Looking for Larkin

A lot of people wander down our street and stand staring up at number 32, a three storey mid to late Victorian era house. 

Their particular and often whimsical focus is on the attic level with its two rectangular and one central arched window in the pointed gable end and, to the right hand side, a further dormer. 

A Civic Society plaque is mounted on the front main wall announcing that from 1956 to 1974 the poet, Philip Larkin lived in the flat at the top of the house. 

The longevity of his residence there suggests that he liked it and indeed in his voluminous correspondence to colleagues, friends and lovers he would regularly champion the privacy that the high rise living provided him with as well as being convenient for the open green space of the public park that it overlooked.

We moved to this inner city location nearly four years ago. It was a drawn out flit from a longstanding stint in a comfortable western suburb of Hull. It took more than 2 years as the first house we went after in the same terraced block was sold before we could offload our own. 

It was only through my wife’s regular and rather suspicious after-work and weekend motoring around the old carriage drive in the park that she noticed another property at the opposite end of the row being sold privately. Everything came together quickly and, after 90 or so text messages with the seller and a buyer for our own house materialising out of nowhere, we were able to move in. 

I can fully appreciate the sentiments that Philip Larkin expressed for the unique surroundings of the street and park with its lake (now a disturbingly toxic green colour), formal tended gardens, Conservatory with exotic reptiles and fish, a statue of a young, thin and very attractive 1860’s Queen Victoria with the separated and rather melancholy figure of her Consort Albert, a largeadventure play area and the expanses of grassed areas for the citizens of Hull to sit, lie, sleep and occasionally, as we have witnessed, get Tasered by the Police, on. 

I can identify with the characters that Larkin regularly saw in these surroundings and these form the main observations in the first four verses of his poem, "Toads Revisited" written around 1962.

Walking around in the park
Should feel better than work:
The lake, the sunshine,
The grass to lie on, 

Blurred playground noises
Beyond black-stockinged nurses –
Not a bad place to be.
Yet it doesn’t suit me. 

Being one of the men
You meet of an afternoon:
Palsied old step-takers,
Hare-eyed clerks with the jitters, 

Waxed-fleshed out-patients
Still vague from accidents,
And characters in long coats
Deep in the litter-baskets – 

In fact, on any of my own frequent forays into the park and with the lines of the poem fresh in my mind the same types and temperaments of park users are still to be found. 

I would however offer a 2017 update to the descriptions of the 1960's Larkin subjects. 

The playground noises are perhaps a bit louder as youngsters are no longer under the post war mantra of not being seen or heard. 

You can substitute tattooed and bare legged young mothers for the rather austere but alluring black stockinged nannies. 

The afternoons still have a good representation from the elderly and infirm (myself currently included in the latter term) although the hare eyed clerks have been replaced by nerve jangled drug and alcohol addicts with a very different type of jitters. 

Larkin’s reference to those waxed-fleshed out types can easily apply to the zombie-esque appearance of those engrossed in their social media screens or just being vague and worse for wear from the rigours of modern life. 

The same individuals can be found, as in any era, in long raincoats and delving into the waste bins.

Larkin speaks of the place and people with a deep fondness. “Pearson Park exercises a fascination over me and I always enjoy an hour in it” he wrote to his mother. 

He was as it seems forcibly moved out of the flat in number 32 after 18 years. It had only been intended , under the ownership of his employer, Hull University ,as temporary accommodation for academic staff awaiting other and perhaps more suitable lodgings and housing in the city. 

Larkin was sad to leave and as he reported to a friend “The University has decided to sell its ‘worst properties’, which naturally includes the house I live in”.

My own writing desk is about 100 metres east and at least 7 metres lower down than the attic from where Larkin found his inspiration and penned his trademark gloomy, death-obsessed and darkly humorous observations of human foibles and failings. 

Being a resident myself I don’t think that he could have done it anywhere else than down our street.