Programme Details
The Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion kicks off the new season of The Verb with a memoir of a childhood cut short when his mother is involved in a terrible accident which leaves her in a coma. Andrew talks about In The Blood with Ian McMillan, and reveals why he decided to turn to prose to write this extensive and emotional tribute to a post war childhood interrupted.
Also on the programme, Tim Lott announces the winner of The Verb's First Time Novelist Competition.
The writer Tahmima Anam starts a four part series exploring Bengali writing in translation, as a new exhibition of the great Rabindranath Tagore opens at the British Museum.
The Hungarian poet and translator George Gumery reviews Liquidation - the latest novel by Nobel prize winner Imre Kertesz. At one hundred and twenty seven pages, it is a tour de force of style, exploring death and identity in unsettling and powerful ways.
And the performance poet Rhian Edwards chants a dance macabre in a special commission for The Verb.
The Verb, with Ian McMillan at 9.30pm here on BBC Radio 3.
Producer: Ariane Koek
Additional Information
- Liquidation by Imre Kertesz is published by Harvill Secker
- In The Blood by Andrew Motion is published by Faber and Faber
- Tahmima Anam introduced us to the work of Shamsur Rahman
- The Art of Peace: Paintings by The Poet Tagore is at the British Museum in London until 12 November
- The winner of The Verb's First Time Novelist Competition is Phil Goodland with his entry The Paper Cup Saloon
The Paper Cup Saloon
In the half light of the early morning, the factory sits squarely in the landscape like some disremembered fort in a far off outpost, tall gates bowed and rusting but still firmly locked against the barbarian hordes, whenever they might arrive through the darkness and the fog. I have my own set of keys, and after springing the padlock to let myself into the yard, my first job of the day is to push the gates back do they're open for the morning shift which comes dribbling in just before six, many of them tired and hungover.
I get to the factory around five, half an hour before I'm supposed to be there. The night watch man, a compact and surly Cornishman named Mickey Rees, stays until five thirty and I'll spend my first half hour with him. He can't understand why I'm always early.
"Five thirty you start!" he says, pointing angrily at his watch. "You're giving these fuckers half an hour of your time every day for free. If I were you, I'd still be in bed enjoying my freedom," he continues. "One hand on my girlfriend's titty, the other holding one of these."
And he waves around one of his foul smelling Belgian cigarillos as if conducting an imaginary orchestra. I've been at the factory for over three weeks now, and I've never seen him without one. Last Saturday I spotted him in town, and even though he had a heavy bag of shopping in each hand, sure enough he had one of his Belgian specials plugged into his lips. He moved down the High Street quickly, almost contemptuously, head erect, eyes straightforward, stumpy legs in their clumpy cowboy boots reaching for their longest stride. Other shoppers parted, forced off the pavement by an invisible bow wave that he pushed before him as he advanced full steam upon Woolworths. I didn't say hello then, because outside work I doubt we'd have anything to say to one another.
Mickey will not invite me inside his shed unless it is raining. Then he fidgets nervously and plays with his lighter, glancing past me to the door as if he expects someone to come knocking at any moment. If I'm lucky he'll make me a cup of instant Nescafe that's too hot to drink, so it burns through the disposable cup, a huge bag of which he has 'borrowed' from the staff canteen. There's only one chair inside the shed anyway, and his portable black and white TV will be chattering away at a distorted volume, which always makes me tense so early in the morning. It's cramped and stinky too, the air thick with the accumulated haze of several hours worth of tobacco smoke, coffee steam and farts. So despite a dawn chill and slight drizzle, we both prefer to be outside. Being outside draws us closer together. We talk with greater ease. We talk about things men usually avoid except when drunk or off guard, like our hopes for the future and the regrets in our past.
It is I who initiated these conversational intimacies, for as anyone who knows me will vouch, I have little time for small talk. It may be un English of me, but I like to cut straight to the big issues, find out what really makes a person tick. At first Mickey was wary of my directness and suspicious of my motives. He answered my questions with grunts and sudden shakes of his head; he could barely bring himself to look me in the eye. He couldn't figure out what I was doing so far from London , recently employed as the janitor at the small factory that he has worked in for over a decade. I could tell he distrusted and disliked my middle class accent too, but there was nothing much I could do about that - we've all got to confront prejudice. But with persistence I was able to win him over, coaxing him into the open like some shy animal. He began to realise that I didn't put my questions to him as challenges or veiled insults, not as attempts to pry or patronise, but out of a genuine interest in his condition. The morning I knew I'd finally won him over was when he started calling me 'Tubs'. I am a big man, six two and twenty two stone - larger than life but not large enough to avoid the indignities of life - and I've been called much worse. 'Tubs' I like, as it makes me sound like a jazz musician or a professional gambler. So far we have discussed work, families, sex, phobias, life after death, life beyond the stars, race relations, political corruption, pollution, the class system, the tax system, the metric system, law and order, hospitals, country music and God.
