Ginsberg in Newcastle

'Hope you can introduce me to lots of hairy rockers': The poet Tom Pickard on when the Beat titan, Allen Ginsberg, paid him a visit

In the summer of 1965 I was 19 years old, a father of a two-year-old boy, and living with Connie, a married woman who was my two-year-old’s mother. We’d been homeless for a couple of years during which time we’d rented a near derelict old turret up a tall narrow forbidding back lane used by prostitutes, petty thieves to unpack their swag, and those desperate to get a quick one off the wrist, haunted by the risk of being caught with the evidence in hand. On match days mob-handed fans, on their way to St James Park, streamed along it, full of alcoholic hoo-yee! And as the lane is only a couple of yards wide you wouldn’t want to walk toward them from the opposite direction. Most approached the entrance to the alley at the Gallowgate end with trepidation. It wasn’t (and still isn’t) a place you walk into without thinking about it.

On one side, the 25ft 13th-century walls, and on the other, the back end of warehouses and a few fume-emitting electroplaters who were protected against burglars by barbed wire on which used condoms were sometimes spiked like a shrike’s larder. The lane was without any form of street lighting and so going to poetry readings on the dark nights made many nervous; but the Northumberland Arms, which backed onto the entrance to the alley, was a welcome drop-in en-route. It was run by Rosie, a feisty blond woman in her late 50s, always immaculately made-up. Rosie could be short and sharp with idiots and her asthmatic husband, George, who called time with a wheezy ‘sup ya pops’ to be followed by her, ‘hev yeez nee yems to gan te.’ The pub was an essential stop-off and enabler for many before taking a first step into the dark lane.

Even in daylight there was no way of seeing end to end, as the lane bends in the middle where Morden Tower sags overhead, only feet away from the factory opposite, and who knows what’s around that bend. A long empty street has a furtive appeal for those who seek its anonymity and who welcome the frisson of a risk, but even a well-oiled and addled flaneur would hesitate on approaching the lane from the Gallowgate end.