Chapter 2: Moortown Water Tower

Moortown Water Tower
If there is a beginning to this story it would have to be my boyhood relationship with Moortown Water Tower. York has its Minster, Winchester its cathedral. Moortown has its water tower. Growing up in the suburbs of leeds the biggest architectural feature that stood over looking our manor was Leeds' oldest Water Tower. An underground service reservoir sits on the corner made by the A61 leeds to Harrogate road and nursery lane. This was not open to the public and fenced off by spear like uprights of iron that stood seven feet tall. This raised field could be accessed by the odd bent or removed spear. I guess I must have been nine or so when I entered a period of exploration. Accessing local public electricity substations and water works. Positioned at one of the highest points of the city the Water Tower took on a spiritual significance. As near to a cathedral we had nearby.
Built in 1872 of intersectional concrete sections, it stands proudly with subtle detailing; stepped flaring of the feet, but largely functional and minimalist. Painted periodically white or cream and has an eight foot high base, octagonal in section where the eight legs stand braced twice as they taper to the drum or storrage cylinder. This holds 75000 gallons of water.
As kids we would enter the fenced off area before shimmying along a fat pipe some eight feet off the ground. To discourage trespassers a spiky circular fence, often geased up and wrapped in a bundle binding of barbed wire. Crossing this itself was tricky for a small boy but once overcome you were basically only restricted from this point by fear. The base slightly domed then had a cast iron spiral staircase that ensured a dizzying ascent adding to the change in consiousness brought on by height and fear. World War 2 sirens still fixed at points.
My fear of heights ensured I took steady measured steps of which there were 118. As one entered the cylinder, the wind, it's noise and disconcertion evapourated as a false sense of security relaxed the final steps. Once on top it tapered, a shallow cone for drainage. A small wall of no more than a foot was all that protected one from falling.
From here as a boy I felt on top of the world. Always a terrifying climb for me but offset by the views over the entire city. In summer, leaf cover obscured some views but winter time meant a true perspective, comparable to feelings Londoners enjoy from their Shard or Eye.
It became something of a right of passage, the enrolment into the select band of boys brave enough, stupid enough but mainly curious enough to climb. These were pre drug days. Yet I feel that the adrenalin rushing from my fear of heights, though unpleasant, was a natural high. Once safely. On top, the sedating neurotransmitters, endorphins became released to calm the raging adrenalin. A speedball for children.
I was nine when my mother first went to hospital for her first mastectomy. She died three years later. Her body became riddled with cancer and these three years were a process of deconstruction as parts were periodically cut away. Operation on operation. Hospital to home to school to hospital each night for three years. Having previously been a clever pupil. Top or there a outs in most subjects, I began to find it pointless. My father wasn't a domestic man and took to drinking heavily. My clothes became dirty and ragged. My mothers christianity, her faith in God and prayer clearly didn't work. My fathers evolutionary atheism, his nature of survival of the fittest was closer. I had never believed in an interventionist God and grew to think the world a dark and evil place where all you trusted and loved would some day prove false.
I took to climbing the water tower alone. It became my high castle. My eyrie. On its top I would lay for hours lost in thought. Sleeping there some nights. No safer place existed. Nowhere so private to be alone with my thoughts nurturing a nihilistic outlook as punk rock broke. The first line on side 1 of 'Never Mind the Bollocks', "You're only 29, got a lot to learn, but when your mummy dies, she will not return." From this platform in the sky I plotted my reinvention as a new creature with a new name. A creature more suited for survival in this cruel place.


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