1 - The Early Years: 1946–1967

Summary

CHILDHOOD

Brian Patten was born in Liverpool on 7 February 1946. His mother, Stella, was 18 years old, and had separated from his father shortly after he was born.

His childhood was working-class. Apart from a brief period in a children's home in Wales, he lived with his mother and grandparents in a cramped terraced house in Wavertree Vale, the street described in ‘Lament for the Angels Who've Left My Street’ in Little Johnny's Confession:

Streets everywhere! All peopled by memories and the times

I was a monster and scared my playmates

On backyard walls cutting clotheslines

Keeping impossible monkeys in impossible jamjars,

Playing games in the kickthecan streets and swinging

On lamps that were then gas and black.

The area was deprived and dilapidated. ‘As a child,’ he recalled in 1975, in an article in the Liverpool Daily Post, ‘my playground was the railway embankments; the back-alleys; the bombsites and the derelict houses.’

The atmosphere in the family home was tense and claustrophobic. Three generations were crammed, bickering, into uncomfortable proximity. Patten's grandmother, who had previously been a dancer in music hall, had been crippled in a wartime bombing raid, and her shattered legs were encased in the callipers that become in ‘Echoes’ (Armada) a symbol of the environment's corrosive confinement, both spiritual and physical:

The frightening heartbeat of the house

Is made by her iron callipers.

The bomb-crushed legs, the bolted bones,

The hands that scrape like talons on the stairs,

The damned-up pain, the hate, the grief;

The soul crushed by iron callipers.

What he later described as ‘the crushed hopes’ and ‘stifled longings’ within the household weighed heavily on Patten's childhood self. Still – in his own words – ‘inarticulate to express the pain felt by the adults around me’, he nevertheless began to develop in his isolation the observational stance and capacity for intense introspection that have since come to characterize much of his poetry. ‘The Eavesdropper’ in Armada is rooted in a childhood memory of separateness:

I sat like a cabin-boy who listens in secret

to the crew of a great, creaking ship,

and eavesdropped on the adults below me.