I remember manning up at Batley Grammar School for Boys
to that brash middle-class no-nonsense noise
that big-banged its way down booby-trapped corridors,
chock-filled with bollockings
from teachers
whose ear-bashings were more
feared than their canes.
Maddening pointing laughter
at every fall or embarrassment,
echoed by bullish sons of alpha males:
new-moneyed middle managers in an age
of possessive individualist, trickle-down, asset-grabbing shite
that saw a bizarre sense of pride
in masculinity, intellectual superiority, Yorkshire, and grime.
Gobs fuelled like combustion engines to open and shut with loud
glottal-stop insults thrust
at the weak or different
in ‘accents clear and proud’.
Top-down didacticism,
make ’em work and punish ’em,
sneering fear the modus operandum.
Nicknames abound.
A year of being pecked
and I’m learning the ropes,
being verbally abused
by a kid in my year
when I turn and I face
and I pluck up the courage,
hit back with a reminder of a nickname given,
Fuck off , Alien – you weird-looking ginger,
and he runs at me (a rarity
that a confrontation here involves physicality).
His face is throbbing, pulsating, angry, red,
arms flailing, he’s going for my head,
and I push him away as instinct takes over,
and he falls to the floor, gets up, and runs.
And I feel at last like I’m winning the battle,
protecting myself, not letting ’em at me.
And from that day I walk with a swagger,
gob off as I please, and don’t fear any bugger,
and I chase after big lads who take our ball,
become a snarling northern bully runt surviving the grammar grind,
a Scrappy-Doo, a yappy dog, an extra from Kes, barking offence, protecting myself.
And later I learn that that kid that I turned on,
that I so charmingly reminded
of his nickname Alien,
had been told around that time
that he was adopted
by kind-hearted folks
who added to their brethren,
and when I stood up to whatever petty insult
he had had for me,
it had hit him hard, that reminder
of not belonging to his family,
but for me, in my ignorance, the moment had assisted me,
instilling survival, self-sufficiency, bravery – it had made me.
Years on I see his photos, his boys and his girl,
contented, smiling
in their Huddersfield Town shirts,
and I am displaced from my South Leeds roots,
living in a rented room without any family,
strutting my stuff with my angry poetry.
Peacocks was/is the nickname of Leeds United Football Club (from the days they spent playing at the Old Peacock Ground – now Elland Road), Terriers is the nickname of Huddersfield Town football club (as in Yorkshire terriers – the yappiest of dogs). The two characters in the piece (who may or may not be based on real-life characters!) are supporters of the two clubs. There is no intended reference to Elizabeth Peacock, who was coincidentally MP for Batley and Spen at the time, but, if you want to apply new historical literary criticism and conclude that this piece demonstrates a subconscious critique of a period in British political history that saw serious damage inflicted on Yorkshire by Thatcher’s neo-liberalism, I won’t stand in your way!