Beyond the shops, the small fish dock had had its lock gates removed. At low tide it was a hillocky swamp of soft mud, its only occupants the hulks of bikes and junked washing machines.
There were very few people about. One or two ancients were walking their dogs among the ruins—all men, no women. I was watched from a cautious distance and could feel that I was cutting a curious figure here. I had spent the previous night in Grimsby, getting ready to return to Hull in style. Bathed, shampooed, in a fresh denim suit and a Leonard of Paris tie, topped with a floppy wide-brimmed brown felt hat, I knew exactly who I must be in the old men’s eyes. I was The Fishing’s first foreign tourist—a portent, maybe. After me, the deluge. You could land coachloads where you used to land cod, and make a Rye-style killing out of History and desolation. Even now there were plans to turn the Humber dock into a yacht marina. Perhaps … perhaps … Could Hull turn into the Lymington of the North, with the riggers’ shops as seafood restaurants, the chandlers’ as nautical boutiques? Clearly someone was hoping so.
I got the story of what had happened since I left in the pubs round English Street over the forgotten taste of Tetley’s No 1 Bitter Ale. The old men had all the time in the world to talk. Nor were they bored with strangers, as people were in the South. Hull, as yet, was no tourist attraction, and it was easy to sidle along the bar and into the conversation. My lonely berth in the Fish Dock was almost as good a passport here as my private-hire driver’s license had been twenty years before.
The story came out in rags and scraps, but pieced together it had the clear, inevitable arc of tragedy.
Britain had been bound to lose the Cod Wars. The few gunboats which were sent to protect Hull’s deepwater fleet were no match for the Icelandic Navy; and in 1975 Iceland’s claim to a two-hundred-mile fishing limit was ratified by the International Law of the Sea conference in Geneva.
Excluded from the North Atlantic, the trawler owners dreamed up a scheme of salvation. They could go south, base themselves on Port Stanley in the Falklands, and fish there. There were already a Soviet and a Polish fleet working the cod grounds of the South Atlantic; why not one from Hull? But the British government, from which loans were needed to fund this logical migration, was not enthusiastic.
“It were that Mr. Ridley,” one man said.” There’s plenty of fish here,’ were what old Ridley said. ‘Why d’you want to go all the way down to the fuckin’ Falklands when we’ve got seas full of fish at our back door?’ It’s like all them people in the government. None of them ever understood The Fishing.”
The Falklands project foundered. In Hull, everyone was at loggerheads with everyone else. The owners squabbled about the future with the masters. The mates and deckhands, who were paid on a share system with a percentage of the catch, saw themselves as proudly independent capitalists and despised the idea of forming or joining a union to protect their jobs. The great thousand-ton trawlers were sold off one by one.
Some went to Australia and New Zealand. Some were converted into oceanographic survey ships. Some became supply vessels for the North Sea oil rigs. Some were sold for scrap. With each boat’s loss went fifteen or twenty jobs for the men on board her, and another seventy or eighty jobs on shore. When I’d last been in Hull, there had been one hundred and fifty registered ships working out of the Fish Dock; now there were none.
But what about the people? I asked. Where were the exuberant would-be deckie learners of 1964? What had happened to the men whom I used to take on epic pub-and-club crawls, for whom the end of a good evening was the contented discovery that you could no longer walk?
If they were lucky, they had seagoing jobs in the oil business, down in Yarmouth or up in Aberdeen. Some had taken to seine netting over the shoals in the North Sea, fishing out of Whitby, Bridlington, Lowestoft. Many were on the dole.
“History’s not been very kind to Hull,” said Jimmy Johnstone, who had retired after representing a fishing constituency in Parliament for thirty years. “It’s just History we’re up against here. You can’t blame it on Mrs. Thatcher. It’s just bad luck that the Law of the Sea conference went against us, that the Humber Bridge came too late … We’ve had a dollop of bad luck here, and it’s made people sort of … doleful, you know? Doleful. It’s an old-fashioned word, but then Hull’s an old-fashioned town. But it’s no worse than that—it’s just doleful.”
“We’re still the world’s capital of fish fingers,” said another man at the bar.
