essay no.
A Black Country Lad garry barker Garry Barker is an artist who draws. He draws things he sees as he walks, he draws the things he thinks he sees as he thinks about what he has seen and he draws the things that are not there when he starts drawing but which arrive as he draws. Born and raised in Dudley, in what was once Worcestershire, Barker found that he was from an early age at the centre of mysterious forces. The places he played in belonged to an age of past myth and these embedded themselves into his visual imagination and still today lie behind his internal imaginative landscape. The council house Barker was born in stood in the shadow of the Wren’s Nest hills. Now a nature reserve, then, in the early 1950s a wild place of sharp rock outcrops and mysterious caves, threaded through with green brown waters that were the entry points of an underground canal system. This playground was a result of the area’s long industrial heritage, a heritage that in the 1950s still appeared to be a live one, as several members of his family were still employed at the Earl of Dudley’s steel works and his grandparents lived in the shadow of the steelworks themselves. As a child he would
a black country lad help his grandmother bring in the washing before they opened the blast furnaces, (if not clothes would be marked with black specks from wind-blown sparks). These furnaces would cast a dark red glow across the sky, their opening signalled by a surprisingly sudden shift of the spectrum. In fact, it is believed that Tolkien’s descriptions of Mordor are based on the Black Country, in particular Brierley Hill, the very area of Dudley where Barker’s grandparents lived and which was celebrated in this anonymously penned poem.
when satan stood on brierley hill and far around him gazed, he said: “i never more shall feel at hells fierce flames amazed.” His maternal grandmother and grandfather had long histories of association with the ‘Earls’. His grandmother when she was a child remembered tales for her mother having to sleep with the steelwork’s horses, so that she could warn her parents of any oncoming illness or other problem that could potentially stop the animals being of use the next day. Her father was a groom as was Barker’s grandfather’s. When the horses were replaced by mechanisation the steam train became the family’s wage earner. As a boy Barker would sometimes be given a train ride by his granddad, who would stop his engine on the single track that ran behind the local terraced houses, and collect up
a black country lad the boy, so that he could ride the 0-6-0 wagon shunter, with its blazing coal fire and polished brass handles, a boy who would be allowed to stoke the fire and his imagination at the same time. Two of Barker’s uncles also worked at the ‘Earls’ and he knew its smell and the feel of engrained oil and coal dust long before he realised that he would himself at some point have to work there. Which he eventually did, but not long enough to scar him, just long enough to shape his memories and hone his vision. Meetings with animals were still an everyday occurrence when Barker was growing up. Besides his grandmother’s close connections with horses, (she read them like a book), a lot of families kept pigs, chickens and rabbits as a supplement to their diet, this of course being something that had been encouraged during the war. His grandmother would be very careful with food preparation, peeling potatoes finely and only cutting out the worst of the diseased cabbage leaves, however there would always be something left over and a job for small boys was to feed the pigs with the scraps. A job not without its hazards and for someone at the time quite short, encounters with pigs could be quite terrifying. Pigs are powerful creatures and when they look at you, you realise they have a human like intelligence; their individual faces still live with Barker today, over 50 years later.
a black country lad Because the local abattoir was over the road from Barker’s primary school, the sound of pigs being led to the slaughter was a constant accompaniment to the daily routine of chanted times-tables and squealing playgrounds. After school t he would play boats in the abattoir’s huge sinks with his best friend. They didn’t mind the rows of hanging carcases that loomed above them, they somehow made the empty spaces peopled and their flesh was comforting and familiar. Children in those days being given boiled pig’s trotters in vinegar as comfort food. Barker’s father’s family were coal miners originally from Shropshire, who moved to Dudley via Cannock, and who before the rise of industry were Shropshire shepherds. This meant that conversations between older family members could often turn to stories of methane gas and coal dust fire and other hazards of the trade. Because Dudley had coal, limestone and iron ore all available to mine locally it was therefore honeycombed with disused shafts and tunnels, some of which went back to the 13th century. This meant that some of the areas children played in were doubly dangerous and of course that much more fascinating. Underground fires in particular were the source of many stories. At times the ground would just open up and houses would disappear down gaping pits. At one time Dudley Town football and cricket club found a seemingly bottomless pit had opened out overnight in the middle of its pitch. This gaping fissure still opening out into the dark depths of Barker’s unconscious fifty years later.
a black country lad Dominated by a castle, Dudley stands on a hill overlooking the West Midlands. The castle has been the site for many years of a zoo another key component in the shaping of Barker’s imagination. The castle stands on an outcrop of limestone and the Wren’s Nest rises up as an extension of this. The Priory Council Estate lying in the hollow below the castle and the rocky Wren’s Nest outcrops. As children we of course often went to the zoo and many of the larger animals inhabited pits and caves very similar to the ones we played in. The story amongst us children was that the caves that the bears inhabited were linked directly to the Wren’s Nest caves. Perhaps more unsettling however, was the sound of alien animals barking, crying and grunting in the quiet of the night as you walked around the edge of the zoo walls. This Black Country landscape still lives, frozen in memory because Barker left the area in the late 1960s never to return. Not many people seemed to leave Dudley and none of his family had outside the area connections. But one person from the Priory Estate did make it out into the wider world; Duncan Edwards. Duncan was a footballer and was in the 1950s perhaps the greatest of his time. His coming from the Priory estate meant that if he could make it, any of us could. One of the Busby Babes, his ghost now looms over the late 1950s, Duncan’s death in the 1958 Munich air disaster predicating what was effectively for the town of Dudley, a state funeral; the population standing in a silent respect that echoed the still deeply felt memorial silences of armistice days. Images
a black country lad of the snow shrouded crashed plane still haunt a generation of football supporters. St. Francis Xavier said, “Give me the child until he is seven and I’ll give you the man”. Barker’s walks through Leeds are patterned by his brain’s memory theatre constructed out of the industrial landscape of nineteen fifties Dudley. His sense of private myth embedded in that period from 1950 to 1969, a time that when looked at from 2010 may as well be Medieval, but which is a time from which he can’t escape and from which perhaps he doesn’t want to.
garry barker publishing www.garrybarkeronline.com
garry barker publishing www.garrybarkeronline.com