Stevie Smith didn't go in much for biographical notes. Asked for one in 1964, she got as far as "Born in Hull. But moved to London at age of three and has lived in the same house ever since" before giving up. Her long years in Palmers Green have been richly mythologised, but her stay in Hull could hardly be more obscure, writes David Wheatley.
Florence Margaret Smith (the Stevie came later) was born there at 34 De La Pole Avenue, on September 20th, 1902. The De La Pole who gave the street its name was a medieval merchant whose effigy still stands guard over the city's marina. Smith's father worked in the family shipping agency, in what was then a prosperous port.
The late Victorian housing of south-east Hull has come down in the world since then. These days, the pebble-dashing has sprouted an acne of satellite dishes and the dustbins have been upgraded to the wheelie variety, but gentrification remains a remote prospect. A large deconsecrated church hulks across the road, and a birthday cake of a disused cinema trades as a Bingo hall.
Contemporary poet Sean O'Brien grew up round the corner on Anlaby Road. Nearby Hessle Road was the epicentre of the fishing community, but now the trawlers have gone too. And then there is the mighty Humber, which Smith imagined "turn(ing) again to deeper slumber, /Deeper than deeps in joys without number".
Illustrating 'The River Humber', Smith drew what looks a floating body, definitely not waving but drowned. Smith had good reason to associate water with ill fortune. Her father ran away to sea in 1905, never to return. Her poems are full of depressed and abandoned children like the speaker of 'Papa Love Baby': "What folly it is that daughters are always supposed to be /In love with papa. It wasn't the case with me."
The family moved south. Novel on Yellow Paper appeared in 1936, and her first book of poems, A Good Time Was Had By All, the following year. The trauma of her uprooting may account for the almost total lack of references to Hull in Smith's work, but subsequent Hull writers have instinctively recognised her as a kindred spirit.
Larkin hailed the "authority of sadness" with which her poems spoke and bought copies of her books for distribution to his friends. Introducing a 1982 anthology of Hull poets, he wrote "These poems are not about Hull, yet it is unseen in all of them". Smith poems such as 'Mother, among the Dustbins', 'Death's Ostracism', 'The Boat', 'Aubade' and 'Papa Love Baby' are all are haunted by the sense of primal loss and separation that was the city's enduring legacy to her. Standing in De La Pole Avenue today, it's hard not to find it ironic that a descent into poverty should drive a family from here to Palmers Green.
Hull has recently experienced a mini-property boom, but a house in these parts can still leave enough change from £15,000 sterling for a slap-up Hessle Road fish supper. I leave the last word to Smith's 'Old Ghosts': 'I can call up old ghosts, and they will come, /But my art limps - I cannot send them home'.
David Wheatley is a poet and critic
Stevie Smith's Hull