Read part one by Andrew Motion and The joy of Essex
Sheffield is a dramatic city, built, like Rome, on seven hills. I was born there in 1939, on the eve of war, and our family was evacuated when I was only months old. We didn’t move far. My father flew off with the RAF, and the rest of us spent the war years in another part of South Yorkshire, in a council house in Pontefract, a town famous not for heavy industry but for Liquorice Allsorts and Pontefract Cakes. My earliest memories of Sheffield date back to our return in 1946, and they are of a city centre heavily scarred by bomb craters, of slag heaps on skylines, and of leafy suburbs almost untouched by enemy action.
These suburbs had survived, as some still do today, in a timeless domestic tranquillity. Vast, dark, soot-blackened, elaborate Victorian mansions, built of millstone grit, loomed over more restrained Edwardian houses with stained-glass fanlights. Avenues of desirable 1930s semidetached dwellings marched up and down the hillsides. To the east, towards Attercliffe and Wincobank and Rotherham, lay an armageddon of devastation and the ruined estates of miners and steelworkers, where we never ventured. At night, the furnace fires lit the sky with a baleful pink glow. Sheffield was an exciting place. There was something biblical about its fiery landscapes, its steep banks and smoking valleys. I was proud of it, and I dramatised it to myself, although I knew next to nothing about its history.
My explorations of Sheffield, as a child, were marked by what would now be considered an extraordinary freedom. Few families had cars, and I cannot remember any mother driving her children to school. (My mother never learnt to drive.) We travelled on foot and by tram, bus and bike. On Saturday mornings I’d go alone on the bus to the Central Children’s Library. In the afternoons I’d go to Endcliffe Park a mile away, with a jam jar and a net, to catch minnows in the municipal pond. On the way home from school I would play in the botanical gardens with friends; although thoroughly suburban children, we went through a period of being pony-mad, and some of our girlish games centred on catching glimpses of imaginary white horses grazing, unicorn-like, in green glades.
The threat of polio did not scare us off attending the echoing Glossop Road public swimming baths, to splash around in the green-blue slippery stench of chlorine. I haunted the old covered market, and the bookshop in Chapel Walk, and Woolworths, with its fierce sugary smell of cheap sweets and sawdust, where dirty old men groped me regularly. This didn’t worry me at all, because I had no idea what they were doing or why they were doing it. The word “paedophile” had not yet come into currency.
We lived in a semidetached Edwardian house with a cellar and an attic, in a neighbourhood called Nether Edge, only a couple of miles from the city centre. Nether Edge was indeed an edge: Sheffield is full of edges. Our road was called Meadow Bank Avenue, and even at the age of six I recognised that there was something special about it. Its entrance led through a gate marked Private Road into an oval lime-tree-lined loop with a pseudo-village green in the middle. This gate was closed one day in the year to maintain its status. I discovered many years later that what we all knew as “the green” had been called the Pleasure Ground when the estate was designed in the 1890s; it was supposed to encourage a communal spirit, and it did. Bonfire nights were very communal: almost, by the modest standards of the day, orgiastic.
I remember sitting on the wall of the green across the road from our house and being allowed to join in the games of older children. I particularly admired the older boy next door, from the other half of our semi: he was a red-haired hero who, like me, had a stammer. My mother coached him for his Cambridge entrance, and in later life he became a distinguished translator of Lacan, Foucault and Sartre, and the author of a startling homoerotic novel. I still find that evolution surprising, though there is no reason why Meadow Bank Avenue should not have fostered such an unusual talent.
Post-war cities provided a dense and secret children’s undergrowth. Novels by my male contemporaries provide accounts of boys playing on bomb sites and picking up bits of aeroplanes, but I was much more interested in the acres of gardens and the patches of rural wasteland that provided our rus in urbe. I would climb through hedges and fences to explore sombre shrubberies and brown fish ponds. There were many dark, ferny grottoes and mossy lairs and runic stones and hidden burrows beneath the laurel bushes and the hollies and the ivy-festooned trees. The earth was rich with undisturbed deposits of leaf mould and beech mast. I nibbled beech nuts like a squirrel, and sipped nectar from the stems of blossoms, and sucked the juices from the stems of ornamental grasses, and studied beetles and ants. Gardeners had disappeared with the war, and their terrain had been abandoned to nature and to me.
