The Water Signs Location Tour: Morecambe Bay

February 4, 2019June 2, 2020 admin

Our train pulled into Morecambe Station just after 2pm. It was raining, so we took shelter in the waiting room in the hope it was a passing shower.

Twenty minutes later we had read every leaflet and transport timetable of interest, and the rain had only got heavier.

Keen to ditch our bags, and with empty stomachs, we started out towards the boarding house. I was uplifted by the smell of salt in the air. My gaze ever-turned towards the watery horizon, where jagged hills loomed in the distance. The bay was so much smaller than I remember it being in my childhood years – a reminder of how perspective changes between the ages of seven and thirty-seven.

Once we’d spent some time mooning over the Art Deco dreaminess of The Midland Hotel, we ambled along in the wild and wet to our B&B just off the sea front. The hotel turned out to be managed by a good-natured Glaswegian who carried my bags to our room even though we had paid a modest sum for our board.

He asked what brought us to the bay. I wanted to tell him I was a writer. That I’d spent many a childhood Sunday in Frontierland – the theme park that was now a Morrisons supermarket, just around the corner from where we were standing. I wanted to tell him I often write poems about the ocean, and that I would probably write a few while I was here.

But I didn’t.

Talking about what I’m writing is always so beyond me in the early stages of a project. There are so many questions that I don’t have the answers to at that point. So I gave the manager an awkward smile and said ‘we are just away for a few days.’ My husband smiled and corroborated my story. He’s good like that.

The next day, we awoke to a view of the bay that was much cheerier than the night before. Friday’s dusk had been moody, smudged in charcoal, which somehow made it even more miraculous that trails of water managed to glitter across the sand like stardust.

That morning though, the Irish Sea was a blend of aventurine green and stonewashed blue. A storm of seagulls cycloned above it whilst the lines of distant hillsides, like the spines of sleeping giants, hunched their backs against the sky.

We swiftly dressed for breakfast, which we were informed was served between 8.30 and 9am. When alone in the room we laughed over the strict timings, though I accept it is the perogative of boarding houses to set less-flexible meal times than the lavish hotels. I’ve worked the hotel breakfast shift myself and know they don’t have to pay staff just for the serving, but for the setting and cleaning. The washing and drying, and the setting for the next meal.

When we went downstairs, we found we’d been given by far the best table in the breakfast room. As I sat down, I thought how lucky this was, especially after arriving the day before to find we had been given an ocean-view room. It wasn’t until I’d devoured a substantial pile of scrambled eggs that I discovered the source of our good fortune.

When booking the room, my email signature had betrayed the fact that I am the author of two novels. I had completely forgotten that signature was even there. Not surprising given my last novel was published a good 18 months ago and in any case, I didn’t think anyone read email signatures. I was wrong.

Whilst I was contemplating a second glass of orange juice, the lady who co-owned the hotel approached me, saying: ‘You’re the author, aren’t you?’

It took me a few moments to work out how she could possibly know this. I replied that I was, and explained a little about my projects when she asked. I promised to send her my poetry if I wrote any about Morecambe. She promised to look up my books and was delighted to have me as a guest.

This, of course, meant all the conversational side-stepping I’d done on arrival had been pointless. I had given myself away as a writer before I had even arrived.

After breakfast we walked down to the sea front so my husband could take in the air and watch me hunt the foreshore for sea glass, rocks and shells. As I looked across the bay, some of the hills in the distance looked like ghosts in the mist. As though I was looking back through time at apparitions of hillsides that once stood thousands of years ago. Before erosion and tectonic shift moulded the landscape into the rugged beauty on offer today.

Right then I decided I would write a poem about this place, and, when I got the chance, maybe update that email signature.

A poem about Morecambe Bay is included in Helen’s bestselling poetry debut: Water Signs.

For tips on writing and publishing your own poetry, tune into The Poetrygram: a poetry podcast hosted by Helen featuring news, views and prompts to use in your own writing.

