A parcel arrived this morning containing ten copies of Sleepers, the last album recorded by Grimms, and now reissued thirty years later by Hux Records as a CD. The cover is a shot of the seven who made up the group during its final phase, lying on a railway track as if fast asleep, heads on one rail, feet on the other, and seeing it brought back the memory of what I was thinking when the photograph was taken: I hope a train comes hurtling out of the tunnel. Such a dark, belligerent thought, however, had nothing to do with my fellow sleepers, but with my mental state:
I wanted one life,
You wanted another
We couldn’t have our cake
So we ate each other
Immediately after three weeks on the road with Grimms in February and March 1975, I began rehearsals for the series of twelve programmes for BBC’s Education department called Focus, which involved scriptwriting and presenting mini-dramas dealing with various mathematical concepts. One episode, for instance, had me standing in front of a row of fruit machines at a funfair on Clapham Common on a dark and rainy night, trying to make myself heard above the music and the jeering, as I explained to camera the complex theories of chance. Script meetings and rehearsals were held in London, and the filming was done on location all over the country, so I was rarely in Liverpool. And when I was back home …
We’ve had our clichés framed
And hung upon the wall
So now for conversation
We don’t have to talk at all.
Publicity photographs show a very washed-out presenter, angst-ridden and withdrawn, gazing beyond the camera lens as if on the run rather than on location. Instead of being with his sons and sorting out the conflict with Thelma, and helping Brenda, who was facing her own marital problems, to find a nursing home for Mother, whose condition was worsening, where was I? On top of Salisbury Cathedral wearing a safety harness and explaining the theory of gravity.
Brenda had known from an early age what she wanted to do in life and on leaving school went straight into nursing, initially at Walton General and later in a smaller private hospital. She was cut out for the job: fearless and tough, she had a sense of humour, earthy and irreverent, that made her popular with staff and patients alike, and a laugh that was infectious (except, of course, on the isolation wards). When the Parkinson’s disease began to squeeze the life out of my mother she moved in with Brenda, her husband Wally and their three sons, and was cared for until cancer eventually killed her. Whenever I was in Liverpool for more than a few days at a time I would take a bus out to Waterloo and spend a couple of hours with her, spinning tales of marital harmony and Scaffold high jinks. Then I would disappear for weeks. ‘Our Roger came to see me on Thursday,’ Mother would proudly tell anyone who was visiting. ‘Always drops in when he can.’ And they’d all nod and agree that I was a wonderful son, and Brenda would nod and go to the kitchen to get Mother’s medication, before washing her and preparing supper.
‘Whenever I feel in need of exercise I put on a tracksuit and write poems about athletics’ begins the preface to Sporting Relations published by Methuen in 1974 and written during my residency as Poetry Fellow at Loughborough University, a post I’d taken up the previous year, attracted by the prospect of an oasis of calm away from the madness of touring and the debilitating skirmishes at home, where I could wander through the groves of academe writing poems that were gifted from the ether, not wrought from the emotional debris surrounding me. But it didn’t work out. (Ever been to Loughborough?) Not only was it an uphill struggle getting science and engineering students interested in poetry, but it became another commitment in an already overcrowded diary. Also, I was lonely. Too old for student parties and, being a non-driver, unable to escape to the pubs in town, my social life became unbearably bleak. Most nights I would head for the Purple Onion, the coffee bar on campus, where I would sit in the corner glowering above a rampart of books. The university was justly proud of its reputation for sport and purple was the colour of the tracksuits worn by the college athletes. Every day I would be out there on the track trying hard to run away from myself. In fact, I spent so much time wearing a tracksuit that I began to feel like a Purple Onion. You know when you’re peeling an onion and you don’t know when to stop? Is it peeled, or should I take off another layer? You begin with a vegetable the size of your fist and end up in tears with something the size of a garlic clove. That was me.
ONCE I LIVED IN CAPITALS
MY LIFE INTENSELY PHALLIC
but now I’m sadly lowercase
with the occasional italic
‘I’m having a baby.’ Isn’t that one of the most wondrous lines in the language?
I had known for some time what made women pregnant, and I had always assumed that when the good news was announced I would take the mother-to-be in my arms like I was Jimmy Stewart, and swing her round and round. But somehow I was never prepared: ‘You’re having a what?’ I’d find myself saying, before recovering my balance to add, ‘That’s … wonderful …’
But that wasn’t how I felt. I had always fancied the idea of the lonely poet, a free spirit without the ties that bind ordinary mortals to earth. At each newsflash, and there were four of them, I had to stop myself bursting into tears and heading for the door. I think that for a lot of men children are gifts they are never quite ready for, but which once unwrapped, they can’t bear to be separated from. When I went to Cornwall in September 1975 to record what turned out to be Grimms’ final album, Finn was three and Tom just over a year, and I was in danger of losing them.
The Sawmills recording studios in Fowey lay at the receiving end of the disused railway line on which we sleepers lay for the album cover, and had been chosen by our new manager for its cheapness and remoteness. Watching him, fill the kitchen cupboard with cans of beans and cans of sausages and beans on that first cold, wet morning, I thought back to the summer of 1972 when we recorded Fresh Liver for Island Records at the Manor Studios in Shipton-on-Cherwell belonging to Richard Branson, where our producer, Tim Rice, presided over sumptuous dinners served by ravishing young wenches. At the Sawmills, I suspected, rapier-like shafts of wit would not be exchanged over impetuous yet able-bodied wine.
The first four-sixths of the acronym, Gorman, Roberts, Innes and Myself, went into the studio with three other musicians including our key keyboard player John Negginson intent on making an album with a chance of commercial success, which meant no poems and no sketches. ‘The Womble Bashers of Walthamstow’, a lyric of mine that Neil set to music, although hardly commercial, remains one of my favourite tracks. Remember the chorus? Of course you don’t:
We’re the Womble bashers from Walthamstow
Make Womble trouble wherever we go
From Wimbledon to John o’ Groats
We wear Womble-skin fur coats.
Unfortunately, the BBC refused to play it for fear of upsetting Uncle Bulgaria and his little furry friends who were big on television, and rumoured to have connections with the Balkan mafia. Our other songs didn’t make the play list either, because by the time the album was released, our manager had chopped down the oak tree and left the country, taking the acorns with him. Our farewell tour, although we didn’t know it was that at the time, had been called Clowns on the Road, and now for that group of itinerant poets, musicians and comics, who had been on the road periodically for more than five years, the time had come to hang up their red noses and face reality.
Away from the laughter
the lights, the applause,
I’m nobody’s fool
Only yours.