I've long thought of myself as a bit of a late starter. It's a habit I got into at a very early age. In fact at no age at all, for I was born in St Luke's Hospital at five minutes to midnight on New Year's Day. Newspaper photographers had been waiting all day to take pics of a New Year baby, but by the time I put in an appearance they'd given up and gone home.
Now jump forward a few decades. I'd just turned 60 when my first novel, Jewel and Thorn, was published. That was last year. But J&T is the first volume in a trilogy and already the second is out (The Brass Key), so I suppose I'm trying to make up for lost time.
The title of the trilogy is The Book of Lowmoor. Lowmoor not Low Moor because my world is a distorted - albeit readily recognisable - version of the region in which I grew up. When I began to plan the trilogy, the choice of setting was inevitable. Low Moor and environs had all the physical variety I needed for an adventure story: a large wood, an abandoned steelworks, meadowland, moorland, a reservoir, a Victorian park with two lakes.
But the landscape of my trilogy is, with a few twists, that of 1956 not that of 2006. Today's Low Moor is a piece of continuous suburbia, but back in 1950 it was still a village with its own identity. It had half a dozen fish and chip shops, a similar number of pubs, three grocery stores, two butcher's, two gents hairdressers, two paper shops, a shoe shop, a chemist's, a draper's (already struggling) and many other businesses. Compare the pathetic redbrick enclave of half a dozen windblown shops that presently occupies the former village centre on Huddersfield Road.
Around it, other villages were equally distinct: Wibsey, Buttershaw, Oakenshaw, Wyke, Norwood Green. "Wyke, Wyke, where they're all alike," Low Moor kids would chant, proclaiming their difference. I wonder if they still do?
My parents lived at Mineral Cottage in Abb Scott Lane. The original house - then split into two dwellings - had been built in the 1850s by the Low Moor Company. Grandfather Grace, my mother's father, was a member of the consortium that opened up Norwood Green pit. When he and his wife died (both before I was born), my mother inherited one of the dwellings. Uncle Cliff, a mining engineer, occupied the other.
My father, Bill Poole, managed Calverley Worsted Mills in Wyke. I remember clearly the first time I was taken to the mill. The noise made by the ranks of looms in the weaving shed was terrific, and I wondered how the weavers managed to cope, living inside that ear-splitting racket day after day.
Every Christmas the mill would throw a party for the workers and their children. There would be games, a delicious tea and, to finish, a visit to this season's pantomime at The Alhambra.
Right next to our house was Morrell's Farm. Lewis and Wilfred Morrell were builders, and the farm was their pet project, a model dairy fitted with all the latest equipment. But those were the days before milk floats, and milk was delivered by horse and cart.
Every so often my mother sent me round for an extra bottle. If no one answered my knock at the farmhouse, I'd walk into the cowshed where the labourers might be hosing down the concrete stalls while the cows were out in the fields, or the beasts might be getting milked. Not by hand - by machines, multiple suckers pulling rhythmically on the animals' teats. Mr Taylor the resident farmer would take me into the cold room where the bottled milk was stored in huge white refrigerators. His right knee buckled so badly with every step you might have thought it was made of rubber. He'd once been tossed by the farm bull.
At that time my uncle was a bachelor, and had a housekeeper called Minnie Pickles. Minnie was a rough-and-ready, broad-speaking Yorkshirewoman, one of a kind that may now be extinct. I loved her dearly. I used to ride on her back while she scrubbed the quarry tiles. Her husband had fought in the Great War, and been wounded so badly that he didn't long survive.
One day Minnie opened an old tobacco tin and showed me her husband's medals and ribbons. Also in the box was a chunk of black metal half the size of your thumb. One face was smooth, the other jagged. It was shrapnel the medics had extracted from his flesh. It was all she had left of him.
Minnie had the countrywoman's practised callousness. She would drown unwanted kittens. She'd drop them mewling into a full water butt and replace the lid. When the lid was removed, the kittens floated. They were pathetic - limp and soggy like discarded fur gloves. Then she dug a hole in the garden and covered them with soil. I found the process fascinating. Children can be heartless too.
