Ted Walker; poet & writer
Hyfler/Rosner
March 30, 2004, Tuesday
THE POET and writer Ted Walker was born and lived for the
first 18 years of his life in a small house almost on
Lancing beach. He could step behind the house straight on to
the sand. Such freedom did not last for long, for early in
the Second World War the beach was mined and became
dangerous and forbidden. Walker remembered clearly the day
when it was cleared and the people of Lancing took
possession again. For Walker it was a day of the greatest
importance.
When he published his first book of verse, Fox on a Barn
Door, in 1965, the titles of a good third of the poems -
"Breakwaters", "The Skate Fishers", "On the Sea Wall", for
example - were clear statements of how well he had used the
beach. The Sussex countryside was just as fertile an
influence. He was familiar with the landscape, from the
sweep of the Downs to the small plants at the wayside. His
childhood seems to have been unusually happy and seemingly
totally remembered. The High Path, an autobiography of his
childhood and youth published in 1982, is a vivid record of
his early days.
His parents had reached the South Coast after his father, a
carpenter, had left Birmingham in a search for employment
during the Depression. His mother and father were
Worcestershire people, and Ted, a traditionalist, was always
aware of that Midlands background and had a feeling for
village life. His father, recognising the young Ted's
intelligence, saved regularly so that he could pay for the
boy to have French lessons. This was an advantage later on,
helping Ted Walker to gain a state scholarship to St John's
College, Cambridge, where he studied Modern Languages,
specialising in French and Spanish.
When he was 15 and at Steyning Grammar School, he had met
his future wife, Lorna Benfell, and almost immediately after
his graduation they were married. She also became a
schoolteacher and for a short time they taught in London,
she in Tottenham and he in Southall. It was at school that
he and John Cotton, a like-minded colleague, founded a
poetry magazine they called Priapus, an attractive if
amateur production, copies of which are now very rare.
Walker published some work in the early numbers, the
beginning of his poetic career.
His stay at Southall was brief. In 1961 he obtained a
teaching post in Bognor Regis and from there moved to
Chichester High School. It was a significant move. He liked
the cathedral city and he was back in Sussex. He had begun
to write poetry regularly and of quality which made it
welcome in the important journals - The Listener, The
Observer, the Times Literary Supplement and the London
Magazine are examples. It drew the attention of William
Plomer, then poetry editor at Jonathan Cape and a powerful
figure in the poetry world. Walker had also submitted poems
to The New Yorker, where Howard Moss made his work welcome.
I had met Ted Walker in the early Sixties when he first
lived in Hunston, a village on the Chichester Canal. We were
both members of a squash team led by the late Robert
Gittings and played against a team of clergymen. We won
quite easily. Walker was highly visible because of his
powerful build. (His grandfather had been a policeman.) He
also wore a pair of American navy-surplus shorts, unusual in
that they carried down one leg the letters "J.F. Kennedy" in
large black print. After that we met frequently and always
exchanged copies of our poems.
It was a heady time for Walker. His collection Fox on a Barn
Door was published by Cape in June 1965 and it was widely
and favourably reviewed. (His only previous personal
publication, Those Other Growths, had been a small pamphlet
issued in 1964 by the poet Jon Silkin.) Walker dedicated the
book to his wife and children. He and Lorna had four
children, two daughters and two sons.
Most reviewers noted Walker's strong personal voice, his
mastery of formal verse patterns and the freshness of his
imagery. He became almost at once a leading young poet,
invited to contribute to anthologies and in demand at
readings. He was a splendid reader of his own verse. Other
collections followed; The Solitaries in 1967, The Night
Bathers in 1970, Gloves to the Hangman in 1973 and Burning
the Ivy in 1978. There was also a volume of selected poems,
Hands at a Live Fire, which appeared in 1987.
Walker was a personal poet in that his work was often the
direct result of his experience and his astonishing
observation. But after these there was an interval of 15
years before he published another book of verse. It was
called Mangoes on the Moon, published not by Cape, but by
Alan Ross at London Magazine Editions.
It is difficult to explain so long a poetic silence, but he
was never idle. Having published his poetry in The New
Yorker he decided in the late Sixties to write some short
stories. They would, he reasoned, help him financially,
something he needed at the time. He spent almost a week
reading the stories printed in copies of The New Yorker, saw
that he could write as successfully, and completed three
pieces in a furiously short time. All were accepted by the
editors in New York and the success decided him to buy
another house and eventually to leave teaching and become a
full-time writer. His new house was a very old one, its
origin pre-Georgian and but a few hundred yards from where I
lived then.
Walker lived happily as a freelance writer until offered an
appointment as a lecturer at New England College, near
Arundel, in 1971. His short stories were collected in You've
Never Heard Me Sing, published by Heinemann in 1985. The
title, a question Walker was asked by his father, suggests
that the stories were "an aspect of his autobiography",
something noted by the writer of the blurb on the book's
cover. It contains 21 stories, all set in southern England
and 17 of them first having appeared in The New Yorker.
It seems in retrospect inevitable that Walker would write an
autobiography. The early life was covered in The High Path,
while The Last of England (1993), which he read as a serial
on the BBC to great effect, brought his life to the day he
left England after the sad death of his wife in 1987.
Other prose books written during the years when poetry
seemed to have left him include In Spain (1987), ostensibly
a travel book, but, while it does exist as an account of
Walker's sometimes frantic journey around the country, it
also is a fragment of autobiography. Very recently, he told
me that what he was trying to do was to give an account of
himself at that time and in those places. Indeed, in that
aim he succeeded admirably. It is very much a self-portrait,
revealing his complex nature, his disgust at the modern
world and its thoughtless humanity, but tolerant and even
loving of the individual men and women he met on his
journey.
Spain meant a great deal to Walker. He had known the country
since he was a young man and, after he married his second
wife, Audrey, who had been a close friend to both Ted and
Lorna, in 1988, they made many visits to Spain. Ted suffered
from bronchitis increasingly during English winters and
found Spanish weather more congenial. In 1997 he and Audrey
decided to move permanently to the village of Alcalali, near
Alicante. Although a necessary move, it was probably hard.
Ted Walker was an English writer, a lover of its beaches,
gardens and hills. And of Brighton too, and the county of
Sussex.
He was very much a man of letters, writing two books for
children in addition, a late collection of miscellaneous
prose pieces called He Danced with a Chair: fictions and
factions (2001), and very successful television and radio
plays. But it is fitting that his last book was a book of
poems, Mangoes to the Moon. It seems an autumnal collection,
reading it again. It has many elegies: for his dead wife,
for his father, for the great Scottish poet Andrew Young,
who frightened him, for his uncle George. And I am reminded
of his gift for friendship, how he would go with John Arlott
and sit in the press box at White Hart Lane, how he
remembered and befriended his old teacher Paul Coltman, how
he and Christopher Fry would telephone each other across
Europe to check the Times crossword. He had, said his wife,
friends everywhere, and it seemed so.
Honours came to him from the beginning. His first book won
the Eric Gregory Award for Poetry, he was awarded the Alice
Hunt Bartlett Prize of the Poetry Society, he was the first
winner of the prestigious Cholmondeley Poetry Award, he was
recognised by the Society of Authors, Southampton University
gave him an honorary DLitt. The Royal Society of Literature
invited him (a rare tribute) to become a Fellow. He wore all
these honours lightly.
Edward Joseph Walker, poet, writer, playwright and teacher:
born Lancing, West Sussex 28 November 1934; FRSL 1975;
married 1956 Lorna Benfell (died 1987; two sons, two
daughters), 1988 Audrey Hicks; died Valencia, Spain 19 March
2004.