1. East Yorkshire Stinks of Shit

...being a heartfelt celebration of the county in which I grew up.

I was born in the City of Kingston upon Hull, which, at the time, was situated in the county of East Yorkshire. During a few misguided years in the 70s and 80s, that county was disposed of in favour of a new one, called Humberside, which very few people actually liked.

Then, thankfully, Humberside was itself disposed of and East Yorkshire returned triumphant. (Although the BBC kept the concept of Humberside alive with its local radio station “broadcasting to East Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire”.)

East Yorkshire has a different quality to the rest of Yorkshire. Its flatter for a start, there are no great hills, peaks or rolling moors, there is a dearth of brass bands, no cobbled streets running down hills, very few brick built factory chimneys, and the wheels of Thatcher-smashed coal mines are nowhere to be seen. Coal was a South Yorkshire thing, in Hull, we had fish. Now there are just a few abandoned or redeveloped docks where the trawlers once landed their catches.

When I was a kid, we used to sing “For those in Peril on the Sea” in school assemblies, and talk of disasters on the waves rather than tragedies down the pits. As a kid, I used to lie in bed listening to the ghostly sound of foghorns warning mariners of the potential of collisions.

Mists still regularly roll in from both the River Humber and the North Sea which mark the edges of East Yorkshire unconnected to the rest of the county.

In the early 70s my parents bought a caravan at the coastal village of Easington, and we spent virtually every weekend there from March to October. We didn’t have a family car, so, me, my Mam, Dad and sister used to cycle the 16 or so miles there and back every Friday evening and Sunday afternoon, which sort of cut me off from my school friends, and made me feel a bit of a nerd, but it was worth it for the fact that we got to see the sea regularly, to smell that air, and give us a sense of being connected to somewhere wild and natural.

When I started writing poetry, it was that sense of belonging to a wilder part of East Yorkshire that I turned to. I had noticed that many of the poets that I had seen performing at open mic nights and the like turned to the places that they had grown up in or lived in for inspiration. Poems in praise of Manchester, Leeds, the Lake District, Scotland, all celebrating the unique qualities of their chosen setting.

But perhaps there is something about coming from Hull, or East Yorkshire that makes one feel slightly ill at ease when comparing that region to others. Or in my case, perhaps it was something to do with the residual awkward feelings about those bike rides with my Mam and Dad, which made me feel unable to celebrate my patch in the same enthusiastic and bombastic way that other poets celebrated theirs.

Nonetheless, I still wanted to express how I felt about the land of my youth, both the glory and the mundanity of it. I wanted to communicate what it feels like to come from East Yorkshire. Or at least what it feels like to me.

So I wrote this…

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East Yorkshire Stinks of Shit  

East Yorkshire stinks of shit  
Get out of Hull towards the coast  
The long, flat roads   
The plain of Holderness  
The rolling Wolds  
The scenes that Hockney paints so well  
Bigger trees at Warter 
Woldgate Woods  
All stink of shit  

The hum of farm machinery  
The crackle of telegraph wires  
The silence surrounding it  
And the stink of shit  

Surrender to it  
Breathe it in  
Fill your lungs  
Good country air  
Good, honest shit  

Cowshit  
Rotting vegetation shit  
Filthy, sloppy, muddy shit  
Rainbow patterns in the liquid pools on its surface  
Look at it: It will turn your stomach  
Taste it: You will gag  

But breathe it in 
Out in that damp East Yorkshire air  
When you can already taste the breeze off the North Sea  
When you can hear all the small noises cloaked in the silence  
Like tiny flies trapped in the head of a pint of bitter  
When you smell it out there 
The stink of shit is a good, good thing  
The smell of boyhood bike rides  
Boulder clay cliffs and pebbly beaches  
Plastic flotsam from foreign vessels  
Crude oil and sand  

And good, honest, shit

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