Psychovertical. Andy Kirkpatrick
exciting and startling. Sacred amongst all these places were the green open areas: the playing fields, the small park, the squares of dog-shit-covered green grass, and the trees. We gobbled these places up, our skin tingling for nature even though we didn’t know it then. I imagined myself an alien who had come from a different world from the other kids, a world that made me different from them and to which I would have given anything to return.
School was amazing. The teachers were experienced and positive, able to deal with a lot of problem kids with a firm but supportive hand. Somehow they made every child feel unique, special and wanted. Nevertheless I struggled in many subjects, finding it hard to do what many of the other kids took for granted, both academically and, more embarrassingly, socially, unable to master reading the time or tying my shoe laces. I began special lessons, the teachers helping me to catch up, and learn new ways of learning. There was never a name given to my slowness of understanding, or stigma, only acceptance that I required help.
Luckily my saviour was the fact that I could draw, a fantastic outlet for my out-of-control imagination. Unable to read, I looked at comics, a braille of pictures becoming my language, the stories I wanted to tell produced in images. I was a real daydreamer, finding it hard to concentrate in class, and I was forever in trouble for scribbling in book margins and on desks, rather than getting down to work. I always seemed to be somewhere else. I spent all my spare time drawing, lying on my stomach in front of the TV. My mother’s brother, who owned a printing company, kept me supplied with off-cuts of paper and card.
My dad’s visits were erratic. Often he went months without seeing us, something that’s hard to understand when you’re a child—or a father. I wonder if perhaps it would have been better to have never seen him again, because of the amount of upset it caused when he had to leave—two days or a week not being enough to fill the hole inside us. Even so I loved him unconditionally, and held on to his image, both because he was my dad, and because he was the only link back to my old life. We, however, were changing fast. Joanne was out of her plaster and a cheerful little girl, and both Robin and I were growing up. In the early days I would pray that Mum and Dad would get back together, but as the years moved on I knew they never would.
When I knew my dad was going to visit us, I’d count down the days as if to Christmas. Then I would stand on a chair and look out at the road, the height of the flats allowing me to see for a long way, waiting for his car to turn off the main road and drive into the flats’ car park. I would pine for him. Nothing else mattered. I could feel the pain of longing, and wondered if my heart was broken like my mum’s and if hers felt like this. But I always forgave him.
When he came to see us he would often take us to the park, and occasionally we’d go climbing and camping in the Peak District, a few hours away. The camp site was only a few miles from Sheffield, but for me it was a magical place of valleys, forest and streams, and a real escape from the city.
One morning I woke up early, crept out of the tent and walked up the hillside, through the wet ferns, and scrambled up a band of rocks called Stanage Edge. It was dawn, and mist hung in the valley below. I didn’t want to go home to the city. I wanted to stay, but I knew I couldn’t. I promised myself that one day I wouldn’t have to leave.
Perhaps it was the memory of Tywyn, or the visits to the Peak District, but I yearned for adventure—wherever it could be found.
We had many trips to Switzerland as children: not the country, but a disused quarry named Little Switzerland set beside the mighty Humber Bridge. We would go there in a big gang and explore its overgrown depths and flooded pools, sometimes abseiling with the rope and home-made harness my dad had given me. I took on the role of twelve-year-old climbing instructor, the rope tied off to some railings, designed to stop people falling over the edge. Now it makes my blood run cold just thinking about it. After we’d done our exploring, imagining we were in the jungles of Vietnam, following in Rambo’s footsteps, we’d make the long nine-mile march home. Often we’d return to the estate looking like a rag-tag army, covered in mud, with dads on bikes shouting at us because they’d been out looking for us for several hours. Generally my mum would send us to bed, having yet again been made sick with worry.
Between the river and our flat lay the docks, vast and sprawling over tens of miles. Once part of one of the greatest ports in the world, like most of the nation’s industrial strongholds they had slowly fallen into a decline. The North Sea trawlers, Arctic whalers, the ships full of wood, wool and, at one time, slaves, had been replaced by rusting prams, oily bobbing polystyrene, and bloated dead dogs.
These docks, along with the bombed-out buildings at the edge of the estate, became my wilderness, a place as dangerous, remote and grand as any Arctic wasteland, an expanse of freedom and possibility.
In those days there was no reason to go to the docks, and the only people you would find there were prostitutes, tramps, anglers and the kids who lived in our estates along their northern edge.
Most of the prostitutes came from our estate, with their children going to our school, and it was not uncommon for one kid to taunt another in the playground with the line, ‘Your mum’s a prozzie,’ to which they would reply ‘Yes . . . what about it?’
I knew about prostitutes long before I knew about sex, and their trade was often a good source of fun as we sped around on our bikes at dusk like the BMX bandits, flushing out all the local working spots such as the old graveyard that bordered the docks, and watching the punters either run or stand their ground and shout and chase us.
The tramps who inhabited the docks came from the Salvation Army building on the estate, and were of the old variety; the hospitals had yet to be cleared of the mentally ill, so the down-and-outs were mainly elderly, smelly, bearded men—no doubt soldiers who never made it home. They drank meths—or at least that was what we believed—and huddled together on the stairs of the church, waiting for the off-licence to open. They would often fall into the docks, either to be plucked out by the fire brigade or to sink below the quick mud and drown. One story at school was of a tramp who survived a jump one night from the sixth floor of Grasmere House—but the bones of his legs went right through his feet. He was left sticking out of the ground, a foot shorter, screaming, until the fire brigade could dig him out.
Although I didn’t actually see this event, the image that it conjured haunted me through my childhood, especially when we were older and would dare each other to climb onto the roof of the flats by squeezing up behind the rubbish chutes, with an unsurvivable drop waiting below.
We were always climbing things, running along walls, messing around on roofs, the heights being the domain of the brave or of policemen with ladders. The bigger the drop, the bigger the thrill.
The estate was full of stories of derring-do and disaster: kids falling from balconies when their washing-line ropes snapped, or people falling down lift shafts. One landmark was a cracked paving stone below one of the ‘proper flats’. It was said to have been the impact point of a woman who committed suicide by jumping from the twentieth floor. This was perhaps the reason the ‘proper flats’ had more respect from us kids; they guaranteed death from the top. The word ‘maisonettes’ was also deemed to be a bit pretentious, not that we knew what that was. I thought a lot about death as a child—perhaps I was a bit disturbed, maybe it was thinking too much about the man who had hanged himself in our maisonette.
In the docks, the anglers fished for the eels which seemed to thrive on the decay. This was also a popular pastime among us kids once we could afford a rod, although most fishing trips to the docks involved very little fishing. We’d cycle down there with our rods tied to our bikes, and after the initial excitement threading hooks and bait, our attention would soon wander. One popular activity was finding druggies’ hypodermic syringes down within the oily Victorian gears of the rotating bridges that joined up the docks. We’d stick them in our bait maggots, and pump these up till they popped. There was always loads of junk that could be thrown in the water, glass windows to break on derelict buildings, or we’d use catapults and see who could hit far-off dead animals that floated like bloated pigs in the water.
When they drained the dock a few years later, to make way for a shopping centre, the workmen came across a dying giant fish over two metres long. Unidentified