In his review of Polly Clark’s Larchfield (Review, 8 April) Ian Sansom suggests that the WH Auden figure in the novel would make “an excellent model for a 1930s detective”. Quite right and he was. My father, Cecil, writing as Nicholas Blake, used a detective called Nigel Strangeways in nearly all of his novels. In the first of these, a prep school story called A Question of Proof, Day-Lewis introduces Strangeways as every inch a portrait of his friend and fellow poet Wystan Auden. As it happened my father was also a teacher at Larchfield prep school (1928-30) and when he moved on Auden took his place – as he did later as Oxford professor of poetry. On departure from Larchfield my Dad left behind the words for a less than brilliant school song. I imagine poor Wystan being obliged to join the singing of this, no doubt through gritted teeth, at morning assembly: “School of the mountain and the lochside / School of the white and blue” – and that was the best of it.
Later Auden was teaching at Malvern and Day-Lewis at Cheltenham. When Wystan had a sleepover with us, yes he added to his bedclothes with carpets and floor coverings, curtains and anything else that moved. His hostess, my unfortunate mother, was then expected to put the bedroom together again. Yet this was the time of his famous poem showing he really could sleep light: “Out on the lawn I lie in bed, Vega conspicuous overhead”.
Sean Day-Lewis
Colyton, Devon
