My family moved from London to Sheffield in 1974, when I was nine years old and, to be honest, quite scared. Perhaps it doesn’t seem very far now, but distances were further in the past, and less easily crossed.
Sheffield was at the fag-end of two great historical movements. The industrial revolution had left monuments: black mountains of slag by the side of the road and mysterious, spindly watchtowers, great diagonal fan-belts, hills of dark solid waste. In the lower reaches of the city, soiled rivers emerged between huge cliffs of brick – the steelworks, forming forbiddingly skyless mazes. They had been there forever and they would be there forever. I had never imagined there could be such a place.
But there was another historical movement that had formed the city: the urge to educate and to put everyone in a relation with proper culture. Before we moved to Sheffield, I had patchy experience of what that meant. London is too big, and so stratified that you have to work at it, with personal introductions. In a city like Sheffield, you already know about the Friday night symphonic concerts at the City Hall (the Penderecki Passion, Rattle doing Mahler), the play by Racine at the Crucible theatre, the magnificent library, the life of the university.
There was (for me) the greatest second-hand bookshop in the world, Rare & Racy – in my day, they tried to drive their customers away with a gramophone playing the farthest reaches of modern jazz. In Sheffield, if you took an interest you quite quickly discovered that there was a resident string quartet and people walking the streets who might be writing books, who everyone knows about. Angela Carter was one of them, if only I’d been a bit older.
That gift of culture, the habit of not thinking of Beethoven or Nabokov as properties connected to swank, money and social class, but just there to be thought about and engaged with, was one thing that made me. But I think the real thing that turned me into a writer was the discovery of difference.
Places were less alike in the 1970s than they are now. To a shy boy, the experience was almost overwhelming. People looked and dressed differently. Speech was quite different – I was quite unprepared for “castle” to rhyme with “cattle”, for the glottal stop that took the place of the definite article, for words that started around here and stopped around here. Gennel; mardy; nesh; gi’o’er. A sister was suddenly “our Mandy”. Food was different – there was something called haslet that you got not from butchers, but with weird specificity, from pork butchers. Most of all, the manners were different. They spoke to you briskly; adult women should not be expected to be shy and retiring; the joke was delivered with a straight face, and usually turned out to be on you. Pretty soon I was giving as good as I got.
The discovery that everyone is not the same is a good one to make. I made it, on a large scale, when I was nine. The expression of difference is at the heart of what a novelist does. They don’t just talk about themselves. They don’t assume that everyone does things in the way that they do.
Most of the industry is gone now – the slag heaps grassed over, toytown-symmetrical green hills. A lot of the culture has gone, too. The classics on the shelves of the great Central Library have long been disposed of, and soon the library itself is going to go, sold off to a luxury hotelier. Rare & Racy closed down last year. Yet it’s still not like other places. Its difference taught me how to look at other people, and listen to them. Taught me not to be so shy, too. I haven’t been frightened of anything for decades.
• The Friendly Ones is published by Fourth Estate in March. To order a copy for £12.74 (RRP £14.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
