that captured exactly how he felt. Being an outsider when he was younger, Blind Wimple Lennon the schoolboy, the crap art student, even the leather clad rocker screaming abuse at drunken German sailors in Hamburg, was something he could stomach. He knew he didn’t belong in any of those places, that he was heading somewhere else. Now here he was, in the place he’d always longed for, surrounded by hip guys and sexy girls, as much booze and drugs and sex as he could want – and he wanted plenty – but never enough, somehow, to stop him from still feeling like an outsider.

But this time it mattered, because where else did he have to go from here?

The door opened and the chauffeur ushered Dylan into the cafe, took his elbow and guided him gently forwards. He looked like one of the Undead as he shuffled towards the table; Donn got to his feet: ‘Hey Bob, how you feeling, come and sit down, man.’

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Under Travelling Skies The chauffeur helped Dylan into the seat next to Donn, but as soon as he took his hand from Bob’s shoulder he began to slump face first towards the table so that Donn had to hoist him back up and hold him in place. Donn asked the chauffeur to go fetch a black coffee. Lennon said, ‘Here, he can have mine,’ and pushed the cup across the table, then turned to watch Larkin walk to the door.

He had a quick stride, swinging his right arm in a brisk, officer on parade style, giving the impression of a straightforward, nononsense, thoroughly dull kind of chap. It fascinated Lennon, the gap between the face people put on for the outside world, and what they hid inside. As Larkin pushed open the door, he turned and looked directly at Lennon, maintaining eye contact when Lennon stared back. He wondered what the old boy saw? An arrogant pop star, who had all the things he’d missed out on, who did what the hell he wanted? Or a guy who wanted to scream, Help! Get me out of here! He’d love to have known. But then Larkin turned away, the door swung shut behind him, and Lennon knew that he’d never see him again.

Malcolm Watson: Purple Haze 102

Under Travelling Skies

Cliff Forshaw

The Bohemian of Pearson Park

‘Fulfilment’s desolate attic’: what a hoot!

From those high windows peering out, femmes damnées burning in your mind still, the cerebral voluptuary requires a titillation more Paris or London, more enfer than Hull. Émaux et camées, À rebours: out there the roughs and the tumbles, the louts and bores.

Your little flat just so, the specially-bought ‘comfortable and chintzy’ armchairs, the carpet like ‘autumn leaves’; the Pye ‘Black Box’ cocked with vinyl, all that jazz; and in the loo the hybrid collage of Blake and Punch. and, coming in to clean twice a week, Mrs Noakes in turn replaced by Mrs Oakes.

How comfort rhymes.

Elsewheres squint out from here, too.

Tall, neurasthenic, silk-socked, the randy-dandy in his kitchen alcove, between décadence and danse macabre.

You grow gross: can’t cast that first stone.

Your books, your prints, your mags and discs: all that jazz and jizz. *

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Under Travelling Skies Pauvre petit poète maudit, Well no longer that, you grow comfortable, fat, but more certainly bad-mouthed by studenty stoner revolutionaries with their graffiti in the library loo, aimed squarely at High and Mighty, dressing to the right, fifteen-sixteen stoners like you. * To purify the dialect of the tribe: Eliot out of Mallarmé.

Essential Beauty’s gone viral now: the open secrets of the screen disclose how your Facebook status quivers with your faith; clocks what your favourites in rows reveal of your innermost depths, the shallows of desire you puddled through friending the total shyly boasted there.

The drunken eighteenth or twenty-first: that lost weekend in Amsterdam or Prague, Ibiza, the Oblivion Express, the stopping train always late getting away but cans on the formica, spliff in the loo...

104

Under Travelling Skies Of course, you also knew them too, in their first soixante-huitard bloom, now retirees with faulty memories, (the whole hideous inverted childhood) still dressed in baby clothes, forever young, the old fools.

Cliff Forshaw: sketch for Another from the Myth Kitty – After a

Bibulous Lunch, Larkin Stumbles on Some Hippies and Mistakes Them for the Retinue of Dionysus

105

Under Travelling Skies

In the shed, the bike, upright with honest crossbar awaits: bolts tight, chain oiled beneath the trouser guard; wheels ready to slice off-days into dull glitterings: life, like sun, somewhere between the spokes.

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Dead Level A February Sunday brings the snow; crash-landed, sky means soft debris, tiny mountains, your head at thirty thousand feet. All that was high brought low.

Forget extinction’s alp, the cemetery’s dead flat. − Not quite: the hallowed ground is riddled, holed; headstones so intent on touching base they further fall where earth is truant, plays hide and seek with the ground of our being, shrinks into the voids between drained clay.

Think absences, the waves that drop, the shoreless days.

This is Hull. (Nor are we out of it in Cottingham.) Some find their level only here.

Acquainted with this great suburban leveller, did you finally find your spirit levelled too?

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Mary Aherne

Quadrille

On the Fish Trail in Hull

Chromed bronze anchovies, brill in York Stone, an electric eel flickers by the electricity sub-station, dogfish chase catfish in Elland Edge rock, gurnard, John Dory, haddock and hake, starfish and yawling, lobsters dancing in slate, x-ray fish etched over Beverley Gate, garfish and grayling branded in timber, cod cast in bronze, boardwalk ice-fish in Carrera.