Movie Memoirs: Jaws

January 4, 2019January 4, 2019 admin

It’s still a family joke. That when our Dad came home from his shift at the bingo one night in 1986, I marched up to him and declared: ‘Daddy, that’s a very naughty fish.’ It took Dad a moment to understand why his weirdo four-year old was being more weird than usual. Then the images flooding out of the TV set caught his attention and he realized I had flicked the channel over to an early evening showing of Jaws.

Though stated in somewhat rudimentary terms, my opinion of sharks hasn’t much changed since that night. Perhaps because we lived so close to the ocean and it was easy for my overactive, pre-teen mind to dream that our house had sunk to the bottom of the Irish sea, and that a shark would crash through my bedroom window at any moment. I was even suspicious of swimming pools for a time and that was before I sat down to a night in with Jaws 3 on DVD, a six-pack of diet coke and an over-sized Milky Bar (never let it be said I don’t know how to party).

Whatever the reason, as a rule, I still keep my toes out of the ocean with the exception of last July when I visited Cornwall with my in-laws. We were staying near St Ive’s during a heat wave and thus paddling ankle-deep in the cool Celtic Sea was relieving. The relief evaporated however when the week after our visit a 9-foot blue shark was spotted circling the bay of St Ive’s, right where I’d been paddling.

For anyone who wants to explain that the likelihood of the shark attacking me is low, you should know a shark would not have to attack me to kill me. My phobia is so intense, he or she could simply wave a fin above sea level and the sight of that alone would be enough to stop my heart.

Over the years I have tried to get this fear out of my system. I’ve written articles about films featuring the ocean, conducted in-depth research into the making of Jaws to remind myself its just a movie (and a book) and made videos about the importance of Jaws in the cinematic canon. I’ve even written poetry about how it feels to look into the black eye of a white shark but still Susan Backlinie’s screams echo in my ears.

Some of my friends have suggested I go cage diving with the creatures to overcome my fright – I refer you to the earlier paragraph about shark fins.

Although I have failed to overcome my fear during the course of the last thirty-three years, it has become a part of who I am and has spurred a fascination with all things below the surface. That fascination has prompted me to create a whole host of things I might never have created otherwise. So, what I’m saying is, fear isn’t always bad and I’ve decided I don’t really want to get over my fear of sharks.

I’m happy to stay out of their natural habitat, leave them to their bone-crunching business and admire them from just far enough away to be able to say that sharks are really quite majestic creatures. And to marvel at the idea that in some ancient civilizations, these monsters of the big screen were worshiped as gods.

Helen explores her relationship with the ocean further in her bestselling poetry debut: Water Signs.

The Water Signs Location Tour: The Solway Firth

December 27, 2018August 5, 2021 admin

I was raised on the edge of the Eden River, at the point where her mouth opens out to the Solway Firth. The Solway is a fault line, marking the brink where two continents once kissed and swallowed an ancient ocean – the Iapetus, a long-lost ancestor of the Atlantic. On a still day, this saline mirror reflects the jagged lines of Scotland, where martyrs were once bound to rocks and drowned, and the English saltmarshes on the other side where the last ammonites laid down to die.

On this windless November afternoon, when the frosts have yet to scratch their nails down the backs of the distant hillsides, you can almost smell the chill in the air. But despite the coldness of this landscape, and its cruelty, despite the firth’s deadly quicksand and the way it hold hands with its radioactive sister: the Irish Sea, even now there is a feverish singing in my blood. A siren call that lures me back to this shoreline.

Like these tides I know of old, I will always return.

Nearby in St Michael’s graveyard, the corpses of Georgian smugglers who pirated brandy and tobacco are buried beneath the Yew trees. Their ears unable to listen to the bells chime in the church tower. Bells stolen from Scotland by English raiders. Bells that sang to me on playtimes and lunchtimes when I was a student at Bowness-on-Solway – a school that stands just a hop, skip and a jump from the skeletons of dead buccaneers.

