Legendary Huddersfield journalist and author DENIS KILCOMMONS is a natural storyteller who brings everyday subjects to life in his own inimitable style. Denis wrote a hugely popular column in the Huddersfield Examiner for 34 years until his retirement in 2023. Now he’s back from a break and writing for Huddersfield Hub.

I’m now 84 and mainly housebound, a situation of my own choice.

I had a fall at home at Christmas which made me re-assess mobility. I could drive perfectly well to go shopping but my legs occasionally gave me trouble once I reached my destination.

Many years ago I suffered the same problem and fell into the frozen food section of Fine Fare while reaching for a bag of chips (the store is long gone). The problem then was a monumental hangover and nothing to do with age and infirmity.

My wife Maria was away in Blackpool that week helping to run her uncle’s nightclub while he and the family were away.

Drink will not trouble me in this new endeavour as I opted for sobriety when I lost Maria 18 months ago. I have been a writer all my life as a journalist and author so I’m used to my own company and my favourite place these days is sitting before a keyboard in my home office.

I’m content in my current lifestyle and have grandchildren just up the road.

To be honest, I think my motivation this time is work related. I have, for some time, been bashing out a series of new books and perhaps writing for Huddersfield Hub will be a healthier and more stimulating way of taking a break, rather than drinking a large milky coffee and eating a buttered malt loaf.

Anyway, make of it what you will. Or not. Basically it’s for me so I’ll start with a bit of background.

I was born on May 8, 1941, in the midst of the Second World War. The place of my arrival was number 5 Cheapside in Wakefield, a tall terraced house off Westgate in the city centre. The actual birthing location was its only ground-floor room that contained all the necessities of life, making it not dissimilar to a stable in Bethlehem.

A gas lamp, which had to be lit with a match, hung from the ceiling to illuminate a sink and gas oven, three piece suite, sideboard, dining table and four chairs and a single window onto the world. It was crowded even without people.

There was no room for sheep, shepherds or three kings. Gold was in extremely short supply and you can forget frankincense and myrrh because of rationing but we had candles because there was no electricity. Candles were needed at night to go anywhere else in the house. Very much like Bethlehem.

There were three-floors although no-one ever went to the top floor. That was a space that time forgot.

“Timmy died up there,’’ my mother once whispered as a requiem and I became convinced it was haunted by ghosts from a Victorian novel.

Was that clanking noise the chains of Jacob Marley? Did Tiny Tim Cratchit sit in the shadows waiting for better times?

Timmy, I later discovered, was a pet dog that died while having a fit. Maybe it was his feet I could hear at night. Maybe it was mice. Or rats. The building was extremely Dickensian and very picturesque unless you had to live in it. A stable in Bethlehem might have been preferable.

In the picture below I was born in the brown door house in the room with the window. A stable would have been preferable.

 

 

A stone’s throw away, Victorian novelist George Gissing had grown up and started his literary career in a similar house in Thompson’s Yard that had been attached to his father’s chemist shop at the top of Westgate.

This is now The Gissing Centre and has a blue plaque outside. People can visit and pay homage, even though few people have ever heard of him.

So far no one has turned 5 Cheapside into a shrine for me. Perhaps if I won the Euro Lottery I might do it myself just for the confusion it would create.

I could fill the window with covers of my books alongside a stylised biography of my career as journalist, writer and hunter in the Dark Continent and a photograph of me looking like a shorter version of Robert Redford in Out Of Africa.

Friend of the famous and, please, no questions about secret missions with a personal body count well over a hundred.

This last bit is true, but only in fiction.

As it happens, the ground-floor room that was my birthplace received a far more suitable accolade than a blue plaque. It became a curry take-away shop and, later, part of the expansion of a bar on Westgate.

The very spot where I was born was then occupied by drinkers enjoying a tipple.

In recent years there has been an attempt to erase the actual location of the house from history. The original Number 5 was, at last sight, a brown door with no identity.

The next house up has commandeered the number. The window and room, behind which I was born, is to the left in the picture. It no longer houses drinkers but appears to have been blocked off for storage.

It has occurred to me that this change could have been organised by officialdom or fans of George Gissing who want to hide my origins and remove me from literary history.

They should remember that officialdom once tried and failed to eradicate from history the name and fame of the baby born in the original stable, the one in Bethlehem, and that Jesus went on to become almost as famous as John Lennon.

I’m still waiting.