I grew up in the West Yorkshire village of Marsden at the head of the Colne Valley, a close-knit community of about four thousand people high in the Pennines, last stop before Lancashire. It was an uninterrupted and in some ways uneventful childhood.
As a consequence there was always a tendency to magnify the smaller details and on those rare occasions when something truly dramatic happened – a suspicious death, a sexual scandal, a mill burning down – those incidents became the stuff of fantasy and mythology. My first poems were about Marsden, and my latest collection contains pieces that reference the village, either directly or indirectly.
The family home was a small end-terrace on the side of the hill, and despite not living there for 30 years my bedroom window in that house still operates as a lens and framing device. I’d lie in bed watching the nocturnal comings and goings in the streets below, even keeping a logbook of activity as people spilled out from the pub at closing time and articulated lorries pulled up for the night in the area of wasteland opposite the New Inn. The evidence of all kinds of skulduggery is probably set down in those pages, though recorded in innocence.
One night the back garden was suddenly flooded by a car’s headlights, and a man in a tuxedo and bow tie made his way towards the dilapidated greenhouse. It was my dad, back late after singing in a concert, watering his tomatoes before turning in, wading through slow summer air thick with floating seeds and drowsy insects. In that projected illumination he looked like a black and white movie star.
Even in Marsden the extraordinary could happen, apparently. Staring out of that window every night I developed a new sense of the world, one that went beyond the factual and the informational. A sense of what it was like, and how it felt. That was the beginning of my life as a writer, even though I still didn’t know how to capture experiences in words. To people passing through, either on the A62 or the Leeds-Manchester train (aboard the cruelly named “Pennine Sprinter”), Marsden actually looks like a small town, not least because of the big textile mills. But its mentality is very much that of a rural village.
Sheep amble down the main street. Around its circumference the hills and escarpments stand far taller than the architecture, and the mills are rotting carcasses waiting for some future purpose. Also, nine tenths of Marsden is sky and moor. From my parents’ house I could turn right and make my way along the valley to Huddersfield, where me and a few like-minded souls would attempt to be bohemian, writing poems in the Merrie England Coffee Houses and trying to get served in the least frightening pubs. Or I could turn left and be in the middle of nothing and nowhere, with no one else for miles.
The moors can be dangerous. People go up there, get lost and don’t come back. But they are also enticing and beguiling spaces, pages waiting to be written. I have a poem inscribed in a quarry at the side of Pule Hill, the landmark vantage point above the village; when working on ancient homecoming narratives like Homer’s Odyssey and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Marsden has played a part, not so much in what I think but how I think.
I live a few miles away now, in the leafier, cushier, lotus-eating Holme Valley, but in winter, from the roof window in my study, I can see Marsden looking back at me from the horizon.
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