 Welcome our actors, Patrick Kennedy, Tara Fitzgerald, Owen McDonald, and of course the wonderful Professor Mary Beard. For those who don't know me, I'm Siobhan Wilder and I am the director of the Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation. I have a few words I'd like to say that Josephine Hart wrote just before her wonderful Theatre Week at the Donmar, her poetry week. I have a note here from National Poetry Day 2022. Lucy McNabb is here with us somewhere. Oh, there you are Lucy. Just to draw your attention to the fact, I'm sure you all know, because you're obviously poetry lovers, tomorrow is National Poetry Day, the biggest one-day celebration of poetry across the UK when millions of people annually read, write, and share poems. This year's theme is the environment and there are some of Larkin's poems that touch on that and some of you I'm sure know already. And National Poetry Day is inviting people to share their favourite poems about the environment online with friends and family. And to join in, go to nationalpoetryday.org, which is full of poems and activities. And now I'm going to share a few words with you that Josephine Hart wrote for that opening night of her Poetry Week at the Donmar Theatre. She wrote that the basic purpose of the Josephine Hart Poetry Hour was to make a public performance of the great poetry of the dead poets read by great actors the norm in London. I think she succeeded. There are many others who followed in her footsteps. The philosophy behind Josephine Hart's Poetry Hours can be simply expressed in three parts. First, the life of the poet. Josephine agreed with T.S. Eliot that we understand the work better if we understand something of the poet's life. As Eliot said, the poet always writes out of his personal life, in his finest work out of its tragedy. Whatever it may be, remorse, lost love, or loneliness. Therefore, Josephine's introductions to the poets are always an important part of these evenings. And this evening, Professor Mary Beard is going to read Josephine's introductions. All of the introductions to the great poets were published by Virago in a volume called Life Saving, Why We Need Poetry. And the book was sent free of charge to all secondary schools in England, as were her two previous books about poetry. Words that burn and catching life by the throat. Second, on the poets read aloud, according to Josephine Hart, poetry startles us into a more full sense of life. It is a trinity of sound, sense, and sensibility. And the sense of sound, and what Robert Frost called the sound of sense, will be lost unless we hear it. Language caught alive. The gold in the oar is the sound. Seamus Heaney, as an undergraduate at Queen's, found that on hearing Eliot's four quartets read by the actor Robert Spate, what had been perplexing when sight read, for meaning only, was hypnotic when read aloud. Yates in his 70s said he'd spent his life clearing out of poetry every phrase written for the eye alone and bringing all back to syntax, that is for the ear alone. Ordon put it more bluntly. No poem, which is not better heard than read, is good poetry. And third, poetry read by great actors. Again, Josephine Hart agrees with T.S. Eliot that poetry should be read to us by skilled readers, the feeling for syllable and rhythm penetrating far below the conscious level of thought and feeling, invigorating every word. In 2016, a memorial floor stone, funded by the Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation, with the lines, our almost instinct, almost true, what will survive of us's love, from an arundal tomb, was installed at Poets Corner in Westminster Abbey London. I'm now going to hand you over to these wonderful voices to hear some wonderful poetry. Thank you. In 1984, I approached Philip Larkin to request permission to present an evening of his poetry read by Alan Bates. Though warned by his old friend Kingsley Amis, oh dear, no Josephine, Philip won't like this at all, Mr. Larkin said yes. I sent roses. Philip Larkin's letter of thanks described the arrival of the bouquet at reception in Hull Library, its procession from one department to another, the tentative smiles of hope which faded as impervious to silent entreaties let it be me, the arrangement was eventually handed to him. That letter could easily have been a poem, illustrating as it does the motif in Larkin's poetry which is uniquely his, the significance of small events, the pressure they exert on an individual psychology thrown into relief against the great themes of life. And though, as someone said, he made the familiar strange, he also, as John Bailey noted, was the only sophisticated modern writer who needs no sophisticated response from the reader. Of the novelist Barbara Pym, whom he greatly admired, he wrote, I like to read about people who have done nothing spectacular, aren't beautiful or lucky, who try to behave well in a limited field of activity, and who can see little, who can see in the little or tumble moments of vision that the so-called big experiences of life are going to miss them. I like to read about such things