Peaceable Land 24 - Will you?
Once graffiti now neon, scrawled on a high bridge in Sheffield’s Park Hill estate, ‘I LOVE YOU WILL U MARRY ME’. Once out the train station you will see it almost the moment you wish to. It is a neat white neon rectangle high in the air to the south of the city. It is illegible from that distance so you cannot then be sure you’ve found it, but you can feel hopeful. Directions received from people in the pub where you order dinner point towards it and so, too, in a way, does the intensely-kissing couple at the next table.
It’s quite a long walk, with overpasses, tram tracks, and parks, but the bright message is visible, so you can follow like a navigator following stars. Finishing the climb, rounding the corner, and seeing it brings a quiet moment.
The girlfriend proposed to, Clare Middleton, accepted the proposal, but was never wed to her boyfriend. Soon afterwards she married someone else. And soon after that she died of cancer, in 2007, aged 30. A poem she wrote is kept on a memorial plaque:
When I was a little girl, I used to have a dream
That one day soon, a knight would come and carry me away
We would live happily in fairyland forever
Where my night would protect me, always and forever
Where no harm could come to me, where nobody could hurt me.
The graffiti was made in 2001. In 2008 it was overlaid with neon. When it was broken it was repaired. When a development had it removed it a campaign had it restored. People are proud of the sign.
A resident let us up. Three walkways of flats proceed off from the bridge. Spraypaint on opposite walls reads ‘SO BE IT’ and ‘YOU & ME BOTH MATE’. Each flat has its own front door and a window facing outwards. People keep plants and trinkets. One has a sign saying ‘Life is tricky baby, stay in your magic’. In another, a tombstone with Snoopy beside it, engraved ‘Don’t forget to have fun’.
Actually the sign quite small – each letter about A4, and the lights cool to the touch. But from the bridge and in its light you can see all of the city, and you know all the city can see you, and the declaration you live by. I thought it might be wise to imagine that you lived on those walkways, how excited people would be to find out that you had come that morning to the city from the sign, and the gentle gladness you’d feel for the chance to live up to that.
As we left two people dashed past us and got in the door before it shut – the kissing couple from the pub!
