How I Got Here, part 1

A well-read punk-peasant's journey into writing

I’m 54 and I’ve been writing professionally for over half my life. I’ve just completed my tenth book (which is my fifth novel), but writing books came to me relatively late (I turned 40 on the day my first novel, King Crow, was published). Before that I wrote scripts: for theatre, radio and TV. Before that I wrote poetry (such bloody awful poetry, Mr Shankly). My first paid gig was in Armley Prison, where I put on a play for the prisons. It wasn’t quite a grim as it sounds. That was 1999 I think. The play was called Locked In and was about two men locked in a room, so the men of Armley kind of got it. And it was a captive audience - boom! boom! (I’m here all week, available for weddings, funerals and Bar Mitzvahs). We performed the play that I’d written in the multi-faith chapel. I think there were about 400 prisoners present and there was no lighting set. The audience were fully lit and we could see the whites of their eyes and the scars on their faces. I didn’t quite know what to expect, I’d never written a play before, had hardly even seen one at that point, but I wasn’t expecting so much audience participation (‘Bang that cunt out!’ ‘Smack him one!’ that kind of thing, all meant in good humour I’m sure).

Driving the van back to the hire shop after the performance, both actors sitting next to me, I broke the news, ‘They really liked it. Want us to come back to do another.’

‘Great!’ said Damian.

‘That’s brilliant!’ said Jim. ‘When do they want us back?’

‘Next month,’ I said.

Both actors sat beside me grinning (it was their first paid work too). We drove through Leeds with big smiles on our faces. We’d done it, we’d been paid to do what we wanted to do. For me that meant writing, for them it meant acting. Jim’s expression suddenly changed to concern as a thought dawned:

‘Have you written another play?’

‘Yeah, of course I have.’

I dropped them off at the pub and drove the van to the shop over the way. As I waited for the man to check for dints and scratches, I reflected on my situation. I hadn’t written another play, so I would have to write one, and I only had two weeks to finish it if we were to get off script in time and get it ready for performance. I joined Jim and Damian for one, made my excuses, ran home to my rented room in Leeds 6 and immediately began writing another play.

In 1999 I was 28, still a young man. I’d left school at 16 to work in a factory. A job I hated. School hadn’t worked out for me. Primary school had been fun, but the first few weeks of secondary school sealed my fate in a way I hadn’t foreseen. We were given some homework, to fill two sides of our homework books with a piece of writing about a room. How well we did would then determine what group we would be in for English, and that would also determine what group you were in for French, and so on. I thought about it long and hard, before putting pencil to paper. I constructed a story about a character (whose name or gender is not specified) who wakes up in a strange room: a crimson rotunda. Outside the room are weird noises. The character tries to escape, feels for a door or a window, but there is nothing. The walls are soft and warm. The character has no idea where they are. The story ends with a flash of light, and the character being pulled towards it. The character is a foetus and is in the act of being born. I remember finishing it and thinking, I bet no one has written anything like that, they’ll have just done the boring thing, write about their favourite room in the house.

I was quietly excited the next day when I put my book on top of the pile on the teacher’s desk. She’ll love this, I thought. The next day I got my book back with a big red ‘F’ for fail in red ink at the bottom of my homework and the phrase ‘see me’ underneath. After class I waited round to see the teacher. She was called Miss Allison, and she was a stern, matronly figure, in a shapeless grey dress and beige cardigan.

‘What’s this you’ve written?’

‘It’s the homework you asked for.’

‘No it isn’t. It’s a stupid story about someone being born. I asked you to write about a room.’

‘But it is a room. For the character, the womb is their first room.’

‘Nonsense! I don’t like cockiness or disobedience. So don’t think you can come it with me!’

She threw the book at me. The next day I found out I’d been put in the bottom group with all the naughty kids, and the ones with undiagnosed dyslexia, and those with undiagnosed learning difficulties. I was angry and humiliated. And as I sat there, next to a gypsy kid who couldn’t read or write, teaching him to spell his own name, I made a decision: I would make the teachers’ lives hell. I would do everything I could to ruin their day, every day I was there. And I was suddenly filled with a thrilling sensation: I had a mission.

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