The poet Graham Palmer tweets historical facts about his home town every day with the hashtag #BiteSizeRoyston. But his proudest achievements include the texts for the song cycle Cracked Voices by Jenni Pinnock – a sequence of cameos from the lives of people who’ve lived in and around Royston over the last two thousand years.
Aidan: Where did you find the stories for Cracked Voices?
Graham: I’d already been researching local stories. The inspiration really was some fellow feeling that made me think these stories need to be told. Things like the story of the coprolite workers locally, who were maimed and died – and enriched the local area! Something that ought to be remembered.
Stories resonating
Aidan: Have you produced any work that reflects contemporary Britain – things like COVID and Brexit, refugees, the cost of living crisis, climate change, and so on?
Graham: Cracked Voices is about the present – stories that resonate or have some connection to the present. My interest in history is to do with its connection with the present.
A museum wanted something about a lar (a Roman guardian deity) which had been found in the mud of an estuary, which I thought fitted perfectly with this idea of trying to reemerge after COVID. Apart from my website, it didn’t actually go anywhere in the end. I don’t tend to write things directly responding to current events. My mind works more tangentially.
Roger Britten never made it into Cracked Voices, because I didn’t know about him at the time. The first recorded person of colour in Royston. I was looking at the archaeology of Royston. The things that were dug up from the heath in the 19th century were put on display in Royston’s own grand exhibition at the Working Men’s Institute. I went back to the original newspaper report of the exhibition, and found it talking about “an intelligent looking African” – I think that was the phrase – printing off things in the main hall. He wasn’t actually African – born in Guyana. And he’d been befriended by a missionary who had connections with Darwin and was known for collecting rare specimens. So he came back to Britain with this man, and he learned the trade of printing in Royston and then moved on to work for the Queen’s Stationery Office in London. And he was instrumental in the publication of the Royston Crow newspaper, created around that time. Jenni and I worked separately on that with the local schools to produce a song for Roger Britten.
The final song in the cycle refers back to all the earlier songs. The one on Lucas, the Hertfordshire hermit, was inspired by Dickens’s visit to him. I was putting words into people’s mouths, just as Dickens was. And I was very aware that I had no more right to try and speak for these people than anybody else.
Finding patterns in everything
Aidan: What influences do you think you see?
Graham: I went on a workshop with Hennessey, the storyteller. He said that when things fail, the storytellers are going to be the people that people turn to. Have you read The Patterning Instinct? It explores how our brains have developed to find pattern in everything and explains how Jackson Pollock is interesting to us because of the fractals within his work. A bit wacky, but it’s an interesting book.
Aidan: Charles Lamb talked of “green Hertfordshire”, and C.S. Lewis responded that Hertfordshire wasn’t green to someone who’d grown up knowing County Down. His first school was in Baldock and he hated it.
Graham: Royston history particularly interests me because it’s a border town. It’s on the edge of the chalk escarpment, and it goes down to what used to be fenland. Royston used to be divided between Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire. If you broke the law in one half of the town, you could hop across the border. In the 19th century, there used to be huge bare knuckle fights on the heath. Because the constabulary from one county could be fooled into thinking it was happening there and they couldn’t do anything about it. It’s not a settled place, and lots of things are going on under the surface.
Lots of things going on under the surface. And Graham Palmer’s work is unearthing them. It’s not such a very different mission from what East Anglia Bylines and its siblings in other regions are all about, and Graham’s Hertfordshire is on our patch. We look forward to hearing more from Graham in future. Who else from Hertfordshire would like to join in? Drop us a line at editor@eastangliabylines.co.uk
