Upon this dreary coast we have nothing but county meetings and shipwrecks; and I have this day dined upon fish, which probably dined upon the crews of several colliers lost in the late gales. But I saw the sea once more in all the glories of surf and foam.
Byron’s time there is now commemorated in the Byron shopping centre. The pub, The Lord Byron, is boarded up and derelict. So much for poets and poetry. Either selling themselves or gone to ruin. Couldn’t find Alfred Street, ran out of time, but walked down to the harbour. It was Bill Griffiths’ Gloucester, Bill Lancaster had told me earlier in the day. Looking down at the harbour with its double entry I can see why he said that. Bill Lancaster ran the Centre for Northern Studies at Northumbria University through which Bill Griffiths did all his dialect work up until his death in 2007.
Bill Lancaster was warm and generous with his time, talking to me for over two hours in his light and airy living room, and again I was staggered at the sheer breadth of Bill Griffiths’ capabilities and interests and at Bill Lancaster’s depth of knowledge and enthusiasm for North East language and culture. I knew Bill Griffiths had written on Seaham, but not so much, and didn’t know he’d written on the history of the Northern Sinfonia or the extent of his archive work.
I’ll be talking more about Bill Griffitths soon, as I’m planning a colloquium in January in an attempt to pull together different aspects of his work and try to open up new avenues of scholarship. And I’ll be going back to Seaham. In the meantime one introduction to Bill Griffiths is through Tom Raworth’s tribute at http://tomraworth.com/bgsea.html. I said what I wanted to say about the poetry there.
On the way to Glasgow on the train the next day I passed Carstairs prison hospital. And if I’m going to write a sentimental poem for Bill Griffiths something about a prison hospital will have to do. He was interested in prisons, Bill, and spent some time trying to get people out of them who should never have been in there in the first place.
By Carstairs and under the clean fence
In the ploughed section Hereford
Cattle bent white faces to the grass.
No kindness in these fences or the
Earth shorn of all vegetation, no meadow
Flowers or ornament in Carstairs,
No beauty to distract the criminally
Insane. I too would go mad in a place
Like that, or make friends with the
Brown cows that nuzzled the outer
Fence. Hard to live without beauty
And harder still to have no distractions
Particularly if your outside life incuded
Axe murder. Only seeing yourself
Reflected back in the shiny surfaces of
The smooth walls. Bill might have played the
Piano for them or standing on his toes
Delivered a line of such delicacy it made
your heart sing and for a while anyway
patterned the smooth walls with sound or
brought the white faced Herefords a little closer.
