Morden Tower

In 1962, Connie and I ran away together, to the Edinburgh Festival, where we enjoyed, amidst our illicit bliss, a fringe performance of Genet’s The Balcony and another work by an American experimental theater group; we also found and explored the wonder of Jim Haynes’s Paperback Bookshop. We hitched back to Newcastle full of dreams to rent a shop in town and open a bookshop with a small café attached where we could stage performances and have exhibitions. I was an unemployed seventeen-year-old from a council estate in Blakelaw and she was a married school teacher, twelve years my senior. We had met on the Aldermaston march, a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, where communities political and cultural were seed-bedded, often in song. Her social milieu was composed of art students, artists, intellectuals from the university, and actors. They would meet in soirées at her flat which was decorated with William Morris curtains and Victorian chaise longues, Caucasian rugs, scrap screens, and other refined but out-of-fashion furniture bought cheaply from the auction rooms. The bookshelves included a set of The Yellow Book, Stendhal, Sartre, Brendan Behan, Paul Tillich, Iris Murdoch, Margaret Mead, Erich Fromm, A Dominie’s Log and other works by A.S. Neill, books on Rosicrucianism, collections of poetry and ballads. There were recordings of Alfred Deller singing Elizabethan songs, recordings of folk ballads, and much else that I consumed when Connie and her husband were out at work all day having employed me as their house cleaner, before we fell in love.

My milieu was fellow restless, unemployed, working-class teenagers—“look out for the JDs” (juvenile delinquents) as Michael Shayer alerted Ginsberg before his first visit—apprentices, petty criminals, musicians, and leftist intellectuals who met almost exclusively in pubs and had done so since the age of fifteen. In his poem Oxford, Ed Dorn comments, while critiquing England,

all you have is a few people you consider
problems anyway who won’t even bother to speak
your language
and all they want to do is beat
your unemployment schemes, the best
of them have gone off
to Katmandu, the best of them
aren’t even interested, except Tom
              Pickard
        who still makes his own sense
                        in Newcastle, but he’s a northerner,
          and will steal and resell
every book Calder and Boyars prints.

In those days on Tyneside the two groups partied together. We were charged by our love and wanted to light up the city.

What we ended up with was the Morden Tower which—a publisher’s rep. told me, after refusing to supply books on sale or return—was more suitable for breeding pigeons than a possible bookshop. It’s true there was zero footfall along Back Stowell Street, except on a Saturday afternoon when herds of football fans used it as a shortcut to St James’ Park. And the only publisher prepared to supply us with books was John Calder. Years later, Dorn described it as less of a tower than a legionnaires tack room. It was extended into its current form by a guild of medieval glaziers. We rented the Morden Tower just after our son, Matthew, was born. At the time we had become homeless, I was still unemployed and, because of the scandal our relationship had created when Connie gave birth to our “illegitimate” child, she lost her job as a teacher as well as her flat.

The Morden Tower is situated halfway along a looming, dark, narrow, forbidding, and dangerous alley on the thirteenth-century city walls and was without electricity or plumbing but was supplied with gas for lighting and a miserable attempt at a gas fire. It became more and more difficult to find the fragile mantles for the light fixture and sometimes the utility was cut off because of an unpaid bill, which forced us to hold the readings by candlelight. Because of its lack of facilities, the town council let us take out a lease for ten shillings a week.

A door opens onto a steep stone staircase, worn deep by centuries, that leads up the city wall to the Morden Tower. To prevent anyone from climbing over the gate, the council cemented broken glass and barbed wire along the top. The tower contained an old piano, a very long table, and nothing else. The first use that we made of it was to store the secondhand books that I sold as a barrow boy in the Bigg Market. The barrow was hired from the Stowell Street Corporation Yard, situated a few hundred yards along the wall in Blackfriars. It’s where I wrote two of my earliest poems, “Stowell Street Corporation Yard” and “The Street Cleaner with His 18th Cent. Muck Cart,” which describe the location.

We began to stock the tower with mostly leftist pamphlets, some of which were produced by Freedom Press, which published Herbert Read’s Poetry and Anarchism. Their magazine, Anarchy, published my first prose piece which described the experiences of exploited working-class teenagers and our growing confrontations with employment officials.

Sometimes prostitutes would take clients along Back Stowell Street for a hand job or a quick and usually drunken hump against the wall—something which must have been practiced in that very location and against those very walls for nine centuries. The back lane and barbed wire were occasionally adorned with a used contraceptive.

One day, in 1963 (or 4) I read an article about a little-press publisher in Lowestoft, on the Suffolk coast. The Scorpion Press published chapbooks by writers outside of the mainstream, and being an arrogant and impulsive 
little twerp, I thought I should hitchhike down there with a bunch of my poems.

