I first came across David Storey when his novel Saville won the Booker Prize. It was one of those books about the progress of a working-class grammar school and his alienation from his background that used to be everywhere.
The grandfather of this school of literature was D.H. Lawrence, and I was studying his novel The Rainbow for A level at the time. Our teacher talked about Storey's debt to Lawrence and suggested we might want to read Saville.
Storey's own life story was like one of his novels on speed. At one time he was studying fine art at the Slade in the week and catching the train back north to play Rugby League for Leeds at the weekend.
He wrote of Rugby league in his posthumous memoir A Stinging Delight:
An odd game, rugby league was confined principally to the two northern counties of Lancashire and Yorkshire and was almost exclusively working class. It seemed to me that it had about it something of the graft of underground labour (several of the more notable players were miners), something of the confederacy induced by enclosed spaces; something of the magnanimity of the elements: dourness, strength, tenacity, graft.
Grafting was what the forward game was all about: five-tank like players formed the scrum, with me shifting between the second row (the two players welded between the three in front) and the loose-forward at the back .The first ten minutes of the game were taken up with seeking what might be described as a psychological advantage: a stag-like confrontation whether forwards trying to suppress and finally demoralise their opposite numbers. There ferocity with which a player ran with the ball was matched by the ferocity with which he was tackled, the subsequent course of the game determined by the conclusions reached in these introductory encounters.
A winter sport, austere and remorselessly physical, we played in rain, mist, fog or occasional snow; on darkening afternoons, in encroaching dusk; on grounds enclosed by industrial workings, or by the debilitating and depressing environs of a smoke-ridden town. Journeys took us around the industrialised valleys of the Pennines. Occasionally the sky would be illuminated by the descending sun, the valleys suffused with a purplish glow. Occasionally the Pennine hills would rear in the distance but, invariably, the terraces were silhouetted against chimneyed roofs, mills, factories, the cooling towers of a power station: slopes of ashy, industrial dereliction.
I'm remined of how Eddie Waring used to refer to the "Satanic Mills End" at Leigh's Hilton Park ground.
Fashions change in literature. Not so long ago I saw Andy Miller from the Backlisted podcast exclaiming online that Saville had won the Booker Prize yet he could find no one who had read it.