My old school gate is an Ouroboros; the end and the beginning of Hadriain’s Wall – an eighty-mile frontier where rebels and Romans shot bronze arrows through each other’s hearts.

Here is division, threat and death, and for the time I lived here that is a truth I was never allowed to forget.

Hiking the periphery of the firth, twenty-five years after I left this landscape behind, I watch eroding earth flirt with the dislocated jaw of the estuary. I mark progress by the hazard signs posted every half mile. Warning strangers about the merciless tides that grip and twist the Eden until she no longer looks like her true self. I am reacquainted with the silence that lives here on the outer rim. The only sound: the intermittent rattle of trucks clattering over cattle grids.

When dusk closes in, mauve clouds threaten to smother and in my bones I know I wouldn’t resist. Through the mist, an invisible hand inks the silhouettes of bare trees on the horizon. The only other witness: a creaking gate the farmer refuses to oil. He’d rather save the fuel for his furnace. For the day the hearth wolfs down his last block of fire wood, when he cannot bear to chop hawthorn bark with chapped hands in the snow.

While we walk through the last shred of sunlight, chased by the icy breath of the coming solstice memories wash up on the foreshore like fragments of old pottery and river glass, and with them some dead bodies.

Looking back over my shoulder at the expanse of silver water, I think about the yawning void between information and wisdom. By the age of ten, when my parents left Cumbria for Yorkshire, the universe had taught me everything I need to know. It took me another quarter of a century to truly understand what to do with that gift.

A poem about the Solway Firth is included in Helen’s category bestselling poetry debut: Water Signs.

The Solway Firth also features in Helen’s essay: My Lessons From Lockerbie.

Becoming a Poet: My Journey from Source to Mouth

November 12, 2018February 17, 2021 admin2 Comments

Yesterday, I took this photograph by Cod Beck, a small river that runs through my home town of Thirsk. Twenty years ago, at the age of seventeen, I used to sit by this river and fill notebook after notebook with poems. The flowing of the water aiding the flowing of the ink.

The poetry was terrible. I can assure you this is not false modesty. It was the typical stuff you’d expect from a Sixth Form poet about death and the fleeting nature of youth. But I enjoyed writing it. It was a safe space, a blank space, set apart from the rest of my somewhat stormy life.

Shortly before my eighteenth birthday I stopped going down to the river to write poetry. I had my heart broken for the first time. It was broken cruelly and with very little room for closure on my part. After that, I couldn’t bring myself to write poetry. I couldn’t find the path back to the vulnerability that poetry demands, and I grieved for the precious, unquantifiable thing I knew I’d lost.

I still wrote. Nothing could prevent that, it’s a compulsion. But I wrote other things. Surface things. Articles. Blogs. Reviews. Non-fiction books. Nothing that risked revealing too much about the person behind the pen. Eventually, I wrote two romance novels that were as dry and sarcastic as I was. I was proud of them, and I still am but there is a certain evasive nature to them. My characters are all rather insistent on dodging precisely the same thing the author had dodged for many years: true intimacy, being seen by anybody for who you really are.

Ushering the characters in my romance novels back into an open-hearted lifestyle however, was the first step in me changing my own course and achieving the same. True healing began in the writing of those books, along with a conscious decision to start trusting others in a way I hadn’t for two decades. Within the safety net of a deeply supportive relationship, I was able to explore my romantic and sensual life again and through that self-exploration, I found inspiration for new stories, and the desire to write poetry once more.

In the year just gone I have had my poetry published in several journals and magazines. I’ve performed my poetry, out loud – my whole body shaking with fear – at several poetry events and I stepped in to lead a Poetry Masterclass at Keats House as part of my role at City Lit college. I have allowed myself to be seen. This stepping out of the shadows culminated last week when I published my first poetry chapbook and to my great surprise it topped two Amazon categories in the first few days and has settled itself at the top of the chart for hot new releases in Women’s Poetry.

