The Rent Collector
100 pencilled lines to L.S.Lowry

'A Portrait Of The Artist?'


Walking, prowling even, in the wondrous gallery
erected in your name, I cannot but marvel -
as do uncounted others - at your artistic industry.

For decades -  in your more mundane existence
as 'the rent-collector' - you manifestly
dipped the litmus of your soul

into all the pungent fluids of
the personalities, strong or otherwise,
of those folk upon whose doors you tapped;

and then, as each door opened, finally,
to your growingly persistent rap
- or in defiance remained resolutely closed -

you patiently endured the oaths, the
condemnations and the pleas of those
stricken with the impossibilities of poverty.

You must have inhaled all the sour odours
of life's detritus - or on the odd occasion
admired a proudly pumice-polished doorstep -

and smiled - or shaken an unconvincing
fist - at those unkempt, unshod, skinny kids
whose jeers and cheeky chanting echoed faint

from cobbled street to cobbled street;
the slate, dank fogs of Salford clinging
to your weighted shoulders like soggy glue.

And you must have sensed the eyes of footpads
burning week on week upon your fragile
pocket-book, skull and kidneys -

whilst in the summer the stench of uncleansed streets
was all-pervasive in your distraught nostrils
as you patrolled that city midden.

So these daily bucketfuls of dross
were carried in your memory for years.
You must have witnessed every grinding trait,

when peering from The Crescent into the stinking Irwell,
or imagining within the walls of Salford Royal
the sweats and groans of the fever-ridden,

overhearing in your mind the anguished screams of
childbirth as you trudged the pounding pavements
of Adelphi St., which shuddered helplessly

to the machinery clanking in the bowels of the engineering halls,
your lungs baulking at the acrid beachworks gases
which hung like gothic mist about you.

Vulgarly accosted in Lower Broughton
by the ladies of the night;
or walking past the racecourse

with its 'November Handicap' and silk top-hats,
the limousines of yesteryear sharing
with the hoi-polloi a moment of adrenalin.

No doubt you grimaced at the tepid pints of 'mild and bitter' pushed
across the raucous counters of 'The Fox', mentally absorbing
its squabbling clientele of drunks and painted ladies;

or mingled with the sailors and the stevedores streaming
from the dock gates onto Trafford Road, with its horse-drawn
carts, its clanging trams and its smoking-funnelled, sea-tang smells.

All these images you escorted quietly home
to your back room - not large enough
to enjoy the sobriquet of 'studio' -

but where you laid your thoughts
as statements upon canvas after canvas,
selecting brushes from the score on score

you had before you.  Painting mournful
portraits of sons and fathers, or multi-landscapes
littered with those thin, disconsolate, down-trodden

figures later christened 'matchstick-men' -
perhaps because their lives flickered only once:
with that bright, sharp flame of your imagination,

their beings formulated with a minimalist shrug
of paint and brush - the whole far greater
than the sum of those tiny individuals,

and yet contriving with your contradictory genius
scenes within which each individual
is greater than the whole.

As in the family figures at a funeral,
or the pithead figures awaiting numbly
the direst outcome of disaster.

No surprise, then, that you frequently escaped
to Peel Park and persistently portrayed,
time and year again, the bandstand

with its Sunday apirations, its sparse fresh air
sniffed at eagerly by the milling crowds, who imbibed
with fervour a music they can have rarely elsewhere heard.

In contrast, hanging also, are the likenesses of your mother and your
father, and your 'self-portrait of the artist as a young man',
which each display an early genuflection to convention -

your mother, against no background, portrayed
as in 'the parlour', the ruff around her throat
a reflection of her era; her gentle poise

and staid demeanour portraying creeds Victorian;
your grey-drawn father slumping in a figment armchair,
moustache and glasses giving a characterless

clue to his own conventiality.  Your mother
might have been my grandmother - her age the same;
her imagined bearing; the districts in which they prevailed:

and their almost colourless existences - hued here in brown.
But: Mr Lowry, your mean houses, your mean viaducts, your mean
mills, your mean railways and your mean populace you have never, once,

illuminated with even those thinneset, meanest rays of sunshine which
undoubtedly alighted.  Small wonder, then - for me - that 'The Lowry'
depicts your life, your outlook - indeed, your whole persona - as truly dour.

For if you smiled on the surface, it appears that you seldom smiled inside.