This Be the Place: My Actual Huh

This Be the Place is a series of short essays in which poets explore the mysteries and meaning of a particular place.

Try as I might, I can’t remember my neighbor’s name, but I remember her doorstep. A jagged slab of stone that looked like it was lugged off a forest floor. Not like our doorstep: straight-edged, right angles, sharp corners. I first got wind of this doorstep because of Mum. The summer I turned eighteen, my stepdad, stepsister, and I were holding our mugs, looking down at the patio that needed pressure washing. A lull in conversation. I necked the last dreg of lukewarm tea, a lump of sugar at the bottom. I hated sugar. I only had a cuppa that way because that’s what Mum liked. As I masked my grimace, Mum rolled another cigarette, a green pouch of Golden Virginia tobacco in her hand. She licked the paper, sealed the cigarette, took a puff, and said, “An actual lesbian, right next door!”

My stepsister shushed her. “Don’t say that.”

I can still hear the silence as my mother sucked her rollie to a nub. A trowel smacked dirt on the other side of the fence, the clack of a flowerpot being set down. A back door being slammed, someone—my neighbor? Her wife?—stepping round the last few moving boxes still to be unpacked in the kitchen.

I went inside and wrote in my notebook the phrase “an actual lesbian, right next door!” Just that one phrase, on the second page. Why keep this throwaway sentence all this time? I had never met a queer adult in Suffolk before. Here was irrefutable proof I didn’t know I needed. People like me existed here, beside the River Blyth. That sentence became a kind of lucky charm or a talisman, my portable queer Blythburgh, six words, tucked away on a dog-eared page in a pocket-sized notebook.

***

Blythburgh. Blithe-bruh. A village in Suffolk. A passing-through village, a blink-and-you’ve-already-driven-through-it place, a one-bar-of-signal-if-you’re-lucky place. If people stop here at all, they stop for three reasons: church, river, pub. Tourists pop in to the medieval Holy Trinity church to see the surviving wooden angels in the nave, or they stop to see “the devil’s fingerprints” left by Black Shuck on the church’s 15th-century door. According to local lore, Black Shuck, a dog at least as large as a horse with blazing red eyes, is said to have burst into the church on an August night in 1577, killing two parishioners and causing the church steeple to collapse, before scarpering into the darkness of the surrounding Angel Marshes. More often than not, people stop to survey the price of a pint in the White Hart, or walk the overgrown footpath along the brown River Blyth, the town’s namesake, and one of 12 rivers that run through Suffolk, a county that Rod O’Donoghue, the archivist of the Suffolk Poetry Society, notes could be described in three words: ‘‘farming,” “fishing,” and “flat.”

***

Back then, I was home alone every other Tuesday as everyone set off for food shopping. I had an hour and a half, give or take traffic—time stuck behind tractors or combines on narrow backroads. I was on my gap year, the UK term for the year between the end of high school and the start of university. A kind of sabbatical year, most people use the time to either travel or save up money. I stayed put. I was on a gap year in more ways than one—in a gap place, a gap village, scratching my head in the gap between “Blythburgh” and “queer,” living in the gap between the pig farm 10 minutes or so down the road and the Soho gay bars I read about at night via the incognito window of my laptop.

I began to know my neighbor’s doorstep every second Tuesday. As soon as I heard Mum’s car start and pull away, I waited 10 minutes to see if anyone came back for a forgotten coupon, or a purse. I moved fast, following my feet, before my head could get a word in, skirting round the stones jutting out of the path. I opened the sturdy, new gate. Not a speck of rust. I sidled past hedges, careful not to bump the nearly ripe berries. Hedges, but not privet hedges, neat and tidy and suffocating. A wild hedge, growing any which way it pleased, branches and twigs shooting off in all directions. Rows of flowers I needed an app to identify. Sometimes, a mouse rustled in the hedge or sprinted across the path. The village cats hunched on the fence, ready to pounce. My Tuesday land.

***

I can make out my hand hanging above the gold house number whose paint was starting to chip a little. What was it that held me back from knocking and fixed me on the doorstep, other than rote teenage shyness? A line from Seamus Heaney’s last collection comes to mind: “Me in place and the place in me.” Was my silence another form of place in me, me in place? My Blythburgh bubbling away under my tongue?

