Photo credit http://hipteens.blogspot.com/

I was saddened to read that Stan Barstow died yesterday. Fittingly enough for someone who’s work was so firmly rooted in his hometown of Wakefield, he died on ‘Yorkshire Day’.

When I was at Crofton High School, I remember us reading two of Stan Barstow’s short stories in our English class, “The Desperadoes” and “Gamblers Never Win” . We had a good (enthusiastic and vaguely trendy) teacher called Mr Goodwill,  (collar length hair, wore light brown clothes, sat on desks rather than a chair etc) and he included a lot of that kind of “Northern Realism” writing into our lessons. Keith Waterhouse’s wistful novel about childhood, “There is a Happy Land” and Robert Westall’s gritty “The Machine Gunners” were other inclusions. The idea was to include stories which used accents, places and situations that would be recognizable to us and, credit to him, it worked. Even though both stories were set in the past, they were obviously in “our world” and definitely familiar.

Anyway, Mr Goodwill’s plans must have worked because I retained a liking for that type of literature and read a lot of those 1960’s “Angry Young Men” novels. When I was at University – and hard up for ideas – I did my dissertation on them and Stan Barstow’s “A Kind of Loving” was one of the main books I covered. Whilst I was writing that, it occurred to me that maybe he still lived locally so, using my fiendish investigative skills, I looked up “Stan Barstow” in the phone book and, there he was, living in Ossett. Anyway, I wrote to him and asked if I could interview him about those novels and what it was like being a working-class writer in the early 1960’s. He agreed and was very generous with his time and patiently answered my questions (which he must have fielded hundreds of times before) with good grace. He was a top bloke, very knowledgeable and talkative and willing to help someone out without being paid a penny for it.

Out of all of those “Kitchen Sink” writers I think Barstow created the most believable characters. Compared to his flamboyant contemporaries like Arthur Seaton (anarchic class warrior), Joe Lampton (ambitious proto-Thatcherite) and Jimmy Porter (tiresome loudmouth), Stan Barstow’s Vic Brown seems reassuringly normal and altogether credible. The theme of social mobility in the novel “A Kind of Loving” has always struck a chord with me, how Vic Brown was educated out of the working class proper but was never really absorbed into or comfortable with the middle classes. That kind of blurringof the lines of social class has stayed quite topical.

Stan Barstow stayed in Wakefield for most of his life, working steadily and successfully, and proving over and over again that people like us and places like ours had a story worth telling. He will be missed.

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