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A Humber Mouth Special Commission 2012. Copyright of individual poems, stories and images resides with the writers and artists. Humber Mouth 2012 acknowledges the financial assistance of Hull City Council and Arts Council England, Yorkshire. British Library Cataloguing in Publications Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British library. First published 2012 Published by Kingston Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publishers. is book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired or otherwise circulated, in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, without the publisher’s prior consent. e Authors assert the moral right to be identified as the Authors of the work in accordance with the Copyright Design and Patents Act 1988. ISBN 978-1-902039-22-0 Kingston Press is the publishing imprint of Hull City Council Library Service, Central Library, Albion Street, Hull, England, HU1 3TF Telephone: +44 (0) 1482 210000 Fax: +44 (0) 1482 616827 e-mail: a class= __cf_email__ href= /cdn-cgi/l/email-protection data-cfemail= 593230373e2a2d3637292b3c2a2a19312c35353a3a773e362f772c32 [email protected] /a script data-cfhash='f9e31' type= text/javascript /* ![CDATA[ */!function(t,e,r,n,c,a,p){try{t=document.currentScript||function(){for(t=document.getElementsByTagName('script'),e=t.length;e--;)if(t[e].getAttribute('data-cfhash'))return t[e]}();if(t&&(c=t.previousSibling)){p=t.parentNode;if(a=c.getAttribute('data-cfemail')){for(e='',r='0x'+a.substr(0,2)|0,n=2;a.length-n;n+=2)e+='%'+('0'+('0x'+a.substr(n,2)^r).toString(16)).slice(-2);p.replaceChild(document.createTextNode(decodeURIComponent(e)),c)}p.removeChild(t)}}catch(u){}}()/* ]] */ /script www.hullcc.co.uk/kingstonpress We are pleased to present Sketches, Dispatches, Hull Tales and Ballads, the latest collaboration from the Humber Writers. Here you have an anthology of words and images responding, sometimes directly, sometimes more obliquely, to Dickens, as we celebrate the bicentenary of his birth. The book is a Humber Mouth Special Commission which echoes and plays variations on the themes of Hard Times, Great Expectations — the watchwords of this year’s festival. The Humber Writers is a group of poets, fiction writers and artists associated with the University of Hull. Over the years members of the group have collaborated on a number of projects specifically focusing on Hull and its neighbouring landscapes, often resulting in books, performances and film for the Humber Mouth Literature Festival: A Case for the Word (theatre performance, 2006); Architexts (art book, 2007); Dri (book and film, 2008); Hide (book, 2010); and Postcards from Hull (book, postcards and art exhibition, 2011). 2012 has been particularly productive as this book follows hard on the heels of Under Travelling Skies: Departures from Larkin, which won the first Larkin25 Words Award, and featured a book, a film and an exhibition of paintings at Artlink in Princes Avenue, Hull. Dickens, of course, is most immediately associated with London and so our ‘departures from Dickens’ often reflect our own city through his themes. Dickens did visit Hull: several of the pieces here refer to an incident which involved him buying silk stockings, presumably for the actress Ellen Ternan, and giving the shop assistant who served him a ticket for one of his readings. There is some doubt as to when (or even if?) this took place. As editors we have sought an imaginative response, and have allowed our writers sufficient leeway with Gradgrind’s facts to make what they will of anecdote, false report, misremembered date, or for that matter history itself. It has been a great pleasure editing this anthology and we would like to thank Hull City Arts who generously supported the project. Mary Aherne and Cliff Forshaw, Hull, June 2012. Painting: Nude with Top Hat 1 by Cliff Forshaw 2 Contents Maurice Rutherford.............. Apology for Absence............................. Valerie Sanders...................... Dickens and Hull: An Introduction.... Mary Aherne........................... Imp........................................................... Malcolm Watson.................... Silk Stockings......................................... Carol Rumens.......................... e Gentleman for Nowhere................ 4 5 12 14 16 Aingeal Clare.......................... e Man and the Peregrine and the Chimney................................................. 30 Cliff Forshaw.......................... A Trinity of Genomic Portraits for Charles Darwin...................................... 32 David Wheatley...................... Cat Head eatre................................... 38 Wanna Come Back to Mine................. 40 Cliff Forshaw.......................... A Season in Hull.................................... 42 Ingerland................................................. 