What would I have done if my neighbor had flung open her door and asked, “What on earth are you doing here?” I had never said the word gay aloud. Gay lived on my laptop screen, in Skype chats to mates, or in the pages of The Gay Metropolis, a book I kept under the bed, muffled in a plastic shopping bag. I had no plan, no notes to draw from, just my Casio watch counting the minutes, my feet planted on this lump of stone.

The garden path was the first whisper of gay I heard in Suffolk. The stones seemed to say that a queer life could exist here, between the apple tree and the washing line, between the calls of redshanks on the muddy marsh banks and the cackling cries of circling seagulls. These paving stones, this handful of decorative pebbles, was the first smidge of a rainbow in my life, a touch of pride.

I always pictured pride as a hands-on-hips gesture, a puffing out of the chest, a throng of people as far as the eye could see, loudspeakers hollering over music. These six paces to this doorstep said, pride can be like this, too: lanky, sweating, stuttering under breath, the tip of a shoe jabbing at the garden path. An oblong chunk of stone like a heavy flag on the ground.

***

The moment the sole of my shoe touched that doorstep, I made my exit from Suffolk poetry—a poetry of foxes and hares, verses about starling murmuration over the roofs of empty country houses, lines on the Sizewell nuclear power plant dome, visible for miles around. I also found myself outside of queer poetry. My head was full of Tales of the City, Allen Ginsberg, stories of fire escape walk-ups and Fifth Avenue. I was a world away from Thom Gunn’s odes to bikers and leather bars. I wasn’t anywhere near Rimbaud’s Paris, Audre Lorde’s buzzing Berlin, or Frank O’Hara’s lunch breaks at MoMA. To this day, it’s easier to find Black Shuck in a Suffolk poem than it is to find queerness. The queer poems I knew had no room for the waft of manured fields. It was almost as though I had been cast out into the white space surrounding the poem, shorn of words. As far as literature was concerned, this doorstep didn’t exist.

In his essay “Trouble and Consolation: Writing the Gay Rural” (republished on Lit Hub as “Where Are All the Rural Gay Poets?”), Bruce Snider remembers that reading O’Hara cemented two impressions in his mind as a young poet: “The first was that if you were gay, you needed to live in the city. The second was that if you were gay and wanted to be a writer, you needed to write about the city.”

In Eavan Boland’s phrase, I spent many years “writing someone else’s poem.” I was wheeling in somebody else’s props, pilfering street names from episodes of Mad Men. I remember writing about being on the London Underground, getting off the Northern Line to go to Heaven, the gay bar. A city I’d never seen, a train I’d never been on, a club I’d never entered. What I didn’t realize then was I had access to an underground of my own. My neighbor’s doorstep was the first step I took into what the writer Richard Mabey called “the unofficial countryside,” a queer landscape I wouldn’t find on any map. A hush hush landscape, an accidental landscape, a ramshackle place that finds you, a place sometimes let slip on summer afternoons over lukewarm cups of tea.

If the rural appeared at all in the queer literature I read, it was in the past, a pained glance in the rearview mirror that’s best avoided, something to move conversation swiftly along from at parties. Here, every second Tuesday afternoon, was a path that said home didn’t have to be a backward look over the shoulder. This humdrum doorstep, a knobbly rectangle of stone, was the first murmur I heard of stay. Home could be now, could be these surrounding tilled fields, these muddy banks of the Blyth, redshanks standing on one leg as the marsh tide draws in like a breath. In the cracks of this doorstep, home, queer, and Blythburgh could all belong in the same sentence.

Tell the truth but “tell it slant,” goes Emily Dickinson’s oft-repeated maxim. I had a slant under my feet the whole time—this doorstep, my chunk of queer “unofficial” countryside, waiting for me all my Suffolk life. No, not a slant. The stone was tilted, “on the huh” as people say in Suffolk. I had my own huh.

***

On a suspiciously warm September day, a Paravanni’s ice cream van pulled up just beyond our front gate—probably the last ice cream van of the year. That was my icebreaker. I didn’t know what my neighbor liked or if she was allergic to anything. I got a vanilla cone, with a chocolate flake. A mint Cornetto for me. I made my way to her door slowly, trying not to slip on the leaves scattered across the path. I don’t know how long I stood there, but the ice cream started to droop like the long stick of ash on Mum’s cigarettes.

