This piece was commission by the Localism, Narrative and Myth project and the Durham Book Festival and performed at the Festival in October 2012. Michael Smith is a writer and broadcaster. He was brought up in Hartlepool, County Durham and graduated from University College London. He is the author of Uncertain City (2013), The Giro Playboy (2006) as well as the a film-maker including Citizen Smith (2008) and A Journey Back to Newcastle: Michael Smith's Deep North (2010). This piece was commissioned for the Durham Book Festival in 2012.
Michael Smith
Are You Local?
I’m not local anymore, but I used to be, and I miss it.
Waking up to a strange, familiar spare room, the rag’n’bone cry through a ghostly, misty morning, like some Marie Celeste of the Old Town.
Walking out the front door, soaking up the street, a nose full of sea air, the squark of the seagulls, the fresh quiet light on the red northern brick, the big seaside skies of summer sighing into autumn, of back to schoolin’ time.
The pomp of Victorian clocktowers and customs’ houses dwarfed by oil rig legs, wind farms being assembled, the medieval sandstone seawall that guards the fishing village where it all began.
Breathing in a town’s worth of memories: everything I look at I’d forgotten, everything I look at I already know, all these thousand things evoking this particular terroir with all the subtle nuance of a fine rare Burgundy: my long lost home, The Town.
Pub
I stopped off at the fisherman’s pub I never dared go in as a baggy-jeaned kid for fear of being stilettoed with a white high heel, but now it was as if it belonged to me, as if I was family, a prodigal son returning.
Supping on the local ruby red bitter like it was the taste of The Town in a glass, nipping the single malt as if its subtleties somehow tasted of my land, of my cliffs and sea air, instead of the sea air of Skye or Jura.
Soaking up the barmaids’ accents, so much broader and truer than mine, the way they get their gobs round the important words: “Mam, fuck, daft cunt”, while I smile in silence in my quiet patch of heaven by the bar.
I’m not saying it’s God’s own acre, but it is a daft ramshackle paradise of sorts; and then I think, maybe I am local again, maybe I have the right to rib it again, rib it like someone who loves it, a love for it I cannot name, or plumb, who feels it run like a river inside, deeper than my understanding: a place is in the blood, I feel it in my waters, this place I could’t run away from fast enough; and now, after one morning, it’s caught up with me again, conquered me again, stronger and tastier than a single malt.
Hamburg Bremen Antwerp
The Town, they call it, as if it’s the only one, stuck out on it’s lonely spit of rock, sea-born, sea-battered, seaward bound, off the road, out the loop, on the way to nowhere; this town’s the end of the road, the next stop’s Denmark or Sweden.
I sit here by the sea wall, me and two lads on BMXs, staring out at the wide horizon. I recognise the absent-minded longing in those lads, and I remember when my heart ached for the wide open world beyond this town. And a piece of battered old signage comes to mind, letters painted proud and bold on the sturdy stone of dockside edifices, a sign that held such romance and longing:
Tyne-Tees Shipping Company
Regular services to
London
Antwerp
Rotterdam
Amsterdam
Dordrecht
Hamburg
Bremen
Ghent
And Northern French Ports
I thought of that sign when I caught the stares of the boys on their BMXs; and maybe that yearning for the big blue beyond The Town, for somewhere else, is also part of what it means to belong here.
Part of them, and me
As afternoon turned into evening, I wandered over West to see my Granny, the sun caught low on the glowing rows of terraces; The sun lays in bright blocks down rows of back to backs, on their baby blue windowsills and clotted cream awnings, these Battenberg rows of two-up two-downs I never thought of as beautiful before, never seeing the pastel through the pebbledash.
A fondness, even love, for the pokey bits: the prefab ugliness of The Asda’s (they always call it The Asda’s, or The Aldi’s), a love for the landfill site at golden hour, for the the stink and the swirl of the seagulls, for the raggy lasses pushing prams and their stunning, rough blue eyes.
Belonging to these back to backs, belonging to these allotments, the shonky wooden fences, and the ramshackle inbetween places, the nameless scrubby patches we used to haunt as children, that now haunt us.
I hear the xylophone of an ice cream van echo, and it takes me way back when. Tarzan ropes off trees, children throwing bricks in the dried up beck, absentmindedly dragging a branch along the rhythm of the iron railings, just like we would, and these and all the other little things are part of them, and me.
Giro Land
Every place is a time, streets are memories and mortar, and crossing Thornton Street brings back long summer evenings sitting on the porches of Giro Land, tinnys and trips and rented rooms and a lovely willowy raven-haired girl I wanted to but didn’t.
