Of Barguests and Breadcrumbs - a tribute to Helen Sant

It’s a sad occasion which brings me back to the Soapbox after an overly long hiatus. The death of a co-worker inevitably brings forth a morass of emotions, and of course the writer in me chooses to process that in the only way I really can – by writing about it. At the same time, setting fingers to keyboard has a feeling of the futile about it – almost, of self-indulgence. Who am I, after all, to write this tribute? There are dozens of people, in York and elsewhere, who knew Helen better than I did. Family, close friends, other co-workers on her many projects in the literary, musical and heritage circles in which Helen moved. My words might as well be breadcrumbs, compared with the pearls that they have to offer.

But write I must, and I shall. And I hope these meagre words do justice to a fabulous creative spirit and a deeply valued co-worker, and that for those of my readers who knew Helen (which I suspect is most of you), something in here will strike a chime of recognition at a sad time.

Since I’ve mentioned breadcrumbs, let’s start with these – or rather with the trail of reflective glass balls set into the pavements of central York. They were put there in 2005, a year before I arrived in the city, as part of a storytelling trail designed to guide children through the history and folklore of the medieval city. Accompanying the trail was a rather beautiful book that I well remember being sold in cafés and indie outlets around the city, including my favourite restaurant of the time. York Breadcrumbs (“Tales of adventure that trace a path around York”) was co-written and illustrated by a group of local writers. The book itself is out of print, but you can still pick up second-hand copies from Amazon, and follow the trail through the streets of York for yourself.

Helen Sant was one of the contributing authors. I met her very soon after my absorption into York’s literary scene. I knew her first as the small, striking, slightly Gothic-looking lass who worked on storytelling projects alongside another of the city’s legends, the late great Adrian Spendlow. Before long I had been spellbound by her translations of medieval legend into the language of today. She led ghost walks, under the pseudonyms Gothic Molly and The Yorkshire Storyteller. Even better, hers were no mere trap for the tourist pound – her ghost tours were bespoke affairs, the venues and the material tailored to the interests and enthusiasms of the audience. I still get shivers when I remember her telling the tale of the Barguest – the malevolent phantom hound – underneath the arches of Lendal Bridge, to a tour party made up of many of my oldest friends. I also vividly remember her taking my writing group around York, telling us all about the benign spirit who haunts the wings of the Theatre Royal, amongst other, seemingly endless tales.

Helen became a regular at The Speakers’ Corner, the spoken word open mic that I hosted until 2018. She would use the open mic to try out snippets of new stories, gleaned from near and far, and re-told with an idiosyncratic Yorkshire spin. Eventually she joined me as a host. I think we shared hosting duties for about five years, though in my head, it seems much longer. Helen was very much part of the furniture – as inextricably linked with York as the outline of the Minster against the skyline, or the scent of sugared chocolate that fills the air when the wind is in the right direction.

One of the curses of the coronavirus pandemic was the way it separated people from one another. We got into the habit of Not Seeing People. After Speakers’ Corner closed its doors for the last time in 2018, the places where Helen and I would coincide became fewer, but they still happened regularly. It didn’t seem as if successive lockdowns had removed her from my life; even if in-person events had ceased to take place, Helen would still post regularly on social media – vignettes about the day-to-day dramas of her neighbours, or news of her ventures into playwriting, performing (when restrictions allowed) and, more recently, her excursions into stand-up comedy. There was a sense of continuity there – that “when all this is over” there would be plenty of opportunities to enjoy each other’s creativity once again. So when the news came, that this wasn’t going to happen, it truly felt as if it wasn’t just a friend and a collaborator who had gone, it was a part of the spirit of the city too.

Church of England funerals can be uncomfortable affairs when the person being remembered was not part of the worshipping community, a stranger to the minister officiating at the ceremony. I have no idea whether this particular funeral was anything like what Helen would have chosen for herself, had she been in a position to choose. Somehow, though, it felt appropriate. The vicar had clearly done her homework, spending time with family and friends and “tuning in” to the memories of what made Helen special. The service itself had a minimum of formality to it – a shared recitation of the 23rd psalm and the Our Father was as religious as it got – and instead of hymns, we had the pleasure and privilege of being able to listen to a recording of Helen herself, singing to a jazz-piano arrangement of The Stray Cat Strut. She was buried next to her father, on a picture-postcard early summer’s day, in the grounds of St John the Baptist church, Adel – a lovingly maintained old Norman church – amongst nose-high grasses and cow-parsley, with a choir of wrens in the trees singing their little hearts out in tribute. As a memorial to someone with such a sense of her connectedness to the earth and to the turn of the centuries, it all felt fitting.

