The Damned United

Tonights South Bank Show (ITV, 10.50) on David Peace's genius book "The Damned United" has got to be worth a look;

The Damned Utd focuses on Clough failing - in the wilderness between Derby and Nottingham. At Leeds he is tortured, haunted, sleepless, entirely alone - without Peter Taylor, who refused to join him - behind enemy lines. His mission seems to be to destroy the soul of his new club. Straight after he arrives he is on the phone trying to sell the icons - Johnny Giles, Norman Hunter - and to bring in his own men. The interior monologues, the detail of the despair, the endless plotting are made up, but all of the events ring true: how Clough took an axe to the desk of his nemesis Revie, how he banned mention of his predecessor's name, burned his infamous dossiers on players and referees; how Clough, the greatest man-manager of them all, the man who made League champions out of little Derby County and would later make European champions out of unfashionable Nottingham Forest, introduced himself to his new Leeds team with these words: 'Gentlemen, I might as well tell you now. You lot may have won all the domestic honours there are and some of the European ones but, as far as I am concerned, the first thing you can do for me is to chuck all your medals and all your caps and all your pots and all your pans into the biggest fucking dustbin you can find, because you've never won any of them fairly. You've done it all by bloody cheating ...'

Letters From Arcadia

click here for the latest LETTER FROM ARCADIA, a regular correspondence between angling's two most original contemporary writers...

Unfinished Business?

note left on Tony Wilson's grave, as seen yesterday



thanks to Rofey

The Bard Of Salford.

Paul Morley, radio 4 documentary on John Cooper Clarke Listen Here

Beasley Street.

Far from crazy pavements -
the taste of silver spoons
A clinical arrangement
on a dirty afternoon
Where the fecal germs of Mr Freud
are rendered obsolete
The legal term is null and void
In the case of Beasley Street

In the cheap seats where murder breeds
Somebody is out of breath
Sleep is a luxury they don't need
- a sneak preview of death
Belladonna is your flower
Manslaughter your meat
Spend a year in a couple of hours
On the edge of Beasley Street


Where the action isn't
That's where it is
State your position
Vacancies exist
In an X-certificate exercise
Ex-servicemen excrete
Keith Joseph smiles and a baby dies
In a box on Beasley Street

From the boarding houses and the bedsits
Full of accidents and fleas
Somebody gets it
Where the missing persons freeze
Wearing dead men's overcoats
You can't see their feet
A riff joint shuts - opens up
Right down on Beasley Street

Cars collide, colours clash
disaster movie stuff
For a man with a Fu Manchu moustache
Revenge is not enough
There's a dead canary on a swivel seat
There's a rainbow in the road
Meanwhile on Beasley Street
Silence is the code

Hot beneath the collar
an inspector calls
Where the perishing stink of squalor
impregnates the walls
the rats have all got rickets
they spit through broken teeth
The name of the game is not cricket
Caught out on Beasley Street

The hipster and his hired hat
Drive a borrowed car
Yellow socks and a pink cravat
Nothing La-di-dah
OAP, mother to be
Watch the three-piece suite
When shit-stoppered drains
and crocodile skis
are seen on Beasley Street

The kingdom of the blind
a one-eyed man is king
Beauty problems are redefined
the doorbells do not ring
A lightbulb bursts like a blister
the only form of heat
here a fellow sells his sister
down the river on Beasley Street

The boys are on the wagon
The girls are on the shelf
Their common problem is
that they're not someone else
The dirt blows out
The dust blows in
You can't keep it neat
It's a fully furnished dustbin,
Sixteen Beasley Street

Vince the ageing savage
Betrays no kind of life
but the smell of yesterday's cabbage
and the ghost of last year's wife
through a constant haze
of deodorant sprays
he says retreat
Alsations dog the dirty days
down the middle of Beasley Street

People turn to poison
Quick as lager turns to piss
Sweethearts are physically sick
every time they kiss.
It's a sociologist's paradise
each day repeats
On easy, cheesy, greasy, queasy
beastly Beasley Street

Eyes dead as vicious fish
Look around for laughs
If I could have just one wish
I would be a photograph
on a permanent Monday morning
Get lost or fall asleep
When the yellow cats are yawning
Around the back of Beasley Street

What Has Happened To All The Walkington Ducklings?

