This was written for the Life In Leeds
exhibition, held at The Royal Armouries Musuem, summer 2004.
The beastliest place, one of the nastiest I know – Charles Dickens
on Leeds
Remember This Is Leeds
On one side of
Calverley Road, people hug the wall outside the
LGI, cigarette smoke mingling with clouded breath in the freezing January air.
On the other side they’re skating in Millenium Square. Just beyond the rink is a
huge hoarding. In letters twenty foot high it says:
NO LA-DE-DA SKATING
NO LYCRA
NO CHEESY SMILES
REMEMBER THIS
IS LEEDS
I couldn’t stand Torvill and
Dean, and glitz and glamour are not my scene, but for God’s sake, where are we,
The Soviet Union? What are people supposed to do? Go skating in bin liners, a
miserable expression on their faces? I was in
Wales
just before Christmas, visiting my parents.
They had an outdoor skating rink in front of the town hall, a fair next to it,
everything brightly lit, a huge sign saying Winter Wonderland. The air
was filled with screams, shrieks of delight and peals of laughter. Here, though,
the skaters go round and round without any fuss at all, rarely smiling. My
daughter asks why I’m shaking my head. ‘You’re not allowed to show off in Leeds’
I say, ‘They’ll fine you on the spot if they think you’re getting above
yourself.’ She looks worried.
‘Really?’
She’s only five,
who knows, it could be true. So I grin to let her know I’m joking. Then I glower
like a pantomime villain (it is Panto season, after all), and in a stern voice
say, ‘No La-De-Da Skating, you.’ She thinks this is hilarious.
We carry on
walking to the café where we’re going to meet her mother. She skips in front,
shouting ‘NO LA-DE-DA SKATING! NO LA-DE-DA SKATING!’ at the top of her voice.
Some people smile and catch my eye. This cheers me up – it doesn’t have to be
grim up north after all. I smile back at them, a big cheesy one.
I wonder what the woman in Pasta
Romana would make of that sign in Millenium Square? I’ll bet she doesn’t disapprove of la-de-da skating or cheesy smiles. For over twenty years
now she’s been singing along behind the counter to the opera blaring out at
deafening volume in the city centre restaurant. Not only has she never been
arrested for getting above herself in all this time, and survived a campaign to
shut her up, she’s become something of a celebrity. Now people go in there
specially to see her perform.
’A Spaghetti Bolognese and the aria
from Madam Butterfly please love.’
Maybe it’s because she’s Italian. They have their own way of doing
things, and a little bit of drama and colour is quite acceptable in
Italy
. If you put a sign like
that up in Rome, people would be outraged. ‘How dare they tell us how to behave’
they’d yell. They’d tear it down, get togged up in the brightest lycra imaginable, pull on their skates and put on a display that would make Torvill
and Dean look like Steptoe and Son. Perhaps that’s it, she feels the
heavy weight of expectation pressing down on her. There’s so little flamboyance
here in Leeds, she feels it’s up to her to provide as much as she can. She’s
just trying to help us out by setting a good example, showing nothing bad will
happen to us if we just let rip now and then and dare to be different. But no
one joins in when she sings, we just sit and stare, nudge each other and smirk.
Sometimes it’s good to see the
place you live through the eyes of an outsider. My friend Barney comes up from
London for a weekend. He’s a dyed in the wool southerner, the kind of person who
thinks Birmingham is in the north. This is his third visit to Leeds, and he’s
loving it. He can’t get over how friendly people are here. ‘I
like the way they call everyone “Love”, you don’t hear that down south anymore’
he says. In pubs, in shops, on the street, people still manage to find the time
for a few words with a stranger. Unlike London, where they’re always on the
verge of pulling up the drawbridge, retreating behind their castle walls. But what really really shocks him is the way people say ‘Thank you’ to
the bus driver when they get off the bus at the end of their journey. In London
this is unheard of. Down there the relationship between bus drivers and
passengers is worse than that between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
He’s impressed too, by the familiar way I greet our neighbours as we
walk home. He doesn’t have neighbours in West Drayton, only people who live
either side of his flat who he sometimes sees rushing out of their front door in
the morning. For a while he wondered if there was something weird about him,
some signal he was giving off that made people ignore him. Then he
checked this people-who-live-next-door-to-you-pretending-they-never-saw-you
malarkey with other friends, and found that they’d had the same experience. It’s
just the way it is in London.
