Martin Wainwright, we loved you

Richard Wilcocks writes:
Martin Wainwright from the Guardian is a great authority on you-name-it when it comes to Headingley, Leeds and northern parts. A childhood which included a spell in God's Own Suburb, and sentences like "We walked up Weetwood Lane and through the Hollies", full of local references, pumped up his credibility no end. He knew so many anecdotes. What was the one with the Hollies in it again? Oh yes - ages ago, the Yorkshire Evening Post had a feature entitled 'Citizen of the Month'. One of the winners of the accolade was a woman who finally plucked up the courage to put a blanket around the harmless, goosepimpled man who used to walk through the Hollies completely naked. She led him to Weetwood Police Station wearing a blanket she had provided.


In the Yorkshire College of Music and Drama on Saturday afternoon, we were agog. We laughed a lot too.


Then there were the stories about Arthur Ransome, who had the good fortune to be born in Headingley, and who was probably a double agent during and after 1917. He had married Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina, who when he met her in Moscow was Trotsky's mistress. This was "a shewd move for a journalist covering the Russian Revolution." Arthur Ransome, we were told, was taught to ice skate by none other than Prince Kropotkin, the anarchist nobleman.


There were plenty of present-day stories as well, like the enterprising specialist textile company in Yorkshire which makes Armani suits - the real thing - and which was fed up with all the fakes around: they found a way of putting DNA into the weave, so that their product is now very identifiable.


The burden of his talk was the way the north is stereotyped by southerners. His True North -  In praise of England's better half  (ISBN 978-0-85265-113-1) was on sale, but not for long, because all copies were soon snapped up. He spoke about the problems of relocating staff, imbued with clichéd views, and the way that visual images of the north tend to drift into a certain category - you know, abandoned mills, chip wrappers floating in the gutter, eternal winter, black and white. Either that or snotty-nosed kids in cobbled streets, clothes lines strung across them and so on. "I have to convince some of my colleagues in London," he said. "When April comes, we have trees which burst into leaf!"


"We need talking up!" he stressed. He did plenty of talking up - to the converted. We should follow the French example. On autoroutes there are little lay-by affairs with picnic tables, where you can look at beautiful landscapes while you bite into your tartine. "We have plenty of places like that in Yorkshire."


He finished with an attack on "tenacious misconceptions of Bradford" and the people with a negative image of immigration. "We would be much less of a place without it. To be an immigrant you've got to have extra energy."


And amongst his recommended very special places - Gargrave and Whitehaven.


Below, pics by Geoff Steedman:

Below, pics by Richard Wilcocks:

Officially launched

It was the first major gathering of the LitFest clan at the New Headingley Club, and the emphasis was on poetry, under the amiable eye of compere James Nash, who not only read his own work, but introduced three other main readers - Liz Bertola, Helen Burke and Richard Raftery. In the previous two LitFests, James has been subterranean, performing and compering in the cellar of the Dare Café, and has now emerged into the upper air. He is revealing himself more and more as a master of the sonnet. The audience was most appreciative.


By the door, tombola prizes were displayed - and plenty of scented candles were won, but not the whisky, which will be raffled at the end of the LitFest on a suitable occasion. A huge new screen at the end of the room showed Lawnswood students dancing and reciting at last year's Poetry Slam. There was a sort of long pause before they came up at the end of the evening because the DVD was playing up. Thanks to Mary Francis for sorting the problem.

Glimpses of our past

The meeting room was, what's the word.......august......that's it. Appropriate for the occasion. Lots of oak. It was filled with appreciative people as well, there for Poetry at the Brotherton. I had no idea the room was there when I was a student at Leeds University: the Brotherton was mainly for revision before Finals, directly under the pantheonic dome. Well, here we all were, survivors.

The readings began at 8.30pm after an informative introduction from Chris Sheppard from Special Collections, in which he told us about the illustrious line of Gregory Fellows and the benign influence of Professor Bonamy Dobrée. Most of the names mentioned were from before my time at the university (I first came across Bonamy Dobrée's name on my reading list - Restoration Comedy, I believe) and I looked at my fellow readers - Jon Glover, Doug Sandle and Jeff Wainwright - with a certain measure of smugness, because I was the youngest amongst them. Not often I can say that nowadays.

