GROWING up next door to Prudhoe’s post office indelibly stamped upon Robyn Bolam a love of the North-East.

And even though it’s decades since she migrated south, she is still writing love letters home through her poetry.

Her latest collection, Hyem – Geordie dialect for home – includes reflective musings on, amongst other places, Newcastle’s Windows music shop and Thomas Bewick’s birthplace, Cherryburn.

The poem that gives the book its name begins:

“When a place puts its hands round your heart

you feel the gentle grip, experience

an inner lift of spirit, a smile

that claims your face, even when alone.”

Robyn, who lives in Hampshire and is Emeritus Professor at St Mary’s University, was the daughter of district nurse Margaret Bolam; her father, Charles, was a joiner. They lived with Robyn’s grandmother, Ellen Bowman, who was the postmistress and whose father, George Foster Hall, was the postmaster for 46 years.

“I grew up in Prudhoe and lived there a long time, right until I left home to study librarianship. Even though I haven’t lived in Newcastle for years, and haven’t been able to visit the North-East an awful lot, it still feels like home and I was really interested in that idea of roots,” she said.

The front cover of Hyem is a painting by the artist Anthony Marshall, called Early Shift, featuring cranes on the River Tyne.

It’s an apposite choice, as Robyn says it’s these towering structures that often remind her of Tyneside.

“I was trying to understand why you feel more at home in some places than others. And while Southampton docks are not the same as the Tyneside shipyards, there’s this strange comforting thing about seeing the cranes there. It always makes me feel hopeful.”

Robyn recalls going to a ship launch with her family at Swan Hunter’s in Wallsend in the mid-sixties.

“They launched this enormous tanker – I think it was the Sir Winston Churchill and Southampton reminds me of the working shipyards. Portsmouth too. But it’s quite painful seeing something that was once so thriving.”

Hyem records this feeling:

When the shipyards closed, cranes were last to go

sold to India along with the dry dock.

I wondered how they dealt with the shock of heat:

our sky was never the same again.

Yet now, in this southernmost county,

cranes draw me to the water as I drive

down Tebourba Way, hoist my heart high enough

to swing me over the estuary, as if I’m travelling home.

“It seemed to me that home can mean lots of different things to different people. but it’s wherever you feel safe and it’s where you are always welcome,” Robyn added.

In this collection, she explores what and who makes us feel at home – from whales off Kaikoura in New Zealand to fish in the Thames, walking the London streets with Dickens or sharing the last moments of a 17th-century helmsman, whose final home is Stockholm’s Vasa Museum.

And it’s about growing up in the North-East and loving that place through all its changing faces.

“For me it’s special, not just because of the wonderful scenery, but also the people. There’s always been a tradition of people being welcomed in the North-East and I think that’s still there, and they carry on this spirit of generosity and kindness.”

** Hyem is published by Bloodaxe Books at £9.95.

pauline.holt@hexham-courant.co.uk