Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Kate Feld 6
Thornley Brow and Lampwick Lane 7
A Rough Crossing 11
Adrian Slatcher 15
Birds and Fish 16
I Will be Buried by Books 20
Katherine Woodfine 24
Thinking Inside the Box 25
A Northern Line 28
Jane Routh 32
February 33
from July 37
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Jenn Ashworth
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Go to Kate’s blog.
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Manchester now
I live at the base of the first hill to the north, where the great
marsh plain gives way to the sheep and air and furze of the Pennines.
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painting that’s been tipped up and shaken so all the matchstick men
fell out. But nothing has been put back in.
Chips is visible from a long way off, three oblong layers stacked
and lettered with the names of local waterways. It crouches at the
centre of acres of blighted ruin, impossible to tell where the building
site ends and the fabric of the neighbourhood begins. The designers
would have had to photograph the interiors very carefully, so the
view showing through windows wouldn’t shock.
Who will live here? What brave pioneers will sink their stake
on Lampwick Lane, getting in on the ground floor, trusting that
Starbucks and Coast will follow and vindicate their real estate gamble?
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These canals were made to move coal and wool, cotton and stone
and wood. There is no reason for them to be here anymore. They are
clogged with empty beer cans and other things people want to forget
about.
Those people who drink with such fierce thirst on Friday nights,
chasing two-for-one-alcopops-half-price-pitchers-ladies-drink-free
from bar to pub to club, they are the denizens of Angel Meadow
losing themselves in sweet drunkenness at the whistle’s call, spilling
into the streets at closing time spoiling for a fight and a feed and a
fuck. This city is constantly changing. This city will never change.
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laughter and
When the dark comes rising, six shall turn it back and
air raid shelters all blooming clover, and
Where the sea meets the moon blanches land,
Listen!
That is all very different than how it really is. But it is also true.
The England of my imagination remains, grafted onto the place I
live now, and I can still remember, yes, that is how I thought it was.
Sometimes I can see with double vision.
When I first came here it spooked me the way it stayed green all
winter long, the bare trees limned with a fine sheen of moss, falls of
ivy twining up houses in a constant silent green-fingered creeping.
It seemed unwholesome the way things never stopped growing.
I missed crunching through the snow and the cold that freezes your
insides with the first breath.
But I have walked miles on the moors in all weathers and had
some particular stillness blown into me until my head was empty
of all but a deep contentment. I have followed pack-horse trails
through the wood with bluebells pooling in the shadows, flying
rowan a pale cloud on the stone wall. Along the summer road, sweet-
eyed mares blowing at flies, hedgerows alive with twists of hawthorn
and dusky sloes and shy rabbits.
It’s easy to love that changeless place. Love for modern England
is harder won, but hard to dislodge when it comes. The bare narrow
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But I know now that I will live here for the rest of my life. This
is my choice, and I am not sorry. Just a little wistful. Each time I
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return to America – after six months, a year, two years – I will find it
more altered. One year I will go back and find it has become another
place, not wholly unlike the place I left but different in countless
immeasurable particulars. It crept up on me the way it always does;
the emigrant’s old refrain, when I go back home for good, heard less and
less often until it has quietly stopped being a possibility. It’s a trick
we have to play on ourselves. If you knew you’d never be coming
back for good, who would leave?
I don’t know where this mysterious sense resides. I can’t say it’s
situated between my second and third vertabrae but it is here. It is
my hereness, maybe. It’s the way where you are bleeds into who you
are. And it is drawing new landmarks on my inner map, sketching in
stone-shouldered Anglezarke Moor, tracing the Irwell’s shaky course.
The map is being written, and I am relocated.
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Go to Adrian’s Blog.
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Even at the end, Fitzgerald wrote prose that flew like a bird, you
can see it in the unfinished The Love of the Last Tycoon, his writing
at its glittering best, even though Fitzgerald, as a man, was over.
What was most important to him – the writing or the life?
It was the life that got him in the end. He worked hard, continued
to support the institutionalised Zelda, looked after Scottie, fell in love
with Sheilah Graham. The drinking overtook him. The mid-western
Irish Catholic liver gave out on him.