“But where does the fish come from now?”
“Oh—well, some of it’s landed at the Fish Dock off of Norwegian sterners, but mostly, nowadays, they truck it in by road.”
Fish? By road? To Hull?
“And they’re putting up that new hotel by Victoria Pier, where the ferry used to go from. It’s going to be a grand place, that, when it’s done.”
“For tourists?”
“Ay, and what’s wrong with that? We’ve got some good museums, in Hull. People who are interested in History—Germans, and Dutch people and that, they all like Hull.”
It was true that Hull was doleful, but it was a long way from being morose. There was too much spiky pride in the city for that, too much skeptical good humor. If Hull was going to have to endure hard times, it was going to see them out with good graveyard jokes and a face cast in an unflinching, if lopsided, grin. It was taking the death of The Fishing in the same spirit in which it had taken the Blitz.
“You know the one about Grimsby trawler that got lost in fog?”
“No.”
“He were fishing off Dogger Bank. Then fog comes down. His Decca’s on the blink. He’s not looking after his course. He drifts for three days before fog comes up. Skipper looks out of wheelhouse, shakes his head. ‘Where we at?’ says Mate. ‘Search me,’ says Skip, ‘we could be any bloody where. There’s a hell of a lot of bloody water out there, and not a bloody ship in sight.’ ‘Hang on,’ says Mate, ‘There’s only one place I know like that. We’re in luck. We’re in Hull. In bloody Fish Dock!’ ”
They had torn down the terraces of back-to-backs around the Hessle Road with their warrens of communicating yards and lean- to privies. In their place were smart semidetached houses standing in their own gardens. Even here though, some of the culture of The Fishing still clung. The houses were painted up as spruce as ships, with varnished bulkheads and newly scrubbed decks. “There isn’t a sailor in the world who can resist a paintbrush,” Jimmy Johnstone said, and these council semis were sailors’ houses, garnished and trim enough to put in bottles.
“You’ll be hard put to find a bad egg among them,” Johnstone said fondly of his ex-constituents. “It’s the danger of The Fishing that does that. It’s the same as miners—wherever you get danger, real danger, you won’t get bad eggs.” Among the jaunty salesmen in the lobby of the Royal Station Hotel, I looked out for Philip Larkin and eventually found his long, pale face, like a fugitive white barn owl caught in unaccustomed daylight. He was evidently prepared for all eventualities this evening. Although the temperature outside was in the sixties, he wore a winter overcoat and knotted scarf, and carried a furled brolly. He was beaming shyly, shortsightedly, and not quite in my direction. I planted myself in the center of the beam.
“Ah, there you are. It was the hat that threw me.”
“I always wear a hat now I’m going bald.”
Larkin’s own large skull was as hairless as a cheese.
“Yes, I used to go in for hats once too. I never found they did any permanent good.”
At the bar, he asked for a gin-and-tonic. “Would you mind making that a double gin? Since I’ve gone so deaf, I don’t seem to be able to see single gins anymore.”
As we sat down he said, “I’m a great deal deafer than I was when I last saw you,” but the tone in which this was said, and the expression which accompanied it, suggested that a marked improvement in his health had taken place.
Larkin was wired for sound, with a conspicuous pink appliance lodged in each ear. His
hearing aids, his thick glasses, the doughy rolls of smooth white flesh on which his chin rested in repose all had the accentuated reality of theatrical props. It was as if he took a melancholy, ironic satisfaction in advertising to the world just how far his worst fears about himself had already been confirmed. He was only sixty, but he insisted, lugubriously, on making you see him as one of his own Old Fools:
… These are the first signs:
Not knowing how, not hearing who, the power
Of choosing gone. Their looks show that they’re for it:
Ash hair, toad hands, prune faces dried into lines—
How can they ignore it?
Larkin didn’t ignore it. He dwelt on it with a strange and solemn humor. His prosthetic appendages were of a piece with the words of his poems: they told the plain, miserable truth—and dared you both to laugh and not to laugh.
“We won’t get much of a meal here,” Larkin said. “They used to serve quite a decent dinner, but I gather that they’ve gone completely down the drain.”