Old Norman churches were very much Helen’s aesthetic. Probably my favourite memories of Helen are those of the times we worked together on our combined poetry performance and storytelling show, Telling the Fairytale. Its first outing was at Bar Lane Studios (as was) in 2011, followed by a bigger show during the York Literature Festival of March 2013 in the decidedly atmospheric surroundings of Holy Trinity Church, Goodramgate – a gem of a place that you’d think had materialised right out of a medieval ghost story. My first poetry collection, A Long Way to Fall, was launched that year, and the folklore and fairytales that inspired many of the poems in that collection worked beautifully alongside Helen’s marvellous storytelling. I remember the box pews, our breath forming condensation-clouds around us in the chill of the air inside the church, our set lists and performance notes scattered about the pulpit. This was Helen in her element, treading in the footsteps of generations gone before – imagining their ghosts, perhaps, stirring themselves awake to listen spellbound to her tales.

I had completely forgotten, until the funeral day prompted me to look back at the Telling the Fairytale set list, that one of the stories Helen included in her performance was one of her own devising, about an enchanted shop somewhere off the Shambles in the heart of York, and a customer who falls in love with the magical lass behind the counter. He leaves without declaring himself, but when he goes back to find the shop again and offer his heart to the fair maiden, he cannot find the place. It has disappeared, gone in a breath of magic, leaving him wondering if it was all a dream, or if he’ll ever see it – and her – again. Of course, I can barely do justice to the story here. It really needs Helen to tell the tale, to weave the magic. But it occurs to me that having Helen vanish from our lives is not altogether dissimilar to what the hapless protagonist of that story must have felt, when he realised what he had allowed to slip through his fingers. Helen brought a little spark of magic to York; and now that the magic has worked its spell, the whole city feels diminished by her absence.

Thank you, Helen, for the joy of your words and the quiet delight of your presence. We’ll miss you.



(The accompanying photo shows Helen and me and was taken as part of the publicity material for Telling the Fairytale)

(If you want to know more about the York Breadcrumbs trail there is a great recent article here).

Iain Banks: RIP

It's perhaps a tad unusual for a poetry blogger to be writing a memorial to the life of one of the UK's most unusual prose writers. But the sad loss of Iain Banks, who died on 9th June aged 59, has got me thinking about why the poetry I write sounds the way it does. The man's influence got into my writing, I think, more deeply than I ever realised.

I've been obsessed with stories and storytelling all my life, from long before I ever started writing poetry. There was a rather fantastical element to my favourite reading matter – fairy tales, Victorian novels, and Tolkien – and I have to confess that when I was younger I pretty much avoided contemporary fiction altogether. I was writing, all this time: fairy stories of my own, some of them of epic proportion. I used them as allegories – spaces where I could get to grips with the darker aspects of the world around me, to try to make sense of the struggles of the people I loved. I've always believed, as Tolkien did, that mythic storytelling is anything but escapism. It is full of symbolism, allusion and metaphor, a way of looking slant-wise at the world and of setting its tragedies and pains in a wider, more universal context.

It was rather a shock to the system to discover a contemporary writer who set his tales in the modern world, but had a way of telling them that was utterly faithful to the tradition of mythic storytelling with which I'd fallen in love. The BBC dramatisation of The Crow Road in the 1990s was my first encounter with Banks's quirky storytelling (I still maintain that “It was the day my grandmother exploded” is the greatest opening line in English literature), and I was captivated from the outset. There was an epic quality, not just about the sweeping Scottish landscapes of the story, but about the young hero's classic quest (in this case, to uncover the truth about the mysterious disappearance of his uncle some years before, opening up all kinds of dark family secrets on the way). The mixture of folklore and pop-culture which seasoned the story was an intoxicating combination for me. And for the first time, it made me realise that it was possible to tell a timeless tale in entirely modern language.

And that, really, is what I've been trying to do in my writing ever since.