But perhaps the writing mattered too much, for he found it both
easy and hard. Has ever a novelist had such a facility? Yet each of his
novels is a chip off of his soul, and by the time of that final work,
he’d already chipped off more than many could. By the end he’d sold
what was left to the devil of Hollywood. His early fame, the ease and
confidence with which he’d written This Side of Paradise and his stories
of the Jazz Age had set him up for those later failures; so that Gatsby
was virtually unread at his death.
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greatest challenge was getting up each day, and not putting the gun to
his head. The writing had to come hard, to give him something worth
living for. You see it in the smooth, perfect morsels wrought out of
granite in the first 49 stories. He railed at the supportive Fitzgerald,
that Scott never did anything, never experienced anything, never slept
with anyone. Gertrude Stein was shrewd about their qualities, and
their failings. She suspected that despite Hemingway’s protestations,
it was Fitzgerald who was the truer artist. For Hemingway, a new book
required a new wife. Was it the life or the work that came harder?
I think, for Hemingway, when the writing left him, he also lost
his lifeforce. Perhaps if Fitzgerald had lived longer, we’d have seen
the same decline. Yet Fitzgerald’s novels follow the life he lived, whilst
Hemingway actively sought a narrative that was grand enough for him
to write about.
They were such different writers, such different men, yet they were
close friends before that falling out. Hemingway, fancying himself as a
boxer, fought a bout against a local fighter, Fitzgerald was timekeeper,
and in his excitement at the fight, Fitzgerald let the round go on too
long, leaving Hemingway a bloodied mess. Hemingway never forgave
him. They, and others, both told the story, in anecdote and in fiction.
It seems a pivotal moment, not just in their friendship, but in
American literary history.
Fitzgerald was always humble about his own talent and knew
how hard were Hemingway’s daily fights to get words on the page.
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It’s a strange kind of evolution from bird to fish. But I think there’s
probably a time when it has to happen one way or another. Fitzgeralds
don’t age so well, for even as their prose gets better, they’ve lost their
faith in the world. It is what makes the work great. Hemingways have
to continue having a reason for living, and once their lifeforce has
gone, then only the writing remains.
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But just because I now live in a house full of books, doesn’t mean
that I was born in one.
Recently I recalled a book I’d read and re-read when I was about
seven or eight. A search on Google found it to be Ninety-nine Dragons
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by Barbara Sleigh. Two children, a boy and a girl are having problems
sleeping. “Count sheep,” their father says, and the girl dutifully does
so, but the boy says “I’m going to count dragons.” In the dream the
dragons go after the sheep, causing all sorts of trouble. I must have
read this book a dozen times, taking it out of the library more than
once, until, inevitably, it got moved to another branch. Getting hold
of a second-hand copy from the internet, I understood why I’d liked
it so much. I wanted to be the sort of boy who’d count dragons rather
than sheep. Books, you see, can take you on any kind of adventure,
but close the covers and you’re safely tucked up in bed.
Over the years I’ve often heard that “boys don’t read”, well here’s
the breaking news – they never did; I was an exception. I’d be the one
ordering from the Scholastic catalogue that came round the school
each term, or with a hefty Jules Verne hardback wedged next to my
P.E. kit in my Adidas bag. In the long holidays I’d be dropped off each
day at my grandparents’ small farm. While my sister was obsessed
with the horses, I played football in the fields, organising one-man
World Cups, and, on rainy and not-so-rainy days, I read books.
But the library was never enough to sate my need for books.
You can track my life in the books I’ve bought. I spent my pocket
money on Ladybird books from the Midland Educational in
Wolverhampton; on holidays in Wales, I emptied the campsite shop
of its Dr. Who novelisations; aged 15, I picked up a glossy American
import Beatles Forever in the WH Smiths in Bournemouth, priced up
in dollars, they had to ring up to get the price in pounds; and I spent
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I moved to a two-bedroom flat about four years ago, one room for
me, one for my books. They still pile up, threatening the reinforced
floors. I can’t always remember if I’ve got a particular title when I
come across a secondhand copy, but I do remember covers, so if it’s
a different edition I’ve now got two or three. I prefer secondhand
paperbacks and brand new hardbacks. I don’t go wild on First
Editions, as I’m building a library, rather than a collection. I like
forgotten poetry anthologies, and hard-to-find books of literary
criticism; I bulk-buy from Booker shortlists and small presses. My
parents were glad to see the back of the books I’d been storing there
for years. It took several trips to Manchester to reunite me with
my library. When I go back there now, I have to remember to take
something to read. You can go round my sister’s house and not see a
book out on display anywhere, despite her studying the same English
degree as I did. Her books are hidden away, or, once she’s read them,
given to the charity shop.