What was I hoping for? A roadmap to a subterranean queer countryside I didn’t yet know, or a garbled passcode to a countryside I didn’t know existed? Reassurance that she, too, might have practiced a coming out speech on a bronze desk lamp? Did I want to be caught? To be seen? Would she have laughed at the amount of daft hope I’d poured into her, a near-total stranger? Would she have understood the amount of possibility I sprinkled into the titchy sapling flowerpot beside the doorstep?

What did I want to ask her? I imagined her calling the Colchester Gay Switchboard, the helpline founded in 1979, biting her nails to the quick at the dial tone, listening for the telltale click that meant someone else in the house was listening. Or I imagined her finding the main road closed and driving down backroad after backroad with no streetlights, across a county border to reach the nearest gay bar in Manningtree, an hour away. When she was my age, maybe she fished that day’s newspaper out of the bin to get a closer look at the ad she’d spotted as her father browsed job listings—a white square that said “Homosexual? You are not the only one reading this paper,” sandwiched between a bloke trying to sell his Mazda and a lady offering Swedish massages. Was she as pitched between dread and excitement as I am now on her doorstep as her eyes skated over the words social events and warm welcome, the last line encouraging her to ring on Wednesday evenings to be sure of a reply?

***

I met my neighbor only once. One late summer afternoon, just after lunch, she came to my doorstep. I was home alone. I’d taken a parcel for her, a heavy box. She asked my name, how old I was. She wore a spotless white shirt, bleached jeans, yellow gardening gloves on her belt. I spent so many nights trying to figure out what it was I wanted to ask her, why I felt such a deep, gnawing need to announce myself to her. I was supposed to be a writer, a words man, but always came up empty when faced with talking to her. The moment passed, she began to make her way to the gate. The latch lifted, clacked shut. A poem begins “as a lump in the throat,” says Robert Frost. My poems, the Suffolk-sized lump in my throat, began here, standing in this doorway, hearing a gate latch open and close, open and close. Every poem I try to write of my “unofficial countryside” is another attempt to parse this place and step beyond this doorway. Every word, another crack at talking to my neighbor. What’s a poem, after all, but an attempt to talk to a stranger?

***

I used to think of that doorstep as the site of my first failure as a young queer person. I had chickened out, never struck up the courage to actually knock. I thought of my silence as another one of the dark local lanes Black Shuck is meant to haunt. Now, I see it differently. The space this doorstep carved out gave me the confidence to say that a tractor has as much right to be in a queer poem as a Fire Island reverie. A queer person has as much right to be in a Suffolk poem as the heather on Dunwich Heath. Stepping onto this stone was the first step I ever took into a future I didn’t know I had. I could’ve stayed inside and daydreamed about that doorstep, what went on behind the frosted glass. Without fail, every chance I got, I walked up that path and took my place on that doorstep. This gate and this path were the first queer Suffolk poem I knew, the first queer Blythburgh poem I walked along. That skewed hunk of stone was the first step I made into the future—a future not in London or Brighton or San Francisco, but here, in this place, this land of dropped H’s, this turf chock-full of words like hant (haven’t), dint (didn’t), scrab (scratch).

Eventually I moved away to a neighboring village, but I still return to those Tuesday afternoons. Eleven years later, my feet remember the edges of that garden path in all weathers. Every now and then, a bus I’m on will drive right through Blythburgh, past the doorstep where I first learned Suffolk and queer didn’t have to have an almost magnetic opposition to each other. If a double decker bus shows up and I make my way to the top deck, I can spot my neighbor’s sapling, shuffled along next to the fenceline, outgrowing the house inch by inch, year on year.

In the last five years, more pride parades have popped up across Suffolk than ever before. Today I can walk toward Lowestoft’s second pride, look at a pride bookshop display. Books full of Dublin, Hackney, California. Not a peep of the pier a stone’s throw away, a popular cruising spot in the years before the First World War. There’s the doorstep, outside the pages, caught in my throat, waiting. Or I can stroll through Bungay’s third pride, look at the crowd. They’re so young. I can pass the high school my parents went to, the building where they might’ve first heard the queer slurs they’d sling my way 20-odd years later. Underneath my heel, in the space between my toes, the tug and heft of that doorstep again. I have come back. I am standing on the doorstep. Standing like the tall green summer weed beside my foot, growing in a pin prick gap in the stone.