Philip Larkin (4 page)

An insight into Larkin’s earliest years is provided by the diaries which Sydney kept of the family’s holidays between 1927 and 1933. He shows an acute self-consciousness. In Lyme Regis in 1927 he carries his bathing costume and towel everywhere, so as not to betray that he is a new arrival, and goes through embarrassing contortions while changing on the beach: ‘I have never seen a rabbit skin itself but the operation must be similar to me trying to get the upper part of a two-piece bathing costume off my wet body.’ In a pattern repeated on later holidays, he sets out to make the family distinctive by buying himself some shorts and ‘Mamma’ a ‘jazz kerchief’: ‘sufficient to lend that amount of distinction to us that I like in a holiday place. Henceforth, we shall not be ciphers in Lyme Regis. We shall be known.’
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One constant theme is the attractive women around him (‘five very fine girls’; ‘beautiful girls’; ‘a vision in turquoise blue’). Philip, as the child of the family, was ‘spoilt’, and was allowed his independence. In 1929 in Ventnor: ‘Philip did not bathe but reported that he had had three fights with different people.’
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Several times his son’s holiday illnesses elicited fatherly concern. In Newquay in 1930: ‘Philip would not eat his lunch and so he went to sleep in the afternoon, on the bed, and I sat with him.’
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In Falmouth in 1931 the nine-year-old Philip dominated one outing with his moody sentimentalism: ‘After lunch we hiked to Maenporth, Philip being in a vile mood. Half way there we palled up with a black dog [. . .] As time went on Philip became a picture of misery owing to his anxiety over the welfare of the dog – whether he was happy, tired &c and whether he would get home.’
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Sydney admitted that, as time went on, these holidays shared by four very disparate people became strained. As he wrote before their trip to Bigbury on Sea in 1932: ‘This holiday is even more doomed to failure than the last one (which in spite of the cold was not too bad.) The whole family agree that it is impossible to have an enjoyable holiday with four people all afraid to do what they would really like for fear of upsetting the others.’
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In 1933, they took their last holiday together as a complete family. As an experiment and an economy, Sydney booked them into the new-fangled ‘holiday camp’ opened by the National Association of Local Government Officers near Scarborough. Philip had just turned eleven and his sister was approaching twenty-one. Sydney anticipated the trip with wry pessimism: ‘This year we are taking the biggest gamble ever by going to the Nalgo holiday camp at Cayton Bay [. . .] it will probably be cold and wet. No one has, so far, had a bright word to say about the holiday. We are the funniest family on earth.’

