Chapter 4

      ‘They f**k you up, your mum and dad’.

 

This was the first line of poetry I read as an adult. At least it is the first line of poetry I remember reading as an adult, and I recall its shocking statement hit me like a well aimed kick in the testicles. Though I didn’t feel the searing pain, nor did my eyes water, but you get the idea.

 

I never thought poets were allowed to swear and hardly thought it would be Philip Larkin, librarian extraordinaire, to be the one to do it. Having said that, Robert Browning once used the word twat in a poem and caused much consternation as he thought it meant a piece of headgear worn by nuns (don’t ask me why) when it really meant the same as it does now. It’s an easy mistake to make. I have often gone up to nuns in the street and asked, "Excuse me, sister, is that a twat on your head?" I’m sure Larkin and Browning would turn in their graves if they knew that is the only reason I remember them.

 

Take the merest glance at Larkin and you’ll see he comes across as his own man. A solitary man, locked away behind closed doors. A grey suited, bespectacled, balding, rather serious gentleman. If you can imagine Eric Morecambe as a sombre librarian you have Philip Larkin. For me he resembled his own poetry �" sombre, with a little twinkle in his eye which made you unsure if he was talking seriously or simply pulling your leg.

I have only just begun to read Larkin. He was one writer who never really appealed to me when I began to find poetry interesting. It was only when I looked closely at his work that I understood how important he could be to me. Larkin was a narrative poet, hence his popularity with novelists. He describes the ordinary everyday things we all see and ignore, and shapes them into something poetic: an unnoticed glove on the floor, the hang of frayed curtains, ‘the long soft tides of grass’, etc. Things he could as easily describe in prose, but are said so succinctly in poetry. He doesn’t beautify his subjects, rather the opposite, he treats them all as the mundane objects they are, but somehow he alchemises them into something special; treating them almost as momentary deviations on a grander theme to help colour in the picture. Reading his poems, most of which don’t rhyme (another incentive for the novelist), I became caught up in their minimalism. He spoke with such a down to earth, almost brutal authority that it made me want to sit up and take notice. His knack of witnessing the trivialities of life is a glorious lesson for any new writer of poetry or prose; to keep their eyes and ears open and take in the details. Everything is trivial until collected then it all becomes important. His poetry is the Sunday afternoons spent alone. The world is at your feet for those few hours. You can go anywhere and do anything, but all you do, one way or another, is waste the day away.

 

Larkin’s poem, Here, was the main reason I was visiting Hull. This poem alone told more of the Hull of the 1950’s and 60’s than anything else he wrote and it was here where I would find my inspiration. If any. Here was Larkin’s remarkable declaration of a city in which he lived and a city no one else wanted to visit. No change there then, except that Larkin now lives underground. The poem begins in the fields and ‘gathers to the surprise of a large town’ where all people do is consume. The words parroted in a staccato style shopping list. Reading it you can feel the change occurring and the claustrophobic strangulation of the choking city where ‘silence stands like heat’ and there is an air of neglect. There is, and could never be, a more apposite poem about Hull which still seems to ring true.

 

I am not trying to analyse his work. Heaven forbid! I don’t understand the full complexities of poetry to allow me to attempt such a feat. All I want is to do is take away what I need in order to become a better writer with better ideas and understanding. Plus I have to make it look like I know what I’m talking about. Even if I don’t.

 

Hull, Larkin’s home for the last thirty years of his life, is not a tourist destination. You have to want to go to Hull. It’s not on the way to anywhere. It’s a purposeful detour. One not many are willing to make. A city of ‘raw estates where only salesmen and relations come.’ Hull is a city dragging along its post-war sense of desolation like iron-chains. The city is under redevelopment. It has been under redevelopment ever since the Germans decided to use it for target practice during World War II and ended up causing damage to around ninety percent of its buildings. In their dictatorial dedication to complete destruction the Germans even bombed nearby Goole under the illusion that it was Hull, or just in case it was going to turn into Hull at some point in the future. Hull wasn’t the only strange place Larkin surfaced. He was born in Coventry and worked for a time in Belfast. Perhaps he liked cities which had been semi-demolished. Perhaps he was trying to find the worst place to live in the UK. Or was he trying to avoid people, particularly tourists?

 

I always try my best to like Hull. It may not sound like it, but I do. More out of a sense of duty to Yorkshire than any actual affection. Hull has a bad reputation; even in Yorkshire. A knew a lad once who thought Hull was the worst town he had ever seen, and he was from Sheffield, which itself is only marginally less ugly.

 

Larkin spent thirty years here and the only nice thing he could find to say about the place was that it was flat and good for cycling. Tour de Hull, anyone? Walter White in his book, A Month in Yorkshire, written in 1858 said "Half a day’s exploration led me to the conclusion that the most cheerful quarter of Hull is the cemetery." Hull was also voted worst town in The Little Book of Crap Towns, and the Channel Four television programme Location, Location, Location recently voted it the worst place to buy a house in Britain. Clearly Hull needs help. As I have said Hull is attempting to rebuild and renew its image; apparently as a Pioneering City, so the big blue and yellow sign announced as it welcomed us into its bosom. Quite what it professes to pioneer is a matter for some debate.

