Writing through the lens of what we know

Do we seek to write the opposite of what we know, or do we often use as our "writing muscle" the tools we were given in our formative years? In Contemporary British Poetry and the City Peter Barry suggests the latter - giving as an example Roy Fisher, who in his later life relocated to the English countryside, yet his poetry remained very much located in the urban environments he knew so well. I think there is some truth in this hypothesis - my own writing, for instance, often resides in a small town - a somewhat claustrophobic urban space that is surrounded on all sides by a brooding army of evergreen trees.

I am currently reading Edgelands by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts and I find myself wondering if the whole town of my childhood is an edgeland of sorts. It is a kind of odd urban sprawl that rather like an over enthusiastic creeper has attached itself to the the few remaining historic landmarks sending out hundreds of shoots and runners. And yet despite this seeming sprawl of housing estates and industrial estates, the Thetford of my childhood was very much contained - contained by the thick and brooding pine forest planted and managed by The Forestry Commission that surrounded it. This inky perimeter gave the town a hemmed-in claustrophobic feeling.

Before the town was eventually bypassed there was a high metal footbridge that went over the All (the main Norwich to London trunk road). The bridge was built to enable pedestrians to pass safely over the road from the estate where I lived to the housing estate, cemetery and industrial estates on the other side of the road, without risking life and limb. As teenagers my friends and I spent many evenings on top of this bridge; smoking roll-ups and weed, playing guitar and just hanging out. The bridge enabled the casual viewer to observe how truly surrounded by forest the town actually was. We had been told it of course, every year or so someone from The Forestry Commission or the Fire Service would come to our primary school to pummel into our heads, through talks and videos, the dangers of setting deliberate or accidental forest fires. They never mentioned the threat to the town itself directly - it was more by implication, but any potential invader would have stood atop that bridge and seen immediately how vulnerable to fire the town was.

The town itself consisted of six or seven sprawling housing estates (mostly council housing, and largely in the 1960s and 70s filled with London overspill families like mine, who had chosen re-location with a job attached over squalid high rises in London), two rivers, a small but thriving town centre and several large industrial estates full of large and small factories. There was also a big golf course, the Grammar School's massive expanse of playing fields and a large common. It is amongst these landmarks - and the more historic landmarks of the town, that some of my poetry resides. Even if it doesn't always allude to it directly there is often a feeling, a sense of it being there in the background somewhere, this odd juxtaposition between rural and urban that I grew up with. It's like a mood or a coloured lens through which I view the world.

You can read my poem about Thetford Forest on the Oxford Brookes University website here.

Autobiographical Poems

Within my collection of fictional autobiographical poems I have tried to create, through use of language and imagery, a sense of alienation and displacement. I wanted to subtly show how the sense of being an outsider that the narrator feels as an adult is echoed in her experiences as a child growing up on a small town housing estate, and that this in turn is echoed in the experience of her family as a whole. Although these poems are not directly autobiographical they do naturally have definite echoes of my own experiences within them. I would hope that I am not as unsettled and alienated as the character in the poems but I have experienced some of those feelings at different times in my life. I was also bought up on a small town housing estate and can trace a sense of displacement and alienation through my own family’s experience. It may have begun with my mother’s grandparent’s move from Southern Ireland but for me it really began with my parent’s move from London to Thetford in the nineteen sixties. My mother was from Ealing and my father was from Acton – both busy centres with a lot going on. They had both been brought up in London. In 1969 they moved to Thetford due to availability of work and housing. They were part of the first wave of what was known locally as “London overspill”. Thetford couldn’t have been more different from London. It was a small rural market town surrounded by pine forest. They had moved themselves away from everything they knew and all their friends and family. It must have been a hard time for them, they did not know a single person in Norfolk and although my father had his job, my mother was isolated at home with a small child. They did not have a car or a phone and had little money for travelling home to visit relatives. There was only one busy road in Thetford – the A11 and that gave the impression of passing the town by, especially when in 1970 the route was diverted from passing through the town centre.

As a bright child who was often bored in school I spent a lot of time gazing out of the classroom window daydreaming about who might be inside the colourful cars and lorries and where they might be going. Cars held an extra mystery for most of the Redcastle Furze kids because in the early 1970s very few families actually owned one. The only person in my family who owned a car was my dad’s mother who would come and visit us once or twice a year. On the day of her visit my sister and I would wait all day by the tall landing window vying for first sight of her yellow mini as it rounded the bend. We lived on the main road in and out of the estate but there was little traffic – maybe five or six cars a day.

There must have been some sense of animosity or alienation between the incoming Londoners and the native Thetfordians, which my parents might have noticed – but as a child I was blissfully unaware of such things. I was however acutely aware of my own sense of “otherness” which partly stemmed from the fact that though essentially working class my parents were fairly intellectual. The house was filled with: books, music, craft objects and the walls were colourful and covered in large French posters. My mother was large and to cover this she wore floor length homemade dresses (a source of acute embarrassment to me as a teenager). They also enjoyed a fairly active social life – they were involved with CND, Thetford Against Missiles, a local arts centre and gallery and later on ran a folk club. This may all sound fairly exciting and idyllic but it was coupled with a precarious and volatile relationship.