He was still teaching when I met him first in 1952 – he had broadcast a kind review of a small collection of poems I’d published, and asked me over to his house in Launceston (he loved showing people around the town, and I recognized much of it from lines in his poems) – but I used to see him mainly in Plymouth when he came up to read at the Arts Centre in Looe Street, or at one of the pubs down on the Barbican – he was one of only two people who knew both my wife and me independently, before we met.Ĭharles was born in Launceston in August 1917. When Charles Causley’s first collection of poems came out in 1951 – Farewell, Aggie Weston, the first in Eric Marx’s elegant series of ‘Poems in Pamphlet’ from the Hand and Flower Press – a fellow teacher at the ‘chalk Siberia’ in which he earned his living, picked it up and remarked dismissively, ‘Good Lord – is this the best thing you can do with your spare time?’ ‘What he didn’t know’, said Causley later, ‘was that it was the teaching I did in my spare time.’
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