If Minnie saw the milkman's horse defecate in the lane, she'd rush out with a shovel and scoop up the manure. Perfect for the flowerbeds!
In my trilogy there's a wise woman, or Syb, called Minny Pickles. From a distance she exerts a significant influence on events.
Over the high garden wall at the rear of the house, a field stretched to the steep retaining slope of Royds Hall dam. Beyond the dam the land rose sharply to Royds Hall Farm, also Royds Hall itself, a handsome seventeenth-century manor house. Below lay the broad leafy tract of Judy Woods. In those days there was a kiosk at Judy Bridge where you could buy ice cream. We would walk down through the woods and picnic by the stream. Minnows came and inspected your toes if you stood motionless in the shallows.
When I was a little older I'd wander for hours through the wood with a pal, or alone. We weren't to speak to "strange men", but I never encountered any in those innocent days. The word paedophile hadn't been invented.
One day I got to Norwood Green. It was one of those perfect days when the sun seems to hold the earth in thrall, as if dazed. I walked past the pit into the village. A stone horse trough on the roadside held a rectangle of light. A game of cricket was in progress and I stood for a time and watched the white-clad figures at play. I say "time", but time seemed held in suspension, as it can in childhood.
But everything changes. The green belt of which Morrell's Farm was a part was continually under threat. Large tracts of meadow turned into housing estates. Low Moor common, an area of allotments and wasteland that separated Abb Scott Lane from Common Road, where in summer you could find massive, hairy caterpillars, was colonised by houses and a school.
But these weren't the two things I found hardest to bear.
One day I came home from University in Wales to find Low Moor village abolished. Stunned and appalled, scarcely able to take in what I was seeing, I walked down from the edge of Harold Park to Huddersfield Road. The scene was like that left in war by carpet-bombing. House after house, shop after shop, pub after pub, was nothing more than a pile of rubble. All that remained were macadamed or cobbled streets forlornly, pointlessly criss-crossing the devastation.
It seemed to me my childhood had been erased in one fell swoop. Terraces, yards, houses, chapels, shops that I'd known intimately had simply vanished - that whole chaotic muddle I knew better than the back of my hand. A community, and with it a history, had disappeared. Who could have done such a thing? Why had it been allowed to happen?
Then there was the fate of Harold Park. The park of my youth was beautiful and mysterious. Maintained immaculately by gardeners, patrolled by a ranger, it had a lake you could go boating on, tennis courts and bowling greens, a paddling pool, a sandpit and other ornamentations. But what, to my mind, gave it its character were its shrubberies and dense rhododendron plantations. Apparently rampant, but planned with great cunning, these created winding avenues and gently sloping lawned suntraps - a magnet for hard-working Low Moor folk to relax in.
But again one day I came home to find that every last shrubbery had been dug up. All that was left was empty space. You could look across the park from one gate to another. The rowing boats had gone from the lake; the paddling pool was long-since drained. It was a place of no mystery, no charm, no interest. It had become a nothingness.
It was only after Jewel and Thorn was published that I came to perceive the book's underlying psychological meaning - for me, its author. Through it I'd sought to re-create the landscape of my childhood: its hills and dales, its woods, its park, its meadowland and moorland, even specific buildings. Through my book I had sought to re-inhabit a lost realm.
But not (I hope) in any mood of nostalgia. There are no human beings of our stature in the novel. The tallest of my humans are seven inches in height, and they're out of kilter with a world where the physical remnants of a lost, "giant" civilisation abound, often dilapidated, rotting or overgrown. It's a dangerous world, with rogue tribes and little law. For the most part my tiny humans cluster in walled settlements for security. Only a few venture forth - merchants and pedlars, itinerant entertainers, travelling preachers called Ranters.
And here and there, scattered across the landscape, are curious areas known as Barrens: blank white tracts of land reputed to be haunted, into which no one strays.
How did they come to exist?
Well, what happened to the Low Moor and Harold Park of my childhood? For these are my private Barrens, I now understand.
Note: A shortened version of this article was published in the Bradford Telegraph and Argus on 10.7.2006.
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