Recently I finished reading what I thought was a fantastic book by a gentleman called Mark Hodkinson entitled ‘No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy’. It details his working class upbringing, love of books (including a collection now of many thousands of them) and subsequent career in the publishing industry. So, while firstly apologising to and acknowledging Mark for leaning heavily on him for the title of this blog, I couldn’t help feeling there were a lot of similarities in my youth to his. No doubt this helped me enjoy his work even more and got me thinking.

Of course the definition of what a working class person is is not rigidly defined and means different things to different people. I grew up on what would be viewed as a good estate of private houses, but beyond that ticked many of the boxes normally associated with the term working class.

By way of examples, in terms of family life, for the entirety of my childhood we only went on one holiday, which was two weeks in this country spent at a relatives. My dad had a very long spell of unemployment as recession blighted the country in the early eighties and I qualified for free school meals. This was something I kept quiet at comprehensive school though, it was less painful to take in sandwiches rather than admit to such a thing. Apart from when I was very young we never owned a car, that was sold in line with the demands of the recession noted above.

However this isn’t the prelude to a doom laden piece about how bad my childhood was. It absolutely wasn’t. And to return to the original theme this was in no small part down to reading and books. Perhaps like many working class households at the time there weren’t many books in the house, or at least not until I got up and running with them in my teens! The three that stood out were the bible, a dictionary and an encyclopaedia. Again that may have been typical in this type of household.

It’s always difficult from a distance of fifty years of course to know for sure if your memories are real, especially if no one else can corroborate them. There was one other book that is visible in the corner of my mind though. It was an early version of the ‘teach yourself’ volumes, so popular currently, about geometry. I think my dad must have purchased it to help him with his work as a toolmaker at the ever troubled British Leyland.

The paucity of books wasn’t down to ignorance on my parents part though. Far from it. Lack of money was the main driver and as a consequence the library (which I was enrolled at from a very young age, basically as soon as I could read) became a frequent haunt. They were keen that I should have a decent education and not be subject to the often haphazard or difficult employment conditions of factory life they had endured.

By the time I left home for university I’d enjoyed many of the classics, especially works by Steinbeck, Orwell and Dickens. Additionally I’d somehow managed to write a successful ‘A’ Level English Literature coursework that largely referenced the writings of former jockey turned crime writer Dick Francis and built up a large reference library on my sporting favourites of football and cricket.

Again, just like Hodkinson in ‘No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy’, the one component of English Literature I never really enjoyed or for that matter particularly understood was poetry. For me, far too much time is spent trying to answer the question ‘what is the poet trying to say here?’, with ever more labyrinthine explanations proposed.

So as an antidote to this and at a safe distance in years from being compelled to have to study poetry I have decided to write one of my own. Firstly because in a world where blogs are being churned out at an alarming rate it will hardly ever be read and then if it is knowing that most folks in the blogosphere are forgiving creative types anyway. It’s a tribute to my long deceased dad (who possibly like lots of people’s parents) was forced down a path in life due to circumstances and not offered the opportunities they could easily have taken advantage of.

Verse 1

The dye is cast.

You said. And it was.

Insurmountable. Impregnable. Impenetrable.

Verse 2

Born into World War.

Intelligence yes. No university then.

Factory. Fodder. Frustration.

Verse 3

Like a Ghost Town.

No jobs. In this country.

Internalise. Introversion. Inhibit.

Verse 4

Then the cancer grows.

Stay silent. Real men do.

Behind. Backward. Belated.

Verse 5

The dye was cast.

A waste. So much missed.

Insurmountable. Impregnable. Impenetrable.