The Companionship of Books: About Poetry by Peter Leyland

 

The Companionship of Books: About Poetry*

This chapter is all about poetry+. It begins with my stay in Broad Green Hospital when I was sixteen for an operation on a torn cartilage. I had been attempting a descent from the wall bars during a school gym lesson and had landed awkwardly, so awkwardly in fact that every time I tried to run for the morning bus my knee would lock into a fixed position and necessitate a system of contortions on the ground in order to free it. Mr Almond, who saw me in Rodney Street, just around the corner from The Liverpool Institute, took one examination and immediately booked me into Broad Green for the operation.

 

I arrived there to find myself in a ward full of men with their legs either covered in bandages or underneath raised frames, which allowed their legs to rest underneath, without the pressure of the bedclothes. On the ward I met Alan who was a trainee teacher. We were in adjacent beds and he talked to me about novels and poetry, particularly that of Dylan Thomas and T.S. Eliot and it is to him that I owe my early love of poetry.

I was so enraptured by his descriptions of those poets that when I left hospital, for my next birthday present I asked for Thomas’s collected poems and my J.M. Dent copy, Collected Poems 1934-1952 has my favourites underlined. One of these was ONCE IT WAS THE COLOUR OF SAYING: The Aberfan disaster had occurred in October 1966 shortly after I left hospital, and although the poem had no connection at all to the disaster, the lines ‘with a capsized field where a school sat still’, gave me a language through which I could share an incoherent compassion for what had happened. 

Following the operation, which was successful I was able to resume my morning milk round, often resulting in frozen fingers, which took place before school. Once, gazing sleepily at a blackboard in a General Studies lesson, an idea took shape, and I began to write my own poetry. I had been struck by Thomas’s “Vision and Prayer”, and its diamond and hour-glass construction and I wrote my own diamond-shaped poem called “Liverpool 8” **, about the area surrounding the school. It begins with the lines, ‘Sun/Once picked/Its ray through/The smoke aged air’, and depicts the relative poverty which surrounded The Institute at the time. The Anglican cathedral, still unfinished, which dominated the skyline is referred to as ‘the half cathedral’, in the middle of the poem. 

 

“Liverpool 8” was picked up by Mr Toobe who had replaced Alan Durband as Head of English and published in the school magazine which had been renamed Elan. Alan Durband was a mentor to Paul McCartney and is credited by him in his book of Lyrics. Paul says that Alan Durband inspired his love of reading: ‘It opened things up for me so much, that I came to live for a while in a fantasy world drawn from books.' This had echoes for me during my time at his alma mater. I did not reach the heights of Paul McCartney in my poetry of the time, but “Liverpool 8” was later re-published in a local poetry magazine called Honesty. I didn’t see a copy of this but was told about it by a girlfriend, Sue, who I think still has it. It was she who sent me a photo of a group that formed during the sixties when Liverpool was in a reported phrase by poet, Allen Ginsburg, ‘the centre of the conscious universe’. 

 

This group was a bunch of would-be poets, musicians and artists who formed as a result of a meeting of school sixth forms at The Liverpool Philharmonic Hall to watch a showing of The War Game in 1967. This was a pseudo-documentary film where a nuclear war is triggered by China’s invasion of South Vietnam and presumably the idea was to sensitize us to the prospects of imminent annihilation. In the film the invasion of South Vietnam is followed by an incursion into West Berlin by Russian and East German forces. Events spiral out of control, there is a thermonuclear explosion in the South East of England and the film depicts the horrific consequences. It uses a voiceover narration to show the events that would happen as a result of a nuclear strike - the effect on the civilian population, the terror, panic and results of radiation. It shows people looting and killing each other in the search for food supplies as resources dwindle. The film ends in a refugee compound in Dover on the first Christmas since the war, where wounded and bewildered civilians are shown in various stages of recovery.

At the end of the showing folk music was played. The iconic Liverpool band, The Spinners, played gently soothing music that was needed to restore us sixth formers from the scenes of devastation witnessed on the screen. After this the girls and boys from The Liverpool Institute, Hillfoot Hay and La Sagesse were then able to mingle and talk to each other, and for some like me it was one of the first opportunities they had had to talk to the opposite sex about anything meaningful. It resulted in meetings and liaisons and out of this grew ‘the gang’. In my inventive mind I modelled us on The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of poets and artists who lived in the middle of the Nineteenth Century for we visited The Walker Art Gallery, The Manchester City Art Gallery and The Lady Lever Gallery in Port Sunlight – all containing Pre-Raphaelite paintings. There was poetry too. At the time there was a black and white television documentary which showed Dante Gabriel Rossetti digging up the poems that he had buried with his dead wife, Elizabeth Siddall. A more recent TV drama about The Brotherhood was no less exciting but less macabre. The series reminded me of a photograph taken in 1971 outside the Palm House in Sefton Park, Liverpool. There are twelve of us. Most are seemingly unaware that their picture is being taken.

