The poet laureate rarely read as a child – it was the view from his house at the edge of the moors that shaped his poetic vision
Marsden is the last village in the Colne Valley as it climbs westward from the former textile town of Huddersfield into the West Yorkshire Pennines. My parents lived in a terrace house on the south-facing side (an end terrace, in fact, which we could claim as “semi-detached” in more aspirant moments), up a steep, narrow road that was rumoured to be Roman in origin and still carries the contours of stone steps in the middle of the carriageway, beneath several layers of asphalt. My bedroom, made from a partitioned section of my parents’ bedroom, looked straight down into the bowl of the village, the house occupying an enviable grandstand location for such a modest property.
The only other terrace or “block” with the same aspect consisted of 20 houses and was known colloquially as Titanic Row, either because of its impressive length, or because it was built in 1912, or because it was sinking slowly into the clay foundations. I watched a lot of TV as a kid and didn’t read much other than comics, so I associate my first poetic experiences with the view from that bedroom window, especially the view at night, dreaming with my eyes wide open when I should have been asleep. I’d watch the streetlamps blink into action, the shutters and blinds go down in the shops at the top of Fall Lane, and headlamps illuminate distant lanes and gable ends. I’d watch people whose shapes and outlines I recognised going into the New Inn or coming out of the Old New Inn, and curtains being drawn in the houses of neighbours and family friends.
'I once said in an interview that I grew up with one foot on the pavement and the other in the pigsty'
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