presented not with self-pity or despair or romanticism, but with the realistic firmness and even humour. That is, in fact, what I call the moral tone of Miss Pym's novels. It is also the moral tone of Larkin's poems. He once said that art should either help us to enjoy or to endure, yet he himself found it difficult to do either. Why? Philip Larkin was born in Coventry in 1922. To Sidney Larkin, eventually Sidney Larkin OBE, an administrative paragon with a passion for literature, and to Eva Day, an intelligent, bookish, nervous woman. They adored him. Crucially, it was a literary household. Sidney introduced his son to Eliot, Ordon and Joyce. Sidney had a passion for exactness in language, and he poured over dictionaries and grammars. He once told his son that Kingsley Amos' inability to grasp the difference between will and shall, would and could, precluded him for any possible future as a writer. Philip Larkin, a brilliant student, sailed into Oxford and sailed out again with a first-class honours degree in English. Oh how clever I am, a star descends on my forehead. I feel like a millionaire. A natural pessimist, he told everyone, he was going to get a third. He also left a published poet. Four poems in the listener, ten in poetry from Oxford in war time. Larkin failed his medical because of poor eyesight. His first collection, The North Ship, was followed by his two novels, Jill and a Girl in Winter. He was, very quickly, very much on his way. Borges like, he became a professional librarian, eventually appointed to the University of Hull in 1955, which famously, he never left. He combined the role of scholar, curator, and administrator in an exemplary career. His who's who entry states his occupation as librarian. A man is what he makes his living from. His early life was unmarked by trauma. He enjoyed great academic and literary success and a career to which he was dedicated. In fact, Larkin's life remained unmarked by personal tragedy, yet right from the beginning, a sad, if not a tragic note is struck. Perhaps the answer lies in his childhood, which was dominated, he said, by an atmosphere of clenched irritation, which curdled the whole experience. What was the rock my gliding childhood struck? A heartbreaking line. Powerful terrors pursued him. The terror of being trapped by marriage and children, a phobic fear of death, a phrase used in its clinical meaning by one of his doctors. They are key elements in the creative landscape from which he drew his poetry and by which he shaped his life. They served another carefully considered purpose in the brutal choice for the artist. Between perfection of the life or of the work, Yates's haunting phrase, Larkin came down firmly, knowingly, on the side of art. If Molly Blooms is the most emphatic, yes, in literature, Philip Larkin's is the most emphatic, no. Was he too clever to live? A comment, amongst others, kindly face, but no kidding him. Perverse psychology, Irish, perhaps. Written in a copper plate hand by the late A. L. Rouse in a copy of Larkin's collected essays, required writing, which I was lucky enough to buy from Rouse's library. Heaney is more gentle on the subject of Larkin's cool intellect, noting, we listen in his poems to his unfoolable mind, singing the melody of intelligence, as we will in toads, poetry of departures, vests to societe. All tell dreams of leaving of escape. And in Mr. Bleaney, the price of the unlived life. We start with a tribute to the whitest man I know, a Raj phrase. Who is he? According to George Hartley, he is Larkin, mocking the self, untarnished by life. Listen out for the marvellous last line in Symphony in White Major. Sympathy in White Major, 1974. When I drop four cubes of ice, chimingly in a glass, and add three goes of gin, a lemon slice, and let a 10 ounce tonic void in foaming gulps until it smothers everything else up to the edge, I lift the lot in private pledge. He devoted his life to others. While other people wore like clothes the human beings in their days, I set myself to bring to those who thought I could the lost displays. It didn't work for them or me, but all concerned were nearer thus or so we thought to all the fuss than if we'd missed it separately. A decent chap, a real good sort, straight as a die, one of the best, a brick, a trump, a proper sport, head and shoulders above the rest. How many lives would have been duller had he not been here below? Here's to the whitest man I know. Though white is not my favorite color. Mr. Blini, 1955. This was Mr. Blini's room. He stayed the whole time he was at the bodies till they moved him. Flowered curtains, thin and frayed, fall to within five inches of the sill, whose window shows a strip of building land. Tuskegee, littered. Mr. Blini took my bit of garden properly in hand. Bed, upright chair, 60-watt bulb, no hook behind the door, no room for books or bags. I'll take it. So it happens that I lie where Mr. Blini lay and stub my fags on the same saucer souvenir and try stuffing my ears with cotton wool to drown the jabbering set he egged her on to buy. I know his habits, what time he came down, his preference for sauce to gravy, why he kept on plugging at the four aways, likewise their yearly frame, the frinter folk who put him up for summer holidays, and Christmas at his sister's house in Stoke. But if he stood and watched the frigid wind, towsling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed, telling himself that this was home and grinned and shivered, without shaking off the dread, that how we live measures our own nature. And at his age, having no more to show than one hired box, should make him pretty sure he warranted no better. I don't know. Toads, 1954. Why should I let the toad work, squat on my life? Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork and drive the brute off? Six days of the week it soils with its sickening poison, just for paying a few bills. That's out of proportion. Lots of folk live on their wits. Lecturers, lispers, lozals, lob-lolly men, louts, they don't end as paupers. Lots of folk live up lanes, with fires in a bucket, eat windfalls and tinned sardines. They seem to like it. Their nippers have got bare feet, their unspeakable wives are skinny as whippets, and yet no one actually starves. Ah, where I courageous enough to shout, stuff your pension. But I know all too well that's the stuff that dreams are made on. For something sufficiently toad-like, squats in me too. Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck and cold as snow, and will never allow me to blarney my way of getting the fame and the girl and the money all at one sitting. I don't say one bodies the other one's spiritual truth, but I do say it's hard to lose either when you have both. Toads revisited 1962. Walking around in the park should feel better than work. The lake, the sunshine, the grass to lie on, blurred playground noises beyond black stockinged nurses. Not a bad place to be, yet it doesn't suit me. Being one of the men you meet of an afternoon, pool-seed old step-takers, hair-eyed clerks with the jitters, waxed fleshed outpatients still vague from accidents, and characters in long coats deep in the litter baskets, all dodging the toad work by being stupid or weak. Think of being them, hearing the hours chime, watching the bread delivered, the sun by clouds covered, the children going home, think of being them, turning over their failures by some bed of libelias. Nowhere to go but indoors, nor friends but empty chairs. No. Give me my intray, my loaf-haired secretary. My shall I keep the call in, sir. What else can I answer, when the lights come on at four at the end of another year? Give me your arm, old toad, help me down Cemetery Road. Poetry of Departures, 1954. Sometimes you hear fifth hand as epitaph. He chucked up everything and just cleared off. And always the voice will sound certain you approve this audacious, purifying, elemental move. And they are right, I think. We all hate home and having to be here. I detest my room, it's specially chosen junk, the good books, the good bed, and my life in perfect order. So to hear it said, he walked out on the whole crowd, leaves me flushed and stirred like then she undid her dress, or take that you bastard. Surely I can, if he did. And that helps me to stay sober and industrious. But I'd go today. Yes, swagger the nuts, strewn roads, crouch in the forecastle, stubbly with goodness, if it weren't so artificial, such a deliberate step backwards to create an object, books, China, a life, reprehensibly perfect. Ver de société, 1974, pardon my French. My wife and I have asked a crowd of craps to come and waste their time and hours. Perhaps you'd care to join us in a pig's arse, friend. Day comes to an end. The gas fire breeds, the trees are darkly swayed. And so, dear Warlock Williams, I'm afraid. Funny how hard it is to be alone. I could spend half my evenings, if I wanted, holding a glass of washing sherry, canted over to catch the drivel of some bitch who's read nothing but witch. Just think of all the spare time that has flown straight into nothingness by being filled with forks and faces, rather than repaid under a lamp, hearing the noise of wind, and looking out to see the moon thinned into an air-sharpened blade. A life. And yet, how sternly it's instilled, all solitude is selfish. No one now believes the hermit with his gown and dish talking to God. He's gone too. The big wish is to have people nice to you, which means doing it back somehow. Virtue is social. Are, then, these routines playing at goodness, like going to church? Something that bores us, something we don't do well. Asking that ass about his fool research. But we try to feel because, however crudely, it shows us what should be. Too subtle that. Too decent, too. Oh hell, only the young can be alone freely. The time is shorter now for company, and sitting by a lamp more often brings not peace but other things. Beyond the light stand failure and remorse, whispering. Dear Warlock Williams, why, of course. Larkin's poetic masterstroke lies in a certain juxtaposition of two normally opposing philosophies, romantic and classical. In this juxtaposition, Christopher Ricks notes in a brilliant insight, a romantic