Home Coming: Driffield, a Small Market Town in East Yorkshire

Walking around Driffield today – over the rusting train bridge, by the razed cattle market, past the river I used to jump in and along the main street stretch of pubs and charity shops – I’m reminded how much I used to resent the place. Growing up in the small East Yorkshire market town – a rugby and farmers kinda town – I left at 18 with not as much as a glance over my shoulder.

Driffield isn’t loaded with cultural history. For a few years in the 1980s there was a recording studio that hosted a bunch of bands, like Loop, Napalm Death and Bolt Thrower. Happy Mondays also recorded their second album in the studio, introducing the local squaddies to pills as a deterrent to violence. That burned down, and during my teenage years it was replaced by a grisly nightclub called Hooters. When I was 17 I saw a friend get glassed there – a bottle of WKD crashed down into his head, sending a spurt of blood all over me.

Chris Evans used to take the piss out of Driffield so much on his Radio 1 breakfast show that it led to a flood of caller complaints inviting him to come and experience it for himself. Bizarrely, he did, bringing the Radio 1 Roadshow there in 1996. As a primary school kid, hearing he was in a nearby pub, I went to get his autograph. Sat at a table with pints in front of him, he was wearing a blinding lime green jumper and leather trousers, with a woman under each arm.

In 2010, the town made national news when a makeshift burger van (a caravan) was shut down by police after undercover officers busted their “spend over £5 and get a free porno DVD” operation. Oh, and the local MP is Greg Knight, who you may remember made this face-meltingly cringe campaign video a few years back, in which he wrote his own jingle, proclaiming “Make sure this time you get it right / vote for Greg Knight.”

Basically, not a lot goes on in Driffield. The event of the year is Driffield Show, an agricultural extravaganza where animals, vegetables and tractors are the headliners. It’s not a town for young people.

Which meant that, as a young teenager, hours were killed perfecting spitting techniques, smoking endlessly on benches and bus stops or pulling out bottles of cider hidden in puffer jackets to drink in parks or down grotty alleyways.

Many people have spoken about being bored during the COVID-19 lockdown, but it remains an alien feeling to me as an adult with all we have available now. Perhaps because boredom played such a significant role in my childhood, its potency still lingers like a phantom limb. The boredom I remember is not just a restless feeling of being uninspired to do anything, but a gnawing, unshakable, pain-in-the-gut physical feeling – like a crippling sensory overload of aching numbness.

I lived in Driffield until I was about five, moved away, and moved back when I was 11. In between I lived in a village called Lowthorpe. The only thing that stopped it from being a hamlet was that it had a church. Beyond that, there was a dilapidated phone box and a bus stop. Around three other children lived there, and I was an only child until the age of 14.

I spent days hammering a football against the wall until the monotonous thump and crumbling brick dust would eventually drive my mum mad. I’d climb trees and hay bales and ride my bike endlessly around the eerily quiet roads, pulling off skids on gravely tracks that felt like they went on for miles. If I wanted sweets, the nearest shop was a five-mile round trip.

In a sense, my Lowthorpe years could be seen as quite pure and idyllic. Some sort of 1950s post-war ideal of suburbia, where kids come home with scuffed knees and rumbling bellies after playing out until the only light left is the burned yellow of a street lamp. Except this was 1990s rural Yorkshire, and I was counting down the days until I could get a games console.

We were pretty broke growing up, but due to the very remote location, my mum could afford to rent a cheap old house that had a garden. The house had no central heating, and our neighbour didn’t even have an inside toilet – we’d hear him pissing in the drain outside, or the slam of the outhouse door for other business.

If mum hadn’t taken me to Glastonbury with her every year when I was a kid, moving to Driffield would have felt like entering some kind of shiny big city metropolis in comparison to Lowthorpe.

Weekends would be spent lurking around town or neighbouring villages like Nafferton, where the duck pond was the star attraction. Boredom can of course inspire creativity and innovation in some, but in others it leads to huffing glue or starting fires. As my teenage years hit, puberty and boredom collided, a mischievous and rebellious streak formed, and for a few years I was a bit of a dickhead.

I was always on the periphery of the really depraved stuff, though. I didn’t have it in me, nor want it in me. Friends were into a bit of petty crime, but it would escalate to twocking or a bit of burglary. I'd constantly be on edge. Walking down the street, someone might decide to smash off a car wing mirror, and you’d suddenly be in a sprint with a fuming man giving chase.