Just after Scotch Corner and after a wait of two hours on that long hike from Newcastle, a second car stopped for me. Ian Wood was on his way back to London from Scotland where he’d been shooting a series of documentary films for the National Coal Board. When we got talking, I told him about the Morden Tower and the dreams we held for it and he told me about his London neighbor, the jazz poet Pete Brown, suggesting we invite him to do a gig in the tower, which we did for our opening reading on Bloomsday, June 16, 1964. Pete later went on to collaborate with Jack Bruce in writing lyrics for Cream, and he rescued me from the police and courts a year later at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh where I was called off stage and ’cuffed by two detectives who said they were taking me to Newcastle and jail for an unpaid electricity bill which had become a civil debt. When Pete passed us on the stairs he asked what’s happening, man? I told him my sorry tale and I suppose put the bite on him to lend me the money to secure my release from those burly Edinburgh cops who’d been informed by their Newcastle colleagues that I was to perform in the Traverse Theatre on that date. On reflection it looks like police theater, and a bit camp at that. The authorities felt threatened by what the Morden Tower represented and often instigated official vendettas or denied funding.

It was a day and night hitchhike to cover the three hundred miles to Lowestoft, and I was burnt out when I knocked on the publisher’s door with manuscript in hand. He declined to publish my poems but over a cup of tea showed his stock of City Lights Books, which he was distributing, and gave me the first three numbers of the magazine Kultur, then saw me to the door for my long hitch back. There was an advert in one of the issues of Kultur for a book published by Jargon Society in North Carolina, so I wrote and ordered it. A very short time afterward, Jonathan Williams replied, writing that he’d recently been through the North East and supplied me a list of the folks he had met and spent time with in the region, and Basil Bunting’s name was amongst them.

From a public phone box in Newcastle one Sunday morning I called the number listed in the directory, and when his wife, Sima, answered, I asked to speak to Mr. Bunting. After a minute, and after I’d put a few more pennies into the phone to keep the line alive, I heard Bunting here—which was his ex- RAF Wing Commander response to calls, brisk and to the point. I spluttered some bollix about starting a magazine called New Lake Poets and asked if he had any poems I could use and told him Jonathan Williams had given me his name. He invited me out to his home, a train ride along the Tyne Valley and up a leafy posh street with houses occupied by business execs and a Queen’s Counsel with two daughters who were budding novelists.

He opened the door and invited me into his small study full of books, just off the hallway, and we talked. The only work that he could give me to publish was a typescript of The Spoils, which had already appeared in Poetry in 1951.

After a while he took me into the kitchen and introduced Sima, his ebullient Armenian wife, who’d come with him from Persia in 1952. Her mother, wearing all black, was visiting from their native country and spoke no English. She sat quietly, smiling or chatting to her daughter. Basil poured us a couple of healthy whiskies and asked: “Do you like caviar, Tom?” “Oh, aye.” I’d never seen the stuff before, and I must have looked astonished because Sima laughed as she delivered a plate of toast and a large round box containing the fresh Persian caviar her mother had brought just two days ago as a gift for Basil. With no one else interested, he scooped a generous portion onto my slice of toast, and we feasted. When the others left, Basil refilled our glasses and decided to read The Spoils to me. I understood very little of the poem, but as I sat on the train going home, lines drifted into memory.

Man’s life so little worth
do we fear to take or lose it?
No ill companion on a journey, Death
lays his purse on the table and opens the wine.

With the taste of whisky on the roof of my mouth and the memory of a slightly salty tang on the tip of my tongue, I knew for certain that poetry was the life for me. Basil gave our second performance at the tower where he read The Spoils and Villon. This was his report of it in a letter to Zukofsky dated July 28, 1964:

He started readings at his tower ... about fifty, half academics, half teenagers, with a sprinkling of thugs, turned up to listen ...
       I read a month later. The academics had gone on their holidays, but a much larger number of teenagers and some of the miscellaneous provincials who seek self-approbation in that sort of thing filled the place, showed something approaching enthusiasm, and queued for my signature at five bob a time ...
       A curious experience, reading to these youngsters. They were not hindered by the difficulties which annoy their elders ... not that they understood what was attracting them, but it certainly did attract.... I found it all very encouraging.

My own practical involvement with the Morden Tower ceased in the early seventies when my marriage broke down and, unable to find work, I contributed to the North East’s greatest growth industry, the drift south. Heroically, Connie continued to run the tower readings, with help along the way from various souls, for another forty years, often, as in the beginning, subsidizing it out of her own meager income when, true to form, official support fell short. Back Stowell Street is now a rat-infested alley overflowing with restaurant waste, and the tower is closed as a possible cheap venue to all creativity, or as a nursery for emerging “alternative” talent.

The graphic anarchy of those early hand-drawn posters was down to Colin Maclachlan or Gus Lindsay, young guys who’d found a home in Morden Tower. Colin went on to become a professional actor, appearing, appropriately, in the film Billy Elliot. I’m not sure what happened to Gus. After opening Ultima Thule Bookshop in Handyside Arcade we worked with a silk-screen printer who was knocking out work for rock and folk bands, and we used whatever images we found arresting for our events, adding the information with Letraset. Sometimes the printers would reuse those images in designs for bands. We produced about thirty each of the Morden Tower posters and I went around putting them in shop windows, pubs, libraries, and university departments, and because I was proud of them, kept two or three for myself.

The Poetry Foundation presents an exhibition of The Life of Poetry in Morden Tower (September 5–December 20, 2019) showcasing posters from the sixties and seventies advertising the Morden Tower poetry reading series, as well as photographs, and letters. Images courtesy of the Archive of Modern Conflict and the Literary and Philosophical Society. Visit poetryfoundation.org/exhibitions for more information.