v. at forty
‘And it was mine’

Tony Harrison must have come this way on the train journey that prefigures v., that ‘controversial poem’ published forty years ago this year 2025, first in January in the London Review of Books, then in December as a Bloodaxe edition with photographs by Graham Sykes. And he must have seen pretty much the same thing I can see now, give or take. (‘One England blots out another’, D.H. Lawrence says in Lady Chatterley’s Lover.) The galleries of back gardens, overgrown sidings, the ruderal and arable in co-dependence as moor cedes to dale, textile to coal, redbrick to Yorkstone so uniformally begrimed that when it’s new it looks like imitative of the real, weathered thing. Though now there’s the new build estates, the delivery entrances of retail parks and warehouses, clusters of supermarkets for any and no price point. I wonder if his train went in reverse at Bradford Interchange, too; if it stopped at these same halts. Three East Asian lads I’d spoken to at Manchester Victoria get off at Pudsey West. What are they expecting? What version of England? And what do they make of the Union Jacks and flags of St George hanging from lampposts on this afternoon in late summer or spilling from the windows of maisonettes? Whatever version it was or is, their disappointment is registered instantly and, as the train pulls away, they resemble Butch, Sundance and Etta Place at the train station of El Dorado (Bolivia).

I don’t know where Harrison’s coming from but he changes at Leeds, his hometown and ...