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BARRY TEBB'S MENTAL HEALTH WEBSITE EXPERIENCES IN MENTAL HEALTH CARING |
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About Barry Tebb |
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I was born in a back-to-back in Leeds in 1942. Our house was in the heart of South Leeds, literally a stone’s throw from the suspension bridge over the Aire that was to be a central symbol in my poems and novellas. The working class life I enjoyed was quite wonderful. It wasn’t of course a life of council estates, drug-gangs and ghetto-blasters. It was essentially a sense of community, of shared values and even - in hard times - shared food. Above all it provided a sense of being cared for and protected, not just by my parents but by neighbours and other children. Among these children was Margaret Gardiner (‘Margaret Hopwood’ in my novellas). It is nearly half a century since I last saw her but she was the very first person to encourage me to write stories and she was my first audience sitting on the hot July pavements of our enchanted summers. She also taught me the dialect of working class Leeds and she was my first love. After twenty five years of not being able to write (1970-l995) it was a deep and powerful dream of her that started off my writing again. In the dream she appeared against a background of the Aire and the suspension bridge saying, - "I am here, I am waiting." Silver water lapped in the dream river, multiple rainbows arced in the air and diamonds danced as together we skipped down the steps to the towpath. The ‘working through’, as Freud would have called it, of the manifest and latent dream content provided the material for nearly all my recent poems, especially the long autobiographical poem, ‘The Bridge Over the Aire’ and my first two novellas, Margaret and Margaret Gone. I have walked and walked round the few bits of my childhood Leeds that remain, especially along the banks of the Aire and in Kirkgate Market, that living museum of the folk memory. When I was twelve my family moved to a council estate on the edge of the city and at the same time I attended an horrendously repressive all boys grammar school. When I was sixteen we moved again, this time to the mill village of Yeadon between Bradford and Leeds, and it was at this time, sitting watching the glide of the swans on the Tarn, that I wrote my first poems. I began to read modern poetry, especially James Kirkup (‘My James Kirkup’, my contribution to Diversions, Salzburg University Press. 1998, a collection for the poet’s eightieth birthday), Auden, Dylan Thomas and Thomas Blackburn, to name only a few. After a year’s unqualified teaching I went to Leeds Teacher Training College. It was the sixties and the atmosphere of the college was very liberal and one in which I flourished. I read widely, Proust, Firbank, Dickens, Ginsberg, Sartre, Kierkegaard, and of course, ‘The New Poetry’ (Plath, Lowell and Berryman). My poems and articles started to appear in magazines such as Peace News and The Poetry Review and Alan Tarling (of Poet & Printer Press) brought out my first collection, The Quarrel With Ourselves, which was fortunate to get a good review in The New Statesman from John Carey, now Merton Professor of English at Oxford and a future Booker Prize judge. This was the period of the Gregory Fellows in Poetry at Leeds University (why are there no more?) such as John Silkin, David Wright, Peter Redgrove, and most importantly, the wonderful Martin Bell. I tried my hand at editing a small anthology of contemporary poets and included Redgrove, Angela Carter - who was a poet before she was a novelist, John Cotton, Michael Holmes, and Wendy Oliver (she was a first-class poet, I wonder what happened to her!). Tarling also brought out a ‘three poets from three regions’ anthology, Michael Longley represented Northern Ireland, Iain Crichton Smith, Scotland, and myself the North of England. Although the book appeared in the sixties, Tarling said he was receiving orders for it - though it was long out of print - until his press closed in 1996. When I finished at college I went to teach at Wyther Park School, Leeds Five, the title/subject of a recent poem published in Poetry and Audience, a magazine which had published my work thirty years before. I was very fortunate in being given an ‘A’ stream of ten year olds, and I taught almost nothing but poetry and painting from nine until four. My experiences in getting children to write were recorded in an article for Peace News, ‘Poetry in the Classroom’. The climax of this period was having my poem ‘School Smell’ included in the ground-breaking Penguin anthology, Children of Albion in 1969, alongside poets like Roy Fisher, Jim Burns, Lee Harwood, Adrian Mitchell, Edwin Morgan, Tom Pickard and Andrew Crozier. It sold more than a hundred thousand copies in a very short time, some indication of how hot poetry was in the Sixties! D. H. Lawrence wrote of ‘the Spirit of Place’ and almost everything I have written has been inspired by Leeds and its people. I have given the title The Lights of Leeds to my recent ‘Selected Poems’ (Redbeck Press) and wherever I happen to be, those lights are etched in my memory.
One Carer’s Story - Barry Tebb Schizophrenia - A Carer’s Journal - Mike Schizophrenia – A Mother’s Story – Georgina Wakefield My Journey Of Sadness – Stan Hagon The Voice Of Carers – Amanda Cummin Yemeni Carers’ Stories – Debjani Chaterjee Beyond Our Reach, But Not Our Love – Brian D’arcy Carry On Caring – Emily Machin & Lucy Machin Enigma And Other Poems - Georgina Wakefield Killingbeck Drive – Brenda Williams Searching The Beyond And Other Poems – Daisy Abey Sharp Edge – Daisy Abey The Long Good Bye – Barry Tebb Looking Back – Barry Tebb Nameless In Camden – Brenda Williams Autobiography – Simon Jenner The Sick Image Of My Father Fades – John Horder Are You A Carer? Caring About Carers
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