One night, someone pulled out a pool ball and threw it through a teacher’s car window. A friend once stole a charity collection box from a chippy counter and hacked it open with a screwdriver to get a few quid to buy weed. I knew this wasn’t me.

Thankfully, I had a GCSE English teacher, Mrs Stevens, who effectively changed my life. She taught me in such an informed and impassioned way that, for the first time, I came to see teachers not as my enemy. She brought the visceral war poetry of Wilfred Owen off the page and it stirred something in me.

Mrs Stevens ran an overflowing second-hand bookshop in town – of which only the sign remains – and I would visit on weekends for recommendations. I started getting A*’s for the first time in my life, and felt encouraged and motivated. Going home at night I'd scribble stories, film plot ideas and insufferable song lyrics. There is a direct correlation between me writing for a living and Mrs Stevens. She had an impact on my life, at a really crucial time, that remains immeasurable.

Most kids I was hanging out with left school at 16, while I stayed on to do A-Levels. Within a few months I'd gone from spending lunch breaks in bedrooms, engulfed in weed smoke, playing PlayStation, to reading in the library. This would later change once we started getting served underage in the pub and afternoons would be blown off for pints, pool and scampi fries, but it was a transitional period.

Also, around this time my perspective of Driffield changed. I was still bitterly bored by the place, but I got a sobering insight of what life could have been like. My mum left school at 16, married a 21 year-old and had me when she was 17.

He turned out to be a violent alcoholic and, thankfully – fearing for my safety as well as her own – she had the courage to leave him, and raised me herself from just 18. He soon split to avoid paying any child maintenance, and I never saw him again until I was 16, when he’d been tracked down and summoned to court over all the money he owed.

I insisted on going to support mum. It was a weird day, filled with a peculiar amalgamation of emotions: fear, anger, uncertainty and curiosity. There was a strange, sagging atmosphere that hung in the courtroom like a dense fog. You could almost feel the misery, heartache and trauma that the room had seen. Like it had sucked it all up and absorbed it through the dull coloured walls, rock hard wooden benches and its lifeless waiting room.

Mum refused to take any money from him in any arrangements made, insisting he only pay me what I was owed. At the time I thought she was crazy, because as a skint teenager I wanted all the money I could get – but obviously, looking back, it’s a moment of overwhelming and immense pride

I feel towards my mum. She’d brought me up without him, his input or his money, and she didn’t want a fucking thing from him. He ran off again and stopped payments a few months later.

I still struggled with Driffield, but this weird little town was probably a haven compared to what could have been. Plus, the friendship group I’d built up by my late teens was special, and to this day some of the people I love most in the world come from this period of my life.

We’d work shitty paid jobs in school holidays – greenhouses, factories, building sites, warehouses – and with our meagre earnings we’d sink pints and pump the pub jukebox with endless pound coins and immerse ourselves in music.

However, coming back after leaving for university was unsettling and anxiety-inducing. You’d see more and more school friends who stayed there get added to the list of people barred from all the pubs in town. One weekend, I walked no more than 20 feet outside my mum’s front door before someone screamed at me that I was a posh cunt. I was only wearing a shirt.

Ironically, it’s those same lads who were once screaming for your death or shouting homophobic slurs because your jeans were too tight who are now out strutting it in V-necks down to their belly buttons, and spray-on jeans as white as their bleached teeth.

Of course, many people in Driffield just settled down, had kids and lived perfectly normal and respectable lives. But growing up in a town where everyone knows everyone, you’d always hear the more extreme and depressing stories, involving violence, crime, hard drugs, prison, abuse, suicide or death. It became a contaminated place in my mind.

However, as years went on and anxieties settled, I started to see the good. A sense of community doesn’t register with you as a child; it’s like an invisible entity. But as an adult you see it and you feel it. You see the people who care about the town and community, you see the pretty flower arrangements and hanging baskets that you probably used to put your fags out in. You see why it would make a safe place to raise children.

Returning now, the town has taken on more significance. The resentment has dwindled and died, and in its place a quiet appreciation has flowered.

It’s the town that I came back to frequently during 2018, when my grandma was dying, to hold her hand as she faded away in a hospice. It’s where my grandad is seeing out his final days in a home with dementia. It’s the town that ignited a life-long love of words and writing, and it gave me some of my longest and dearest friendships. It’s the place where my mum brought me to be safe, rescued from spiralling domestic abuse.

For all the years it slowly tried to suffocate me with boredom, I'm grateful for Driffield.

@DanielDylanWray