On the first evening in the camp at an ‘initiation ceremony’, ‘we were christened Oxo, Pussy, Snooker and Godiva – which Kitty and Philip voted to be a bit “balmy”’. Sydney encouraged his family to enter into the spirit of things: ‘We all filed down to the beach hut where we had community singing to the light of the numerous fairy lamps and Chinese lanterns. Philip got to bed very late.’ With something of the diffident self-ridicule characteristic of his son, Sydney joked that he had come close to winning the booby prize in a whist competition. On the other hand he boasted that he and Kitty had walked to Scarborough and back in one and a half hours, ‘a thing no camper has done before’. His verdict on the holiday was mixed: ‘Mamma was not at all well during the whole period and could not enjoy it properly. Kitty is not cut out for camp life – not speaking to any other person unless spoken to. Philip enjoyed the table tennis and bathed occasionally but caught cold.’ Nevertheless, Sydney calculated, the holiday had cost only ‘about one half the usual and was therefore much better value for money. Philip ought to take his spectacle case.’
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Sydney was delighted when his son passed the entrance examination for the respected King Henry VIII School in Coventry. But the surviving drafts of his school reports show that Philip made a hesitant start. In 1934 the Headmaster, A. A. C. Burton, wrote: ‘Inclined to take things too easily, perhaps.’ In 1935 at the age of twelve he was ranked about the middle of his year-group, and since he was more than a year younger than his classmates it was decided that he should repeat the year. This easing of pressure had its effect and in April 1936 he was rated ‘Very Good’ in some areas, but: ‘Would be better still if he would bring more enthusiasm to his work.’ From July 1936 onwards he regularly came first in English, but showed no enthusiasm for other subjects. By Christmas 1937, at the age of fifteen, his future was in the balance. Burton commented: ‘unlikely to pass the School Certificate unless he devotes himself to the task’. In 1938 his report reads: ‘
Conduct
: Moderate. Tendency to foolishness must be checked;
Progress
: Much too one-sided. His considerable ability in English is more than off-set by weaknesses in languages and science. This must be corrected if he is to pass S.C.’ He was now placed twentieth out of twenty-eight boys. Then in the summer of 1938 he joined the Arts Sixth and no longer needed to apply himself to mathematics or sciences. The result was a dramatic improvement. He came second in a class of eight, his friend Noel Hughes being placed first. In his final report, on 26 July 1940, Larkin was placed first in English and History, and third in French, German and Latin. He left King Henry VIII School a lanky youth, already six feet tall, but weighing only ten stone seven pounds.
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At school Larkin developed two contrasted relationships: a pattern which was to be repeated in different forms throughout his life. He shared his deepest feelings with a paying pupil, James Sutton, an aspiring painter and son of a local builder. But he was also inseparable from the cocky defier of authority, Colin Gunner, who would throw paper darts around the Assembly Hall and then deflect collective punishment by gamely owning up to his crime.
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Larkin later described Gunner as ‘a small, agile, tough boy, with a face like a nut’, and remembered sharing fantasies out of the boys’ weekly magazine, the
Magnet
,
Tom Brown’s Schooldays
,
Dracula
and ‘the more colourful aspects of the Hitler regime’ with him. When pupils were each presented with a George VI coronation mug, he recalled his friend ‘shying his own into the squalid sewer the River Sowe (I have mine still)’.
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The young Larkin took care himself that his ‘tendency to foolishness’ did not land him in serious trouble and, in a school regime in which corporal punishment played a prominent role, it seems that he avoided ever being beaten. His father, it seems, would not have permitted it. Though the obscure reference to ‘violence a long way back’ in Larkin’s late poem ‘Love Again’ (altered in drafting from ‘difference a long way back’) has led some to speculate that Sydney might have been prone to domestic violence, the evidence is quite to the contrary. Larkin’s father was sensitive to any hint of physical duress. He recollected in his autobiographical essay that he had himself been beaten, as a boy, by a sadistic woman teacher: ‘I always thought she herself seemed to get a thrill out of it too.’
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For two years there were no family holidays. In 1934 and 1935 Sydney and Eva holidayed on their own in Germany and then Switzerland. Then in 1936 they took Philip with them to Germany, and again around the time of his fifteenth birthday in 1937. As Sydney’s holiday diaries show, he now felt at home in Germany. He paid his dutiful respects to German culture: ‘Beethoven was a remarkable man. We saw his piano [. . .] He was a most wonderful genius and his life is worth studying.’
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But his main pleasures were of a simpler kind: lake bathing, beer drinking and fleeting encounters with young women, though he always refers to ‘Mamma’ with proper respect. Glued into the diaries of 1934 and 1935 are photographs of ‘Kath’, ‘les girls’ and ‘Backs of girls’. In Königswinter in 1936, he writes: ‘we left the awful dullness of the Mattern Hotel’ after dinner, and ‘went to the Bier Klause, where the fun was fast and furious. Tired at last we went to bed.’
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He does not mention whether Philip accompanied them on this occasion, but a repeated theme of the diaries of 1936 and 1937 is his determination to find a good place for ‘bier’, in order to initiate his son into this adult masculine pleasure.