43 Ray French............................... Insomnia................................................. 48 Cliff Forshaw.......................... Two Ballads from the Bush................... 62 David Wheatley...................... Northern Divers..................................... 71 Guns on the Bus..................................... 72 Carol Rumens.......................... Beware this Boy...................................... 74 Aingeal Clare.......................... from Wide Country and the Road...... 75 Kath McKay............................ Hull and Eastern Counties Herald March 1869............................................. 83 Aer the Silk Stockings......................... 84 Aer Abigail Finds the Letter............... 89 Malcolm Watson.................... A Christmas Carol................................. 94 David Wheatley...................... Interview with a Binman...................... 95 Visitors’ Centre....................................... 96 Vacuous and Unknown......................... 97 Jane Thomas........................... Charles Dickens and Hull..................... 98 Mary Aherne........................... Hope on the Horizon............................ 104 birds......................................................... 110 Maurice Rutherford.............. Second oughts....................................112 3 Maurice Rutherford Apology for Absence Dear Editor, Moved by, and grateful for your invitation to present a script – something of expectations, great or small, hard times, health, poverty, philanthropy, of which Hull’s known its share, both good and bad – I have to say my contribution would entail recourse to reference books today and here’s the rub: I’ve given them away. Cerebral palsy, surely blighting births when Magwitch stirred the marshland mists, still does, so, heeding a request to donate books (whose small print now lay fogged beyond my reach) chancing a bicentenary salute to one who wrote life as it was, backlit with love, and left a legacy of hope, I bagged my Dickens paperbacks for Scope. Two feet of empty shelf, some disturbed dust, Pickwick and Nickleby – both hardback gifts from absent friends taken before their time – remain, reminding me of kindnesses that came my way, like this approach from you I can’t feel equal to. Forgive me when with gratitude and, yes, resurgent grief I must, ungraciously, decline this brief. ps. May I append the shortest gloss: no giving’s worth its name where there’s no loss. 4 Valerie Sanders Dickens and Hull: An Introduction The Hull people (not generally considered excitable, even on their own showing), were so enthusiastic that we were obliged to promise to go back there for Two Readings! (letter, 15 September 1858) What did Dickens know – or care – about Hull? As a ‘southerner’, born in Portsmouth, but popularly regarded by most people as a Londoner, he might look like the last person to have anything interesting to say about a provincial town on the Humber estuary. As the opening quotation shows, however, he came to Hull in September 1858 on one of his famous public reading tours, and was an instant success. His letters record that he made ‘more than £50 profit at Hull’ on his first reading, and returned by popular demand a few weeks later. However strapped for cash people were clearly willing to turn out twice to hear the nation’s best-loved novelist perform favourite extracts from his works, as they did on his return visits in 1859 and 60. He was back again in 1869 for his farewell reading tour, when he stayed at the Royal Station Hotel, and regaled an audience at the Assembly Rooms (later the New Theatre) with another round of his old favourites, including ‘Sikes and Nancy’ and ‘Mrs Gamp.’ We know the people of Hull loved Dickens on tour, but apart from these performance pieces, what else in his novels suggests they might have struck a chord with the audience he entertained? And given today’s ‘hard times’ what can we still find in Dickens to speak to our own experience of austerity and hardship? The most obvious link between Dickens and his Hull audience, both past and present, is their shared familiarity with rivers, estuaries, bridges, the flat, featureless landscape, and the varieties of shipping which ploughed up and down their muddy waters. A Victorian commentator on Hull, the Revd James Sibree, dated his letters home to his mother as ‘From the fag-end of the earth.’ 