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Interview 'There was a real humanity and beauty in those words'

DAVID CAIN talks to Andy Croft about the genesis of his Forward Prize-nominated poem, drawn from verbatim transcripts of the inquiry into the Hillsborough stadium disaster

DAVID CAIN has had a good season. Luton Town have just been promoted to the Championship and now his first book of poems has been shortlisted for this year’s Forward Prize for best first collection.

Truth Street  is a book-length poem about the events at Hillsborough on April 15 1989, when 96 men, women and children died during the opening minutes of the FA Cup semi-final between Nottingham Forest and Liverpool.

It remains the worst tragedy in British sporting history and for almost 30 years the survivors and the families of the dead have had to campaign against the police, government and media who blamed Liverpool fans for the tragedy.

Cain was at Kenilworth Road that afternoon, watching Luton Town. Seeing the events at Hillsborough later on the TV news brought back vivid memories of the FA Cup semi-final in 1985 at Villa Park he attended when he was 12.

“I was in the crush in the Holte End that day as near-on 18,000 Luton supporters were herded onto one terrace,” he remembers. “My grandfather, a tough ex-Bevan Boy, grabbed me as I was being swept away by the swell of the crowd, holding me between the lifebelt of his arms.

“Like so many who stood on the terraces of English football grounds in the 1980s, I could see right from the start that what was happening at the Leppings Lane End was a terrible and  extraordinary event — and one clearly not incited by crowd trouble.”

As have many, Cain started writing poetry in his teens and some of his poems were set to music and performed by Cerys Matthews on her BBC Radio Six Music show. Then he wrote a poem about watching Luton lose in the Conference play-off final at Wembley in 2012. It was read on national radio and afterwards the club invited him to write a regular feature for the match-day programme.

Reading the reports of the second Hillsborough inquest in Warrington in March 2014, he knew he wanted to write something about the events of that day from the point of view of the fans. Charles Reznikoff’s cycle of poems about the Nuremberg Tribunals and Svetlana Alexievitch’s oral-history of Chernobyl gave him the idea of making the book entirely out of the testimonies of survivors.

Every line of Truth Street is drawn from 260 days of formal evidence presented at the second inquest, anonymised, framed and sequenced into a  timeline.

To anyone who says that Truth Street isn’t really poetry, Cain argues that all poetry “is found in how we try to describe human experiences and the Hillsborough stadium disaster was a very terrible, human experience.

“There was a real humanity and indeed beauty in those words and I wanted to try and rescue those fragile lines from all the legal jargon and also the headline-news verdicts.”

When he started to write the book, Cain was anxious that he might be accused of exploiting other people’s grief but he hopes that people will see that it comes from “wanting to bear witness to people’s experience and to share that experience so others can better understand the events that day.

“At its heart is a deep desire for social justice and understanding. I also hope it reaches out to all fans of football, regardless of their allegiances, and that in some small way it can counter the lies fostered by the Sun.”

Football has changed a lot since 1989. Ground safety has improved and racism is less of a problem. “Of course racism is still there,” Cain says, “we still have a long way to go. Football is not a vacuum. But there is a greater solidarity these days between football fans, helped by the expansion and diversification of the game’s fan base.”

He’s currently working on a book about the refugee crisis, to challenge the way that so many deaths are reduced to numbers.

“I want to try and give those people a fitting memorial and a name brought to life from a statistic on a spreadsheet,” he says. “Poetry can make us stop and think and question. Then we as people can have the power to change things.”

Truth Street, price £7.99, is published by Smokestack Books, smokestack-books.co.uk

There was like a silence (from Truth Street)

It was just an eerie sound.
It probably only lasted a second or two.
But it felt like a lot longer.
It’s hard to describe the sound.
I’ve never heard the sound since.
As it seemed to settle, people started screaming and panicking.
It wasn’t nice. It was people screaming, people crying all at the same time.
The noise is almost impossible to describe.
People screaming, people shouting for kids
People shouting to the pitch side for help.
It was so hot. The smell was terrible and lingered in the air.
Sweat. Heat. Vomit.
The smell is not something I have ever smelt before and I have
never smelt it since.
Is it the smell of death?
I don’t know.

 

 

 

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