<<  -- 13 --  Roderic Dunnett    BEHIND THE LINES

Other reproduction gravestones (Roseberg's, bearing the star of David, and Ledwidge's, mentioned above), are also exhibited. Gurney's piano and headstone will form the joint centrepiece of a permanent Ivor Gurney exhibition (and point of pilgrimage for Gurney enthusiasts) to be housed in the Twigworth church from summer 2003.

Wilfred Owen's family received their telegram -- he died on the Sambre Canal near Cambrai in November 1918 -- just as the Armistice bells rang out a week later. If any book anticipated the 'pervasion of ugliness' Owen refers to (in a manuscript displayed here), it was Henri Barbusse's cyclonic attack on war, Le Feu. Owen, a fluent French speaker (he had spent time as a tutor in France before the war) devoured it -- Barbusse's firebrand directness feeds straight into his own new brand of poems. Owen's copy nestles alongside his personally annotated copy of Keats's Endymion -- the old influence edged out by the new -- and his outline planned order for Disabled and Other Poems (1918).

Here too are the toy boat his father carved for Wilfred and his brother, a profoundly moving schoolboy letter, the poet's hairbrushes (slightly ghoulish), his silver cigarette case (inscribed 'W'), his hammer for collecting geological specimens, and the chest (again, the immediacy) in which Owen kept his most valued books and draft poems.

Continue >>