Belsen Newsreel and Peter Pan

In the article ‘The Inkwell of Dr Agrippa’, Harrison writes: ‘When I search my childhood for something to explain what drove me into poetry [… my] images are all to do with the War’. As well as stressing his northern – but not, in terms of the quotation, especially working-class – credentials, he remembers his experience of the Second World War as a child in Beeston:

This quotation posits Hiroshima and the Holocaust, and the broader context of the war, as loci for his poetry. These images of a particularly British experience of the war are returned to throughout his oeuvre. Falling bombs recall the child crouching in the cellar in ‘A Close One’, and the nightmarish sound of a passing plane in ‘Listening to Sirens’; in the former poem, a montage of searchlights and Messerschmitts haunts the poet's memory to the extent that the process of mourning for his parents’ deaths cannot be divorced from historical trauma. ‘Lit-up streets’ evokes the trope of fire which runs throughout his work, and connects such diverse referents as the family hearth and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.