Barney enjoys a chat, so he only uses Asian shops now, where the owners
always greet him with a friendly smile, ask how he’s been, comment on the
weather, and what’s been happening in the football (he’s a Spurs fan, and they
all know that now and are always ready with commiserations about the latest
disastrous result). He avoids the white owned shops where they look at you with
unconcealed loathing as they serve you, their bitter mouths clamped shut,
annoyed that you’ve interrupted them reading their newspaper. They wouldn’t get
away with that here. They’d go bankrupt in a month. Remember this is
Leeds.
It’s Saturday afternoon, I’m at
Dave and Mary’s house. Our daughters are playing together in the living room. I
was only going to stay half an hour, return a book I borrowed, have a cup of
coffee. But we got talking, and now Dave is in the kitchen, cooking some pasta
for the girls, and we’ll probably end up having a beer while they tuck into
that. Grandstand is on the in the background as Mary and I swap stories
about our week. Then suddenly Mary spots a final score that brings her great
joy. She jumps out of her seat, clenching her fist. Eyes blazing, she yells at
the top of her voice ‘YES! THE SCUM LOST!’
Some people think The War
Of The Roses ended in 1485. They’re wrong. I’ve heard it said that you
should never underestimate the importance of history in
Ireland
, that something that
happened hundreds of years ago is still remembered as vividly as if it occurred
last week. It’s the same here. Perhaps they should build a peace wall between us
and Lancashire.
Who’s that dying on the runway?
Who’s that dying in
the snow?
It’s Matt Busby and
his boys.
That’s what they sing at
Elland Road when Man U visit. You must
have heard it, this cheery little ditty about the Munich air crash. It’s a
cliché, but true : Leeds fans hate Man U more than they love their own team.
Mary smiles gleefully and says ‘Just think what a foul mood their
supporters will be in on the coach back to Scumchester.’
She isn’t even from Leeds, but has been here so long now she’s gone
native. If you really want to fit in, you have to hate Man U as much as
the people born here – remember this is Leeds.
There aren’t many Leeds United
fans in Chapeltown. The favourite teams are Arsenal, Liverpool and, yes, them, Scumchester United. The kids will wear the white shirt of
England
(and many painted
their faces with the cross of St George during the last world cup). But you’ll
struggle to find any who’ll wear the white shirt of Leeds United round here.
One Lee Bowyer, there’s only one Lee Bowyer.
That’s what groups of white lads would start chanting whenever any Asians
came into certain pubs in Leeds to watch the football during that time,
the time we don’t like to mention.
Chapeltown, many people have told me, is a terrible place. A taxi driver
refused to take a friend of mine to her front door when she lived there. She was
eight months pregnant at the time. ‘Sorry love, I don’t want to get mugged’ he
told her apologetically, as he dropped her off on
Chapeltown Road, leaving her to walk the last
ten minutes on her own at midnight.
‘You don’t work there, do you?’ I’ve been asked, ‘Have you had
anyone chase you with a machete yet?’ Then they laugh, and when I don’t laugh
back, they say ‘What’s up? No sense of humour?’ I’d like to say ‘No, I just
don’t have your sense of humour’, but I don’t want to cause offence, so I
smile vaguely and change the subject.
The people who say this kind of thing have usually only passed through it
on a bus or in a car. Even by Leeds’ admirably high standards, Chapeltown is
an very friendly place. It often reminds me of
Ireland
- the way people stand and chew the fat
on street corners, on benches, in shops. Everyone talks, talks, talks. Rushing
is considered a rudeness, even when you’re racing against the clock, you
must somehow find time for a conversation, so that the other person doesn’t feel
snubbed.
And I have grown to like the way people punctuate their sentences with
‘Insh’allah’ – god willing.
‘Next week I start a new job, insh’allah.’ This reminds me of my
relatives in
County
Wexford,
who would say at the end of our summer holiday there ‘We’ll see you next year,
god willing.’
Even though I’m not a believer, it’s good to be reminded of the
unpredictability of life. One minute you’re on top of the world, everything is
going brilliantly, the next you’ve fallen under a bus. The pre-landing
announcement on Air
Pakistan
goes like this :‘Ladies and gentlemen, the captain wishes to announce
that in a few minutes, insh’allah, we shall land.’ Insh’allah, a reminder to
never get above yourself (hang on, maybe Yorkshire, Ireland and Islam have more
in common than we think).
