After reading your moving obituary of Tony Harrison (28 September), tributes to him from Ian McMillan and others (Classics with added Yorkshire class, 28 September), and the article by Mark Lawson (‘The man who came to read the metre’: Yorkshire poet Tony Harrison was the National Theatre bard, 27 September), I’d like to add a personal postscript.
As a visiting poet, Tony became my tutor for my final year at Newcastle University (1969-70). My tutorial partner was the urbane Bostonian wife of the England cricketer Mike Brearley. When she told us about her father’s library, she didn’t mean anything like the little prefab on our council estate, but a designated room in their colonial-style home.
I was a slightly lost working-class scholarship girl, coming, like Tony, from a grammar school in Leeds. If his fierce knowledge and passion for classical literature often intimidated me, his insistence on always being true to your northern roots gave me solace. During that year I learned you could write dazzling poetry in a language that belonged to us Loiners (residents of Leeds), that I’d missed out on all the “mucky sex” going on in the 1960s, and that there were ways of defying and denouncing the rotten class system from within.
When I began to wonder why someone like me would even be at university, he bundled me off to the library to write about Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience – “from your own experience!” I cried when I read the “more power to your elbow, lass” he’d scribbled across the bottom of my essay. It was the first I’d ever written where it felt it might be fine to just be me.
Last year, aged 75, I was awarded a PhD, looking at class and gender from the point of view of a first-generation working-class woman in the arts and academia. As I walked across that Dublin stage to collect it, I whispered Tony’s words to myself. More power to your elbow, Tony. You did all us Loiners proud.
Dr Chrissie Tiller
London
• Black Daisies for the Bride (1993) was an award-winning TV drama documentary for which Tony Harrison wrote the script. It has stayed with me ever since I first saw it, and I later used an extract in training NHS staff in person-centred care of people living with dementia. While the setting is dated (the former High Royds hospital in West Yorkshire), the words, music and images tell a powerful and timeless story, featuring some residents living with dementia, as well as staff and visitors.
Brian Allen
Retired former NHS chaplaincy team leader, north-east England
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