31 Postcodes - Poem 23

 

Banging

The semi-detached

is a shock to the system.

We check off the items,

mouths open too wide.

Our own front door.

Sitting room (with chairs).

A garage (no way!).

Garden and greenhouse.

There’s a mystery neighbour.

We hold no parties. 

It’s a hideaway home,

complete change of scene.

He bakes veggie loaves;

burns, rolls, and smokes.

On a manual typewriter,

I tensely tap tap.

Out back they are banging,

building a hospital.

Decks in our bedroom

bash out Funk and Drive.

RF 2021

Video/audio for this one here.

I can’t remember why we left the previous flat to be honest but we did, in July 1992 (I was 25). Maybe there were complaints about the noise after all. Or maybe we just wanted our own front door. It gets a bit hazy in the memories at this point and the diaries (sometimes reliable) either have big gaps in them or are nowhere to be seen (maybe they never existed, days were disappearing, melding together). This house was in another hidden away street but it was in between two areas of Leeds that I hadn’t lived in up till then – Chapeltown and Chapel Allerton (on the map it calls this area between the other two Potternewton but I don’t remember anyone ever saying ‘I live in Potternewton’ – Leeds people feel free to put me right on this). I think originally I moved into this place with my previous Leeds flatmate but I hardly remember her being in this house so I’m guessing she was more at the new boyfriend’s and this ended up being a house I shared, officially this time, with the boyfriend mentioned in the last couple of posts. 

Looking at the picture above (from google), the house has changed a bit since we lived there (the garage has gone, and the greenhouse – it was a bit wobbly and that was about 30 years ago so no big surprise there). I did have a car (an old Volvo 340, a sofa on wheels) but I can’t remember if I ever actually put it in the garage. The house was a little post-war end terrace with very thin walls and no insulation or central heating (cold!). We did have a garden but no inclination to care for it (I cut the grass once, got sunburnt). I have memories of the boyfriend cooking here a bit more (he was a vegetarian and very little ready-made veggie food was available at this point, plus we were pretty skint as neither of us had anything like a wage). Mostly I remember sitting up late writing and typing articles and interviews for the alternative magazine where I was working via a government scheme of some sort.

Also it was here (in Sept 1992) that I started DJing – at first playing a show with a friend on one of the Leeds pirate radio stations (Dream FM). The boyfriend had a show on the station and it had very few women DJs at that point (if any) so we had a go (and loved it) and ended up doing two shows a week and then getting club work too (from Spring ’93). Before long there were quite a few other women DJs on the station, so many we organised a day to celebrate us all which got quite a bit of press attention. Few people used their real names on pirate radio so the friend and I called ourselves Daisy & Havoc after dolls I had as a kid (bought in a DIY/toy shop in Darlington, I’d forgotten the name but my Darlington expert tells me it was called Woodworkers). I wasn’t particularly aware as a child but the dolls were both Mary Quant products – Daisy wore the fashionable frocks and platforms, Havoc was a secret agent with guns, harpoons, underwater cameras, a machete (I still have my Havoc and all her accessories, photo here). The big surprise was that as DJs (she was Daisy, I was Havoc) we even made some money, got work, had accounts, kept at it for a good few years. We got our first club work at the Leeds club Vague that started in early 1993 (first in Hi-Flyers then it moved to the Warehouse). Before long this club got very trendy (something I’d not really encountered before – being fashionable) so then we were, briefly, trendy too and this caused some issues of its own. The track mentioned in the poem (Funk and Drive) was a particular favourite of the boyfriend, I think, and is here. 

I left this house (on my own) in September 1993 (I think that’s when it was, though I’m not sure how I know that date, it’s just in a notebook). I didn’t go far.

This poem is part of the annual Fun A Day Dundee project where participants try to do something creative every day for the month of January. You don't have to be in Dundee to take part and there are other Fun A Day projects around the world. People post as much of their work online as they want to (largely on Instagram but it can be elsewhere too). This year I am posting a whole poem a day (one poem for each of the 31 addresses I have lived at, covering the period 1967-2021). Videos/photos of the poems show the places remembered in the poems but were mostly taken from recent Google Street View. The videos are on my Instagram, maybe elsewhere too. Use the hashtag #fadd2021 on social media to see other people's online contributions.