 

I would love to know why everyone calls this place Hull when the city is officially named Kingston-Upon-Hull after the small tributary of water running into the town. Why is it not named Humber? The Humber is by far the greater river. In fact its breadth is so much that it widens to an estuary. Why is it named after a river at all? I don’t recall having heard of towns named Avon, Trent or Tyne. To be honest a lot of the names of rivers �" Ouse, Exe, Tyne, Avon �" all mean ‘river’. So why do we not call it Kingston? Or is that too much like a Jamaican township?

 

No matter from which angle you enter Hull’s centre by road it is a disappointment. Whether passing tower blocks poking up like spying periscopes, or weaving through industrial monopolies and warehouses, or suburban streets lined with metal-shuttered shops with youths in tracksuits and baseball caps and young mothers accompanied by push-chairs, a cigarette balanced between their lips and a venomous look in their eyes. It’s a disappointment. This is not to say I am being negative about the people of Hull who live in such deprived surroundings and circumstances. How could I? I was born into a one-parent family on a grubby council estate and I could not have been happier.

 

Granted playing hide and seek on a council dump and playing out with holes in the knees of my trousers and snot encrusted sleeves now does not sound like my idea of fun, but back then it was wonderful. That’s not to say I am comparing my village childhood to living in Hull, but I do know something about deprivation.

 

Our first stop was Pearson Park, Larkin's home for the majority of his writing life where he fed a complex fondness for pornography and jazz. A rather ordinary looking park on first glance. I’m not sure what I had been expecting but it looked fairly characterless. I made my way into the park, with Amber as ever at my side, kicking through the crunchy sycamore leaves coating the ground. The park was, as parks often are, made up of an expanse of grass with a murky pond at one end, and paths running here and there which were mostly covered in duck s**t near the pond. Around one side of the pond was a small green hut covered in graffiti. This served as the parks café which looked depressing to say the least. A handful of old people were seated on the plastic chairs dotted around outside, huddled in overcoats against the back end temperatures. On the other side of the stagnant pool of water was a greenhouse that apparently housed some birds, reptiles and fish, so said the guidebook, but it looked like it had been closed for some time and it too was covered in graffiti, scratched into the white-washed glass. It really was quite a relentlessly gloomy place. The entire pond end of the park stood in constant shade at this time of the year from the surrounding trees and buildings which didn’t help matters.

 

After a little searching I managed to locate number 32 lurking in the furthest corner of Pearson Park, the depressing pond end, naturally, where Larkin lived in a flat at the top of a large suburban semi-detached presiding over all this misery from a dormer-window in the attic. Even this building had seen better days. The paint on the window frames was flaking, the roof was green with moss where the sun failed to reach, and there was a clump of grass growing in the gutter. The whole house seemed to be hiding behind a large hedge and thick bushes as if Larkin was still living there trying to keep away from prying eyes. It seems strange that this was where Philip Larkin wrote almost all his best work, yet it is 105 Newland Park his (no longer) ‘ugly little house’ or ‘a garage with a house attached’ as he described it where he moved to afterwards and wrote virtually nothing, which is adorned with a commemorative plaque.

 

We made our way further into town and came quite by surprise upon Queen Victoria Square, the gateway to the old town. It was here the whole image of Hull changed; thankfully for the better. Impressive ornate architecture proliferated throughout the square, all of which over looked a grand statue of Queen Victoria sitting on top of some rather elaborate underground public toilets which I thought was a rather conspicuous place to hide them. I wonder if Queen Victoria herself ever came to Hull and thought   

      "One would like to spend a penny under a huge statue of oneself." I wonder if she ever came to Hull at all come to that!

 

As I waited for Amber to use these facilities I sat reading Hull’s Essential Guide which I had just procured from the Tourist Information Centre across the square. As well as Philip Larkin I was surprised to learn of Hull’s other famous residents: William Wilberforce, the man who worked tirelessly to bring about the abolishment of the slave trade and Amy Johnson, the first woman to fly solo to Australia (was she trying to get as far away from the town as possible?). I read that Queen’s Gardens, formerly an 18th century dock, was where Daniel Defoe’s fictional character Robinson Crusoe set sail on his seafaring adventures. I was just getting to the part about the Hull Fair, a huge fun fair held in the city every October, when Amber returned.

 

It was obvious that the Germans had missed this part of Hull on their bombing tour of 1940, but what the Germans had missed the teenagers and pigeons certainly had not. I sat over the toilets in an area which looked like it was used by the local, manky pigeons for target practice. Several local teenagers in regulation baseball caps or hooded-tops, imaginatively called hoodies, were gobbing great wads of mucus from their profane little mouths nearby, creating a general feeling of unease in an otherwise beautiful area of town. I always smile to myself when I see teenagers hanging around like this because I know they will be serving me a Big Mac and fries in a couple of years time. Well they will if they ever get off their lazy arses and aspire to such dizzy heights of what they deem a career.

