31 Postcodes - Poem 27

 

Springtime

We take the old place to pieces,

eras of carpet, one by one,

we finger the dial of the rotary phone,

then rip it out soon after.

Too much repetition.

We take down ancient curtains,

we’re not overlooked at the end of a lane. 

Only the patchwork garden sees us,

a wealth of colours and textures, 

so soft and sweet.

We get the nest fluffed up and ready

for the imminent arrival of flesh and blood.

In the bright sunny bathroom we feel her move,

joyful splashing and laughing

at the end of the day.

RF 2021

Video/audio for this one here.

Not long after the fire and one too many aggressive comments from neighbours Mark and I decided it was time to find a place together (in 1998 – I was 31). We moved out of the city and bought a little end terrace house in Batley, a smaller town further out (much cheaper than most of Leeds). Because it’s an end terrace you can’t see the house much from this google photo but it’s at the end of that little street, surrounded by gardens (its own and that of a big fancy house on the other side of the wall – my Mum’s dog escaped into their massive garden once). We had friends who lived nearby and they showed us around and helped us find the house. The elderly couple selling up were real Yorkshire characters – the woman particularly had some great stories (and had written her life story in Yorkshire dialect). They also had quite the carpet collection (at least 3 piled on top of each other in several rooms). The house was tucked away at the end of a dead end (a row of what had been railway cottages on the way to a mine – though in our time there was a bed factory nearby instead). The house had several gardens, one on almost every side (the husband had been a council gardener and they had obviously just collected patches of land, no doubt for pennies, when others weren’t interested over the years). It looks, from the new photos, like someone has made one bit of garden into a parking space (parking was a nightmare when we were there so it’s a good job Mark’s at least part robot). Also, despite his lack of art college background (see poem 25), he is pretty skilled at making homes look good so, in his spare time from work, he turned this dark, dusty house into a lovely bright home. He stripped floors, put in a shower, refitted a whole kitchen (for £500). 

And what was I doing all this time you may ask? Well, I tried working in a ‘proper job’ again (with some disastrous results, there was at least one office admin job where I just cried all the time and did not make it through my probationary period – the office environment is not my friend). I had a few part-time jobs too – one in a concessionary clothes store in an office block (through a friend), one in an FE college being a learning assistant to special needs students (loved that job), one tutoring GCSE English – but mainly, after one year in the house, parenthood became a main focus. I got pregnant in 1999 and spent the huge months working a little but also eating too many Magnum ice-creams, falling asleep trying to read Middlemarch (I’ve never finished it), and getting wedged into the tiny old kitchen (the refurb was some time later). Our precious daughter Heather was born in April 2000 in Dewsbury hospital (though we were home 2 days later), so most of the memories of this home are baby/toddler related (and of course we took LOADS of photos so the memories have a lot more help from here on in). 

We were happy in that house in many ways but we did start to wonder if this was where we wanted to raise her long-term (she’s 20 now, has her own blog). One issue was that I had become a big walker (partly because of all the travel-related anxiety) and whilst I can enjoy an urban walk (and have done many) we longed to have new places to explore on foot and some more green space. Yorkshire and the north of England has some lovely countryside but we were nearer to endless motorways and retail parks than fields in the main and we were miles from the sea (which had been another big part of my gradual mental rebuild – getting to the coast as often as possible, January birthdays in Whitby and such like). Another major factor was the ‘casual’ racism amongst a high proportion of white people in this area which was hateful and could feel all-pervading (one neighbour started on a racist rant the day we first brought Heather home from the hospital, like there was nothing nice she could say even on a day like that). We’d come across people like this before of course, but in this area, at this time, it was like a thick fog, and a far-too-settled one. We weren’t surprised when Jo Cox (the MP for this area a few years later) was murdered with racist motivation as a major driving force. It was all here, waiting for Farage and co to light the fuse.

With all this in mind we were half thinking about moving when one day in 2001 Mark, by then working at Leeds University in the IT department, saw a job ad for a post in Dundee, said “I could probably do that” and sent off an application. We both have Scottish mothers and we had had a lovely, and for me possibly a lifesaving holiday together in Scotland in 1997, so it seemed a good direction to head in. Finally, in 2002, we did move up (and we’re still here, if not in the same house). So, tomorrow – the road north.

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.