“Ted Walker [1934-2004] was one of the foremost English poets of his generation, with five critically acclaimed books published between 1965 and 1977, beginning with Fox On A Barn Door.
“His work eventually encompassed short stories, radio and television drama, travel writing, and two volumes of autobiography – notably The Last Of England, which he read in serialised form on BBC Radio 4 in 1992.
“In a parallel career as a teacher and interpreter of literature, he fulfilled roles as diverse as creative-writing tutor in prisons, writer-in-residence in primary schools and longstanding lecturer at the British campus of a private American college.
“Ted was born in Lancing, west Sussex, the son of a Birmingham-born carpenter who had found work in the south-coast construction industry. Educated at Steyning grammar school and St John’s College, Cambridge, where he read modern languages, he became a teacher in London.
“Success as a poet came early to Ted Walker, and he and wife Lorna were able to move to Hunston, in his beloved Sussex. Characterised as a nature poet, in his sharp-focussed depictions of the natural world he utilised nature to place our human concerns in proper perspective. Accruing major awards in his 20s, he had published five collections of poetry by his early 40s and then, as he put it in a poem, “My muse went AWOL.” “I haven’t had a poem in years,” he would say. Fifteen years in the end.
“It is not surprising that his most substantial works are his autobiographical volumes: The High Path (1983) and The Last Of England.
“The first vividly evokes the wartime childhood of one (in George MacBeth’s phrase) “too young to fight and too old to forget”.” https://www.theguardian.com/news/2004/apr/02/guardianobituaries.artsobituaries1
Today I finished reading ‘The High Path’ which, perhaps because he was just seven years my senior, but more likely the clarity of his memory and descriptive skills, he has the ability to evoke my own memories. I, too, remember the shortage of money in my family, dependent upon the weekly wage of a working man when priority was given to payment of the rent for fear of eviction, and on the skilled economy of the housewife-mother’s home cooking; being a scholarship boy at a Grammar school struggling to catch up with more privileged pupils better prepared for the mysteries of geometry and algebra; lobbing brown paper bagged water bombs over the doors of unsavoury lavatories, and competing to piss highest up a wall.
The poet’s love of language I also share. Walker’s autobiography is packed with spare, full, detailed description, alliteration, metaphor, and simile, involving all the senses, particularly of hearing, since the ear is so important to a poet. Even with the writing of a blog, I pay attention to how it would be read aloud.
For his first ten years the author was an only child albeit aware of his parents’ loss of a younger sister who lived only a few days.
The tradesmen he describes in immediate post-war England are those I too, remember, when a wire cutter was used to cut blocks of cheddar cheese in the days before pre-packed supermarket fare; and the cash-carrier payment method in department stores where money handed to the counter assistant was carried in a container on overhead wires to the cashier in a lofty perch who popped the change in the container, returning it to the counter (a job my sister tells me our mother had before marriage). “Far more interesting [to pre-school Ted] were the tradesmen’s horses which put their huge heads over our roadside hedges and tossed back their heads to get at the oats at the bottom of their nosebags. The tradesmen themselves were worthy of close observation, too, each belonging to a unique species of human kind, each with his own colour and smell and sound. The clinking milkman was the first to call……While his trailing sourness yet lingered in the outhouse, the brown baker snapped back the hasp of the gate; and he smelt warm and deliciously of buns as he flipped open the creaking lid of his wicker basket for our tin loaf…….” the copper boiler which simmered and steamed…”
“The living-room was more constricted than any I have been in since; we had no option but to be in a close family” is an example of the dry wit that litters his prose. Here is another: as a consequence of “Constipation, despite my best wailings and protestations my mother would insist on ramming a piece of green soap (she tried not to let me see it, but I saw it right enough) up my backside. The pain was searing. She would lift me on to the big lavatory, tell me to be a good boy, leave me to my task; then I would strain and heave, wanting so much to please her, wanting above all else to be rid of the gnarled vegetable of agony that rooted deep in my insides. There would be heard a minor but gratifying plop, and I would cry out with relief: but when I was lifted off, and we examined my achievement, all we saw in the clear water was the sliver of green soap……”. Fortunately I do not share the reason for this description of potty training, but many of us will identify with the need to please with the required achievement.
I also remember the steam trains described with the poet’s alliteration of “a monster so enraged that it smothered them in gouts of hissing breath. A perpetual light drizzle of condensed steam…..”
We, too, had a GP who would always make a home visit whenever called, and perhaps as a result died of a heart attack in his forties.
Walker takes us through infancy; primary school days (reminding me of my shared terror on a first day entering a playground full of swarms of noisy children); postwar playing on bomb sites; first long trousers (which I ripped while climbing a tree the day before Grammar school for which they had been bought); first fumbling for the mysteries of girls, (despite celibacy before marriage, in my case for fear of mortal sin); first love, (mine more normal, in that it ran its course) which in his case lasted through early marriage and his wife’s early death – I also have memories of the latter.
Diane Barker’s illustration for the book jacket shows young Ted with his home made gun practising for membership of the Home Guard.
Elizabeth joined us for the afternoon and stayed for a dinner of Jackie’s wholesome chicken stewp with a fresh, crusty, French baguette. I drank more of the Garnacha; my sister drank tea; and the Culinary Queen drank Diet Coke.
