Esther Chilton

Welcome to my regular guest writer slot. This week it’s the turn of another Swannicker (name for a writer who has attended Swanwick Writing Summer School) to take the spotlight. Graham Clift has a natural ability to draw us in and to entertain us with his non-fiction writing. I’m currently reading Graham’s first memoir, North Facing – Late Flowering: A Yorkshire Lad’s Quest to Find What He Needs to Grow Up, which is available from Amazon. Here is an extract. I think Graham brilliantly capture’s a teenager’s uncertainty when it comes to dealing with the opposite sex:

TO YVETTE

There are three contacts in the Princess Ballroom Disco beginners’ game. Here’s the first one, where a girl comes over and puts a hand on my shoulder to shout in my ear.

‘Will you go out with my friend Yvette? She’s over there in the green skirt.’

‘With the glasses on, drinkin a coke?’

‘No, next to her.’

‘Yeah OK. What do I have to do?’

Soon after, we descend the steps and leave together as Elvis sings, ‘The Wahunder of You.’ Outside, the night’s sooty reality nips me. What am I doing? My ears ring in the relative silence as a breeze, cold and damp like a lost inshore wind, shifts our hair around.  If only some words would come, and I could transmit them to you. But instead, I button up my shivering teenage self inside my Levi jacket, and point to say, ‘This way?’

You point, in the opposite direction, and we walk.

Under the first street lamp you look at me as if to say, ‘Well, what does that look mean?’

‘What?’ you say, quietly.

‘Nothin,’ I say.

I’m not clear why we’re here. You obviously know already where to go to catch your bus. But your friend told me, ‘it’s what you do, walk a girl to the bus stop.’

The shops I normally know, are dark and strange. In Kennard’s record shop the curved sound booths are indiscernible, Jackson’s self-service supermarket is all quiet except for loud pink window ‘offers’, and the plugs are out in the Rediffusion shop where I’m sent to pay the TV rental. Hardy’s butcher’s shop is bare except for pink lights on marble fields, and hedges of plastic parsley. We pass them all saying nothing.

I do think of things to say. ‘It’s strange walking along with a girl.’ ‘You smell nice, like cake.’ ‘Why do you need make-up around your eyes?’ ‘Your orangey coat is thick and buttoned right up.’ ‘You look lovely.’ But it’s too hard to say any of this out loud.

Oh but it’s not as hard as passing Markes’s fishing tackle shop, as if it was just the dry cleaners or a bank. Its window lights are on, and I didn’t tell you that, in daylight I always stop there. I didn’t say, ‘Look at the fluorescent floats, the cone of stacked bait boxes that look like a giant segmented maggot, and the glistening glass fibre rods on the wall. Arranged along the window bottom are swivels and leger weights, spinners and pike lures, brass spring balances and a diminishing line of gilt hooks down to size 24 for match fishing. Which do you like best? Do you like fishing?’

I wish now I had been able to say that, because at least we would have been talking and sharing, warming up some words.

I could have said, ‘Look at the wicker baskets with webbing straps – I use a wooden box I made myself, there are bags of ground bait, those are porcupine quills for making floats – I shape mine from firewood that I paint and varnish. Over there are fine monofilament lines that you can hardly see, and a neat plastic lead-shot dispenser – I use a tobacco tin for mine with soldered dividers I made from a bean can. What do you think? Do you make things? What do you like to do?’

But I have learnt that revealed passions are often ridiculed. Being with you is so novel, that I feel weird and I know that, I can’t just be my ordinary self.

Contact number two is made when we pass the closed market hall, and I take hold of your warm hand, and you don’t seem to mind. You walk with ceremonial steps. Looking down, but also looking out. There is something about the way you do this that sticks in my mind. You are careful but not fearful. As if you are walking me to somewhere we will never go again.

Oh, if only we had talked. So that when we arrived at your bus stop, we might have really said something. When you said, ‘What?’ again so gently I might have said, ‘I am looking at you this way because all of this is a new experience, and I’m a bit lost. I know the time for acting cool is over. Catching a fish is special: the float slides, you strike and then marvel at the force pulling from the end of the line; but being with you, walking on the wet pavements of Brownton on this cold April night, beats even that. You are a fish I never caught before, one I’ve only seen in library books, like a smooth tench.’

I ought to tell you that you are more attractive than all the fishing tackle in Markes’s shop, and that being with you is touching something in me that I never knew before. You have such a sense of completeness. At only 14 you have a fully formed strength surrounding you like Stonehill’s castle keep. As we stand under the Yorkshire Traction sign you have a way of looking at me and lifting my eyes to yours. I am melting in the presence of your beauty.

I can say none of this to you. I’ve walked through this place so many times on errands, or for school shoes, but tonight in the dark among the muted shops this is a different place. I have slipped out of my usual world to swim like Cousteau in the ocean. I’m in awe of what I see. You are a ‘new creature never before seen by mankind’, inspiring a sense of wonder in me that makes me check my air supply. I can’t say that I love you because I’ve no experience of that, but you are making me think about what love might mean. And it is a start. You are from a place where a child has two loving parents, and I cannot comprehend that yet. But I know that you are loved, because everything about you says so, from your steady gaze and air of contentment, to your fearless questions and your substantial well-made clothes.

I watch conscientiously for your bus, because it will signal that contact three may be permitted. When your bus leaves, I will walk back home tasting your lipstick, and noticing the moon and the stars. I’ll remember you for all of my lifetime, as the first girl I walked to a bus stop. The orange coated girl who embodied self-esteem, illuminating it for me like a struck match offered to a small pilot light.

In 30 years’ time and in another age, I will find myself on another kind of dark street, and I’ll remember your beautiful wholeness and confidence and wish it for myself. I will at last find all the words I need to heal and leave the darkness behind. I wish you a long and happy life, with someone who will cherish you as you know to cherish yourself.

But for now I’m back to leaning on the concrete bus stop post, as my under-dressed teenage self, and I have thought of something that I will say out loud.

‘You comin next week?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Can I walk you to the bus stop then as well?’

‘If you want to.’

 ‘OK.’

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Here’s a little bit about Graham:

Graham Clift escaped industrial South Yorkshire to work in various land based jobs before ending up walking crops for farmers. His early attempts at memoir read like civil service reports until he discovered the power of creative writing courses and writers’ groups. He wishes everyone would write their life story (except celebs and politicians). His first memoir, North Facing Late Flowering, about his teenage years was published in 2021. 

If you’d like to be included in my guest writer slot, please get in touch: estherchilton@gmail.com. Poems can be up to 60 lines and prose 2000 words. If you’d like to add a short bio and photo, then great.