“Well, don’t let’s eat here then,” I said firmly, dreading a Larkinesque dinner in which every course would prove that things were getting worse and worse.
“Oh, there’s nowhere else much, is there?”
“I passed a Lebanese restaurant on the way. That looked all right.”
“A Lebanese restaurant? In Hull? Good heavens.”
Larkin spoke in a reedy plainsong. The one-note musical drive of his voice was, I suspected, a relic of the technique he must once have used to cure a childhood stammer.
“What sort of food would one get in a Lebanese restaurant? Would it be … mushy?”
Fiercely defending my decision to escape the Royal Station Hotel, I said, “No—you can get kebabs and salads and things like that.”
“But I like mushy food. It’s the only food I really enjoy now.”
“Oh. Well, there’ll be hummus and tabbouleh and taramasalata—they’re all extremely mushy.”
“Oh,” Larkin said, suddenly skittish. “Then let’s go Lebanese.”
He drove us to the restaurant as if the one-mile drive were a hazardous adventure and Hull a city as foreign as Beirut itself. Arms braced rigid against the steering wheel, searching myopically for landmarks through the windscreen, Larkin squeezed cautiously down on the accelerator, allowing his car just enough petrol to get under way, then lifted his foot off, leaving the car to coast, more and more slowly, until, when it had almost reached a complete standstill, he repeated the procedure. It occurred to me that this curious and unrelaxing style might be some kind of fuel-economy technique that Larkin had read up in a motoring magazine.
I said: “I think it’s on—what is it? Lowgate?”
“Lowgate? Where’s Lowgate?”
“I think you turn right here …”
“This is very rare for me,” Larkin said. “I don’t see much of Hull nowadays. I’ve managed to reduce my life to a triangle. There’s the house on Newland Park—far too big for me. Then there’s the library, of course. Then there’s a shop I go to on that block in Cottingham Road. That’s about it, really.”
The triangle he described was roughly equilateral, with each side measuring about two hundred yards. He appeared to be inspecting this account of his existence and vetting it for accuracy.
“There is the station and the train to Oxford,” he admitted.
“Do you spend much time in Oxford now?”
“No, not as much as I’d like.”
We drifted to a stop beside the restaurant. Larkin got out, locked the car and said, “Oh, dear. This is no good. I’m on a yellow line.”
“It’s long after six o’clock. Yellow lines only apply in the daytime.”
“I don’t want to be towed away.”
“You won’t be. It’s perfectly legal. Look at all the other cars—”
Larkin scanned the street. “In my experience, what other people get away with is a pretty ropey guide to what one can get away with oneself.” He laughed, a snuffling honk. “Still, I suppose one has to live dangerously sometimes.”
He made a happy pantomime of being foxed by the menu, investigating words like “falafel” as if they were bombs that I’d called him in to dispose of. “How do you say it?” he demanded loudly. “Like ‘kerfuffle’? Ferluffle?” An oval bat of pita arrived on his plate.
“What on earth is that?”
“It’s unleavened bread—”
The snuffling laughter started up again. “Bread? It doesn’t look anything like bread to me.”
But he tucked into the hummus. “This is rather good. It tastes like … Farex.”
For a moment I saw how his kitchen might look in the house on Newland Park, its shelves lined with tins of baby food. Did Larkin live on minced chicken and apple puree and green-vegetable goo? Or was this all part of an elaborate charade on the theme of second childhood, played out in fish-faced deadpan? I wasn’t sure whether I was Larkin’s confidant or his stooge.
