Ever fancied leaving home for a "life of shame"? Where would you go?
People choose the strangest places. In Stevie Smith's poem Correspondence between Mr Harrison in Newcastle and Mr Sholto Peach Harrison in Hull, a father irately asks his son: "Do you think I bred you up to live a life of shame/ Down south in Kingston-upon-Hull a traveller in glue?" Despite being born in Hull, Smith never graduated to glue-selling there: she left for London at the age of three. A half-century later a young librarian called Philip Larkin got a job at the town's university. He wrote a little poetry on the side too, and no amount of shameful living was ever enough to drive him out of the place.
Pearson Park
For most of his time in Hull Larkin lived in a house on Pearson Park, just down the road from the flat I have occupied since moving here last January. On the other side of my flat is the hospital where he died, as he predicted he would, aged 63, of cancer in 1985. I pass his portrait every time I enter his library, I've shopped in his Large Cool Store, Marks & Spencer, played Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet recordings in my bachelor flat, enjoyed the terminate and fishy-smelling pastoral of ships up streets and I almost said I work all day, and get half-drunk at night. Well, not every night. Yet.
Stevie Smith and Larkin weren't the first Hull poets: in the 17th century there was Andrew Marvell, who promised that he "by the tide of Humber would complain" until his coy mistress succumbed to his charms. She must have been prompt about it, since Marvell soon took off to London and the House of Commons. The fact that the school he attended in Hull is beside somewhere called Sewer Lane might have had something to do with it too. Smith and Larkin weren't the last of Hull's poets either: among those who have passed through since their time are Douglas Dunn, Roger McGough, Douglas Houston, Tom Paulin, Andrew Motion, Sean O'Brien and Maggie Hannan. Academic birds of passage have included Richard Murphy, Peter Porter and Ian Hamilton.
Irish connections
On the radar of Irish writing, Hull has historically been the merest blip. Mina Harker takes a ship to Hamburg from Hull in Bram Stokers Dracula. In his poem Going Home, Derek Mahon describes the "indigestible/ Dawn mist which clings/ All afternoon/ To the south bank of the Humber". Tom Paulin has hymned the bracing dinginess of the town and the great, graceful, pointless Humber Bridge (so much for the folk who live in Lincoln). And that's about it.
More substantial are Larkin's Irish connections. Readers of his letters may remember his advice to anyone wanting to eat well in Dublin: take sandwiches from Belfast. Dolmen Press notoriously passed up a chance to publish The Less Deceived, but Larkin doesn't appear to have held a grudge, lining the library shelves with the latest Austin Clarke or Thomas Kinsella collections as they appeared. Still, he got Dublinesque and The Importance of Elsewhere out of his time in Ireland, so it can't all have been wasted.
Hull today isn't the most ethnic of places, though - like just about everywhere else in Britain - it stretches to a few Irish pubs. If it looks to anywhere, it is Holland, with which there are ferry connections; there is also a splendid gold statue of King Billy over a gents' toilet down by the Humber. A visit to one of the Irish pubs may involve ordering a "dra wat wan", as native Hullonians have been heard to call their glass of Chardonnay. Other aspects of Hull-speak too may cause problems to strangers, such as its remarkable "o" sound, only dimly suggested by the expression "eugh". In winter, for instance, you are well advised to geugh sleugh when there's sneugh on the reughd. You get the idea.
Animal life
The Hull poet Sean O'Brien called one of his books The Indoor Park in honour of the conservatory in Pearson Park, whose inmates include a pair of South American axolotls and a parrot who can whistle Pop Goes The Weasel. But animal life is everywhere in Hull: around the avenue where I live there are ducks (which get their own road sign), geese, bats, owls, squirrels and rabbits. Larkin has a poem about a rabbit getting caught in a trap and clubbed to death, typically enough. I haven't seen anyone waving a stick at the bunny in my neighbour's garden yet, but it goes to show: there are other ways of coming to a sticky end in Hull than selling glue.