ROGER: I do wonder if Izzy has ever thought about my age. She’s never
come up to me and said, “My God, you’re old!” but she must be conscious of
it. I am, because Izzy was born when I was 53, which was also the age my
father died. He worked on the docks in Liverpool, and, like a whole swathe
of men back then, he died young. When my dad died I was 19, and thought 53
was quite old. When Izzy was born I still felt quite young — you can imagine
the confusion I was feeling. So Izzy was special for a lot of reasons: she
was my youngest child, my first daughter — I already had three sons — and
born at a period in my life when I was giving a lot of deep thought to time
passing.
There’s a saying among poets that “A pram in the hall means the loss of a
hundred sonnets”, and I was worried that having a child in my fifties would
have an adverse affect on my writing. But it actually worked in the opposite
way. Izzy gave me a new lease of life, and the things she said and did as a
child helped me see the world in a different light. She inspired me to
write, and there’s been more poetry since. And I think my best work has been
later on in life. In fact, one of my most requested poems at readings,
Cinders, is about Izzy. It talks about the time we took her to see a
pantomime up north — my wife’s from Yorkshire — and me carrying her back to
the car in the snow and finding it hard to get her belted up in her car seat
and suddenly feeling old, like her grandfather, and wondering if I’d ever be
around to warn her against the pantomimes and Prince Charmings of life and
see her dressed for the ball. Would I ever have enough time with her?
Izzy was great growing up. Her brothers were always rushing around and
knocking things down, but Izzy was always much quieter, much more delicate,
and most of the time she preferred to play on her own. She’s always been
quite a creative person, and in the last few years her artistic ability has
really developed. Although she’s very messy and spreads her work out through
the house like an amoeba, I get a real kick from coming downstairs and
seeing her working on her portfolio. She never really comes to me for ideas
or guidance with her work though. I’ll suggest things, but she’s very
strong-willed and will tell me if she doesn’t think my advice is right. A
lot of the time I won’t understand where she’s going with her art — she’ll
be collecting barbed wire, bottles and rubbish, and I’ll wonder why. But
when she assembles and paints it all, everything comes together.
I’d love to have done what Izzy’s doing now. I’ve always been interested in
drawing and painting, and wanted to study art when I was at school. But back
then you either did art or you did Latin. My parents were from a generation
that was very practical — they wanted me to do something that would help
society in some way — and said to me: “What’s the use of doing art unless
you’re very good?” So I went to Hull to do French and geography; I’d failed
at English lit simply because I wasn’t interested in the books on the
syllabus. I couldn’t read Thomas Hardy at all and prepared for my exams at
the last minute, so I just scraped into university.
I first started writing when I was 18 or 19, in my first year at Hull.
I was able to write anywhere back then. Philip Larkin was the university
librarian at the time, and funnily enough he was actually the sub-warden at
my hall of residence, because at the time he had just arrived at Hull and
hadn’t yet been given his own accommodation. He was this toppling tower of
tweed.
I was aware of him as a poet and was wondering how I could best approach him.
In the end I sent him some of my own poems, and he very kindly responded to
them, so he was an early influence on me.
If Izzy did write poetry, I think it would be very different from my own.
She’s a good writer, very fluent, but I wonder if she’d be influenced by me
or not, because she has her own tastes and her own inspirations. Sometimes,
though, I feel Izzy’s a lot like me. She has my focus and artistic side,
intellectualises about a lot of things and has a bit of a secretive nature
too. She also has gifts that I never had. When I was younger I found it very
difficult to express myself in large groups, so writing helped me get all my
thoughts down on paper and I made sense of things that way. But Izzy has
this natural grace and beauty. I like to think that with all my kids, the
good things about them come from me, but I can’t take credit for those two!
I’m at an age now where I’ve got the freedom to do the things I wanted to when
I was in my thirties and forties. When I was younger I wanted to sacrifice
everything for my art. I didn’t want to marry and certainly didn’t want
children.
I I always thought it would be a solitary life for me, that I’d be like
Rimbaud and Baudelaire and live life to the full, really suffering for my
poetry. I wrote poems like Let Me Die a Youngman’s Death when I was in my
early twenties and afraid of being swallowed up in a life of boring
suburbia; I used to take the piss out of the sort of area and the type of
house I live in now. I wanted to live fast and die young, and I managed to
fail on both counts, but if I’d known back then that I would manage to get
to my seventies and have four children, I actually think I would have been
delighted.
IZZY: It’s only been in the last couple of years that I’ve realised
what my dad actually is. I always thought it was normal, Dad being a poet,
but as I’ve got older I’ve realised I’ve grown up around a lot of really
creative people, and that words have always been very important in our
house. Most of Dad’s friends are well-known poets like Brian Patten, Michael
Rosen and Carol Ann Duffy, so doing a creative subject like art has always
seemed natural to me. Even now, Dad still gets to work with some really cool
people. He did something with Jarvis Cocker recently, who was like, “Hey,
Rog,” and I was just standing there thinking, “That’s my dad talking to
Jarvis Cocker — they’re mates!”
Some of my earliest memories of Dad are from our summer holidays in Mallorca.
That was the only time I ever really got to spend with him, because at home
he was always in his study writing. We’d go out for a meal or a drink most
nights, and because it was a long walk back to our villa he would always
carry me on his shoulders. He’d point out all the stars and constellations
in the sky and talk to me about his dad, who I never knew. He would tell me
how strange it was that years ago his dad would have been under exactly the
same sky, looking up at the stars like we were, and that even though he
wasn’t alive any more, he’d always be looking down on us.
