They lock you up
Alan Smith finds Philip Larkin goes down well with prisoners in his
literature class
It's a pity that Philip Larkin couldn't have done a few years in prison. He
would have fitted in really well and probably enjoyed himself. The guys in my
literature class have really taken to him. It might be the direct, no-nonsense
sense of language, the booze, the porn and having three or four women on the go,
or perhaps it's just the courage and the honesty. They like his anger, the way
in which he jumps up and down with it in Sunny Prestatyn and This Be The Verse.
There is after all something, unmistakably, of the lifer about Larkin.
Not that he would have had too smooth a ride. Jason has the sense to pull me up
when I'm going on about The Whitsun Weddings and I can see that he and Larkin
might well have had a brief but telling exchange back up on the wing. "All
that arrow shower crap at the end, Al, it don't mean a thing; not after all the
sneering he's done in the middle, manky little gett needs a bit of a dig."
Words mean something in here. Larkin would have had to watch his step with the
racism as well. The guys won't have it. There might well have been a date with
destiny in the showers.
When we read Ambulances there is no mistaking the real chill that Larkin puts
into the air. "Very unpleasant, that," says Jason, catching in his own
voice some of Larkin's sombre glee. "Don't like to think of
death like that, just being busy, being dead ordinary, in the street. Go off
your head thinking like that."
"He was off his head," says Alistair. "See him on the telly?"
"That wasn't him."
"I know it wasn't. I know it was a film. You mug." Alistair shakes his
head. "Bottle of sherry for breakfast, course he was a bit off key."
"Anyway," says Jason, "he takes a delight in it, doesn't he, the
miserable bastard?"
"Not in An Arundel Tomb," says Alistair, flicking through the pages to
find the poem.
"Yeah," John says. "They fuck you up your mum and dad, that's not
right is it?"
"Well," says Jason, "I can't say it is, can I? My mum and dad
have been married 30 years. Brilliant they are."
Alistair looks up from the book and says, "Your mum's your best friend when
you're in here."
"Mine is," says Lee. "Every visit and she's here. Still calls me
her little soldier. I try and tell her: I say, Mam, I'm doing life, but it makes
no difference. She's even stitched name tags in my clothes. I feel a right
dick."
"What will survive of us is love," says Alistair. "Right at the
end, page 46." He waits for us to find the place. "That's true, that,
I reckon. That's what he really thinks, isn't it?"
Eric reaches into his mouth, pulls out his false teeth and puts them on the
table. There they are, his four front teeth. Something has to be said and they
are all looking at me. I am the teacher, after all. "For fuck's sake,
Eric," I tell him, feeling at a bit of a loss.
"Every night when I take my teeth out," says Eric, "every morning
when I put them in, I think of my dad. He knocked my own ones out for me when I
was a kid."
"Man hands on misery to man," says Malky, in his soft Glaswegian
whisper. Eric's teeth glisten on the table. Malky glances at them. It deepens
like a coastal shelf, he assures us, smiling.
Alan Smith reprinted from The Guardian, Tuesday September 16 2003