Iain Banks was more than a cracking good storyteller, though. His descriptive writing was some of the most beautiful I’ve ever read, in prose or poetry. There was something of the nature poet in Banks’s writing, a knack of capturing a place in a way that engages every sense. The opening paragraphs of Espedair Street, his roller-coaster faux-biography of an ageing, forgotten rock star, have haunted me for years:

“Two days ago I decided to kill myself. I would walk and hitch and sail away from this dark city to the bright spaces of the wet west coast, and there throw myself into the tall, glittering seas beyond Iona (with its cargo of mouldering kings) to let the gulls and seals and tides have their way with my remains... or be borne north, to where the white sands sing and coral hides, pink-fingered and hard-soft, beneath the ocean swell, and the rampart cliffs climb thousand-foot above the seething acres of milky foam, rainbow-buttressed.

“Last night I changed my mind and decided to stay alive. Everything that follows is... just to try and explain.”

My own nature writing harks back to similar scenes – the shore, the deep ocean, even the Corryvreckan whirlpool (which also makes an appearance in that first paragraph) – and I've always tried, like Banks, to convey a sense that my reader is right there in that place, in the snapshot moment, smelling and tasting the tang of wind and sea-spray. I'm surprised now, when I revisit his prose, just how many echoes of him I find in my most recent poetry.

Tastes and tangs and the crazy soundscapes of life infuse Banks's descriptive writing. It's hardly a surprise. Banks was a malt whisky enthusiast of the highest order. He knew the spirit's capacity to surprise and astonish with its spectrum of flavours and fragrances. He also knew the futility of trying to pin down the character of a malt whisky. His non-fiction bestseller Raw Spirit wasn't really a "search for the perfect dram", despite the advertising slogan: it was an autobiographical road trip, a journey of self-discovery. That heightened capacity for sensory detail, honed through a finely trained whisky palate, was a gift that any poet would envy.

There's a Gothic aspect to Banks's novels which made it very easy for me to fall in love with them after an upbringing on fairy tales and Victoriana. The macabre murders in Complicity (the first Banks novel I read cover-to-cover) almost have something of the Brothers Grimm about them; the islands and open spaces and creaking ancient buildings where his stories are set could easily belong in the work of the Brontës or Bram Stoker. Banks's characters have secrets, personal tragedies, enormous unspoken sadness, which make them grotesque and compelling at the same time. They are the sort of characters I have been trying to fathom out in all my writing, from my first teenage epics to my most recent prize winning poems. But it's his eye for the small details which make their awful dramas resonate. In The Steep Approach to Garbadale, a dream-like fixation with the description of an old coat becomes a chilling foreshadowing of the wearer's suicide:

“The coat is too big for her, drowning her; she has to double back the cuffs of the sleeves twice, and the shoulders droop and the hem reaches to within millimetres of the flagstones. She rubs her hands over the waxy rectangles of the flapped external pockets... The door slams shut behind her, leaving him where he's been for some time now, screaming unheard at her, silently and hopelessly, begging her not to leave.”

What I love most of all about Banks, though, is that his writing bursts with an unstoppable compulsion to tell stories; and it's that compulsion that makes the tales so vibrant, so addictive. The plots may be fantastical, the settings might read like something from Robert Louis Stevenson or Daphne du Maurier, but they're infused with satire and social comment which brings a realness to them despite the preposterous excesses of their characters. If Banks ever guest-featured in one of his own novels, for my money it was in the guise of Kenneth McHoan, the storytelling father of The Crow Road – the curmudgeon with a romantic streak, blasted off the face of the earth by a lightning bolt on a church roof, leaving the memory of endless tall tales behind:

“ 'The rich merchant was very powerful, and he came to control things in the city, and he made everybody do as he thought they ought to do; snowball-throwing was made illegal, and children had to eat up all their food. Leaves were forbidden to fall from the trees because they made a mess, and when the trees took no notice of this they had the leaves glued onto their branches... but that didn't work, so they were fined; every time they dropped leaves, they had twigs and then branches sawn off. And so eventually, of course, they had no twigs left, then no branches left, and in the end the trees were cut right down... Some people kept little trees in secret courtyards, and flowers in their houses, but they weren't supposed to, and if their neighbours reported them to the police the people would have their trees chopped down and the flowers taken away and they would be fined or put in prison, where they had to work very hard, rubbing out writing on bits of paper so they could be used again.'

“ 'Is this story pretend, dad?'

“ 'Yes. It's not real. I made it up.'

“ 'Who makes up real things, dad?'

“ 'Nobody and everybody; they make themselves up. The thing is that because the real stories just happen, they don't always tell you very much. Sometimes they do, but usually they're too... messy.' ”

I have to leave this tribute on that thought – and with the awareness that the world has lost one of its most original and idiosyncratic storytellers, a poet in his own outlandish way. The great man is away the Crow Road; and may the journey ahead be a bright one.

