I’ve lived all my life in the north of England; in Barnsley for 18 years, then Lancaster, then Barnsley briefly again, then Liverpool for a while before settling in Manchester. In my poetry, particularly my debut, physical, and now in a novel, Pity, I’ve always been interested in what role writing can play in celebrating and rethinking place; how it might illuminate silences, or cut through the radio static of assumptions. It’s an interest that was, perhaps, inevitable having a poet for a father, who always encouraged all of us, myself and my two sisters, to see where we lived and how we talked as equal to anywhere and anyone else.
The collection physical was my attempt to surface same-sex desire, the fragility of masculinity and the legacy of rapid and often brutal de-industrialisation in the northern town and then the northern city that I lived in. More recently, with Pity, I wanted to interrogate what narratives exist about a place and who gets to tell them. I wanted, in the words of the great north-east poet Barry MacSweeney, to stand at the coalface, like Hamlet, and strike a match.
How should I write about the north? I think about it as I leave my house, amble past Newton Heath and Moston tram stop, head up on to Newton Heath high street, beyond the library, the canal, the old church ahead of me. I think about it as I catch the train back to Manchester from Barnsley, first on the slow single track to Huddersfield, and then through the hills back to the city. I think about it as I’m visiting my best friends in Westhoughton, as I’m organising a reading for my forthcoming novel in Whitley Bay. What does “The North” mean to those who don’t live here? Or those who have never lived here? What role does it play in the national psyche?
In truth, there are hundreds of thousands of versions that could be written. There is no one thing that is “The North”, no one lens to view it through, no one way it can be spoken of. And where is “The North”? Are its borders cultural or political or geographical or financial. Is it possible to speak of “The North” without also speaking of its psychological antipode “The South”? And if it’s not, is it possible to do so without resorting to cliche?
Cliche is language turned over and over into familiarity, but it doesn’t make it less accurate. One danger of cliche is that it seeks to dismiss or ridicule that which perhaps still needs to be thought about, just in new ways. “Oh, you’re from Barnsley, and you’ve written a book that talks about the pits, how cliched,” the thought might go; so work might stay unwritten, because the prevailing national narrative says: “That’s been done to death, you don’t need to talk about that any more, we’ve already told you how you should feel about that.”
Two books I found recently that offered fascinating perspectives on the north were, for a long time, out of print. Caliban Shrieks by the Oldham-born Jack Hilton, published in 1935, which was recently rediscovered by Jack Chadwick and is being reissued by Vintage next month, is a breathless and dizzying modernist howl of a novel which explores the first decades of the 20th century. The book, considered a precursor to George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, offers the reader deep insights into northern society and industry as they stood in the early 1900s, and Hilton’s voice acts as a rallying cry for a fairer Britain.
Then, last summer, I read the recently reissued The Death of Grass, John Christopher’s 1956 post-apocalyptic novel, which explores what happens to the country as a famine unleashes waves of violence, xenophobia and ultimately societal collapse. One of the most interesting things is how prominently northern geography features as the characters try to make their way towards a presumed point of refuge in the Lake District.