Congratulations to Doug for doing most of the organising for this successful event - and also to Kathryn Jenner, the guardian lioness of Special Collections.

I read a selection of poems by Geoffrey Hill (English Department staff 1954 - 1981), who was my tutor in 1967 - 1968, beginning at the beginning with Genesis and finishing with Tristia: 1891-1938, A Valediction to Osip Mandelstam. I had to edit out so much from the initial list: I would have loved to have said more about poor Mandelstam, for example, who was killed by Stalin, who had himself been published as a (Georgian nationalist) poet in his early years just after he left the seminary. I had plans at one stage to sing something by John Dowland as well.

Doug Sandle produced more laughter than me, first with his selection of poems by William Price Turner (Gregory Fellow 1960 - 1962) whose University Vignettes were hilarious, then with a selection of poems by Martin Bell and himself. I felt strongly for  Bell in his From the City of Dreadful Something, and particularly remember Doug's poem The Stone Gatherer, which is dedicated to Ken Smith and his son on their first visit to the Isle of Man. Doug tells me that pruning back the first list of choices was difficult, but we couldn't have gone on until midnight.

Jon Glover remembered a sit-in which I had mentioned earlier, which took place in the Parkinson Court in 1968 to protest against the university security men, who had been taking the names of students holding up placards with various messages about the Vietnam War, but his main memory was of the extraordinary Jon Silkin (Gregory Fellow 1958) who had founded Stand magazine in 1952, and whose early career had embraced teaching English as a Foreign Language  and gravedigging. Jon Glover is the current editor, and copies of the latest issue were on sale at the event. He read The Coldness, by Silkin, which is about the pogrom against the Jews of York in 1190 - a poem I remember from many years ago. Poems by Glover included the excellent CERN: Frontiers, Grave-Diggers.

Jeff Wainwright (student 1962 - 1967) reminisced as well, and spoke of Geoffrey Hill, about whom he has written seminal essays. He mentioned his great attention to detail - every word matters, none of them are for the wind, proofreading is inevitably important - and the fact that he was a good and sympathetic tutor to most, leaving his mark on many. I agree. He read a series of short poems by himself, and also by Ken Smith, a poet I had previously (misleadingly) characterised in my mind as 'non-difficult'. Jeff had driven up from Manchester to be with us.

Below - Jeff Wainwright and Jon Glover.

Strange goings-on at Lento

It's a good job there were extra chairs in the Café Lento on Wednesday evening: if anybody else had turned up, they would have had to swing from the chandeliers, which would have been challenging, because there aren't any. It was St Patrick's night, and groups of revellers were walking past the big window during the short story readings wearing those high and hideous I-am-a-little-leprechaun hats with Guinness badges on them, proving that the wearers were not of Irish heritage. They might have been Polish. They like revelling. The first story was set in Ireland. It was by Roddy Doyle, had a Polish protagonist named Halina who was in charge of a pram containing babies, and was read by the man with the coffee machine - Richard Lindley. One item in it was a pretty horrific story with a supernatural tinge, which set the tone for the evening.

Because by coincidence, all the stories that followed had a supernatural tinge - Moira Garland's included a lady from Victorian times, Doug Sandle's was about strange goings on during his childhood on the Isle of Man, mine was entitled I Invented a Ghost and Peter Spafford's was about the otherworldly laughter his mother used to hear.

The audience, according to what was said afterwards, loved everything. They asked us for more soon. Perhaps we'll convene again in the summer.

Congratulations

.....to Headingley resident Kay Mellor, now Kay Mellor OBE!

Are you around, John Comer?

If you're reading this, John Comer, we - Doug Sandle and myself - would like to know where you are. You are a one-time resident of Headingley, and our attention has just been drawn to your recently-published The Old Time. So are you close enough to come to any LitFest events or to join us for a drink in Arcadia, which is very close to where you once lived in Alma Road?

The Old Time - ISBN 142514298-2 Trafford Publishing

Email us at heveliusx1@yahoo.co.uk

Below, John in the 1960s. Photo taken by Dave Williams in Moorland Avenue, LS6