Hey Jeff

The above was a headline in last weeks Beverley Guardian that caught my eye on a bank holiday visit to see my parents. Walkington is a small village in a semi-pretty part of East Yorkshire. I spent my teenage years there before escaping the rural coma and heading to the Big Smoke to achieve my ambitions of finally becoming the low-rent media-yahoo-borderline-alcoholic-with-nagging-drug-problems I had always dreamed of. I have mixed feelings about the place as it's not really home anymore but it's nice to visit sometimes. One ex-girlfriend of mine once described it as "the land of cowshit and four-wheel
drive" which pretty much sums it up I suppose. Anyway, it seems fear and horror is stalking the Walkington village pond. This
year's batch of ducklings are being devoured by some mysterious creature or creatures. Parents are afraid to take the kiddies to the pond to feed the ducks (which seriously cuts down the list of potential leisure activities in the village). Of course there was no other subject being discussed by the dark lords around the bar at the local pub The Barrel on Saturday night. One might immediately suspect Mr Fox but this has been dismissed as the foxes up there are properly wild (not the fried chicken-loving hipsters we are used to down here) and would never venture as far as the pond because of passing traffic and the volumes of people around the centre of the village. Even village godfather and highly accomplished naturalist Ernie Teal is stumped. Some are suggesting a more plausible villain is the Terrapin. After the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle craze of a few years ago it was claimed that unloved and unwanted terrapins were being released into the pond where they have been breeding and adults are quite capable of devouring a ducking apparently. See the attached photo of one sunning himself on Saturday. Local farmer and occasional crab fisherman Rodge 'The Dodge' has taken to baiting crab pots with rotting flesh and putting them out in the pond at night in an attempt to rid the local landmark of the amphibian menace.
However I fear I may have another explanation which has remained a dark and guilty secret of mine for some twenty years. Well, until now that is I suppose.
The year was 1988 and I was a slacking six-former. The second summer of love pretty much passed us by up there away from the bright lights of Shoom and Spectrum and apart from the occasional trip across the M62 to the Hacienda my best friend and I spent most of the summer taking acid and going fishing. One fateful night dead-baiting for pike we caught a frisky 5lb Jack and my friend (who ironically is now a respected marine biologist working in the Pacific monitoring the Japanese fishing fleet) decided it might be a gas to release it into Walkington village pond.
Now I have felt very bad about this for years. A smallish village pond is no place for a noble fish like a pike and I assumed that the poor thing must have expired but my partner in crime (armed with an MSC in marine biology by this time) always claimed it would have thrived on the small fish and large amounts of bread in the pond and, of course, would be totally at the top of the food chain. Could that very same fresh-water wolf from all those years ago be responsible for the violent decimation of the Walkington duck population?
I fear so and that I have created a monster.....

Neil

Tomoland

Making Love In 2003

This morning I woke up to the sound of the neighbor trimming his tree. I told myself he would stop trimming only if I got out of bed. The tree got smaller and smaller. Soon it was just a stump, and he had to go underground and start trimming the roots, and still I couldn't get up. The roots were gone and he was sawing through the earth and I told myself that when he came out in China, I would get up. It took him all day. I wept and curled and uncurled myself in a way I couldn't control. I was actually writhing in heartache, as if I were a single muscle whose purpose was to mourn. But by the time my neighbor had hit the molten core, I was motionless. I had exhausted myself into a blank stare, a full-body examination of the ceiling. I could feel him pushing up underneath the streets of Shanghai, and to my horror, I felt hunger. The body's expression of hope. As he burst through the ground and into the Chinese air, I sat up. He plowed into the sky, upward through tree leaves and then the clouds. My neighbor sawed into outer space. He cut through the Milky Way, right through the stars and stardust. He went around the universe in a giant circle. And then he landed, with a quiet thud, back in his yard. I lifted the curtain and saw him putting out the sprinkler. It was dusk. If he saw me, I would live. Look up, look up, look up. He raised his eyes, as if it were his own idea, and I waved.

From 'No one belongs here more than you. Stories by Miranda July', 2007

Notes:
A broken heart is a troublesome thing at any time of year, but when the trees are bursting into leaf, as Larkin wrote (see our March post), heartache seems evermore a hardy perennial that can withstand the melting beauty of even the sunniest spring day. My foolproof remedy at times like this is to immerse myself in books. These are times when only literature can massage balm into the hard-to-reach places of the human heart, and I am currently finding grateful relief in Miranda July's short stories. The passage above is, I think, one of the best descriptions of unrequited love I have ever read. It makes no difference to the ardent feelings of the narrator of this story, an adult schoolteacher, that it's a fifteen-year-old special needs student that she's in love with, but only a brave writer could pull this off and make it plausible and humane and hilarious. Miranda July, better known perhaps for her debut feature of 2006 'You, Me and Everyone I Know', has one of the most original and surprising fictional voices I've read in a long, long time. It's almost worth suffering heartache just to experience the relief of knowing that someone else out there knows what it's like and can render it so beautifully. Highly recommended.

Love,

Jemma

kitchen sink dramas

German Bight.

The piece below, written by Mark Hodkinson, is an insightful tribute to the writer Barry Hines.
Mark, in his role as proprieter of Pomona Books has recently republished a couple of Barry's lost titles and this piece is the first draft of the introduction to an anthology he is publishing next year.

Like a lot of folk of around my age, "A Kestrel For A Knave" was one of the books that "got me in to reading". Yes there had been the Famous Five and The Lion, The Witch and the blah blah blah, but "Kes" was real.

Mark kindly sent us this;

I first met Barry Hines about 10 years ago. I'd been sent to interview him by The Times. He asked me to meet him at his writing den, a small office on the campus of Hallam University, Sheffield. I remember being struck by the starkness of the room: a postcard on the wall, a desk containing a pen and a few sheets of paper, and that was about it - no books, no computer, no
telephone. On the floor was a tiny kettle, able to contain just enough water to fill a single mug; I'd never seen one of these before.