The ramshackle fallen victorian villas of Giro Land, a no-man’s-land where the strange flowers flourished with the weeds. Bags of skunk in rented rooms with one bar on the fire, and bearded blokes who played guitar and talked me through their vinyl, and me stoned and silent, and watchful as an owl, a strange, awkward owl-eyed kid they took under their wing.
And that lovely coffee-coloured freckled girl who lived in the room downstairs, who I was all doey-eyed and shy round, and Hutton Avenue was my bohemian rhapsody, waking up on couches that stank of rollies, lying next to last night’s kebab.
Granma and The Old Town
So many people with dogs on leads, and the time and the space to care for them; slumbering suburbs at sundown, bowling greens and speed bumps through Mock-Tudor avenues, one lawn layed with astroturf below a ghostly moon.
There’s a cottonwool comfort in Granma’s house, a silent, swelling calm that feels like it’s taken 50 years to soak into the carpets and sofas. An old lady’s house that somehow reminds me of the smell behind babies’ ears.
The walls are a grotto of old sepia photos, photos of the Old Town, a knot of crooked, crowded streets, maze-like, alive, ripped out to make way for B&Q car parks and Barrat cul-de-sacs - and I’m angry, feeling robbed of something that was never mine, saddened by the loss of something that was never part of me, levelled long before I was even a twinkle, and now I’m grabbing at smoke for somewhere that may or may not have been, but in the movie in my mind that proud and portly little town’s a sideburned Victorian with a stovepipe hat and cigar, galleys, rigging, gartered hooers, cigarillos and saloon bars.
I can see it in the gothic terracotta of the chimneys, the wooden turret above every attic window, the wrought iron railings of Empire, a grandeur long forgotten behind formica signs for Chinese take-aways and pet shops, and “tonite, DJ Glen” written in pub chalkboard - a hundred Victorian gingerbread terraces, a thousand turreted attics snoozing under a North Sea sky.
This irrational, unreasonable pipe dream whisps away when I try and grasp it, yet I feel it in my waters. The heart has brain cells, it thinks, like the brain, only thicker, and this instinct of belonging to the Old Town is unreasonable, ungraspable, absolute, gut.
Are you local to where?
The Town, they call it, as if it’s the only one, turning its back on England, staring out at the wild North Sea. My old mates hate the next town along, “They think they’re hard” one told me; I asked my grandmother whether she’d trust them - “Ooh no!” she squarked. This is a town you can physically see from ours, whose clocktowers and dockyards are easy to make out, but for us, it may as well be a town on the face of the moon, always visible, forever out of reach, a different world entirely.
And in that next town along, they’ll have similar intangible profound feelings for similar memory-soaked redbrick buildings, buildings that mean nothing at all to me. And from those similar lunar buildings, my old mate stares back across the bay at night, blowing kisses to his daughter here, as she does from her bathroom window, saying, “Night dad,” before she falls asleep, and maybe that’s belonging.
Belonging
Belonging wells up from some deep secret spring: there’s an instinct, a gene for it. There’s a wandering gene, the DRD4 gene, stronger in nomadic populations - but surely there’s also a local gene, a belonging gene as fundamental.
We need to belong to places, and for places to belong to us. We need to stick down our flagpoles, if only in our minds. I’ve belonged to, variously:
The Town
The East End
Soho
Portobello Road
And wandered away from all of these.
I even stayed for a little while in the writer’s room in Paris, and felt proud to be part of the Republic, roused by Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, stirred by Proust’s room covered in cork to block out the sounds of the city; felt a family in Burroughs, Joyce, and the other writer-exiles, an abstract kind of family spanning centuries and nations. I felt a belonging to the bookshelves of the writer’s room as strong as the belonging to the black and white photos that granma shows me of Auntie Annie in the Old Town boozer our family ran. Wandering and belonging, as deep as the blood, encoded in the origins of our hunter-gatherer species.
The prodigal
If roots are what bind us, and roots are what tie us, then one man’s roots are another man’s bondage, and roots are the enemy of freedom. I certainly thought so as a kid, yearning for that funny kind of life I’d read about in biographies, a life my closed and rounded little world could never help me find.
“Bye mam, bye dad, bye house,” I whispered, cut loose, off to go walkabout round the big city lights, wide-eyed and clueless and green, my hopes as wide as the open sky, and vapour trails like lines of cocaine, off to glamorous places.