5 Reaching Barton after an exhausting twenty-six hour journey from London in 1831, he remembered how the ‘flatness of the country palled on my spirit’ – and there was still the river crossing to make by small steamboat, loaded with cattle as well as his fellowpassengers and their luggage.1 Much of this apparently dreary landscape might have reminded Dickens of the Kent marshes, which he had known from childhood when his father worked in the Navy Pay Offices based at Sheerness and Chatham, towns which feature in several of his novels including e Pickwick Papers and David Copperfield. At his least charitable, he nicknamed the Kent towns of his childhood, especially Rochester, ‘Dullborough’ and ‘Mudfog’, while in Great Expectations (1860-1) his hero Pip overhears a convict recall the marshes as ‘“A most beastly place. Mudbank, mist, swamp, and work; work, swamp, mist, and mudbank”’ (Ch. 28). The banks of the Humber in a dripping November mist might be similarly described. The Humber might have reminded Dickens of another, grander river estuary which became an integral part of his life when he worked at Warren’s blacking warehouse on Hungerford Steps. The Thames is a murky and fairly sinister presence in many of his novels, from Oliver Twist (1838) to Our Mutual Friend (1864-5), which opens with the image of ‘a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance, with two figures in it,’ floating between Southwark and London Bridge on an autumn evening. Given the perpetual brown sludgy appearance of today’s Humber it is easy to recognize Dickens’s references to the ‘slime and ooze’ of rivers, though what chiefly interests him in these watery landscapes is the human traffic. Gaffer Hexam and his daughter Lizzie are here shown trawling not for fish, but for dead bodies, and when the river features in Great Expectations, it is in relation to human cargoes of convicts. Opening in the Kent marshes, the novel plunges the reader straight into knowledge of the ‘Hulks’ or holding vessels for prisoners ready to be shipped off to Australia. ‘By the light of the torches,’ Dickens’s young autobiographical narrator Pip recalls, when he sees the 6 terrifying convict Magwitch handed over to the authorities, ‘we saw the black Hulk lying out a little way from the mud of the shore, like a wicked Noah’s ark’ (Ch.5). When Magwitch risks his life returning to England over a decade later to visit the boy whose education he has been secretly subsidising, Pip and his friend Herbert Pocket concoct an elaborate plan to help him escape before he can be caught a second time. Their intention is to row him down the Thames to where he can catch a steamer either for Hamburg or for Rotterdam: destinations he could also have reached from Hull, whose grim prison (1865-70) on Hedon Road was built in the same decade as the publication of Great Expectations. Typically for Dickens, who rarely allows wrong-doers, however well-meaning, to escape scotfree, Magwitch is rearrested before he can board either of the European steamers, and dies peacefully in jail, instead of being hanged as a returned transport. Even when Dickens opens a novel by describing the London streets, as in the famous foggy opening chapter of Bleak House (1853), they seem to blend with the Thames, in one continuous haze of grey shapes and adjacent counties – the Essex Marshes and the Kentish heights, ‘fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats.’ Why does Dickens so often evoke these misty maritime scenes at the beginnings of his novels? Does he want to convey the common mystery of cities and rivers as places of human traffic so complex and multifaceted, seething below and beyond human vision that only gradually can he begin to pick out faces and personal histories from the general blur? In this passage from Bleak House, he also notices ‘Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.’ This reminds us that bridges, too, fascinated Dickens, both as landmarks in themselves, and places where people pause, take stock of things, and arrange secret assignations, as Nancy does at London Bridge with Mr Brownlow and Rose Maylie, Oliver’s protectors, in 7 Oliver Twist. Despite its grandeur, the Thames at nearly midnight, looks as muddy and marshy as the Kent landscape, with its riverside buildings , the old ‘smoke-stained storehouses on either side,’ rising ‘heavy and dull from the dense mass of roofs and gables,’ the ‘forest of shipping below bridge’ almost invisible in the darkness (Ch. 46). London Bridge makes another fleeting appearance in Great Expectations, as Magwitch is rowed down river, past the kind of waterfront scenery which clearly fascinated Dickens in novel after novel. However urgent the pressures of plot, he always takes time to note the maritime clutter of dockyards, which Pip recalls as ‘rusty chain-cables, frayed hempen hawsers and bobbing buoys,’ down to the level of miscellaneous surface rubbish as their boat momentarily collides with ‘floating broken baskets, scattering floating chips of wood and shaving, cleaving floating scum of coal’ (Ch.54). There was clearly little about rivers, or dockyards, which Dickens failed to observe throughout his life. David Copperfield, on his way to stay for the first time in Mr Peggotty’s