A LEEDS LIFE
WORD WEAVER
Keith Waterhouse
1929 – 2009
by Tony Goodall
In 1975 I worked for BBC Radio Leeds and had the opportunity to interview some wonderful writers. One of these was Keith Waterhouse, who was a delightful man. Keith was born and bred in Leeds but lived and worked most of his life in London. Many of his books are read in schools, particularly Billy Liar and There Is A Happy Land, both of which have autobiographical elements. I went into three Leeds schools in search of questions from the pupils. Here are some of Keith’s responses, focusing on his 1930s schooldays in Leeds and how much of his life he mined for his fiction.
“I discovered I wanted to be a writer before I could even write. I was always fascinated by pens and pencils and paper and I used to cover pages with scribble and couldn't wait to learn to read and to write. I never doubted for a second that I was going to be a writer. I began selling my stuff at the age of 15 when I was able to persuade other people that there was a writer in me.”
“I was one of five children but I was the youngest by about four years. So I was always the kid who was the nuisance hanging on. I was always being sent home and used to run after them, saying ‘Let me come too!’ Of all my books, There Is A Happy Land is really the most autobiographical. The personalities were kids who were in my street and the sort of gang that we used to hang around with.’
“We all lived in terror of the headmaster, a very remote figure known as Old Pop. He seemed to be in a perpetual rage at us and the world. He was sort of like God. We thought he had eyes everywhere. There was a man called the Board Man who was a man dressed all in black whose function it was to chase up truants. We regarded him as Old Pop's secret agent who was following us everywhere.”
Keith’s father died when he was very young.
“He was a costermonger who sold fruit and vegetables from a horse and cart. I remember very little about him, but my main memory is a magic one of being scooped up out of bed at four in the morning and wrapped in a potato sack and taken on this cart down to Leeds Wholesale Market, where he bought all this fruit and veg. Coming in out of the cold and the dark was like going into Aladdin's cave. It was all lit with oil lamps. Great piles of oranges and bananas and pineapples, someone shoved a bacon sandwich the size of a brick into my hand and I gnawed at this while they loaded up. The noise and clattering of horses’ hooves, the smell of oranges and all the other fruits, and then I was taken home put back to bed. I woke up in the morning and I thought it had been a dream, as indeed it had in a way.’
There is a Happy Land is set in Middleton, where Keith grew up. The characters in the novel explore quarries and one of the schoolchildren was curious to know where they were in real life.
“The quarries were up in the far side of Middleton Park Woods and going on to the old railway. That kind of area where I used to roam around in the Bluebell Woods, on the golf course finding golf balls, in the park and the kind-of drain that led out of the park into Belle Isle Estate. It was a wondrous experience of simply crawling down this tunnel and finding yourself in a separate part of England as far as we were concerned. You went through this sort of drain like Alice in Wonderland and found yourself in another part of the world. Quite extraordinary.”
“My main memory is a magic one of being scooped up out of bed at four in the morning and wrapped in a potato sack and taken on this cart down to Leeds Wholesale Market. It was like was like going into Aladdin's cave!”
Another of Keith’s books is Billy Liar. Was this young dreamer based on anyone in particular?
“I think that I really started with my own sort of adolescence and in mind. Obviously, the undertaker's, because I worked in an undertaker's and I did fantasize a great a great deal. But whereas Billy simply fantasized into the air, I was able to put my fantasy to use in writing stories. His background was very different from mine; I made him lower-middle class, living in what we used to call a ‘bought house’ and at grammar school, whereas my background was rented flat and council school. My own mother was very supportive of my idea of wanting to be a writer and she used to bring me copies of Punch. Billy’s mother is a very different, weak character. I also took characteristics from various people until Billy became a person in his own right. It’s an interesting thing about creating a character because when you're writing a story you think you know how it's going to go. Originally when I planned this book, I was going to have Billy finishing up in in London as I'd done, but then Billy took control of the book himself, and it was quite clear that he wasn't going to go to London at all.”
When Billy Liar was adapted into a play, Keith collaborated with fellow Loiner Willis Hall.
“Willis and I both come from Leeds and while we were living here, we were really watching that transition from where they were pulling down the terraces and moving into the tower blocks. The play is really about the beginning of that move where family streets were being broken up and people were being decanted into these strange new worlds. They were very apprehensive about it and, as it as it turns out, rightly so. [They’ve] been a spectacular failure. I think we were ahead of our time. I think the message that emerges here is still relevant, because it was rather prophetic in the way it's what the foretold that what a dull world and disastrous world these people were being forced to go to.”
I asked him to explain how he distils real experience into fiction?
“It's as if describing a dream. You've got to have a sort of gauze between you and the experience so that you're describing it to yourself and to someone who wasn't there, rather than simply recounting something which happened. It's a process that just goes on in the author's head. It's very difficult to describe, but it's what separates fiction from simple recollection. “
On paper, Keith was very articulate. However he had a speech impediment, so everything he said was peppered with extended ‘ers’ which made it almost impossible to listen to. To fit into our short time slot, we edited out these “blemishes” with razor blades and sticky tape. I wonder in hindsight how ethical it was. Anyhow, I’m so pleased that I was able to meet a great Leeds writer before he died – and that we can share his voice to a new audience 40 years on.