swell of feeling meets the bracing counterthrust of classical impersonality. With Larkin, it usually happens in the last lines of which John Donne wrote centuries ago, the whole frame of a poem is a beating out of a piece of gold, but the last clause is as the impression of the stamp, and that is what makes it current. Alan Bennett, less elegantly but more wittily notes, you'll have to think about this in an Alan Bennett voice. Philip Larkin takes you firmly by the hand and doesn't let go of you until you're across the finishing line. You're almost always traveling in England. Most particularly in his collection, The Whits and Weddings, he turned his voice into one of the means by which his country recognizes itself, and remotions, telling phrase. He ne agrees. Larkin's poems like Joyce's Dubliners would happily fit under the title Englanders. If Larkin were to compose his own version of the divine comedy, he would not find himself in the middle of a dark wood, but in a railway tunnel halfway through England. In Going Going, written in 1974, he warns with great prescience of the destruction of the countryside. Churchgoing, reverence without religion, the church, a serious house in which it's proper to grow wise in if only that so many dead lie around. And the brilliant, I remember, I remember, Proust subverted, the station sign, Coventry, the Madeleine, which triggers memories of where my childhood was unspent. The truth of most ordinary childhoods tumbling down to one of the great last lines in poetry. Nothing like something happens anywhere. To Sonny Prestatin and the girl on the poster who was just too good for this world. Sonny Prestatin, 1962. Come to Sonny Prestatin, laughed the girl on the poster, kneeling up in the sand in torntened white satin. Behind her, a hunk of coast, a hotel with palms seemed to expand from her thighs and spread breastlifting arms. She was slapped up one day in March. A couple of weeks and her face was snaggletoothed and boss-eyed. Huge tits and a fissured crotch were scored well in, and the space between her legs held scrolls that set her fairly astride at tuberous cock and balls autographed Titch Thomas. While someone had used a knife or something to stab right through the mustached lips of her smile. She was too good for this life. Very soon, a great transverse tear left only a hand and some blue. Now fight cancer is there. Going, going. 1972. I thought it would last my time. The sense that, beyond the town, there would always be fields and farms, where the village louts could climb such trees as were not cut down. I knew there'd be false alarms in the papers about old streets and split-level shopping, but some have always been left so far. And when the old part retreats as the bleak highrises come, we can always escape in the car. Things are tougher than we are. Just as Earth will always respond, however we mess it about, chuck filth in the sea if you must, the tides will be cleaned beyond. But what do I feel now? Doubt? Or age simply? The crowd is young in the M1 cafe. Their kids are screaming for more, more houses, more parking allowed, more caravan sites, more pay. On the business page, a score of spectacled grins approve some takeover bid that entails 5% profit and 10% in the estuaries. Move your works to the unspoilt dales, grey area grants. And when you try to get near the sea, in summer, it seems just now to be happening so very fast. Despite all the land left free, for the first time, I feel somehow that it isn't going to last. That before I snuff it, the whole boiling will be bricked in, except for the tourist parts. First slum of Europe, a roll it won't be hard to win, with a cast of crooks and tarts. And that will be England gone, the shadows, the meadows, the lanes, the guild halls, the carved choirs. They'll be books, it will linger on in galleries, but all that remains for us will be concrete and tires. Most things are never meant. This won't be, most likely, but greeds and garbage are too thick strewn to be swept up now, or invent excuses that make them all needs. I just think it will happen soon. Church going, 1954. Once I'm sure there's nothing going on, I step inside, letting the door thud shut. Another church, matting seats and stone and little books, sprawlings of flowers cut for Sunday, brownish now. Some brass and stuff up at the holy end. The small neat organ, an intense, musty, unignorable silence, brewed God knows how long. Atlas, I take off my cycle clips in awkward reverence. Move forward, run my hand around the font. From where I stand, the roof looks almost new, cleaned or restored. Someone would know, I don't. Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few hectoring large-scale verses and pronounce, here endeth, much more loudly than I'd meant, the echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door, I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence, reflect the place was not worth stopping for. Yet, stop I did. In fact, I often do, and always end much at a loss like this, wondering what to look for, wondering too when churches will fall completely out of use, what we shall turn them into, if we shall keep a few cathedrals chronically on show, their parchment, plate and picks in locked cases, and let the rest rent free to rain and sheep. Shall we avoid them as unlucky places, or after dark will dubious women come to make their children touch a particular stone, pick symbols for a cancer, or on some advised night see walking a dead one. Power of some sort will go on in games, in riddles, seemingly at random, but superstition, like belief, must die, and what remains when disbelief has gone? Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky, a shape less recognizable each week, a purpose more obscure. I wonder who will be the last, the very last, to seek this place for what it was, one of the crew that tap and jot and know what rude lofts were, some ruin-biber, randy for antique, or Christmas addict counting on a whiff of gown and bands and organ pipes and myrrh. Or will he be my representative, bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground through suburb scrub, because it held unspilt so long and equably what since is found only in separation, marriage and birth and death and thoughts of these, for which was built this special shell. For though I have no idea what this accoutred, frousty barn is worth, it pleases me to stand in silence here, a serious house on serious earth it is, in whose blunt air all of our compulsions meet, are recognized and robed as destinies, and that much never can be obsolete, since someone will forever be surprising a hunger in himself to be more serious, and gravitating with it to this ground, which he once heard was proper to grow wise in, if only that so many dead lie round. I remember, I remember, 1954, coming up England by a different line for once, early in the cold new year we stopped, and watching men with number plates sprint down the platform to familiar gates. By coventry, I exclaimed, I was born here. I lent far out and squinted for a sign that this was still the town that had been mine so long, but found I wasn't even clear which side was which, from where those cycle crates were standing, had we annually departed for those family halls, a whistle went, things moved, I sat back staring at my boots, was that my friend smiled, where you have your roots? No, only where my childhood was unspent, I wanted to retort, just where I started, by now I've got the whole place clearly charted, our garden first, where I did not invent blinding theologies of flowers and fruits, and wasn't spoken to by an old hat, and here we have that splendid family I never ran to when I got depressed, the boys all biceps, and the girls all chest, their comic forward, their farm where I could be really myself, I'll show you, come to that, the bracken where I never trembling sat, determined to go through with it, where she lay back and all became a burning mist, and in those offices, my doggerel was not set up in blunt ten point, nor read by a distinguished cousin of the mayor, who didn't call and tell my father, there before us had we the gift to see ahead, where you look as though you wish the place in hell, my friend said, judging from your face, oh well, I suppose it's not the place's fault, I said, nothing like something happens anywhere. A man who is capable of experience finds himself in a different world in every decade of his life, as he sees it with different eyes, the material of his art is constantly renewed, that's Elliot in praise of late Yates. In High Windows published in 1974, when he was 52, there is little evidence that Larkin saw life differently. The material of his art, time, choice, evanescence, and the voice remained consistent, that's the reason why the structure of this evening is more thematic than chronological, to Larkin and the women. His attitude to sex was never exactly politically correct. He once told Kingsley Amos after an unsatisfactory date at Oxford, all I got was a wet kiss, it's just not worth it, the food alone came to three pounds and nine shillings. Neither lust nor love, however, was going to lead to marriage or children. He's escaped one home, he wasn't going to create another, to escape from home is a life's work, like writing decline and fall of the Roman Empire. One of the greater piveness of my life was when I realised it wasn't people I disliked, just children. He was in fact a much loved man, Monica Jones and Maeve Brennan loved him for decades and there were many other relationships. In fact, he inspired in women levels of self-sacrifice as would have done Lord Byron proud. Amongst the last poems that you're going to hear is the shocking deceptions. I was the more deceived, a line again subverted, then three poems which strike a different note on love and sex, wild oats, early sexual lessons, high windows, everyone going down the long slide to happiness and as Mirabilis celebrated sexual joy which according to Larkin began in 1963. This be the verse with its notorious opening line, they fuck you up, your mum and dad, clearly my Lake Isle of Ines Free, he wrote, I fully expect to hear it recited by a thousand girl guides before