I’m half way or so through life, all being well, and I know now
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that I won’t ever read every book I’ve got. I collect them, but I don’t
dust them or catalogue them, or put them in alphabetical order.
I just keep buying them. They pile up in the available space, and
sometimes seem to shift around by themselves, so that a forgotten
volume unexpectedly catches my eye. I’ve bought a dozen in the last
fortnight alone. I don’t own a luxury apartment or special edition
Toyota, but I’ve got a dozen collections of John Ashbery’s poetry, and
at least four copies of The Great Gatsby. Whatever I’m looking for, I
won’t find it in the one book, but in the many. And, as you know, I’m
a writer. I’ve thousands of books and not one of them has my own
name on the spine. Yet.
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Go to Katherine’s blog
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trove of memories, both real and imaginary, but certainly very far
from straightforward. After all, as Rushdie himself puts it: “once
we have left our childhood places and started out to make up our
lives, armed only with what we have and are, we understand that
the real secret of the ruby slippers is not that ‘there’s no place like
home”, but rather that there is no longer any such place as home.”
The remaining boxes retain a lingering scent of Dewberry, White
Musk and Impulse body spray, now empty but for a smattering of
tarnished sequins and crusted silver glitter.
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It’s home time and I’m waiting for my train, kicking my heels
in the dust on the empty platform. This is part of my routine now:
ordinary yet otherworldly. As the train approaches, humming as it
slides towards the platform, I can’t help thinking that even the trains
seem different here: there is none of the hot hiss of a Manchester
train as it comes snorting into Piccadilly Station. This train is
smooth, disinterested as it glides soundlessly on its way, carrying me
with it towards the city. It’s the end of another week and I’m heading
home at last, except of course this place still doesn’t feel like home to
me. Gazing out of the train window, the London I see is an unknown
country, little more than a series of disconnected points, coloured
dots on a map.
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We pull into Queenstown Road and the Quiet Zone sighs with
the twitching pages of a dozen tattered newspapers. Everyone is still,
silent but for the regular, whispering hush of the pages turning.
Yet as we pull away, a flicker catches my eye: it’s a fox, a fox trotting
briskly down the empty platform beneath the sign reading do not
alight. The flash of an eye “so unexpected, so familiar”, so known: it
slips beneath a fence into the undergrowth and disappears so fast
I wonder if I imagined it. A thought-fox, swift as a shadow on the
station at Queenstown Road Battersea, where at last it seems that
something else but me is alive.
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A fox cub
On the hump of Chalk Farm Bridge!
… an unpredictable
Powerful bounding fox?
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At last, the train hurtles down the platform, sending hair and
newspapers flying. The doors skim open and I embark on the final
stage of my journey. As I find my way to a seat, it occurs to me dimly
that all this is part of my life now, this journey to and fro beneath
the city, but today there was a fox, and foxes make things different.
Now the doors glide shut and at last I’m heading northwards, which
surely must mean going home.
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Born in the Fens in 1917, the language she heard and learned in
childhood would have been wholly local. But as a child, you’ve no idea
your language is local, some words even particular to your own family
– until you meet other ways of speaking. Skerrick, I said the other day,
only to discover this word of hers isn’t universally understood. My
mother would have started to lose her local speech when she went
to secondary school in Sleaford, the High School intent on making a
lady out of her. Or at least a teacher.
The beginning of WWII took her to a town; she would have heard
radio language then. Television, when she was 35. By the end of her
life I’m not sure whether you’d have been able to tell where she was
from – certainly her brothers and sisters had broad Lincolnshire
accents in comparison. But maybe vocabulary’s more deeply
ingrained, and phrases.