But now the arc of my life hangs poised in the balance, and its outward bounce becomes mirrored by its inward grounding, and that headlong rush into some blind future seems like an arrow with no target - now that closed and rounded little world feels like a warm enfolding embrace, a mother’s hug, home.
Are You Local?
I’m not local anymore, but I used to be, and I miss it.
Waking up to a strange, familiar spare room, the rag’n’bone cry through a ghostly, misty morning, like some Marie Celeste of the Old Town.
Walking out the front door, soaking up the street, a nose full of sea air, the squark of the seagulls, the fresh quiet light on the red northern brick, the big seaside skies of summer sighing into autumn, of back to schoolin’ time.
The pomp of Victorian clocktowers and customs’ houses dwarfed by oil rig legs, wind farms being assembled, the medieval sandstone seawall that guards the fishing village where it all began.
Breathing in a town’s worth of memories: everything I look at I’d forgotten, everything I look at I already know, all these thousand things evoking this particular terroir with all the subtle nuance of a fine rare Burgundy: my long lost home, The Town.
Pub
I stopped off at the fisherman’s pub I never dared go in as a baggy-jeaned kid for fear of being stilettoed with a white high heel, but now it was as if it belonged to me, as if I was family, a prodigal son returning.
Supping on the local ruby red bitter like it was the taste of The Town in a glass, nipping the single malt as if its subtleties somehow tasted of my land, of my cliffs and sea air, instead of the sea air of Skye or Jura.
Soaking up the barmaids’ accents, so much broader and truer than mine, the way they get their gobs round the important words: “Mam, fuck, daft cunt”, while I smile in silence in my quiet patch of heaven by the bar.
I’m not saying it’s God’s own acre, but it is a daft ramshackle paradise of sorts; and then I think, maybe I am local again, maybe I have the right to rib it again, rib it like someone who loves it, a love for it I cannot name, or plumb, who feels it run like a river inside, deeper than my understanding: a place is in the blood, I feel it in my waters, this place I could’t run away from fast enough; and now, after one morning, it’s caught up with me again, conquered me again, stronger and tastier than a single malt.
Hamburg Bremen Antwerp
The Town, they call it, as if it’s the only one, stuck out on it’s lonely spit of rock, sea-born, sea-battered, seaward bound, off the road, out the loop, on the way to nowhere; this town’s the end of the road, the next stop’s Denmark or Sweden.
I sit here by the sea wall, me and two lads on BMXs, staring out at the wide horizon. I recognise the absent-minded longing in those lads, and I remember when my heart ached for the wide open world beyond this town. And a piece of battered old signage comes to mind, letters painted proud and bold on the sturdy stone of dockside edifices, a sign that held such romance and longing:
Tyne-Tees Shipping Company
Regular services to
London
Antwerp
Rotterdam
Amsterdam
Dordrecht
Hamburg
Bremen
Ghent
And Northern French Ports
I thought of that sign when I caught the stares of the boys on their BMXs; and maybe that yearning for the big blue beyond The Town, for somewhere else, is also part of what it means to belong here.
Part of them, and me
As afternoon turned into evening, I wandered over West to see my Granny, the sun caught low on the glowing rows of terraces; The sun lays in bright blocks down rows of back to backs, on their baby blue windowsills and clotted cream awnings, these Battenberg rows of two-up two-downs I never thought of as beautiful before, never seeing the pastel through the pebbledash.
A fondness, even love, for the pokey bits: the prefab ugliness of The Asda’s (they always call it The Asda’s, or The Aldi’s), a love for the landfill site at golden hour, for the the stink and the swirl of the seagulls, for the raggy lasses pushing prams and their stunning, rough blue eyes.
Belonging to these back to backs, belonging to these allotments, the shonky wooden fences, and the ramshackle inbetween places, the nameless scrubby patches we used to haunt as children, that now haunt us.
I hear the xylophone of an ice cream van echo, and it takes me way back when. Tarzan ropes off trees, children throwing bricks in the dried up beck, absentmindedly dragging a branch along the rhythm of the iron railings, just like we would, and these and all the other little things are part of them, and me.
Giro Land
Every place is a time, streets are memories and mortar, and crossing Thornton Street brings back long summer evenings sitting on the porches of Giro Land, tinnys and trips and rented rooms and a lovely willowy raven-haired girl I wanted to but didn’t.