I die, was written the same night as Anas Mirabilis and there's a thesis in that somewhere. The wits and weddings of Fellini-like vision of on station platforms of grinning and pomaded girls in parodies of fashion heels and veils, mothers loud and fat and my own favourite Larkin poem, Dockery and Son, a Dickensian title. He once said he found a way to make poems as readable as novels. He was right, the wifeless, childless, middle-aged narrator recalls a boy Dockery who seized his moment sexually and begot a son who now attends their old college. Then Larkin throws down the gauntlet. Why did he think adding meant increase and where do these insane assumptions come from? Larkin's later years, and he did not have enough of them, were garlanded in honours. The Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, Fellowships, Membership of the Royal Society of Literature, companion in honour of honour, though not in poems. Larkin was offered and turned down the poet laureate ship, saying poetry, that rare bird has flown out the window and now sings on some alien shore. Larkin himself died as he had predicted in 1985 at the age of 63. It had long been an obsession of his that he would die at the same age as his father. After all his fear, he seemed the nurse said to be resigned. I go to the inevitable. His headstone reads simply Philip Larkin, writer. To our last poems of love and death, Obad, the darkest poem he would ever write, and we will finish with the softer Arundel tomb and the line which perhaps inexplicably connects us to him. What will survive of us is love, but first to talking in bed. Talking in bed, 1960. Talking in bed ought to be easiest. Lying together there goes back so far, an emblem of two people being honest. Yet more and more time passes silently. Outside, the wind's incomplete unrest builds and disperses clouds about the sky and dark towns heap up on the horizon. None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why, at this unique distance from isolation, it becomes still more difficult to find words at once true and kind, or not untrue and not unkind. Deceptions, 1950. Of course I was drugged, and so heavily I did not regain consciousness until the next morning. I was horrified to discover that I had been ruined, and for some days I was inconsolable, and cried like a child to be killed, or sent back to my aunt. Mayhew, London labour and the London poor, even so distant, I can taste the grief, bitter and sharp with stalks he made you gulp. The sun's occasional print, the brisk brief worry of wheels along the street outside, where bridal London bows the other way, and light, unanswerable and tall and wide forbids the scar to heal, and drives shame out of hiding. All the unhurried day, your mind lay open like a draw of knives. Slums, years have buried you. I would not dare console you if I could. What can be said, except that suffering is exact, but where desire takes charge, readings will grow erratic, for you would hardly care that you were less deceived out on that bed than he was stumbling up the breathless stare to burst into fulfilment's desolate attic. Wild Oats, 1962. About 20 years ago, two girls came in where I worked. A bosomy English rose, and her friend in specs I could talk to. Faces in those days sparked off the whole shooting match, and I doubt if ever one had like hers. But it was the friend I took out. And in seven years after that, wrote over 400 letters, gave a ten-ginny ring I got back at the end, and met at numerous cathedral cities unknown to the clergy. I believe I met beautiful twice. She was trying both times, so I thought not to laugh. Parting after about five rehearsals was an agreement that I was too selfish, withdrawn, and easily bored to love. Well, useful to get that learnt. In my wallet are still two snaps of bosomy rose with fur gloves on. Unlucky charms, perhaps. High windows, 1974. When I see a couple of kids, and guess he's fucking her, and she's taking pills or wearing a diaphragm, I know this is paradise. Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives. Bonds and gestures pushed to one side like an outdated combine harvester, and everyone young, going down the long slide to happiness endlessly. I wonder if anyone looked at me 40 years back and thought, that'll be the life, no god anymore, or sweating in the dark about hell and that, or having to hide what you think of the priest. He and his lot will all go down the long slide like free, bloody birds. And immediately, rather than words, comes the thought of high windows, the sun comprehending glass, and beyond it, the deep blue air that shows nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless. Anas Maribelis, 1971. Sexual intercourse began in 1963, which was rather late for me, between the end of the Chattelé ban and the Beatles' first LP. Up till then, there'd only been a sort of bargaining, a wrangle for a ring, a shame that started at 16 and spread to everything. Then all at once, the quarrel sank. Everyone felt the same, and every life became a brilliant breaking of the bank, a quite unloosable game. So life was never better than in 1963, though just too late for me, between the end of the Chattelé ban and the Beatles' first LP. This be the verse, 1971. They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had, and add some extra, just for you. But they were fucked up in their turn by fools in old-style hats and coats, who half the time were soppy stern and half at one another's throats. Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, and don't have any kids yourself. The Whitsun Weddings, 1964. That Whitsun, I was late getting away, not till about 120 on the sunlit Saturday did my three-quarters empty train pull out, all windows down, all cushions hot, all sense of being in a hurry gone. We ran behind the backs of houses, crossed a street of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish dock. Thence the river's level-drift breath began, where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet. All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept for miles inland, a slow and stopping curve southwards we kept, wide farms went by, short shadowed cattle, and canals with floatings of industrial froth. A hot house flashed uniquely, hedges dipped and rose, and now and then a smell of grass displaced the reek of buttoned carriage cloth until the next town, new and nondescript, approached with acres of dismantled cars. At first, I didn't notice what a noise the weddings made, each station that we stopped at. Sun destroys the interest of what's happening in the shade, and down the long-cool platform, whoops and scurls, I took for porters larking with the males and went on reading. Once we started though, we passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls in parodies of fashion, heels and veils, all posed irresolutely, watching us go, as if out at the end of an event waving goodbye to something that survived it. Struck, I lent more promptly out the next time, more curiously, and saw it all again in different terms, the fathers with their broad belts under their suits and seamy foreheads, mothers loud and fat, an uncle shouting smut, and then the perms, the nylon gloves and jewelry substitutes, the lemons, moaves and olive oakers that marked off the girls unreally from the rest, yes, from cafes and banquet halls up yards and bunting dressed coach party annexes, the wedding days were coming to an end. All down the line, fresh couples climbed aboard, the rest stood around, the last confetti and advice was thrown, and as we moved, each face seemed to define just what it saw departing. Children frowned at something dull, fathers had never known success so huge and wholly farcical, the women shared the secret like a happy funeral, while girls gripping their handbags tighter stared at a religious wounding. Free at last and loaded with the sum of all they saw, we hurried towards London, shuffling gouts of steam. Now fields were building plots, and poplars cast long shadows over major roads, and for some 50 minutes that in time would seem just long enough to settle hats and say, I nearly died. A dozen marriages got underway. They watched the landscape, sitting side by side. An odion went past, a cooling tower, and someone running up to bow. And none thought of the others they would never meet, or how their lives would all contain this hour. I thought of London spread out in the sun, its postal districts packed like squares of wheat. There we were aimed, and as we raced along bright knots of rail, past standing pullmen's walls of blackened moss came close, and it was nearly done, this frail traveling coincidence. And what it held stood ready to be loosed with all the power that being changed can give. We slowed again, and as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled a sense of falling. Like an arrow shower sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain. Dockery and Sun. 1964. Dockery was junior to you, wasn't he? said the Dean. His son's here now. Death-suited, visitant, I nod. And do you keep in touch with, or remember how black-gowned, unbreakfasted, and still half-tight, we used to stand before that desk to give our version of these incidents last night. I try the door of where I used to live, locked. The lawn spreads dazzlingly wide. Unknown bell chimes, I catch my train ignored. Canal and clouds and colleges subside slowly from view. But Dockery, good Lord, anyone up today must have been born in 43 when I was 21. If he was younger, did he get this son at 19, 20? Was he that withdrawn, high-collared, public schoolboy sharing rooms with Cartwright, who was killed? Well, it just shows how much, how little. Yawning, I suppose, I fell asleep, waking at the fumes and furnace glares of Sheffield, where I changed, and ate an awful pie, and walked along the platform to its end to see the ranged joining and parting lines reflect a strong unhindered moon. To have no son, no wife, no house or land still seemed quite natural. Only a numbness registered the shock of finding out how much had gone of life, how widely from the others. Dockery now, only 19. He must have taken stock of what he wanted and been capable of, no, that's not