wonderful upturned boat-house in Yarmouth, notices every scrap of nautical debris which builds his excitement as they near the beach: the ‘lanes bestrewn with bits of chips and little hillocks of sand,’ ‘the gas-works, rope-walks, boatbuilders’ yards, shipwrights’ yards, ship-breakers’ yards, caulkers’ yards, riggers’ lofts, smiths’ forges, and a great litter of such places’ (Ch. 3). In rhythmic, lilting lists like this Dickens is half way towards a poem, sharing his hero’s excitement about everything to do with the sea and rivers. The strange sound of the technical terms – ‘caulkers’, and ‘rope-walks’ – fascinates him, removed as it is from the language of everyday life, and redolent of places where men do real work in tough physical conditions. His late series of essays, e Uncommercial Traveller (1860-9), takes this further in a chapter on the bustling life of ‘Down by the Docks’: in this case, the Rochester waterfront, where he lists in dizzying detail the food, drink, oysters, fishy, scaly-looking vegetables, public-houses, coffee-shops, drunken seamen with tattooed arms, sausages and saveloys, hornpipes, parrots, waxworks, and poetic placards rhyming: ‘Come, cheer up 8 my lads. We’ve the best liquors here, And you’ll find something new In our wonderful Beer’ (Ch. 22) – poetry of a lesser kind, but still inspired by a sense of place. Dickens, in a word, for all his associations with London, was steeped in the liminal, perpetually unsettled, restless world of river and sea traffic, with all its shoreline dramas, failed escapes and fatal encounters. The creative writers who have contributed to this volume have drawn much of their inspiration from two of the shorter Dickens texts: Hard Times (1854) and Great Expectations. Significantly different though they are, they share certain themes which still speak to today’s readers, not least through their interwoven motifs of money and poverty, work, aspiration, ambition, and education, which troubled Dickens throughout his career. A pervasive concern of Dickens’s writing remains the unbridgeable chasm between rich and poor, and the ways in which impoverished families scrape together a basic subsistence. Broken homes and families feature in all his novels, as do the reconstituted ‘families of choice,’ where people with no biological connection share lodgings and food, as in David Copperfield, where Mr Peggotty’s eccentric, but all-inclusive household numbers – besides his orphaned niece and nephew (Little Emily and Ham) – the sorrowful Mrs Gummidge, widow of his partner in a boat. The Peggottys’ ‘ship-looking thing’ (as David calls their home) is a healthier place to live than the overcrowded city tenements, like those of Hull when cholera epidemics struck the town in 1832 and 1849. James Sibree recalls how the streets ‘were ill-paved, and unfrequently swept’ (p. 10). Unlike the uniform streets of Dickens’s Coketown in Hard Times (based on the Lancashire mill town of Preston), the houses of Hull ‘were irregularly built- scarcely any two alike’ (Sibree, p. 10). Sibree was disappointed by the lack of grandeur in the public buildings, only Holy Trinity Church, the Infirmary and Public Rooms standing out from the monotonous townscape, making them little better than those of Coketown, where ‘the jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town-hall might have been either, or both, or anything 9 else (Book the First: Chapter 5). The Hull workhouse – that archetypal Dickensian symbol of social protest – had existed since 1698. Though Victorian Hull had its fair share of distinguished visitors, including Queen Victoria, who in 1854 stayed (like Dickens) at the Station Hotel, and was moved by the sight of hundreds of loyal Sunday School children assembling to greet her, it was, by all accounts, essentially an earnest workaday kind of place, sustained economically by the whaling and fishing industries, and spiritually by more than its fair share of churches and chapels – not unlike Coketown’s chapels built by members of eighteen different religious sects. Though cotton mills briefly existed in Hull2 the Coketown of Hard Times conveys the sense of a more mechanical and deadening industrial landscape than Dickens would have found here. Even Coketown has its off-duty moments, however, in the form of Sleary’s Horse-Riding, which shares features with the Victorian version of Hull Fair: an assembly of market stalls, freak-shows, and circus acts as well as the new steam-driven roundabouts. Displays of horsemanship, such as those performed by Mr Sleary and his troupe, are known to have been staged in the Market Place in Hull, where visitors might also be treated twice-daily to shows of ‘Dancing, Singing, Tumbling, Learned Ponies, Feats on the Wire.’3 Dickens was always a great advocate of popular entertainment, epitomised in Mr Sleary’s famous lisping insistence tha
