There’s a man running full pelt down Winslow Street in Walton, a cardboard shoebox held out in front of him as he sprints. Watching is a four-year-old boy with a quizzical expression. Where is the man off to in such a hurry? Why the shoebox?
The scene pauses in the now fully-grown boy’s memory as he reveals the answer some 63 years later: there was a canary flying just ahead of the box, and the man was trying to catch it. Now Liverpool-born author and playwright Jeff Young has a different conundrum to solve: “Why have I remembered that and not my first day at school?”
The slipperiness of memory is a subject he has returned to again and again in his work, and does so once more in his new book Wild Twin, the second part of his memoir which began with 2021’s Ghost Town: A Liverpool Shadowplay.
Young is fascinated by what we remember from episodes in our lives – how the past rewrites itself with time, inserting erroneous details and forgetting others; some episodes vividly replayed like a reel of film, some bleary around the edges.
“A memoir isn’t historical fact, a memoir is a poetic approach to the sediment of memory,” he says over a green tea with lemon in Hope Street’s Pen Factory, next door to the Everyman Theatre which has produced many of his plays. “Everybody rehearses and rewrites their own memories. I’m fascinated by that. And I think that’s what I’ve done in this book as well.”
Sometimes the past is almost too painful to recount. Although Wild Twin centres on Young’s youthful escapades in Europe, it also takes us into the recent past. The final part, entitled Time Machines, covers the last year of his dad’s life. Young wrote it on his laptop while sitting at his dad’s bedside.
“There was a point where I just thought, this is a big mistake,” he says. “You know, it’s too raw.”
But then he realised the symmetry of bookending the story with his dad, the “kind and gentle soul with pale blue eyes” who cannot comprehend his son’s itch for an unpredictable life; whose response to Young’s plan to hitchhike to Paris is the quiet, cutting words: “Well, that’s a silly thing to do, isn’t it?”
Young says: “Part three could have just been a misery memoir but hopefully it became more of a kind of meditation on loss, rather than wallowing in it.”
During his dad’s final year, Young began “curating” memories inside tobacco and cigar tins – “thimbles, foreign coins, medals, brooches, holiday snaps, acorns, pebbles, seashells, door keys” – that he saw as physical poems.
“You’ve got this vast archive of seemingly inconsequential things, but they’re not inconsequential to the person who owned them. When my sister Val died in 2019, we went through her possessions. There was stuff that everybody else would have sent to a car boot sale or a charity shop. She kept these things because they had a sentimental value attached to them.
“In Ghost Town, there are photographs scattered through the book, but it never explains what they are or who the people are in them. It’s meant to be like a biscuit tin with objects in it, letters, bills or whatever, that you find when you’re clearing somebody’s house after they’ve died. That biscuit tin is their autobiography. I like putting things together like that, it’s a little, secret gift to the reader.”
Paragraphs of Young’s writing resemble these tins – lists of rich detail constructed from observations he has been compulsively recording in notebooks for most of his life. His habit of noticing builds an intricate picture of seedy hotel rooms, graveyard pilgrimages, and Amsterdam alleys.
Wild Twin is poignant, but not heavy. And there are laugh-out-loud anecdotes in there too – an uncooked lamb shank flung out of the window during a dinner party fight, his mum cooking for eight weed-smoking “anarcho-squatters” – as Young embraces his adventurous alter ego. Meanwhile, he first experienced the sense of his own “wild twin” at the age of seven or eight, after his family had moved to Maghull.
“In those early years of living there, I realised that you could just disappear. I was lucky enough to be born in the time where your parents just sent you out of the house in the morning and told you to come back when it was dark. You could get on your bike and go down the canal, and you could be somewhere else.
“And once you’re elsewhere, nobody knows who you are. I think that’s when you become your own wild twin. You’re not the person that you are when you’re at home having your tea with your family. You become a realisation of who you are without the shackles of conformity.”
Where is his Wild Twin now? “It’s kind of in retirement,” says Young. “The last five years have been really difficult due to the pandemic and so on, so I live a quiet, very safe life. I don’t drink. I don’t do drugs. I stay at home and read the paper. And it’s fine for now. But I’m hoping I’ll have a few adventures now the book’s out.”
Main image: Jeff Young (credit Pearl Buscombe Young)
Wild Twin is out now. For more information, click here.
To read Jeff Young’s article for Northern Soul, click here.
