To get me into the mood to write this, I’m listening to “Mr Blue Sky” by Electric Light Orchestra. On repeat. “Sun is shining in the sky / There ain’t a cloud in sight.”
I must associate that song with Moseley in Birmingham, perhaps because summers were so bright there. Or maybe it’s that Bev Bevan of ELO went to the same school as me. As did the comedian Jasper Carrott, the England cricketer Moeen Ali and former Guantánamo detainee Moazzam Begg. “Running down the avenue / See how the sun shines brightly in the city / On the streets where once was pity.”
I lived on College Road, very near Moseley school, in the same semi-detached house from birth to 19. Down the road was a small roundabout I was once stranded on as a child – a long story – and branching to the left was urban Sparkhill, which led to the city centre. The BBC comedy Citizen Khan proudly begins: “Welcome to Sparkhill, Birmingham, the capital of British Pakistan.”
Up College Road and along the leafier Wake Green Road is the wooded Moseley bog, the other side of which is where Tolkien grew up. I was more interested in cricket than books – I had trials for Warwickshire before I gave up completely – and wouldn’t have known about Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and that the woods up the road were his inspiration for the enchanted primordial Old Forest.
Along Wake Green Road in the other direction was eventually Edgbaston cricket ground which was another kind of holy place for me, a green bucket of mixed memories. I’d go every summer to half-watch matches as a young boy on my own, with a Walkman and a cassette – usually the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour – playing on my headphones.
I once saw Muhammad Ali there, who was visiting the nearby Central mosque, and got his autograph, with my name on it and everything. My father was never prouder of me than when I came home with this, nor as disappointed as when I lost the shiny green Parka I used to carry the signature in, zipped into an arm pocket.
The memories that seem to hold me most are in green pockets, in gardens, parks, bits of woodland. Perhaps it’s time’s green pockets, as much as Moseley’s. The first poem in my book Us begins with me as a boy, looking for a cricket ball beyond the boundary, in brambles – in “a fingernail of forest” – having a moment where I can almost sense myself in the future looking back, looking for something. Which is how I feel, writing this now, with the same song still on repeat. “Nevermind, I’ll remember you this way / Mr Blue Sky … ”
My book ends with a blue sky above a tree I used to climb in my back garden in Moseley. I have a mad theory that the old forest of Arden has left an imprint somehow, zipped into the air, small pockets that fold worlds in. There was a hazy, wooded feel to the worlds I lived in, whether concreted-over or not. I like how poetry can hold this mossy, maybe Moseleyed sense of folded-in worlds.
Us takes bits from other books, including a snippet of Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. It left an early imprint, with its forest that grew … and grew … “and the walls became the world all around”. Where I grew up, on the Sparkhill edge of Moseley, did feel like the world all around.
And it still feels magical to me, even from this distance.
• Us by Zaffar Kunial is published by Faber (£10.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.