the difference. Rather, how convinced he was, he should be added to. Why did he think adding meant increase? To me, it was dilution. Where do these innate assumptions come from? Not from what we think truest or most want to do, those warped tight shut like doors. They're more a style our lives bring with them, habit for a while, suddenly they hardened into all we've got and how we got it. Looked back on, they rear like sand clouds, thick and close, embodying for Dockery a son, for me nothing, nothing with all a son's harsh patronage. Life is first boredom, then fear, whether or not we use it, it goes, and leaves what something hidden from us chose, and age, and then only the end of age. Next, please, 1951. Always too eager for the future, we pick up bad habits of expectancy. Something is always approaching, every day, till then, we say, watching from a bluff the tiny, clear, sparkling armada of promises draw near, how slow they are, and how much time they waste, refusing to make haste. Yet still they leave us holding wretched stalks of disappointment, for though nothing bulks each big approach, leaning with brasswork prinked, each rope distinct, flagged, and the figurehead with golden tits arching our way, it never anchors. It's no sooner present than it turns to past. Right to the last, we think each one will heave to and unload all good into our lives, all we are owed for waiting so devoutly and so long. But we are wrong. Only one ship is seeking us, a black-sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back a huge and birdless silence. In her wake, no waters breed or break. Oh, bad. 1977. I work all day and get half drunk at night, waking at four to soundless dark. I stare. In time, the curtain edges will grow light. Till then, I see what's really always there, unresting death, a whole day nearer now, making all thought impossible, but how, and where, and when, I shall myself die. Arid interrogation. Yet the dread of dying and being dead flashes afresh to hold and horrify. The mind blanks, blanks at the glare. Not in remorse, the good not done, the love not given, time torn off unused, nor wretchedly, because an only life can take so long to climb clear of its wrong beginnings and may never, but at the total emptiness forever. The sure extinction that we travel to and shall be lost in always. Not to be here, not to be anywhere and soon. Nothing more terrible, nothing more true. This is a special way of being afraid, no trick dispels. Religion used to try that vast, moth-eaten musical brocade created to pretend we never die. And specious stuff that says, no rational being can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing that this is what we fear, no sight, no sound, no touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, nothing to love or link with the anesthetic from which not come around. And so it stays just on the edge of vision, a small, unfocused blur, a standing chill that slows each impulse down to indecision. Most things may never happen. This one will. And realization of it rages out in furnace fear when we are caught without people or drink. Courage is no good. It means not scaring others. Being brave lets no one off the grave. Death is no different wind at than withstood. Slowly light strengthens and the room takes shape. It stands plain as a wardrobe. What we know have always known, know that we can't escape yet, can't accept. One side will have to go. Meanwhile, telephones crouched, getting ready to ring in locked-up offices, and all the uncaring, intricate, rented world begins to rouse. The sky is white as clay with no sun. Work has to be done. Postmen, like doctors, go from house to house. An Arundel tomb, 1956. Side by side, their faces blurred. The earl and countess lie in stone. Their proper habits vaguely shown as jointed armor stiffened pleat. And that faint hint of the absurd, the little dogs under their feet. Such plainness of the pre-baroque hardly involves the eye until it meets his left-hand gauntlet, still clasped empty in the other, and one sees with a sharp, tender shock, his hand withdrawn, holding her hand. They would not think to lie so long. Such faithfulness in effigy was just a detail friends would see, a sculptor's sweet commissioned grace thrown off in helping to prolong the Latin names around the base. They would not guess how early in their supine stationary voyage, the air would change to soundless damage, turn the old tenetry away, how soon succeeding eyes begin to look, not read. Rigidly they persisted, linked through lengths and breaths of time. Snow fell, undated. Light each summer thronged the grass. A bright litter of bird calls strewed the same bone-littered ground. And up the paths the endless altered people came, washing at their identity. Now, helpless in the hollow of an unarmorial age, a trough of smoke in slow, suspended skeins above their scrap of history, only an attitude remains. Time has transfigured them into untruth. The stone fidelity they hardly meant has come to be their final blazin' and to prove our almost instinct, almost true, what will survive of us is love.