There was one notable exception: the grounds of Kenwood House, a few minutes’ walk from us, were still beautifully preserved. This house is now a Marriott hotel, but I believe in those days it was largely a private residence, though part of it had already been converted into apartments. The lawns were well mown, the herbaceous borders ambitious, and the lake was stocked with tadpoles and stickleback. These amenities are still on offer to guests, along with a gym, a sauna and a swimming pool. I had no idea then that these grounds had been landscaped by the Victorian horticulturalist Robert Marnock, who had also designed the more famous Sheffield Botanical Gardens, but I like to think that I may have sensed an affinity between these favourite open spaces. (Marnock also worked at Warwick Castle and in Regent’s Park, and his style was known as “gardenesque”.) I cannot now recall whether my fishing trips to the lake at Kenwood were acts of trespass, but some of my visits were official. I was a devotee of the open day of the summer garden party. This had the entertainments that such events have to this day: you could guess the weight of a fruitcake, play hoopla, take a dip in a bran tub, win a goldfish, or buy the latest cheap novelty. I recall a yellow plastic bird-shaped whistle that warbled if you filled it with water and blew down its tail. This was a magic bird. Every child should have one.
This was the Sheffield of my childhood, of the 1940s and early ’50s – a world of decay and fermentation, of childish games and of adolescent loneliness. Post-war reconstruction had hardly begun when my father’s career took us away from Yorkshire. I was 15, and I didn’t get back for another decade. I know the exact date of my return in 1966, because I kept the hotel bill. I spent a secret night of passion in the Royal Victoria hotel, near the railway station, which was then a British Transport hotel. (We were in room 258, and the bill was for £6-8-0, and he was the most handsome man in Europe.) I can’t now remember whether it was loyalty to my birthplace or some less romantic consideration that drew us to this hide-out, but it is surely significant that that was where we fetched up. And it must have been my idea. I was a published writer by then, and most writers have a homing instinct, compact of sociological curiosity, nostalgia, and a search for the key to the riddles of childhood, and sex is somewhere bound up in that bundle. You need to take the man to the place, to re-mark the territory.
I remember the night of passion, but I also remember waking up in the morning and seeing from the hotel window for the first time the new council housing developments of Hyde Park and Park Hill. They reared up towards the sky like the visionary ramparts of an Italian hill town. Designed by the architect J L Womersley, they had arisen in the late 1950s at the behest of a Sheffield housing committee chaired by Roy Hattersley, who speaks of them now with a certain ruefulness. They housed 6,000 people. Much of their fabric has since been demolished, but at the time they were hailed for their boldness and beauty. The architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner described the project as “sensational” and “socially a success”, even while prophesying that it would inevitably degenerate into a slum, but “perhaps a cosy slum which people will feel to be their home”. To Hattersley it represented a blow against the suburban don’t-play-with-the-dirty-children-next-door mentality that divides and bedevils English society, but he came to recognise that most of us prefer to live in suburbia.
I didn’t venture into Hyde Park in 1966, but the dazzling apparition lingered in my imagination, and over the years I made many excuses to explore the heights. I told myself I was doing research for a novel, or writing an article about unemployment and Thatcherism for The New York Times, as indeed I was, but mostly I was just pottering about, trying to reconnect and find out what was going on. I became fascinated by the urban myths these buildings generated – about leapers, and roving alsatians, and tenants killed by TV sets chucked from high balconies. These stories are rife all over Britain now, but then they were quite rare. I talked to strangers in pubs, and listened to what they had to say about their homes: some loved them, some loathed them. I asked a little girl in a lift if I could get to the top of one of the blocks and get out to look at the view. She was so eager to help: she pressed the right button and told me which way to walk when I got out. “It’s lovely up there,” she said.
And so it was. When you looked up from the battered grey cement of the brutal balconies to the panorama, you could see the nearby heart of the city, and hillside after hillside extending into the distance. Sheffield is fortunate in its location.