The ramshackle fallen victorian villas of Giro Land, a no-man’s-land where the strange flowers flourished with the weeds. Bags of skunk in rented rooms with one bar on the fire, and bearded blokes who played guitar and talked me through their vinyl, and me stoned and silent, and watchful as an owl, a strange, awkward owl-eyed kid they took under their wing.
And that lovely coffee-coloured freckled girl who lived in the room downstairs, who I was all doey-eyed and shy round, and Hutton Avenue was my bohemian rhapsody, waking up on couches that stank of rollies, lying next to last night’s kebab.
Granma and The Old Town
So many people with dogs on leads, and the time and the space to care for them; slumbering suburbs at sundown, bowling greens and speed bumps through Mock-Tudor avenues, one lawn layed with astroturf below a ghostly moon.
There’s a cottonwool comfort in Granma’s house, a silent, swelling calm that feels like it’s taken 50 years to soak into the carpets and sofas. An old lady’s house that somehow reminds me of the smell behind babies’ ears.
The walls are a grotto of old sepia photos, photos of the Old Town, a knot of crooked, crowded streets, maze-like, alive, ripped out to make way for B&Q car parks and Barrat cul-de-sacs - and I’m angry, feeling robbed of something that was never mine, saddened by the loss of something that was never part of me, levelled long before I was even a twinkle, and now I’m grabbing at smoke for somewhere that may or may not have been, but in the movie in my mind that proud and portly little town’s a sideburned Victorian with a stovepipe hat and cigar, galleys, rigging, gartered hooers, cigarillos and saloon bars.
I can see it in the gothic terracotta of the chimneys, the wooden turret above every attic window, the wrought iron railings of Empire, a grandeur long forgotten behind formica signs for Chinese take-aways and pet shops, and “tonite, DJ Glen” written in pub chalkboard - a hundred Victorian gingerbread terraces, a thousand turreted attics snoozing under a North Sea sky.
This irrational, unreasonable pipe dream whisps away when I try and grasp it, yet I feel it in my waters. The heart has brain cells, it thinks, like the brain, only thicker, and this instinct of belonging to the Old Town is unreasonable, ungraspable, absolute, gut.
Are you local to where?
The Town, they call it, as if it’s the only one, turning its back on England, staring out at the wild North Sea. My old mates hate the next town along, “They think they’re hard” one told me; I asked my grandmother whether she’d trust them - “Ooh no!” she squarked. This is a town you can physically see from ours, whose clocktowers and dockyards are easy to make out, but for us, it may as well be a town on the face of the moon, always visible, forever out of reach, a different world entirely.
And in that next town along, they’ll have similar intangible profound feelings for similar memory-soaked redbrick buildings, buildings that mean nothing at all to me. And from those similar lunar buildings, my old mate stares back across the bay at night, blowing kisses to his daughter here, as she does from her bathroom window, saying, “Night dad,” before she falls asleep, and maybe that’s belonging.
Belonging
Belonging wells up from some deep secret spring: there’s an instinct, a gene for it. There’s a wandering gene, the DRD4 gene, stronger in nomadic populations - but surely there’s also a local gene, a belonging gene as fundamental.
We need to belong to places, and for places to belong to us. We need to stick down our flagpoles, if only in our minds. I’ve belonged to, variously:
The Town
The East End
Soho
Portobello Road
And wandered away from all of these.
I even stayed for a little while in the writer’s room in Paris, and felt proud to be part of the Republic, roused by Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, stirred by Proust’s room covered in cork to block out the sounds of the city; felt a family in Burroughs, Joyce, and the other writer-exiles, an abstract kind of family spanning centuries and nations. I felt a belonging to the bookshelves of the writer’s room as strong as the belonging to the black and white photos that granma shows me of Auntie Annie in the Old Town boozer our family ran. Wandering and belonging, as deep as the blood, encoded in the origins of our hunter-gatherer species.
The prodigal
If roots are what bind us, and roots are what tie us, then one man’s roots are another man’s bondage, and roots are the enemy of freedom. I certainly thought so as a kid, yearning for that funny kind of life I’d read about in biographies, a life my closed and rounded little world could never help me find.
“Bye mam, bye dad, bye house,” I whispered, cut loose, off to go walkabout round the big city lights, wide-eyed and clueless and green, my hopes as wide as the open sky, and vapour trails like lines of cocaine, off to glamorous places.
But now the arc of my life hangs poised in the balance, and its outward bounce becomes mirrored by its inward grounding, and that headlong rush into some blind future seems like an arrow with no target - now that closed and rounded little world feels like a warm enfolding embrace, a mother’s hug, home.