But though the poet was indeed to become a confirmed beer-drinker, he did not share his father’s enthusiasm for Germany. ‘My father liked the jolly singing in beer-cellars, three-four time to accordions [. . .] think of that for someone who was just buying the first Count Basie records!’
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His recollections of these two holidays were of embarrassment: ‘I found it petrifying, not being able to speak to anyone or read anything, frightening notices that you felt you should understand and couldn’t.’
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His most excruciating German experience, he later told Kingsley Amis, arose from a failure of language. On one trip, given pride of place at the front of a bus, he assumed that the driver had asked ‘Have you been to Germany before?’ and replied ‘No.’ He was puzzled when the driver took offence and avoided him for the remainder of the excursion. Later he was mortified to learn that his words had actually been ‘Do you like Germany?’
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These early expeditions, he later wrote, ‘sowed the seed of my hatred of abroad’.
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Possibly because of Philip’s resistance to a third German trip, in 1938 the family spent their holiday in Sidmouth, and in 1939 in Jersey.
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Then, the day after returning from Jersey, on 16 August 1939, father and son set out on a tour of Somerset, taking the train to Bath and spending a week cycling together between Radstock, Glastonbury and Ilminster. Reading between the lines of Sydney’s sparse diary, this outing seems to have been an idyll. At the end he proudly recorded: ‘Philip’s cyclometer indicated that we had ridden 162 miles.’
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Much of Philip’s leisure time in Belfast and during his early years in Hull was to be spent in the countryside on a bicycle.

Larkin claimed that when he later tried to ‘tune into’ his childhood in 1 Manor Road, Coventry, the emotions he picked up were ‘overwhelmingly, fear and boredom’. It seems, however, that with two doting parents in a ‘dull, pot-bound, and slightly mad’ home his childhood was happier than most.
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‘It was all very normal: I had friends whom I played football and cricket with and Hornby trains and so forth.’
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His short essay ‘Not the Place’s Fault’, written in 1959, breathes a warm nostalgia. He attributes ‘the slight scholarly stoop in my bearing today’ to his habit of looking for cigarette cards of ‘Famous Cricketers’ in Coventry gutters.
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His schoolfriend Noel Hughes later recalled the ‘intimidating tidiness’ of his house, ‘its highly waxed furniture and the practice of hushed conversation’, though Mrs Larkin always welcomed him with ‘unfailing graciousness’.
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The young Philip would escape for long hours to the more relaxed atmosphere of James Sutton’s home: ‘One of my strongest memories of their house is of its long attic, that ran the whole length of the house, and which contained among many other things the debris of a hat-shop the family had once owned.’
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He would give Sutton novels by Lawrence, and Sutton gave him books on Cézanne. The description in ‘Coming’ of the poet’s childhood as ‘a forgotten boredom’ rings true in its poetic context. But Larkin’s childhood was, in fact, a vividly remembered scene of pleasurable activity.

His warmest recollections were of jazz. ‘I became a jazz addict at the age of 12 or 13, listened avidly to all the dance bands of the day and tried to learn to play the drums.’
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At first he felt some highbrow reservations. In a letter written on 9 August 1939, his seventeenth birthday, and signed ‘Snooker’, he told Sutton: ‘you simply can’t think of Jazz after Beethoven. It’s a physical impossibility [. . .] it’s just “big”, that’s all. Jazz isn’t big . . . but I refuse to start theorizing again on Jazz and its ethics, morals, foundations etc. etc.’
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It was not long before jazz overwhelmed him: ‘On Saturday afternoons we sat, frowning intently, in the glass cubicles at Hanson’s, trying to decide whether both sides of the latest Parlophone Rhythm-Style Series or Vocalion Swing Series were sufficiently good to justify expenditure of the record’s stiffish price of three shillings.’
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Looking back from 1968, in the Introduction to
All What Jazz
, he rises to lyrical eloquence:

Sitting with a friend in his bedroom that overlooked the family tennis-court, I watched leaves drift down through long Sunday afternoons as we took it in turn to wind the portable HMV, and those white and coloured Americans, Bubber Miley, Frank Teschmacher, J. C. Higginbotham, spoke immediately to our understanding. Their rips, slurs and distortions were something we understood perfectly. This was something we had found for ourselves, that wasn’t taught at school (what a prerequisite that is of nearly everything worthwhile!), and having found it, we made it bear all the enthusiasm usually directed at more established arts.
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