Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Some people might call that a grave disadvantage, a staggering load: after all, it’s supposed to be the roughest place in Ipswich except Greenwich Estate. (To Gainsborough people, Greenwich is what Gainsborough is to the rest of Ipswich. A no man’s land, ‘Indian territory’. A huddle of brick and concrete lodges, round the doors of which cluster snotty infants and mangy, savage dogs. Or so we Gainsborough lads like to imagine.)

I’ve never considered Gainsborough Estate anything but one of the most glorious places to hail from. Describe it and people show envy and disbelief. No doubt most of us glamourise or deglamourise the place where we were born.

Despite the rumours though, we didn’t drink out of jam jars. As for the gas-fired geyser, we used it to get hot water to fill the bath with. The floors were swept and I never knew anyone to keep a pig or goat in the coalhouse; but then again I wasn’t born until after World War It. So was also spared toenail pie.

If you read your social history you’ll discover that the council estates put up in the 1920s and ‘30s augured a great new respectability. In Ipswich in particular there were during my parents youth sprawling slums down near the docks where you had to fetch your bucket of water from a stand pipe. (I believe my father mentioned ‘Paradine Street’, or was it ‘Eden End’?)

When my day came we working-class lads and lasses were getting the benefits of a very enlightened social policy. Naturally, we took it all for granted, as ours by right. Not that it was just plain sailing and gravy running out of the back stairs. Even in my day if you got an apple for your lunch you might be asked by another boy, ‘Can I ‘ave your core?’

Benny Harris and I went home one afternoon from Morland Road School (now Morland County Primary) with slips of paper that smelled of spirit. These said we would have medical examinations in two weeks’ time and would need to strip to our underpants. Benny and I looked at each other in guilt.

‘Underpants? What are they?’

‘I don’t know.’

The Harrises were a family of ten with any number of cousins, aunts and uncles. It was considered that Mr Harris was a malingerer when he complained of aches and pains, but they finally took him into hospital and found galloping cancer. He emerged trussed up like a chicken and only lasted a couple of weeks.

My bosom friend Benny was as hard as nails and tender-hearted. His brother Stan was a playground hero. You thought of him when reading about a trapper who ‘didn’t know what fear was.’ Stanley Harris, notorious scrumper of apples. Strange that he became such a modest carpet fitter.

We loved running free on ‘the Lairs’, which was a stretch of parklike land beside the River Orwell, untouched since before the days of Robin Hood. Doubtless wolves had excavated their dens there in former centuries, but now we found only such forms of life as grass snakes, rats and occasionally a fox. It was also haunted by the malignant squirt known as ‘Nipper’ Nevins, whose family had connections with the gypsies. Their illustrious career was extensively documented down at the police station.

As well as the Lairs there was the Woods, which could be reached by jumping over my grandmother’s garden fence. This too was untouched land from before time out of mind. Tony Verrey, who lived next door but one from me, knew the Lairs, but I was a Davy Crockett of the Woods. (Now Brazier’s Wood housing development).

The Woods was more like a haven than, say, the grassy ‘Rec’ by the shops. Along where humans congregated you were liable to get beaten up for some flimsy reason, or at least ‘cheeked’. That was when you neede your friends--for help, or at least philosophical consolation.

Many was the bottle of cider Benny and I fetched from the off licence of the Duke of Gloucester. His mum and mine exchanged knitting patterns and Saturday nights we would go round theirs and watch Robert Ryan Westerns on the 9-inch black and white TV. Gainsborough is to me associated inalienably with the Wild West. It was the culture of the day; there were a dozen Western films a week shown on TV in the 1950s. Jack Bettle’s mother covered the TV screen with noisy kisses when Clint ‘Cheyenne’ Walker appeared. The behaviour of such characters as less Harper and Flint McCullough was discussed in classrooms, canteens and hairdressing establishments with a gravity now reserved for the inhabitants of Coronation Street and Albert Square. Now if not the soaps it would be Deep Space and virtual reality, but then it was Bronco Layne, Gil Favor and Seth Adams. The boys of Gainsborough lived by a sort of frontier code and most of the villains naturally came from such outlandish estates as Greenwich and Chantry.

Mrs Harris, as well as warning me always to shave closely when I was older ‘or all your strength will go to your beard’, was the one who pointed out that the main characters in TV Westerns were always given the biggest horses.

A year or two ago Ipswich’s Evening Star newspaper featured a pull-out which showed the aerial view of Gainsborough Estate. The front door of the old ancestral manse in Shannon Road stood out touchingly in royal red. Such a small domain it seemed, that pattern of streets. Finite. It felt as if there must have been a medieval wall or a moat missing from around of it.

There used to be a song about what we lads would do if we had the wings of a sparrow and the arse of a dirty great crow. Thin was brought to mind, inevitably, when looking at the area of the photographic spread which showed the Headmaster’s part of Morland Road Primary School and the quadrangle where hung the humiliating clock under which miscreants had to stand.

Gainsborough Estate: is it detached from time and climate? Wasn’t it much as Troy must have been, vibrant, exuberant, pungent, full of life, before they lugged in the Wooden Horse?