And what of the oarfish in Hopton Wood Stone that slithers down a ginnel off Bowlalley Lane?

Flying fish leap by the old Seaman’s Mission, for sailors the sign of good luck and good fortune.

Net herring and mackerel and eels set in decking, and at old Scale Lane Staith catch an elegant salmon.

Hake cut in steel vie with monkfish in marble all flaunting whiskers, gills, tails, fins and barbels.

Viviparous blenny takes a twirl on a terrace, (posh) Cerutti’s is graced with a turbot in granite.

Festooned with crinoids, formed in Tilberthwaite Tuff, black Belgian marble, Jurassic or rough grey-brown sandstone; in bricks known as Kettley and Staffordshire Blue, carved in Lazenby redstone, or cut into slate these slitherers, ditherers, flounderers, waifs of the rollers 108

Under Travelling Skies now surge on the pavements, tread water in stone.

Molluscs, crustaceans, small fry make their home on the streets of a city once famed for the smell of the silver-pit bounty, the trawlermen’s haul.

And now it’s the artist we all have to thank for the pilots’ pub pilot and the Market Place plaice and basking in Whitefriargate outside a bank, the shark with a menacing grin on its face.

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David Wheatley

Erosion

Sunk Island Level with a passing ship and buried by sky, the flood plain shows the tide a quivering top lip of shallow soil between my house and the soft clay banks I hardly trust.

Drip-fed back to gull and wader, the fields will go and not be missed, dry for now but underwater.

Though barn and spire may stand against the heavens’ downward-plunging level, here we are captive though unfenced.

Deliver us, Lord, not from evil but, worse again, the solving blank of a place where only postmen come, and save for us when all has sunk a tremor in the churchyard loam: no resurrection of the flesh, but our thin coffins shaken from their moorings by the tidal wash, plunging us past all roots and home.

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John Wedgwood Clarke: Cornelian Bay (low tide)

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 After, 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.

James Booth taught at the University of Hull between 1968 and 2011, with semesters in Nigeria and Jamaica. His publications include Writers and Politics in Nigeria (Hodder and Stoughton, 1981), Sylloge of Coins of the British Isles 48: Ancient British, Anglo-Saxon, Norman and Plantagenet Coins to 1279 (OUP and Spink for the British Academy, 1997), Philip Larkin: Writer (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), and Philip Larkin: The Poet's Plight (Palgrave, 2005). He edited Larkin's Trouble at Willow Gables and Other Fictions (Faber, 2002) and Maeve Brennan's memoir The Philip Larkin I Knew (Manchester UP, 2002). He is currently completing a new biography of Larkin.

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Under Travelling Skies John Wedgwood Clarke is currently Leverhulme Artist in Residence at the Centre for Environmental and Marine Sciences at the University of Hull, Scarborough. He is UK and Ireland poetry editor for Arc Publications and teaches poetry on the part-time creative writing degree at the University of Hull. He is co-Artistic Director of Sea Swim. Sea Swim is part of imove: a Cultural Olympiad Programme in Yorkshire www.imoveand.com/seaswim. His pamphlet collection, ‘Sea Swim’, is available from Valley Press www.valleypressuk.com 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 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.

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Under Travelling Skies 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.

John Mowat taught at the University of Hull. He has published articles on Anthony Burgess, James Joyce and Saul Bellow. Since 1990 he has written over a hundred poems and seen many published in small magazines. He lives in Cardiff and Bath.

Christopher Reid was for two years the Professor of Creative Writing at Hull. A Scattering won the 2009 Costa Book Award in both the poetry and overall Best Book of the Year categories. His Selected Poems was published in 2011.

Carol Rumens has published a number of collections of poetry, including Blind Spots (Seren, 2008) and De Chirico’s Threads (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. Some of her poems in the anthology first appeared in Blind Spots.

Maurice Rutherford, born in 1922 in Hull, spent his working life in the ship-repairing 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.

Sarah Stutt completed an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Hull and lives in Beverley. She won the East Riding Prize in the Larkin and East Riding Poetry Competition in 2010 and 2012 and has been shortlisted in several national competitions. Her translation of Rilke’s ‘Archaischer Torso Apollos’ was The Guardian Poem of the Week.

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Under Travelling Skies 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.

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 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 The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry, and he reviews widely, for The Guardian and other journals.

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Under Travelling Skies is an anthology of words and images by writers and artists associated with the University of Hull. Taking the work of Philip Larkin as a starting point, it sets off to explore Hull and the landscapes of East Yorkshire. The book grew out of a commission for the first Larkin25 Words Award and is accompanied by a short film. Exhibitions of the artwork associated with the project were held at Artlink and the University of Hull.

The Humber Writers are: Mary Aherne, James Booth, John Wedgwood Clarke, Cliff Forshaw, Ray French, Kath McKay, Christopher Reid, Carol Rumens, Maurice Rutherford, Sarah Stutt, Malcolm Watson, John Mowat and David Wheatley. The book is edited by Cliff Forshaw.