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of my coat. I’m sure of the date (though I’ve had to track the year
by looking for a poem I wrote: 2005) because we saw nine buzzards
circling above us. Ken always says Look higher when we hear distant
mewling but haven’t yet spotted the birds, and he’s right: they’re
usually directly overhead. Those nine were, but very high, sweeping
in vast circles up there. We decided they’d gathered in a sort of
parliament to stake out the territory for the season and after that we
were back to the usual pair working the valley.
A couple of years before, I’d noted the first wild daff open in
the wood on Valentine’s Day. It was cold, but the sun was out and
‘I can’t stay in any more’ I wrote. February has a feel to it. In 1998,
I was even projecting my awareness of this on to fellow creatures.
There was ‘an odd feeling to the day; creatures have been wandering
about, oddly, unseasonably’. On the morning of 13th there was a
weasel strolling along to and under the side gate, and then messing
around in the clematis netting. Next a stoat flipped and rolled under
the front gate, trotted along the edge of the flower bed and went out
under the side gate where the weasel had gone. He was soon back,
and idled around on the lawn, not quite in the high jinxing dance
you see on a summer’s afternoon, more in a sort of dreamy waltz.
A blackbird watched over her shoulder, not much affected. Then he
was back on his beaten track: round the house, along the terrace, a
quick dash under the mahonia and under the double gates into the
field. (The very particular civility in the matter of gates on the part of
fellow creatures here is that the fence has rabbit mesh round it: gates
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When I drove back from taking the post the sparrowhawk on the
wire didn’t bother to move, and the hare by the gate only loped a car’s
length away then stood watching me, his black tipped ears seeming to
double his height.
The strangeness out there was that the silence was, quite
suddenly, overflowing with birdsong.
The radio said that London had had its highest February
temperature since, since ... records began. I put the central heating
off. I lay watching twilight greys take possession of the winter sky and
a pipistrelle dashed past the window, and another. Not so foolish: I’d
wafted my hand through gathering midges as I opened the gate.
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N o milk for me, thank you. He pulls the chair away from the table
and settles in: I’ll just take the weight off while it cools. This is
going to be a long session. The first rain after a dry month, but still
there’s nothing moving: worms must be dropping straight into the
runs. He’s been mole-catching (a pause while he calculates) just
over sixty year now. Three thousand a year, that’s a lot of moles.
(A pause while we calculate.) Yes, a lot of moles and still they tunnel
on, undeterred.
In places where there are old, long established runs, they can be
left to themselves and their underground lives. It’s new workings –
maybe at this time of year young moles sculling around just under
the surface – that cause trouble, throwing up stones that catch in
machinery, or soil into hay that make it spoil in store before the
season is out. Any kindly feelings remaining towards moles from
Wind in the Willows soon evaporate if you care for a lawn they’re
intent on undermining. Get one in your vegetable patch, and you’ll
happily join the pursuit: the only time I’ve known a mole work in
a straight line has been along a row of vegetables. Roots disrupted,
your winter crop fails.
Only when moles go deep do they throw up hills. The last few
weeks have been dry: worms burrowed deeper into damp earth, and
the moles after them – the resulting hills, enormous. There are a
couple of astonishing hills among young trees near the house, a foot
high and over a yard across. Nests, maybe – though on the whole they
nest and overwinter in the cops, the built-up hedgerows that provide
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Tea without milk takes a long while to cool. We’re on to the price
of coal now. He can tell me exactly how much I paid for nuggets last
time I had them, and that was years ago. Now he’s retired, all the
time in the world, he does a bit of keepering as well. He’s always had
all the time in the world: even when he had the coal yard, you’d see
him standing motionless in a field, listening for moles. He can’t hear
them scratting so well these days, he has to wait until they throw
some soil up, then he can get them: you don’t shoot at the heap, but
below that, where they’ve come from. He digs out the dead, so he can
tell you how many he’s caught. I’ve never known him do his accounts
by hanging corpses along a fence. (Someone’s hung 73 on barbed
wire by the moor road. I’ve just counted.) I suppose he works among
friends, and he’s trusted.
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heads; another answers from its territory in the rafters of the main
room.
I’ll leave it with you he says, putting the yellow cartridge into my
hand when he goes.
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