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Walker, Ted

The High Path, [25] 17; The Last of England, [51] 80

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20100301120551 Lawrence Sail on Ted Walker, The High Path

Beginning in Gladness

Lawrence Sail on Ted Walker, The High Path

Though I’ve long been familiar with Ted Walker’s poems, until recently I had not read The High Path, his wonderful memoir of childhood. I came to it not only with the curiosity of a fellow poet, but also as one having newly completed a memoir of my own. For a writer, the recall of childhood runs an assortment of risks – the editing effected by forgetfulness or by self-censorship; the distortions brought about by nostalgia or over-simplification; the assumption that the particulars of family history will axiomatically be of interest to the reader. Yet the best memoirs – and Ted Walker’s is surely among them – carry a potent charge, not only conveying the sensuous quick of childhood, but avoiding pure solipsism by acting as triggers for the reader’s own memories.
20160901144846 J. Weston Lewis. Martin Sorrell on Ted Walker

Land of Lost Content

Martin Sorrell on Ted Walker, The Last of England

One afternoon sometime in the early 1950s, the lad who by a country mile was my father’s ablest pupil in his sixth-form French and Spanish class rang our doorbell, and announced that the schoolgirl on his arm had just consented to become his wife. Not immediately, of course, but as soon as both had made it through the higher education which would force them to live far from each other for the next three or four years. That lad was Ted Walker, his bride-to-be Lorna Benfell. The two had met when he was 14, she one year older. They’d fallen urgently in love. Ted wanted my parents to be among the first to hear. He held them both in high regard, and they him – a mutual affection that lasted to the end.

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