Brian Patten finds re-visiting his childhood memories a difficult task, he tells Laura Davis

THERE are phantoms hiding in the shadows of Brian Patten’s memory that he’s wary of awakening.

Spectres with sharp talons clinging tightly to half-written stanzas long discarded into the deepest parts of his mind.

He will have to confront them if he is to complete the task – started and stopped and started again over several years – of writing his childhood memoirs.

“It’s hard digging up the past,” admits the 64-year-old, who made his name by creating and performing “accessible” poetry with contemporaries Roger McGough and Adrian Henri.

“Sometimes I think to myself ‘let it be’, because often you disturb ghosts that you don’t want to disturb because there was so much back then that wasn’t very happy.

“There are so many people from the past that you’re trying to resurrect and it’s hard to do them justice.”

Many of the places he visits in his memory have vanished – the two Wavertree houses he grew up in are long since demolished, as is Sefton Park Secondary Modern, opposite Toxteth Park Cemetery on Smithdown Road, where he learned that writing poetry could get him out of gym lessons.

It was in one of these homes, at the age of 11, that he recalls discovering his first poem – possibly a Robert Frost – read out on the radio.

“It was like there was somebody reading a magical spell, suddenly something clicked,” remembers Patten, who is performing at Crosby Civic Hall later this month. “It was weird because I didn’t know what it was about, but it sounded fantastic to me.

“I grew up in Wavertree in a little terrace and nobody seemed to talk to each other. The family wasn’t good at communicating and they let feelings fester. I used poetry as a way of trying to articulate what I felt inside me from a very early age.”