Poetry transvestism?

It's not all that long ago that I was blogging about the possible demise of the York Literature Festival - one more victim of an austerity regime that seems to place little value on the power of the creative arts. Thankfully, the Festival has survived. This year it recorded its most triumphant season yet, with over 2000 tickets sold for a variety of shows ranging from big-name gigs to smaller community arts ventures. There was a veritable buzz about the Festival this year - ample proof that all that energy, enthusiasm and creativity has not been in vain.

One thing that struck me very forcefully about this year's Festival was the capacity for poetry to manifest itself in all kinds of guises that one wouldn't automatically think of as poetry. It crept up on this year's audiences in other guises - wearing the clothes of other artforms, if you will, a sort of literary transvestism.

It manifested itself most clearly in this year's headline act - a double-header, featuring on the one hand a fairly conventional poetry reading by the Poet Laureate herself, Carol Ann Duffy, and on the other a sublime fusion of classic verse with rock 'n' roll in the guise of poetic troubadours Little Machine. Little Machine are a couple of 90s stadium-rock survivors who have teamed up with a performance poet to present several thousand years' worth of poetry - from Sappho through Shakespeare to Philip Larkin's infamous "This Be the Verse" - in a variety of infectious musical arrangements. Some were sublime, some ridiculous, but all were calculated to get right under the skin and leave you humming along. When they handled classic texts, they had the gift of breathing new freshness into words which were otherwise over-familiar, giving them a whole new lease of life. When they set contemporary verse, they created a whole new way of approaching an art form that is all too easily dismissed out of hand as too serious, too difficult, or too intellectual. The great joy of Little Machine is that they showed just how wrong this stereotyping of poetry can be.

Little Machine aren't the first musicians to do this, of course. Last year I had the great pleasure of seeing my personal folk-rock heroes, The Waterboys, electrify the stage with a concert performance of An Appointment with Mr Yeats, an entire album's worth of musical settings of the poetry of WB Yeats. And if Little Machine surprised and delighted, the sheer power of the Waterboys' rendition of The Hosting of the Shee was enough to blow you backwards off your chair.

Poetry and music, of course, go hand in hand as art forms. An even more intelligent form of poetic transvestism took place in the form of Bob Beagrie and Andy Willoughby's show Kids: a poetry cycle ostensibly inspired by the film reel of Charlie Chaplin's silent classic, The Kid, but underpinned fundamentally by the writers' experiences of working with deprived and troubled teenagers in the most recession-hit areas of north-east England. The power of Kids came not just from the words, the mimes that accompanied them, and the excerpts from Chaplin's original movie that played out as the backdrop to the show (to the accompaniment of a brand-new piano score). It came, most of all, from the quiet anger of the social commentary that infused each poem. This was poetry in the form of an art that wasn't afraid to challenge the status quo, and ask the big questions of how and why society has ended up in such a mess, and what are we going to do about it?

I'll even admit to having a go at a bit of poetic transvestism myself. Telling the Fairytale, my first ever show for the Festival, wasn't really my show at all, if I'm honest: it was a collaborative effort between me and my good friend, storyteller Helen M Sant, to recreate some classic pieces of folklore and re-tell them in a 21st century context. In some ways, Telling the Fairytale was the exact opposite of Kids. Instead of contemporary social comment, here we had timeless fairy stories. Instead of a Powerpoint projector and a piano, our backdrop was an icy cold, medieval gothic church. But the reason I love fairy tales lies in the layers of imagery and metaphor behind them. The archetypes of fairy story may hark back to a bygone age, but they represent real concerns. Love, abandonment, social disconnection, mental illness - and the ultimate need we all have, for that happily-ever-after. Being able to wrap these concerns in the cloak of familiar childhood stories provides a way in for an audience, where a direct approach to the subject in a poem might be hollow or trite. Being able to perform these poems, set against some wonderful contemporary storytelling and a haunting flute accompaniment, made an hour of sheer enchantment.

It seems that rumours of the death of literature in York have been very much exaggerated. It's well and truly thriving, and often in the most unexpected guises. All art is richer when it collaborates, when it draws from experience beyond itself. And poetry, perhaps, most of all.

So that's my challenge to poets for 2013. Try on someone else's clothes for size, and see how they feel. An artist's, a musician's, a social campaigner's. You could find a new freedom in your writing. And, perhaps most importantly, you might find new audiences too.