What struck me reading both these novels is how, in their different ways, they strayed away from the realism or straightforward narratives that I’d often been drawn to about the north, such as Walter Greenwood’s 1933 novel Love on the Dole, set in Hanky Park in Salford where Greenwood himself was born and brought up, and where we witness in unflinching detail the Hardcastle family pulled apart by the economic devastation caused by the great depression. Or the direct and colloquial poetry of Geoff Hattersley, who grew up in Wombwell, the next village over from me. In my favourite poem of his, The Persuaders, six friends walk through Wombwell on their way to a particular pub – the other pubs they pass along the way have names that come to seem like a lament for all the things villages like that one have lost over the years, their industry, their religion, their political certainty:
the six of us walk in single file
Up the narrow street that takes us
past The Angler’s Rest and The Ship
and the Conservative and Catholic clubs
and British Legion and Royal Oak
And The Alma and Little George
And into the Horse Shoe …
All this is a reminder that there isn’t one way to talk about the north; it’s not one thing, it’s prismatic. Just think about the different angles we’ve been given in the last decade. The way Okechukwu Nzelu uses Manchester to explore ideas of race, class and sexuality with humour and tenderness in his debut novel, The Private Joys of Nnenna Maloney, is different from Kim Moore’s Barrow, which is different from Malika Booker’s Leeds, with its hidden histories, on which she turns the poet’s magnifying glass. Helen Palmer’s Blackpool, which is reinvented in Joycean, carnivelesque ways in Pleasure Beach, is different from Zaffar Kunial’s northern landscapes, where poems are carved from specific place, and from Gareth Gavin’s haunting queering of the north, as its post-industrial landscapes are turned into dreamscapes in his Goldsmiths-shortlisted novel Never Was. Then there’s Jessica Andrew’s vivid debut Saltwater where, in Washington, “Boys at school knew the factory was looming over their future, waiting for them to grow into the overalls.” Sunjeev Sahota’s Sheffield, seen in the novels Ours Are the Streets and The Year of the Runaways, is different from Anita Sethi’s journey of reclamation through the Pennines in her moving memoir I Belong Here. Any one of these narratives could claim to represent the north. None of them can, individually. Perhaps all of them can, collectively.
It’s not just what you say, but how you say it. Because I’ve moved around so much my accent could probably be filed under “Northern: generic”, but try saying “Barnsley” to a cross section of people, and see how long it is before someone comes back with “Baaaaaaaaaarnsley”, stretching out the vowel for condescending emphasis. Often it seems like the broad brushstrokes that exist about the north – those prevailing national narratives, the contrast of its Heathcliffian landscapes and its quaint villages, the faded grandeur of its seaside towns, it’s dilapidated deindustrialised heartlands, its accents and dialects being seen as comedic rather than profound, the sense of it as reactionary rather than progressive, the idea of it as monocultural rather than diverse – come from a vantage point not unlike that which gives rise to talk of the “flyover states” of the US; people and places passed over, a bird’s-eye view, instead of streets that are walked through, which are known like the back of your hand.
This is sadly often also true of the national press, with roundups of forthcoming cultural highlights or exhibitions missing out the world-class art found in the Hepworth in Wakefield or the Whitworth in Manchester, at the Baltic in Gateshead or the Yorkshire Sculpture Park to name just a few of a plethora of places. There is a phrase often used when talking about regional funding, levelling up and community art – that of “giving voice” to people, when really the necessity is to tune into, and help broadcast, the different frequencies of voice that are already present up and down the country.
Some of the challenges faced in the north are empirical and calculable. The political choice of austerity caused hundreds of thousands of excess deaths nationwide, and its impact on local services and communities probably means it continues to be responsible for many more. When calculated per head, Liverpool was the worst hit by austerity measures, followed by Barnsley. As with everywhere in the country, these effects, in shuttered shops, in the devastating increase of people sleeping in the streets, are all too literal and evident, and while things such as Arts Council funding for the first ever Barnsley book festival are welcome, these are wounds from which it will take towns like Barnsley a generation or more to recover. At the end of the last decade, studies showed that seven out of the 10 places with the largest council cuts were in the north-west, the north-east or Yorkshire.
Some of the problems the north faces are infrastructural (and as evidence we need only remember the prime minister standing up last year in Manchester, at his party’s conference, to announce the scaling back of HS2, a major project meant to better connect that city’s population to the wider country). There are regions connected by slow and ailing train networks. Towns where buses stop after 9pm.
