The poet and author on two inspiring English teachers and the arrival of a youth club that opened up his world
When asked where I grew up, I say Skipton, as there’s a chance people will have heard of it, but really it was a village several miles away, Thornton-in-Craven, to which we moved when I was six, a village so small that the primary school had only 18 pupils. We lived at the top of the hill, in what had previously been a rectory. Out front, in the distance, lay purple moor; to the left a valley that led to Skipton, gateway to the Yorkshire Dales; to the right small industrial Lancashire towns – Earby, Colne, Nelson and Burnley (the last boasted a top-flight football team, as it does again today).
The village wasn’t isolated – a road ran through it, one so busy that my parents banned me from having a bicycle – and in those days there was a shop. Once a year, when not rained off, there’d be a fete. But there wasn’t much happening for children, least of all on Sunday, which is why, at nine, I joined the village choir, as a way of seeing my mates at weekends. My atheist dad and lapsed-Catholic mum weren’t keen (I may have been the first child in Christendom to beg permission to go to church), though they did attend one carol service to hear me sing the opening verse of “Once in Royal David’s City”, a solo part I suspected I’d been given not because of my fine treble voice but because of my status as the son of GPs.
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