Poems [antikvár]

Introduction I first came across G. K. Chesterton while I was at primary school in Southport, Lancashire, where we had been evacuated during the War. On certain afternoons (I think Wednesdays) at 4.30 p.m., the BBC broadcast on the radio plays of the Father Brown stories. If I got back in time—school finished at 4 o'clock and we had a mile to walk—I always tried to tune in. I was fascinated by these stories, full of the unexpected, and they led me for the first time into the topsy-turvy, paradoxical and magical world of Chesterton. Later, at school in London, at St Paul's, where Chesterton had also been a pupil, our English master read to us a passage from one of his essays, as an example of briUiant writing. It described the difference between England and France: It requires long years of plenitude and quiet, the slow growth of great parks, the seasoning of oaken beams, the dark enrichment of red wine in cellars and in inns, all the leisure and the life of England through many centuries to produce at last the generous and genial firuit of English snobbishness. And it requires battery and barricade, songs in the streets, and ragged men dead for an idea, to produce and justify the terrible flower of French indecency. Not only were the images vivid—'ragged men dead for an idea'— but the way he used the words with long 'o's to convey the slowness of England's development and the sharp, short, staccato consonants and words for the French led me to realise that here a master of the EngUsh language was at work. Then, when I was at Oxford, I found a friendly bookseller in the second-hand books department of Blackwell's, who would bring out a pile of unsold Chesterton first editions, for he was not popular then, and I was able to buy them for 5 shillings or 7/6d. I soon reaUsed that Chesterton's output was enormous. A xi