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Rather like a coral reef , Western literature teems with small fry and minnows. The minor poets , "strangely-neglected" authors from the past ,
unpublished authors of the present. Through these unnumbered shoals swims the occasional figure who may trail in his wake a slipstream of
publishers’ advances and full-page reviews in the literary periodicals while remaining unknown to the general public. We are about to shine
a passing light upon a little-known author of three slim volumes of verse , one Brian Higgins (1930-1965). Although he’d shown youthful
promise as a gifted mathematician , he first became a professional rugby league player , then a schoolteacher , before migrating to London
to pursue an unsuccessful and bibulous literary career. “Born in Batley in 1930 , bored at Bradford in 1940 , in 1950 he had an affair with
the gamma function” , states the autobiographical note to his first book of poems , from which the following excerpt is taken :
Manchester , the great pale face of Lancashire.
Spewn in useless fly-blown shops and prosperous slums
A ganglion of rotting and roaring industrialism
A monstrous rancour of wheels and payment
From glass-blowing St. Helens to the grease-filled passageways of Oldham
And then the Pennines , waste and mist and lonely sheep
Walls dividing nowhere from nowhere
A tow-headed farmer and the occasional sudden pub.
In the winter you can never see much for the fog and sleet
In the summer it's like Turkey or somewhere
Then Huddersfield , Halifax , Bradford and Leeds
With a few banal remarks about the juxtaposition of muck and money .....
Although unremarkable in themselves , these lines evoke for me the experience of a journey made several times a year for over forty years ....
the bus ride between Oldham and Leeds. Brought up in Oldham , where my parents continued to live their (separate) lives , I went to University
in Leeds , a city I live in still. At first the bus took the A62 route through the Pennine villages west and east of the Standedge pass , along
the Colne Valley to Huddersfield. From there it motored alongside the Calder as it ran through Mirfield and Dewsbury , finally coming into
Leeds with the ‘sweet river Aire’. Here was a travelogue documentary through the Industrial Revolution. Isolated weavers’ cottages , ruins of old
water-powered mills , derelict canalside wharves and loading bays. Quarries on every skyline , abandoned railway lines , factories now limping
their way from the Steam age to old age (and retirement). After the M62 motorway had been completed , the bus sped along it. A noteworthy feature
was the farmhouse of an exemplary Yorkshireman who had refused to move , so he and his family now dwelt in between the east- and west-bound
carriageways. He had been supplied with an underpass under each , so he could access the moorland on which his sheep grazed. Anyone who has been
obliged to pull up on the hard shoulder of a motorway and get out of their vehicle will have a notion of what it must sound like to live in the
middle of a motorway. An appropriate symbol of the North's resilience as the roar and racket of 24/7 'progress' shakes all their windows and rattles
their walls.
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