What this does lead to, though, is a rich literary identity for individual towns or cities, that otherwise might be gathered under a great sweeping brushstroke. If the last train home is too early, or too unreliable, then it’s probably best to set up a spoken word night in your local pub, rather than risk going to the next town over. There are a remarkable number of incredible small and independent presses in the north of England; some, like Carcanet in Manchester or Bloodaxe in Hexham, Northumbria, have been around long enough to be seen in the strata of the publishing mountain. Some like Bluemoose, based in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire (the first to discover the great Benjamin Myers and publishers of international sensation Rónán Hession), or And Other Stories in Sheffield (bringing international works to the English market), are like fresh rocks dropped into a lake, sending ripples of new voices out from their own self-made centres. Some, like Valley Press in Scarborough, or Fox & Windmill in Bradford, which focuses on publishing south Asian writers, show a strength of entrepreneurial spirit combined with a great publisher’s curatorial eye.
None of these publishers, or the numerous others I could mention, is publishing work purely about the geographical space they are in, in the same way a London-based publisher wouldn’t just publish work set in London. But their location, economically and geographically, within the community they are embedded in, and their relationships with local bookshops and libraries, give them an identity they might not have had, even if they’d been situated just five or 10 miles up the road. The cultural life of each part of the north changes in the same way accents change: imperceptibly, and then suddenly as you cross the invisible borders from one hamlet into another.
Earlier this year, in collaboration with New Writing North, I established the Tempest prize, named after the street I grew up on. Its mission is to find new unpublished queer writers from the north of England, and not just from the major cities, but from wherever people might be living. I understand the literary privilege I was raised in, to not only grow up in a house that was full of books, and contemporary poetry books at that, but to know that literature isn’t elsewhere, that it is exactly where I was and am. To know that your voice, your house, your street, your town, was worthy of writing about. That there is no one place that is inherently more worthy than any other. A novel might come from Barnsley (indeed it already has, in the Barry Hines classic, A Kestrel for a Knave, and in the bestselling works of Milly Johnson) just as much as it might come from Oxford or London.
When the prize opens for entries later this year, as part of the wider suite of Northern Writers’ awards, my fellow judge and I won’t have anything in mind that we’re looking for. There is no single way to write “northern” in the same way there’s no single way to write “queer”; the work that eventually wins might be sci-fi, might be personal memoir, might be poetry, might be some as-yet-unthought-of blend of all of those.
One of the things I try to wrestle with in my new novel is the question of who gets to tell the story of a place, and what story do we even mean? The characters – a drag queen trying to reshape understanding of the town’s past, a former miner still grappling with how to carry what was lost into the future, a security guard at the Alhambra shopping centre, a sex worker, a call centre employee trying to make ends meet, academics bringing an outsider perspective as they work on a community ethnography and history project, a young poet with armfuls of tattoos who may or may not be me – all wrestle with that idea.
Towards the end, in their final section of Fieldnotes, the academics in the novel write: “We are certain that the story a place tells of itself should be more important than the story which is told about it”, before going on to complicate their own assertion by wondering “which story the town might tell of itself do we really mean … anybody carving out small chunks of story from the wall of sound and noise and memory is doing so selectively, and a small nugget of something larger should never be taken to be the thing itself”. A metaphor using mining language! Oh Andrew, how cliched.
Somewhere between the story a place tells of itself, and the story that is told about it, between the prevailing national narrative travelling in one direction, and the truth – individual, messy, contradictory – hurtling in the other, sits cliche. If writing has a function in helping us define where it is we’re from, and I feel very certain that it does, that lies in its capacity to give new language to experience; if there are new ways of articulating the past, of processing what has happened, then maybe a place can write into being a new future for itself, the black diamond of new words on a page, forged beneath the competing pressures of expectation and perception and desire.
I’m finishing this sitting at my parents’ table, in the back room of the house I grew up in. I’ve just been to the shop, walking the same walk I walked to primary school each morning. The same houses, the same shops with different names, the Longbow Pub that was the Co-op and now a Nisa, and across the other side of the village my old secondary school, that’s now a Tesco Express; the windmills, over near where the old pit used to be, turning like the propellers of some great ship. Partly the reason I wrote Pity was to enact what I was taught when I was younger, that literature isn’t singular. It’s pluralistic and it’s wherever you are.
• Pity by Andrew McMillan will be published by Canongate on 8 February. To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