 

We strolled further to the dazzling sunshine dancing off the rippling water in the marina, and the glass frontage of Princes Quay. We ambled alongside the boats crammed in like children in a Victorian bed, passing the Spurn Lightship �" one of two boat museums in the city �" which housed a mini lighthouse on its deck. I had never seen a floating lighthouse before. I wondered if it has ever run aground on the rocks? We wandered on passed the dockside and over a footbridge to where the worlds only submarium, The Deep could be found. What on earth is a ‘submarium’? Are they just making up words now? It seems a bit of a feeble claim to be the world’s only some-word-you’ve-just-made-up. Anyone could get away with that. Okay, I’m going to have a go. I am now officially the world’s only writician. Thankfully my computer put a squiggly red line under the word writician as it didn’t recognize it. If it had not you would be calling me a liar right about now.

 

In photographs The Deep looks rather a large building, but up close it feels small and very out of place, jutting out from the shoreline like a glass encased UFO having crashed landed on the banks of the Humber reflecting the sun’s occasional rays like a jaggedy-arsed diamond. Entrance was quite pricey, but then so was the building It cost £45.5million and they have to re-coup their money somehow. The Deep is Hull’s vain attempt to encourage people into the city and I must say I highly recommend paying it a visit.

 

A couple of hours later and back out in the real world Hull looked drab and dreary in the solemn cloak of twilight after all the brightly coloured fish and exhibits. We enjoyed the peaceful seclusion of the old town. Dark shadows dowsed the narrow lanes as our footsteps echoed along the cobbles. We stopped for a pint in the Olde Black Boy, one of Hull’s best kept secrets and a favourite watering hole of Philip Larkin. Walking around some parts of the town you do get a sense that the place could do with tarting up a bit. Or tarting up considerably. Or even re-tarting up. Some areas had witnessed redevelopment, some had even seen it first-hand, yet a lot still needed to be done. Hull has the potential of becoming the great city it once was; or once should have been. It has architecture; it has history. It even has quirky street names such as Dagger Lane and the fantastic The Land Of Green Ginger, which American and Japanese tourists seem to find so appealing.

 

Coming out onto Gelder Street the Christmas lights were in evidence, strung out over the street like morning dew on a spiders web. The city did itself proud with its Christmas lights and made a dreary shopping area into a bright and convivial place to be. The lights reminded me that I really should have been thinking about buying my nephews and nieces some Christmas presents. How many had I now, six, seven, I was losing count. Amber and I went into Marks & Spencer’s where I was told there is a copy of Larkin’s poem, The Large Cool Store, hanging inside. We never found it, but I did manage to secure one Christmas present. It’s a start.

 

The Times obituarist described Philip Larkin as ‘the most widely read and appreciated poet of his generation’. A fair comment, considering his contemporaries were John Betjeman, Ted Hughes and TS Eliot. All worthy poets but these were the last generation of the great poets. The fame of the poet by the mid 19th century was on the wane. People didn’t want poetry anymore. Novelists, movie stars, television personalities, pop stars and celebrities have superseded the poets diminishing light. The poet is the dinosaur of contemporary self-expression. Almost the only place to find poetry today is in small press bedroom magazines �" the first step on a one rung ladder.

 

You can, if you look hard enough, find poetry in music. An age old tradition of rhyme and song has finally come full circle. You could almost say that whereas poetry has distanced itself from rhyme, music embraced it from the moment of conception. Both are relatively pointless without rhyme. Poetry becomes prose, and lyrics simply liquefy into words placed on a melody. Of all the different musical styles, rap has most in common with poetry. It may not possess perfect syntax, style, grammar or diction, but it has taken the rhyme and made it into an oral weapon. Possessing far more vitriol than a poet ever produced. Lyrics spit rhymes like an AK-47. Poetry does have a home in everyday 21st century life. It’s just not in a book anymore.

 

The next time you hear a rap song listen very carefully and in the background you may just make out the sound of William Shakespeare screaming.

 

I’ve just thought, Hull does at least have one redeeming feature �" the Humber Bridge. Despite the bridge being located in nearby Hessle. Larkin considered the bridge’s opening to be the death-knell for the areas solitude, reasoning that thousands more people would come and disturb his tranquil backwater. He never stopped to deduce that, for the people of Hull, it would also serve as an easy escape route into Lincolnshire. The Humber Bridge opened in 1981. It is made of 480,000 tonnes of concrete, 11,000 tonnes of steel wire stretching a total of 43,000 miles and has 80 acres of painted steelwork. It held the world record for the longest single span suspension bridge for 17 years before the Akashi Kaikyo bridge in Japan was opened. Even today it is the third longest suspension bridge in the world. The whole structure constantly moves and in high winds the bridge bends more than ten feet in the middle. Before the bridge was built 90,000 vehicles used to use the ferry service to cross the Humber each year. Now 100,000 vehicles a week use the bridge. We traversed the mile and a quarter across the Humber estuary and made our escape into Lincolnshire.