 

It is a poetic image and poetry was all about us at the time. Roger McGough led the way with Let Me Die a Youngman’s Death in 1967 and he was joined by Brian Patten and Adrian Henri at readings in O’Connors Tavern around the corner from The Institute, where in a room above the bar they gave us the poems which would be collected into a book called The Mersey Sound, one of the largest selling poetry books ever produced. I have followed Roger McGough through the years and attended his readings in a number of places, notable among which are Bedford College of H.E.; The Everyman Theatre, where 40 years since the book’s publication was celebrated; and most recently in Buckingham where I live now. Following the Everyman Theatre celebration Roger and Brian Pattern turned up at breakfast at The Hope Street Hotel where I was staying. After doing a double-take I retrieved my copy of the book from my room and got them to sign it. There were only two of them there, Adrian Henri having died in 2000. After Roger’s reading in Buckingham, I managed to speak to him and I said, "Not like O’Connors then?" And he told me that now it was a Chinese Restaurant. The most significant exchange, however, came after the earlier Bedford reading. Still hopeful of becoming a poet myself, I asked for his advice: “Go on an Arvon Course,” is what he had said to me.

 

                                                                                    *

 

Arvon poetry courses are wonderful events during which to meet people, evaluate one’s life and even produce some poetry. At the time of my first course at Lumb Bank in Yorkshire in 1982 I had just had two poems published in Iron, a poetry magazine edited by Peter Mortimer and carrying some weight in poetry circles. One of the poems was called “Settle” and was an account of a walk I took across the Yorkshire Dales while the other was called “Standing in the Smoke”. This was about how I had learned that the popular station master at my local railway station had died of the same illness as my father. Even though it was by now many years later, I still hadn’t completed the grieving process.

 

Poetry has always had that effect on me. It can bring into focus powerful feelings that I was having as described earlier with Dylan Thomas, and the Lumb Bank course channelled many of the feelings I was having at the time. I had just become a single parent, having separated from Vivien and my daughter, and I was dealing with the confusion that this had caused. The group that had formed at Lumb Bank that week consisted of a number of women drawn to the site by the legacy of Sylvia Plath. The cottage where the course took place was owned by Ted Hughes, the husband of Sylvia Plath, who had become an icon of the women’s movement, particularly in regard to poetry. Out tutors were Martin Booth, an English novelist and poet, who had attended Middlesex University of which more later, and Pete Morgan, a poet who after joining the army had resigned his commission and become a pacifist. According to his obituary by Miles Salter in 2010 Morgan was admired by Ted Hughes. I have his final collection August Light published in 2005. Martin Booth had called him ‘…one of the best social poets writing in this country.’

 

Martin had set my task for the poem I was to write. It was to find a mill chimney in the vicinity, go inside and shout inside it. Then I would write about my conclusions. He also told me about a theory that the voice leaves its impression upon stone. I set off eager to find the building and carry out the assignment. I soon found myself in trouble, however. Despite my father having served as a navigator in the many planes he had flown during the 1943-5 war, I had not inherited his skill and I had the most appalling sense of direction. In my haste and eagerness to carry out the task I became confused and discovered that it was impossible to find this abandoned mill amongst the thickets of woods and trees beside Lumb Bank. In the event - suddenly it was there - and I did my best to carry out the task, my voice gradually growing louder as I shouted in the chimney stack.

 

The activity and my frustration became the poem I would write and later perform with the others on the final evening. It was a kind of therapy, a poem about finding my voice. I had been mired in depression about being alone and isolated after the separation and subsequent divorce but it seemed that in the chimney the connection that I was making between all the past people who had worked there and whose voices had become part of the walls reached into my mind and comforted me and enabled me to be stronger, one of the first real experiences of the bibliotherapy that The Companionship of Books is about. Later, on the last evening, when all the participants had gathered, we read our completed work to each other and received generally approving comments. As was the practice on Arvon courses we also had a guest writer, the poet Liz Lochhead. Liz had recently published her first work Memo for Spring and read from it a number of engaging poems about family, failed relationships and general life events. I bought a copy of the book which she signed for me.

 

During the week I had become acquainted with Irmtraud, a German woman who was interested in the poetry of Sylvia Plath. On Arvon writng courses it was also the custom for participants to be divided into groups together to create, prepare and cook a dish that the whole group could share. Irmtraud and I had been in the same group which had made a pasta meal in which tuna and tomatoes featured and we had got on well, joking and talking. Later on, she told me about her interest in Plath and we decided to visit her grave. We found it in the village of Heptonstall and stood and played a quiet homage. Irmtraud was from Hamburg and could remember having to run and hide from the air-raids across the fields near her home during the war in which my father had played a part. She worked in Manchester as a waitress in themed banquets about the life of Tudor Monarchs like Henry VIII. We became friends and once the course had finished, I travelled with her on the train to her home. I stayed at her house for a few days composing and writing poetry while she went to carry out her duties of serving eager customers who would also be dressed to re-enact the lifestyles of past ages.

 

Martin Booth, whose expert tutelage had helped me to write "The Mill Chimney", which provided me with the first indication that being alone and single after eight years of marriage wasn’t the end of the world, was a student at Trent Park College of Education which later became part of Middlesex University. By a strange co-incidence I was also a student at a college that later became part of that University and was in fact at its centre, The Burroughs in Hendon, North London. The next and a key part of the bibliotherapy story is set at Hendon College of Technology.

"Some names have been changed

+ Parts of this blog appeared in Authors Electric, 2nd January 2023

** "Liverpool 8" in Elan 1967

 

References:

Collected Poems 1934-52 (1952) by Dylan Thomas

The War Game (1966) written, directed and produced by Peter Watkins

The Mersey Sound (1967) Adrian Henri, Roger McGough, Brian Patten

Memo for Spring (1972) by Liz Lochhead

THE LYRICS (2021) by Paul McCartney, edited by Paul Muldoon