IN the 1980s, when I’d given up my job at the tennis ball factory and become a full-time writer, lots of my time was spent running writing workshops all over South Yorkshire, including in various bits of the Barnsley borough.
I’ve always thought that writing workshops are one of the engine rooms of the wider culture, with people finding their voices making work in prose or poetry that deserves, always, a wider audience.
Consequently, at these workshops, and at workshops that I run now, I have to make sure that everybody gets a turn and that nobody takes up too much time because everybody, naturally, wants to make the voices that they’ve found heard loud and clear.
Which makes the case of Silent Frank even more baffling. I have to tell you before we go any further that Frank wasn’t his real name, but boy he was silent.
Silent Frank would come to one of my evening workshops somewhere in the borough, probably in a library or an adult education centre.
He would be there before anybody else, often waiting outside in the evening darkness as the caretaker opened up.
He would be clutching, as though his life depended on it, a probably in some ways it did, a folder that said in big letters on the front MY POEMS.
The miners’ strike was a recent memory and a lot of the poems and stories people read were angrily political or elegiacally remembering a time before the strike.
There were family memories, too, and funny poems about all sorts and often somebody who was writing a science fiction trilogy set on the distant planet Zorg.
I would try my best to gaffer everybody to make sure that they all got a fair crack of the whip and the science fiction trilogies didn’t overwhelm the tiny poems and I’d try and do it in the simple and, I thought, democratic way of just going round the room and listening to everybody’s work and making a few comments on and encouraging the group to do the same.
I’d always emphasise kindness and empathy, though, in the comments, because let’s face it without kindness and empathy where are we and who are we?
This all worked very well until it came to Silent Frank’s turn. I have to say that before the workshop started Silent Frank wouldn’t in any way be Chatty Frank but he would be, let’s say, Less Than Taciturn Frank.
He would exchange pleasantries and small talk as we waited to go into the room. He would order his half time tea and sometimes express a preference for one kind of biscuit over another.
But then the workshop would begin and Frank’s vow of silence would be taken. Taken, and adhered to.
I would start the readings and comments at a random point in the circle and then move to the reader’s left until we went round the room. Whenever I got to Silent Frank I would ask ‘have you got anything for us this week, Frank?’ and he would shake his head or make a dismissive gesture with his hand and we would move on to the next person in the circle.
Well, fair enough: but there was Frank’s folder in his arms with the MY POEMS written on it. And if there were poems in there and it wasn’t just an empty space, then I would love to hear them and talk about them and each week I said as much but Frank just shook his head and we moved on.
Was Frank just shy? Well, at the time, I thought that perhaps he was but he had plucked up the courage to bring the poems so he wasn’t shy in that way.
Like me, he came on the bus, and I’d seen him on the bus with his folder on display so it wasn’t as though he was wary of announcing himself as a poet.
Anybody on the bus could have sat next to him and said something like ‘show us one of thi verses, lad’ and perhaps he would have felt obliged to.
I wonder where Silent Frank (not his real name) is now, all these years later? I wonder if he’s still writing poems and, more importantly, I wonder if he’s reading them aloud to people.
I hope so; there are too many silent people around, keeping their empathy and kindness to themselves. Speak up, Frank. Give us a poem!