Barry wasn't unfriendly but a bit gauche - a word he'd never use, of course. There is angularness about Barry, in his movements and manner, that takes a while to get used to. He doesn't go in for social protocol, asking how you are and whether you've had a pleasant journey. This isn't for affect or to invoke any kind of power-play: he probably just forgets. After a few minutes, it doesn't matter anyway because he has an aura that coalesces kindness with straight-talking. In short, he feels good to be around.

During our conversation he often repeated the word 'wondrous'. A lot of things were wondrous: being able to work as a writer and not down the pit; Barnsley FC's current form; the standard of script-writing on Coronation Street; American crime novels. He sang the word, much like a kid would having just learned it.

Over the years, I kept in touch with Barry. I couldn't resist. He, among a handful of others, had made me want to be a writer in the first place. Every day he is with me, his influence, as I try to emulate the honesty and compassion he brings to his work, in my own. Also, we are brothers, working-class brothers. Although he is a generation older, I know so well the people of his novels because they could be my family. My granddad worked on the railways, my mum and gran in sewing factories. The
grind, the humour, the ups and the downs - it is a common history.



When I set up Pomona a few years ago I asked Barry if I could republish two of his old books - Looks and Smiles and The Price of Coal. At this point, I imagined I might possibly encounter a more anxious and vain Barry Hines: writers can be very fussy and precious about their work. He remained the same Barry I had met in that tiny room. He was flattered by my interest, trusting me with the covers and contract, happy to help in any way.



I was delighted to learn that he had a folder of unpublished work labelled, 'Early poetry, short stories.' It is from this folder that This Artistic Life is drawn. The stories date back many years, some to the late-1960s and early-1970s, when the success of Kes, the book and the film, had elevated Hines to the unexpected position of feted writer.

Much of the work is nostalgic and mentions of 'secondary modern'; recs'; 'two-bob'; '11-plus'; 'silly buggers' and kids saying, 'Soz' when they mean, 'Sorry', feel like a portal to another world. He writes a great deal about the mining industry and two incidents in particular that have stayed with him always - the death of his granddad in a pit accident and the time he was berated by a neighbour for choosing (briefly) to work down a mine.

Tinker Lane, one of the longer pieces, feels like the first draft of an autobiography. In his trademark unadorned style, Hines tells us about the people that lived in his neighbourhood, the scrapes they got into. The writing is effortlessly simple, a sense of time and place and person brought to life within a few short sentences.

The football stories are largely on a similar theme. Another Jimmy Dance, Tottenham Hotspurs and The Turnstile Man effectively feature the same protagonist - an ex-hero returning to his former club with his latest team, now older and slower, facing the ridicule of the crowd. The players - Eddie Royle, Jimmy Dance and Jackie Moon - are, above the colour of their shirt,
brave men running their hearts out, one of a team but alone when they receive the ball. In all his work Hines innately sings the song of the underdog and in these stories he is calling on the reader to consider issues of loyalty and decency.

There are little cameos within the stories that show off both Hines' sharp eye and the power of under-statement. In The Turnstile Man, we learn that the boy's father is estranged from his mother. This merits just a few lines but resonates loudly. Without revealing any more, the reader is left wondering about the family's home life, how the separation occurred, how
they are working things out between them.

A father-son relationship is complex and, again, Hines states this without addressing it head-on. In Another Jimmy Dance the father, exasperated by his son, scolds him and then, a few minutes later, pulls up the lad's hood when it starts to rain. Any parent will recognise this see-saw between anger and love that a child can set in motion.

The poems which intersperse the stories reveal a hitherto unseen side to Hines. Much like his writing, they are succinct, whether playful as in Prudence Dowd or sombre in the sketches about mining and the loss of the communities that formed at pit-heads.

Once, while we were talking about books, Barry mentioned an admiration of the American writer, Bernard Malamud, in particular his novel, The Natural. In Barry's stories, The End of Sammy's Career and Billy Peak he veers from his usual style and touches upon what became known as 'magicrealism', of which Malamud was masterful. The short story lends itself less
well to this approach but it shows Hines' willingness to embrace an idea that was very much in vogue in the late-1960s.

There is, in the very best work, always a moment. That point where head and heart collide. It can be a chord change in a song or a line of dialogue in a play or film that is brilliant and true. This comes, for me, in this book in the short story, Tottenham Hotspurs. The father is telling his young son how to negotiate getting into a football ground. The boy wants to go through the same turnstile as his dad, but is told he can't. He asks why;

''Because that turnstile's for misters,'' his dad says.

In this simple sentence Hines shows us everything: the clarity of his memory; his ear for language; and his ability - perhaps a writer's greatest skill - to take us back there, making us believe whole-heartedly in the story and the storyteller. 'Back there' is a very specific sense of place, in this case to a time when we were kids and our dads took us to football matches and used words like 'misters'.

Many years ago another writer, clearly an insightful soul, congratulated Hines on his 'iron integrity'. This little collection forms an eclectic hotchpotch of stories and poems, some of them nicely formed, others sketchy and whimsical, but that iron integrity is across it all and through Barry Hines, the man, too.

Mark Hodkinson

Pomona