Sometimes the biggest moments in our lives arrive with absolutely no sense of occasion.
No fanfare.
No announcement.
No cinematic music swelling in the background.
Sometimes they arrive because it is raining, you are ten years old, your older cousin has disappeared to somewhere far more interesting, and you are bored out of your mind.
That is where Paper Doorway, the sixth and final poem in Spanish City Slickers, begins.
One wet afternoon at my Aunty’s house on the Marden Farm Estate, the North East weather had done what North East weather has always done best: cancelled everything.
Longsands was hidden behind sheets of grey. The Lido was out of the question. Arnold Palmer’s crazy golf had lost much of its appeal beneath a downpour. Spanish City might as well have been on another planet.
I was stuck indoors.
And my cousin, five years older and therefore approximately forty-seven in ten-year-old terms, had little interest in entertaining me.
He managed one grudging game before drifting off to wherever teenagers went when younger cousins became inconvenient.
So I went looking for something to do.
And found a door.
The Kingdom Down the Hall
My cousin’s study had always held a certain fascination.
It belonged to the mysterious territory of older boys.
There were things in there I understood.
And things I definitely did not.
Most tantalising of all were his Marvel comics.
These were not comics in the traditional sense of being read, folded, swapped, left under beds and occasionally decorated with toast crumbs.
These were artefacts.
Spider-Man.
Batman.
Brightly coloured treasures sealed inside protective plastic sleeves and guarded with the sort of security normally associated with crown jewels.
Touching them would have been unwise.
As the poem puts it, I had every reason to suspect I might leave the room with several fewer fingers than I entered with.
Books, however, were different.
Bookshelves do not generally threaten violence.
They simply wait.
And on one of those shelves was a book I picked completely at random.
Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot.
I knew nothing about it.
I had no idea that I had just made one of the most consequential choices of my life.
I was simply trying to get through a wet afternoon.
The Moment the Room Disappeared
There is a point in Paper Doorway where the physical world begins to fall away.
I opened the book.
The rain moved closer to the window.
The room seemed to thin.
Marden Farm disappeared.
No Spanish City.
Just paper, thunder and a fictional town waiting on the other side of the page.
That sensation is difficult to explain if you have never experienced it.
There is reading.
And then there is entering.
One moment you are holding a book.
The next, you are somewhere else entirely.
For me, Salem’s Lot was the book that made that happen.
Stories stopped being words printed on paper.
They became places.
Some Doors Only Open Once
At the time, of course, I had no idea any of this mattered.
I thought I had found something to pass the time.
A few hours later, the rain would stop.
Tea would appear.
My cousin would eventually return from whatever glamorous teenage existence had temporarily claimed him.
Life would carry on.
Except it did not quite carry on in the same direction.
The poem describes certain books as doors that open only once — pages that somehow reveal the hidden roads your life will eventually take.
That was what happened.
After Stephen King came other writers.
Other towns.
Other worlds.
Ray Bradbury.
Harlan Ellison.
Science fiction.
Horror.
Fantasy.
Stories that stretched reality, bent time and made ordinary places feel slightly less ordinary afterwards.
Books became a way of travelling without going anywhere.
Which, on a rainy afternoon in Tynemouth, was an exceptionally useful technology.
The Second Pillar
In the previous poem in Spanish City Slickers, Arcade Fire, I write about another moment of discovery.
The first generation of video games arrived inside Spanish City and completely captivated me.
Later came a Sinclair ZX80.
I taught myself to programme.
Technology became one of the two great pillars of my life and career.
Paper Doorway is about the other one.
Words.
If computers taught me that worlds could be built through logic, books taught me that they could be built through imagination.
One gave me systems.
The other gave me stories.
One became a forty-year career in technology.
The other stayed quietly alongside it, waiting.
Reading.
Writing.
Ideas scribbled into notebooks.
Words that refused to disappear.
And eventually, decades after that rainy afternoon on Marden Farm, poetry.
Bradbury Summers and King-Lit Nights
One of the things I love most about looking back is discovering connections you could never have seen at the time.
The ten-year-old boy choosing Salem’s Lot did not know that one day he would write a poem inspired by Ray Bradbury.
He did not know that fairgrounds, books, computers, sea-fret, arcade machines, abandoned swimming pools and paper cups of cockles would eventually find themselves living together inside the same collection.
He certainly did not know there would be a book called Spanish City Slickers.
Why would he?
He was mainly concerned with whether vampires were about to appear.
But the ingredients were already there.
The coastal summers.
The places.
The technology.
The stories.
The imagination.
They were simply waiting for someone to connect them.
Why Paper Doorway Comes Last
It felt important that Paper Doorway should close Spanish City Slickers.
The collection begins outside.
At the Lido.
Then it moves through crazy golf, the fairground, the shellshack and the arcade.
Each poem explores another piece of the geography of childhood.
But the final journey is inward.
The boy is no longer racing along a seafront, climbing a roller coaster or saving the planet ten pence at a time.
He is sitting quietly with a book.
And yet that may be the biggest adventure of all.
Because every other place in Spanish City Slickers eventually disappears or changes.
The Lido closes.
The crazy golf course goes.
The old fairground vanishes.
Arcade machines become obsolete.
Childhood itself moves beyond reach.
Stories are different.
Once you discover them, you can carry them with you.
Coming Back Carrying Stories
There is an image near the end of Paper Doorway that, for me, connects the entire collection.
Years later, the boy returns.
Not literally.
But through the person he became.
And he comes back carrying poems in his hands like shells gathered from the beach.
That is probably the simplest explanation of where Spanish City Slickers came from.
The poems are things collected.
Fragments.
Sounds.
Places.
People.
Small moments that did not seem especially important while they were happening.
A swimming pool.
A golf ball.
A Helter Skelter.
A paper cup of cockles.
A blinking arcade screen.
A paperback taken from a shelf because there was nothing else to do.
You carry these things for years without quite knowing why.
Then, eventually, you put them down on the page.
The Door Was Paper
Looking back, it seems almost ridiculous that such a small thing could matter so much.
No grand plan.
No teacher handing me the perfect book.
No revelation that I was destined to become a writer.
Just rain.
Boredom.
A bookshelf.
And chance.
I reached out and picked one book.
Had my hand moved six inches to the left, perhaps I would have chosen something else.
Perhaps the afternoon would have passed.
Perhaps the door would have remained closed for another year.
But I picked Salem’s Lot.
I opened it.
And somewhere between Marden Farm and that fictional town in Maine, something changed.
A love of words began.
Decades later, that love became Spanish City Slickers.
Which is why the final image of the collection is not really about where the boy went.
It is about what he brought back.
Stories.
Stephen Watson is the co-founder of Shades4Seasons and manages the day to day operations of the store. As a professional copywriter Stephen manages the store's social media marketing and content creation. Stephen has published long-form articles and blogs extensively on LinkedIn on topics ranging from technology to self-improvement and commercial matters. He is also a published author with his collections of poetry "The Milling Street Tales" and "Spanish City Slickers". You can find out more about Shades4Seasons founders here.