He had been kind to me when I was a student at Hull. I had discovered within a couple of weeks of my arrival that Philip Larkin, who was, as far as I was concerned, the university’s only ornament, had worked out a thousand ways of escape from undergraduates who wanted to talk poetry to him. I wanted to talk poetry to him, and like everyone else I was politely rebuffed. I got myself elected to the council of the students’ union and invented a Library Committee, whose only member was myself. The function of the Library Committee was to meet the University Librarian once a month (“Couldn’t you make that once a term?”) and discuss things like opening hours, fines and longer loans. On my first entry to his office, disguised as a Library Committee, Larkin had taken out his handkerchief and waved it, saying, “White flag.” The formal business of each meeting was summarily dispatched by Larkin. (“Stay open an hour later? In the winter term? Oh, I couldn’t do that. All my girls would get raped on their way home.”) The conditions of his treaty with me were strict: poetry was out, but we could talk about novels and jazz. I treasured these visits, past the security arrangements of his two secretaries; they were the only tutorials for which I was punctual, and Larkin himself seemed to exact some gloomy enjoyment out of discovering how little I had actually read. My role as stooge then consisted of having attributed to me an encyclopedic, but quite useless, knowledge of the works of Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Jean Genet and Thomas Wolfe. (“Of course, I suppose The Afternoon Men would seem a bit flat to you after Naked Lunch.”)
He had been forty then—my age now; he had seemed to me to belong to a world as august and remote as Tennyson’s. Had I seen the word “shy” written of Larkin, I would have thought it mad; his withdrawnness was a grand quality, not a product of unhappy embarrassment and reticence. Now he was just shy, funny, sad, but still as hard to gauge.
Watching him over the hummus, I’d been dogged by the last four lines of “Dockery and Son”—the lines that you can frighten yourself with in the dark:
Life is first boredom, then fear.
Whether or not we use it, it goes,
And leaves what something hidden from us chose,
And age, and then the only end of age.
It seemed to me that Larkin’s way of nailing the unbearable truth and saying it out loud in poems had perhaps become intolerable to him—that his “drought” might stem from being unable to face what his next poem might unfold. I quoted the lines back to him.
“Oh, I wrote that a long time ago. No, I wouldn’t say that now. No boredom left for me, I’m afraid. It’s fear all the way.” He meant every word, and laughed, challenging me to find it funny too. One had to be brave to laugh with Larkin.
“I suppose there must be some people …” he looked at the knot of lounging waiters in the almost-empty restaurant, refugees from another stricken city; “I suppose there must be some people who think life is first fun, then contentment. Wouldn’t wash in a poem, though, would it? ‘Life is first fun, then contentment.’ Doesn’t sound at all right to m
e.”
“There’s some fun, though.”
“Yes. Some fun.”
“Old Dick Francis books?”
“Mmm. And people who make you laugh. Do you have people who really make you laugh? It’s much the most important thing.”
“Yes, one or two. Who makes you laugh?”
“Kingsley,” Larkin said. “Kingsley always makes me laugh.”
“I only know Amis to nod to,” I said.
“Kingsley made me laugh at Oxford and he still makes me laugh now. That’s something, isn’t it? I always look forward to seeing Kingsley.”
“And Sidney Bechet?”
“I don’t seem to be able to listen to records much, now I’ve gone so bloody deaf.”
This seemed the hardest of Larkin’s afflictions. When I’d last seen him, fun had meant Jazz. In “For Sidney Bechet” he had written, “On me your voice falls as they say love should,/Like an enormous yes.”
I said, “I’d been hoping you could pin down a record I lost years ago. It was a woman singer, black, doing one of those songs which advertised restaurants. I thought probably Memphis, maybe New Orleans. All I can remember is the refrain: ‘Between Eighteenth and Nineteenth on Chestnut Street.’ ”
“ ‘Between …’?”
“ ‘Between Eighteenth and Nineteenth on Chestnut Street.’ The tune’s vivid, but I’ve lost the words and the name of the singer.”
“What date?”
“Middling ’30s, I think: 1933 or ’4?”
“Oh, no,” Larkin said, “The ’30s are long after my time.”
We had reached the bitter coffee stage, and the waiters had started to flick unnecessarily over tablecloths with rolled napkins. We were the last diners.
“Did Jill and A Girl in Winter come as hard as the poems have done? Couldn’t you commission yourself to write another novel?”
“I’d adore to write a novel. I love novels. I’ve started novels. Five of them, I think. Five lost novels. No, it’s not the writing that’s so difficult with novels, it’s the plots. Keeping them up. I don’t know. Kingsley always seems to manage to find stories in his life; I’m afraid that mine’s not the sort that easily lends itself to stories. That’s probably it.”
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