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Bardic Stopover

Changed trains at Peterborough and Wakefield, arriving at 1.55pm to find Toby waiting at the station. It was drizzling and he said don't worry, he'd worked out the route to the digs in New North Road. As he forged along up a street that had a missing signboard I asked a bloke going by and he said we were headed the wrong way.

Long story short: got to the place, comfortable double room. We'd already paid £10 deposit. Toby's room we never saw, but he said it was all right. He was intending to leave the following morning on the 7:20 train, so he'd miss breakfast. More fool him. After Anna and I had unwound a bit, making tea with our travelling tea pot and even doing some yoga on the carpet in the spacious room, we met him in town at 4:00, intending to place some books in local bookshops. Only we couldn't find any, except the remainder bookshops like Booksale. Went up to the office of Bards Amalgamated. I'd always imagined it to be a bookshop affair, but it was just an almost empty, dull-looking office with a bloke and a woman in evidence. The bloke I thought was probably Mick Meredith, but we didn't stop to find out more. A little way along was another office like, with a rack of magazines, so we went in. There was the poet Simon Roper and a girl. I remembered Roper from Ipswich, though I wouldn't have recognised him if Toby hadn't made the introductions. Roper wouldn't be coming to our reading at the Albert as he had a workshop of his own on Thursdays. (There's a feud between poetry groups in Huddersfield, as if the game wasn't tough enough already.) Roper and Toby stood discussing arty business --projects, Workshops, getting funds for festivals, disabled Workshops, all that sort of shit. Pseudo-jobs while claiming Dole, it seemed to me. Toby always says he's 'teaching', which satisfies every enquiry. Talking about Projects all the time. All these schemes I've heard about in letters over the years. Such as the 'professional theatre company' for which he is the 'facilitator'. And the play of his they put on that sank without trace, 'One Looked Through Prison Mesh'.

Anna and I went for an Indian at the Shabar. The food was greasy and I had to order nan bread to sop it up. Still couldn't finish. The onion bhajis were spicy and chewy --should have had a basket of 'em, they were the best part of the deal. I ordered a glass of lemonade. Anna said she'd wait until we got to the pub for a lager, but I saved a last couple of gulps for her.

At the Albert at about 7:00 we saw Toby standing at the bar. He said no one had shown yet. But there was a table full of people and with his back to us a man I thought could be Tommy Wingfield. I said excuse me, and it was. He didn't know it was me as we hadn't met for eight years and I'd shaved my beard. We shook hands and made introductions. It was the first time I'd met Shirley, his wife. The other blokes sat there as if they thought they looked like gunfighters. And there I was, the soft southerner with a collar and tie. One in particular I made the mistake of confusing first off with the organiser. He kept staring and making sarcastic comments. Toby got some supposedly jovial flak too, which he shrugged off. Stupidly perhaps, I clammed up a bit, though chatting all right with Tommy and also with old Renfrew Barnes who was sitting beside him. Barnes I'd met years before in Lincoln at 'The World's Smallest Literary Festival'. The quibbler though, a grey-haired, grey-bearded individual who I later found out was twelve years younger than me, said brayingly, 'What are you going to do, then, read poetry? In the back room there? That's fine, so long as you're not going to bore us.'

'That's all right, mate,' I said, 'I'll leave that side of things to you.'

The organiser arrived and we heard that Compton Lees, a good poet and Toby's publisher as well as mine, had phoned to say he couldn't make it to read as he had 'flu. This was a downer.

At the right time we moved to the crowded back room and the reading went OK. The sarcastic joker had threatened to heckle, but in the end kept his mouth shut. I felt him staring just like the Toad used to in Ipswich, though when I glanced over he'd turn away. All intimidation. I could have got funny, but something told me to play the suave artist. When he asked my business I could have said, I didn't come to Huddersfield so I could give an account of myself to you, piss off. In the end the diplomatic approach proved most efficacious as he kept quiet through my reading and then left, even shook my hand as he went. Maybe I even made a convert and 'soothed the savage breast.'

Next day, after a sandwich and coffee thermos lunch at the station we got the train for Wakefield. Huddersfield struck us as a nice place architecturally, with the yellow stone (Millstone Grit?), but thin on attractions when it came to books. Even the charity shops only had a shelf or two each, and mostly paperbacks at that. We found a market stall in an arcade that had a few decent collector's items (at the going rate), but that was it.

We were glad to get back to Ipswich. It was after 5:00pm and our bikes, which we'd left in the £1 bike lockers, didn't have any lights. However we risked it, cycling along the path some of the way and walking in the brightly lit spots where there were likely to be coppers. This was better than the hour-long plod from the station that we know so well. And better than paying £5 for a taxi, too.

Back home I kept recalling how sitting in a Huddersfield café with Toby and Anna I'd mumbled on about, 'Well, I pay my way, I've got a day job which accounts for the old bread and butter. At least I can say I've worked for what I got.' Waiting for some response. But he never takes the bait, Toby, he just maintains a cheap silence. He did moot some plot about a £35,000 grant which he hoped to split between himself and a woman who had lived in Paris for fifteen years but now resided in Lowestoft. The scheme involved tying in an 'experimental novel' he was working on with this woman's paintings on aluminium. It all sounded a bit nebulous.

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