The reviews have been dizzyingly positive. Did these readers somehow know, somehow see? That the page was a veil and behind it I was just a human woman at once both terrified and exhilarated? Did they sense that publishing this book was the bravest thing I’ve ever done in my life?

Last night I returned to the river. To watch the ducks paddle and squabble over nothing in the early dusk. There, I thought about how the last twenty years had led up to this moment of becoming and how even though life’s river winds and bends in ways we would not choose or expect, there is hope to be had in the idea that all those many currents are carrying us to the place we’re meant to be.

My first poetry chapbook Water Signs is available now. To purchase your copy, click here.

To listen to me read some poems from this and other collections, click here.

A hike to Heptonstall, visiting Sylvia

April 9, 2018April 10, 2018 admin

For our second wedding anniversary the Hubster and I spent a night away in Hebden Bridge, Calderdale.

Until my better half mentioned it, I hadn’t given any thought to the fact that Plath was buried in the next village. I was too distracted by the glint of the canal and the gritty texture of the buildings. But my husband knows Plath is one of my literary heroes (it’s no coincidence I wrote my own story about an Esther in New York) and he had a premeditated pilgrimage to Plath’s grave penciled in the following day.

I’m using the term ‘hike’ in the title very lightly. The walk from Hebden Bridge to Heptonstall is not at all far, but since Hebden sits in the bottom of a valley, the walk is all uphill. About half way, you’ll pass the small Methodist graveyard pictured above that overlooks the village below.

It dawned on me as I walked towards Plath’s burial site that for all I’d read of and about her, I had no idea why she was buried in Heptonstall. Hughes was from Mytholmroyd which is very close to Heptonstall and his parents lived in the parish. Sylvia Plath did visit her in-laws just after she married Hughes but I’m struggling to find any deeper connections with Heptonstall and Plath herself (if you know anymore please tweet me). Plath’s burial place seems more related to her husband than her own identity, an issue which has caused a great deal of anger among fans of the famous novelist and poet.

The churchyard at Heptonstall actually houses two separate churches. One, a ruin that began decaying after a major gale in 1847 and a new church built to replace the one that was all but destroyed by the weather.

Some of the remaining gravestones lying on what would have been the floor of the church are still legible even though the church was founded in the 13th Century. The ornate nature of the typography is just breathtaking.

Even if the main point of your visit to Heptonstall is to visit Plath’s grave, it would be criminal to pass so close to this beautiful relic and not take a few minutes to roam around what remains of its former glory.

In a separate graveyard, near Back Lane, you will find Sylvia Plath’s grave. Don’t do what me and the Hubster did and rock up without any information as to the grave’s whereabouts and hope for the best. You will end up, as we did, praying you have enough battery left on your phones to bring up the stone’s precise location.

Finding Plath’s grave is actually very easy if you’re organised. Open the gate and walk straight ahead with the gravestones on your right. When you get about three quarters of the way across the cemetery, look right and you should see a small trail through the grass, walked by many others who have come to visit the site. It will lead you to what you’re looking for.

Alongside the flowers brought by other visitors, someone had left a small pot containing pens and paper. Something had been written on the paper but it seemed inappropriate to read it. Even if it had been left in a public place, it was likely a very personal message.

The epitaph on Plath’s grave is a quote from Hindu scriptures, though it reminds me very much of the kind of imagery seen in poems like Lady Lazarus.

Looking back on these photographs now, it seems perhaps a little odd that I spent a portion of my wedding anniversary in a cemetery. The Hubster and I are both big Buffy fans but this may have been taking things a bit too far. Still, I’m glad I visited Plath’s resting place. Her poetry has, on so many occasions, given me strength, perspective and solace. Though perhaps few would think to turn to her verse for any of those things.

I was struck by a strange sense of peace to see for my own eyes where her body ended up, and there was a comfort afforded to know for myself just how beautiful a place it was.