How I Wrote The Spirit House And Other Meditations. (From Bradford Telegraph and Argus)

How I Wrote The Spirit House And Other Meditations.

12:26pm Saturday 3rd May 2008 in News By Joolz Denby

So there we were, driving through a iron-cold Northern evening, the beat up, Beat-baby car thudding into every pothole and the road a slug-silvery track into some Godless anti-Eden city where we would construct, with the arcane and brutal Mysteries of rock n' roll, yet another furnace-bright blast of music from New York Alcoholic Anxiety Attack, the savage Young Guns of the
Northern music scene and my personal bad habit. Yes indeedy, roll up one and all and see the Devil Woman's Hell-Hounds howl the night apart at the seams and tear the moon down for a toy. Hah.

I lit a Black Sobranie and got exhaustedly caught up in the pitch and shift of the road, the aromatic smoke whipping its poison incense out of the microscopic crack in the side window I'd opened out of courtesy to Mik's
raggetty, tawny-velvet singer's voice. I glanced at his profile, pure as a fighting angel, illuminously (as they say in Bradford) pale in the space-ship dark. He frowned and pushing aside his heavy copper-black curls,
rubbed his forehead.

'Got another headache, sugar?' I asked, cranking the window further down guiltily, feeling the slithery shiver of damp cold coil across my shoulders
like a ghost-snake.

'Yeah, hurts.'

'Want me to take it away?' I took a last drag and pitched the black-and-gold
tab-end out in a wicked little stitchery of red sparks. 'You'll have to pull into the next Services . . .'

I can take headaches away, you see. And ease aching bones, cure miasmas and conjure away the shakes. My Welsh grandmother taught me how, along with the
telling of cards, reading hands and deciphering tea-leaves - a dying art in this day and age, because who brews tar-black leaf-tea anymore, in order to
leave its prophetic spoor in teacups' bitter dregs like pictures in a child's bible. Mik's got Welsh blood in him, like me. He believes without believing, and he fights magic because he can't hold it in his hands,
forgetting it's in his hands anyway, the unasked-for Gift.

'Tell me about your Nan' he says, 'tell me a story'.

He likes stories, does Mik. He likes to hear the long weaving, the embroidery, the warp and weft of it all threading into a tale that rolls the miles past quicker and wraps the heart up snug.

So I tell him, again, about my Nan. Once bright-glowing Lily of the Valley, become an old, old woman; the wrinkled dusty-pink of her soft cheek bent
down for kissing, those knuckley hands that took fevers and boiled the life out of cabbages holding my pudgy baby paw tight as we toddled to the shop
for six-penny-worth of chips. Her world was a dark and golden lattice of mythologies and incantations, superstitions and always, always, the
hovering, vaporous shadows of her dead loved ones, curdling and thickening round the fat flicker of the stinking coal fire, moving in the spaces left
by her grief, calling to her in bird-high voices as the Welsh fell from her heart in songs she always protested she'd forgotten until she'd drunk a glass of gin that loosed the years and made her Lily, sweet Lily again in
the steep-sided green valley where her people rived anthracite from the earth's bones and her brothers died in the crushing horror of a pit collapse.

Nana, Nana, dead and gone these long years; sing for me, bach, sing about mist and briar and mothers calling their children home, sing in your old voice, cracked and beloved, and put your hand on my hot forehead to draw out
my fever because I burn, fiercer and more furious than ever, in a land where fire and passion are the archaic curiosities of a dead age.

And I cry, telling the tale, because I always do, and Mik with the burnished hardness of the young says you should write a poem about your Nan, and so,
after a time, I write The Spirit House.

And the dead, live.