The only recorded instance of Philip Larkin shedding tears was in March 1979. His secretary Betty Mackereth remembers how, “He just stood at the window of his office, looking out, and said: ‘I mowed the lawn last night; and I killed the hedgehog.’ And tears rolled down his face.” The hedgehog had been a frequent visitor to his garden. The next day he wrote a poem about the incident, as if the animal shared his humanity. It is sobering to think of the master of poetic gloom as a lachrymose Mr Tiggy-Winkle.
Larkin was nuts about animals. His letters to girlfriends were full of little drawings, showing them as cute squirrels or bunnies or honey bears. Letters to his mother pictured her as a seal in a frock. One of his library assistants, Mary Wrench, visiting his flat, was startled to hear her boss making a miaowing noise behind her; when she turned round, he was wearing a cat mask he had made himself. When his Oxford Book of 20th-Century English Verse was published, reviewers remarked on the high incidence of poems he had chosen about horses, lions, birds and bulls.
- Review of Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love by James Booth
Larkin was nuts about animals. His letters to girlfriends were full of little drawings, showing them as cute squirrels or bunnies or honey bears. Letters to his mother pictured her as a seal in a frock. One of his library assistants, Mary Wrench, visiting his flat, was startled to hear her boss making a miaowing noise behind her; when she turned round, he was wearing a cat mask he had made himself. When his Oxford Book of 20th-Century English Verse was published, reviewers remarked on the high incidence of poems he had chosen about horses, lions, birds and bulls.
- Review of Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love by James Booth
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