After the posthumous exhibition

at the library, I walked with my daughter

(a student at Hull and sure she’d seen him once

in the lift) down Newland Avenue

to Pearson Park. I pointed out the house

where Larkin’s flat had been and told her how,

more than twenty years before, a  friend

and I had been persons from Porlock.

He’d answered the door in a dressing gown,

vest, grey flannels and, ruefully, let us in.

He was frying sausages for his tea,

he explained, before a bridge evening

with his secretary and her parents.

Nevertheless, with traditional jazz

in the background on his Pye Black Box,

he was very generous with the G & Ts,

shying the empty bottles, across the room,

to land unbroken in a basket full of

screwed-up typing paper. Nothing was said.

Our host seemed pleased rather than surprised.

In the loo was a print of Blake’s ‘Union

Of Body And Soul’ and a cartoon of

a pantomime horse, ‘Ah! At last, I’ve found you!’

Before our visit, my friend had sent him

one of my poems – as a calling card

or warning. It was more or less about

dancing. Larkin commented kindly

on the piece, mentioned he was writing one

around a similar theme. “Your fault then,”

my daughter asked, “The Dance unfinished?”

“Perhaps. But think of As Bad As A Mile,

‘Of failure spreading back up the arm…

The apple unbitten in the palm.’

Yet all those empty bottles landing

exactly where they were aimed in an

already cushioned environment.

So, a writer’s life exposed, irony,

‘the only end of age’ – or all three?”

Note: Two more accounts of the visit may be found in ‘AN ENORMOUS YES In Memoriam Philip Larkin (1922-1985)’, edited by Harry Chambers, Peterloo Poets, 1986 and ‘LARKIN AT SIXTY’, edited by Anthony Thwaite, Faber and Faber 1982 respectively