‘Ah! Your family is from
Ireland
’ says the woman who owns the chip shop in
Chapeltown. ‘We love the Irish in my country – all the aid workers in
Sierra Leone
are Irish.’ She
worked her way through college while running the chip shop and bringing up her
children, and studying at night behind the counter. People would come in and see
her pile of books on law and sociology and start telling her their problems.
Soon she was dispensing legal advice with the fish and chips. Her fame spread
and people came from far and wide – ‘Cod and chips wrapped please. And my
landlord wants to put up the rent again, what can I do?’
‘You’re a writer’ she says, ‘I’ll tell you my story and you write a
script based on it.’ ‘Why not?’ I reply, ‘Desmonds was set in a
barber shop in Brixton, why not a sitcom set in a fish and chip shop in
Chapeltown?’ We laugh. We say we’ll definitely do it. But she’ll never find the
time. She’s very rarely behind the counter these days - she lectures, she
continues to study, she serves on committees, attends conferences, organises
volunteers – she has no time to write scripts with me. A pity, her story is a
good one. There are lots of good stories here.
I tell her about the sign in Millenium Square that warns against la-de-da
skating. She roars with laughter. ‘That is so Leeds!’
‘What’s it all about, this determination not to be impressed by anything
flash? I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, it’s just… sorry.’
I stand aside to let a couple of hooded teenagers buy chips.
‘In fact it’s a good thing in many ways, but I can’t help feeling it’s
got out of hand. If there was a huge party, a really fantastic do, and every
town in Britain was invited to it, I can just imagine Newcastle, Birmingham,
Glasgow, Bristol, Swansea, Liverpool and Sheffield and all the others joining in
the fun - drinking and dancing and having a laugh together, and Leeds would be
standing in the corner on it’s own, clutching a tin of beer, saying “Well that
lot may have been taken in, but I’m not falling for it.”’
One of the teenagers gives me a scornful look. His mate turns to the
woman who owns the chip shop and says ‘What’s he on about?’ She shrugs, who
knows? They take their chips and go.
She says ‘Listen, if you want to see people letting go and enjoying
themselves, then come to our carnival.’
‘I’ll see you there, insh’allah.’
Salaam aleikum, aleikum, salaam.
Peace and blessings be upon your head.
Jah Rastafari!
Ah, bless!
Remember this is Chapeltown.
As I’m cooking her tea, my
daughter skips around the kitchen, loudly chanting her new catchphrase.
‘NO LA-DE-DA SKATING! NO LA-DE-DA SKATING!’
‘Will you please sit down?’
‘NO LA-DE-DA…’
‘And stop shouting.’
‘SKATING! NO LA-DE-DA…’
Her mother says ‘Now look what
you’ve done.’
How we laughed at Barnsley. At
trendy London architect Will Alsop’s dream of turning it into a Yorkshire
version of a Tuscan hill town. The latest plan, according to the Yorkshire Post,
is a scheme to shine white light through a prism into the sky. This would
reflect off the clouds and form a halo, epitomising, apparently, hope for the
future and symbolising the change that will be seen in Barnsley over the next 30
years. We don’t hold with that kind of nonsense in Leeds. We call a spade a
spade. We know what we call Barnsley too, and it certainly isn’t a Tuscan hill
town. A few years ago, as Leeds became more trendy, an advertising agency
tried to label it ‘The Milan Of The North.’ Something to do with the elegant
shopping arcades in the centre, apparently. It never caught on though.
People just looked bemused, or laughed and said ‘ You what?’ Il Milano di Norte! Who are you trying to kid, sunshine?
Remember This Is Leeds.’
My daughter is drawing a
picture. People skating. None of them seem to be smiling. I sit down
beside her. ‘I want you to be happy, that’s the most important thing in this
life’ I say. ‘If you enjoy doing something, and it doesn’t harm anyone, then you
go ahead and do it sweetie. Don’t worry about what other people might say, or
whether they think you’re getting above yourself. I wasted so much time worrying
about that kind of nonsense, I don’t want you to make the same
mistake.’ She looks up for a moment, gives me a quizzical look.
‘What I’m saying is, when you grow up,
if you want to do La-De-Da skating, that’s alright by me.’