Moor
POETRY: I’ll never be done with my life in the north
February, 1984.
There’s a nine-stone stick on Woodhouse Moor.
I’m conjured, whole, in an upright stance
by the bouncy castle of a student grant.
I’m the Urban Dandy, invulnerable pride,
my dance-shoes, stylish, bright cream hide,
an apricot suit, with a belt
to fix its 34 waist to my 26,
and the jacket kept large, tailor, if you please:
a muscular look, some hoodlum sleaze,
Miami Vice cool, which is utterly lost
as the smooth leather soles
fail to grip
and I slip, floppy haired
down I go –
clumsy flamingo –
into the crystallised, refrozen snow of Leeds.
The Moor is fogged,
sound softened,
delayed.
Bird-song, traffic and footfalls fade.
The mist eats the treetops, all detail uncertain,
shrouding the world, its thick-beaded curtain
is snipped from its grip at the Moor’s noisy border
by gables,
by buses,
by man-made disorder.
My nose moistly sniffing at nature’s dead-end,
slush-stained, I walk down the road,
round the bend and into my room,
where a French movie poster
looms over my saviour: the sandwich toaster.
Returning in June, 2006,
same Moor,
same buildings,
same weather-worn bricks,
new people, new chapters and episodes,
and a new mix of shops on Brudenell Road.
No bakery now, but an alarm-doored mart,
there’s pizza, and pizza, and burgers,
but part of my history’s there:
The Picture House stands, it stoically
met all my movie demands.
An Edwardian lair, and my then-nightly treats –
Casablanca, or Kes, on these back-to-back streets,
the authentically arse-aching stiff wooden seats.
And just five doors down,
here’s our house, our back yard.
That’s changed!
The cellar-windows,
all barred,
and it’s hard, these 22 years after
to hear what I miss now:
her bright stairway laughter.
To Woodhouse, the Moor
summer-sunny, a park –
it’s green, it’s wide open,
it’s crowded, still stark
and it’s tough to imagine as misty, or dark,
where a brutal rape shivered the secret night hours,
frost crisply dropping, municipal flowers,
a place where the wind whipped through with a moan,
a rainstorm face-lashing me all the way home,
or the infamous time when the rugby team
rigged up a 30-foot penis from snowballs and twigs
on the Moor.
I’m older,
it’s older,
an orderly place.
Mature. Exemplary.
The city’s green face.
But still it is touched by authority’s mark:
an imperious Leeds City Council remark
on a sign, at the border of Woodhouse Moor:
“No Parking In The Park” – it’s the law.
AS EACH YEAR GOES BY, I’m persistently drawn to neighbourhoods I’ve lived in, the streets and rooms of earlier days, and a feeling that these places hold things I’ll never finish. It’s especially true of Leeds, where I was a student and which was especially carefree – a sense helped along by having a large family in my early 20s and rarely being footloose again. This is not a complaint, but a commentary on the way the facts of our lives hem us in. We adjust to suit, or are maddened by nostalgia.
My journeys to Leeds took multiple hours on boats and trains. I’d travel through the East Midlands to the place labelled on roadsigns as “The North” – a huge yet specific lump of a place. Out of the window, the trackside relics of decaying industry passed by as I listened to Cocteau Twins’ Garlands album on a Walkman. It felt like I was headed to a gritty version of heaven.
The main photo is me, dicking about behind my house in Leeds in the ’80s. I had a terrific little “Agfa Family” super-8 camera that let me take a low-res, grainy shot on every one of its thousands of frames per roll. An amazing precursor to the just-keep-clicking habit of digital photography. I love this blurry record, it fits perfectly with my aversion to selfies. I’m there, but only just.
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All images by me.
Beautifully rendered
This is fantastic, Ian. Such vivid recollections and pleased to hear that my hometown has had an impact on you.
I grew up in Headingley and currently live a couple of miles up the road. We watched Paddington at Hyde Park Picture House just before Christmas - lovely place.